A close analysis of the Republics diverse literary styles shows how the peculiarities of verbal texture in Platonic discourse can be explained by Platos remolding of tropes and techniques from poetry and the Presocratics. This book argues that Plato smuggles poetic language into the Republics prose in order to characterize the deceitful coloration and polymorphy that accompanies the world of Becoming as opposed to the Real. Platos distinctive discourse thus can transmit, even to those figures focused on the visual within his Republic, the shiftiness of the base and the unjust.