Politics and Whales

I got to thinking about Steve's very interesting question at the end of class, about why it is that Plato's Republic has for so long been interpreted as essentially a political tract, despite the fact that the text itself says many times and in many ways that it isn't. the claim is not unlike saying that Herman Melville's Moby Dick is about a whale -- not precisely false, but so misleading as almost completely to miss the point. (Some of you literature students may remember that Moby Dick sold poorly during Melville's lifetime, partly because he declined Hawthorne's generous offer to review it, and because everyone else mistook it for an adventure tale for boys.)