Whatever you think of Socrates, don't make the mistake of thinking that The Republic is a model for an ideal state. Doing so puts you in the ranks of a Karl Popper.
The Republic acts much like Socrates' most famous saying, "All I know is that I know nothing." It is constructed naively, as a continuous question without a definitive answer. The questions always return to nothing, or to myth. Ironically, this compels all of the participants, readers included, to become invested in the question of justice, to build an idea of it themselves. There is an architecture of ideas behind it all, but this is closer to a rough sketch than a blueprint.
As form, the city unfolds as a dramatic scene, an act of justice: unexpected, and forcing difficult decisions that may cause uprisings or injustices. Without this vital aspect it would not remain the most powerful work of philosophy for over two-thousand years.

Of course, there is a practical side too. And who can say that artists make great works when freed of the martial threat over their heads?

https://news.1rj.ru/str/goldenageman/186

- Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits

"For these reasons, Plato affirmed the existence of ideas, avoiding the opinion of the Epicureans, who asserted that everything happens by chance, and that of Empedocles and others who asserted that everything happens because of a natural necessity. This reason for affirming ideas, namely, on account of the previous planning of the works that are to be done, is suggested by Dionysius, who says: “We say that exemplars in God are the intelligible characters of things that come to be, the individually pre-existing causes of subsistent beings. These, theology calls ‘predefinitions.’ They predetermine and cause godly and good inclinations in creatures. It is according to these that the super-substance predefines and produces all things. However, because an exemplary form or idea has, in some sense, the nature of an end, and because an artist receives the form by which he acts—if it is outside of him—we cannot say that the divine ideas are outside of God. They can be only within the divine mind, for it is unreasonable to say that God acts on account of an end other than Himself or that He receives that which enables Him to act from a source other than Himself."

- 𝑺𝒕. 𝑻𝒉𝒐𝒎𝒂𝒔 𝑨𝒒𝒖𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒔, 𝑸𝒖𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝑻𝒉𝒓𝒆𝒆: 𝑰𝒅𝒆𝒂𝒔, 𝑨𝒓𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒍𝒆 𝑰

https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.b90bb6e5fa821f6c6288f8b83294b107?rik=m1PAe7vhVgh7Bg&riu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.swiss-artists.com%2Fprints%2Fportraits%2FThomasAquinas.jpg&ehk=Iymq6T%2BYKLJqzqq8XnGZD4Totvd50XMgbviDyo7M%2B58%3D&risl=&pid=ImgRaw&r=0

"Such then, I [Socrates] said, are our principles of theology—some tales are to be told, and others are not to be told to our disciples from their youth upwards, if we mean them to honour the gods and their parents, and to value friendship with one another.

Yes; and I [Adeimantus] think that our principles are right, he said.
But if they are to be courageous, must they not learn other lessons besides these, and lessons of such a kind as will take away the fear of death? Can any man be courageous who has the fear of death in him?

Certainly not, he said.
And can he be fearless of death, or will he choose death in battle rather than defeat and slavery, who believes the world below to be real and terrible?

Impossible.
Then we must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales as well as over the others, and beg them not simply to revile but rather to commend the world below, intimating to them that their denoscriptions are untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.

That will be our duty, he said.
Then, I said, we shall have to obliterate many obnoxious passages, beginning with the verses:
I would rather he a serf on the land of a poor and portionless man than rule over all the dead who have come to nought.¹

We must also expunge the verse, which tells us how Pluto feared:
Lest the mansions grim and squalid which the gods abhor should he seen both of mortals and immortals.²

And again:
O heavens! verily in the house of Hades there is soul and ghostly form but no mind at all!³

Again of Tiresias:
[To him even after death did Persephone grant mind,] that he alone should be wise; but the other souls are flitting shades.⁴

Again:
The soul flying from the limbs had gone to Hades, lamentng her fate, leaving manhood and youth.⁵

Again:
And the soul, with shrilling cry, passed like smoke beneath the earth.⁶

And:
As bats in hollow of mystic cavern, whenever any of the has dropped out of the string and falls from the rock, fly shrilling and cling to one another, so did they with shrilling cry hold together as they moved.⁷

And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.

Undoubtedly.
Also we shall have to reject all the terrible and appalling names describe the world below—Cocytus and Styx, ghosts under the earth, and sapless shades, and any similar words of which the very mention causes a shudder to pass through the inmost soul of him who hears them. I do not say that these horrible stories may not have a use of some kind; but there is a danger that the nerves of our guardians may be rendered too excitable and effeminate by them.

There is a real danger, he said.
Then we must have no more of them.
True.
Another and a nobler strain must be composed and sung by us.
Clearly.
And shall we proceed to get rid of the weepings and wailings of famous men?
They will go with the rest."

- Republic Book III

¹ Odyssey 11.489-491, Achilles in the underworld
² Iliad 20.64-65
³ Iliad 23.103-104
⁴ Odyssey 11.493-495
⁵ Iliad 16.856-857
⁶ Iliad 23.100
⁷ Odyssey 246-249

It continues:
"But shall we be right in getting rid of them? Reflect: our principle is that the good man will not consider death terrible to any other good man who is his comrade."

Yes, Socrates plays with the idea of censoring lines of Homer. However, it is for the sake of bringing up the best possible men, not even all men but only their 'disciples.' It's certainly not about erasing Homer from all of history. He only wishes not to teach his students the parts of Homer which have the great hero Achilles whining or which wax poetic with denoscriptions of death being cold and horrible, since those might dishearten the young and impressionable youths from being heroic themselves. He includes these passages with the 'weepings and wailings of famous men' which undoubtedly is meant to include the dramatic, effeminate tragedies of the theater.

You must also hold in suspension the idea that Socrates may be making a ridiculous argument meant to be rebutted, in order for the truth to shine through to the reader. I suspect Nietzsche tried to write in a similar manner, but again, Socrates bests him.

If Socratic ignorance is to know nothing, can it also be said that justice is to not know? Of course, one should not apply epistemology to jurisprudence, and one of the lessons in The Republic seems to be that justice knows, whereas we do not.
It is a question similar to Pindar, who also attacked Homer, even more severely. This is worth pointing out since it shows us that any opposition to Homer is not based in logic alone, it may be a matter of Agon. And of course, one should not forget that Nietzsche was the one who attacked Homer's artistic sense, an unforgivable crime.
The opposition of not knowing and the absolute knowing of justice is the source of Socratic irony. And why the dialogues are a type of play, neither tragedy nor comedy but a genre all their own. And it is the eternal, titanic quality which horrifies the more base poets, that which surpasses time is an eternal enemy to those who can only see the immediate.

The answer is in Seneca's two states: the greater state that includes gods and men "measured by the sun", and the lesser state of citizens, family, mere accident of birth. Politics is essentially the mediation and elevation of the two states, service and inheritance. But it cannot be only this. There is not only being, not only a subject and an object, there must also be division and reconciliation, a constant struggle The problem is not rationality, it is a specific type of reason which tends to make rationality absolute. Why does this happen? The answer may be found in the dissolution of poesie, or the combination of poetic communication and machina, the essence of meter in poetry. Here each element raises the other to a higher sense of exactness and order. "Poetry has a logic of its own, as severe as that of science."

"To bring back the peace of all peace, which is higher than all reason, and unite ourselves with nature in an infinite one – this is the aim of all our striving." This is not anti-rational or anti-reason, but a more-than-reason, a reason which is neither aimed towards valuisation nor the definitive but an absolute language and experience. Poetry too can be definitive, a coarse lie or trick, as we see in Ion.

"Lohengrin Arrives on a Boat Drawn by a Swan", Vintage Illustration, Artist Unknown (Mary Evans Picture Library)

"What is belief? How is a belief born? All belief assumes that something is true.

The extremest form of Nihilism would mean that all belief—all assumption of truth—is false: because no real world is at hand. It were therefore: only an appearance seen in perspective, whose origin must be found in us (seeing that we are constantly in need of a narrower, a shortened, and simplified world).

This should be realized, that the extent to which we can, in our heart of hearts, acknowledge appearance, and the necessity of falsehood, without going to rack and ruin, is the measure of strength.

In this respect, Nihilism, in that it is the negation of a real world and of Being, might be a divine view of the world."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power

Nietzsche here acknowledges the divinity of the Titans and the sacrality of art. To live outside the realm of perfect and definitive truth, to operate within appearances, to live courageously in the world of Becoming—this is the great Titanic power which he elsewhere calls 'Dionysian.' It is the source of the divine madness of great men, who are really master artists of life itself.

"I cannot wash away your negativities and sins with water, nor can I remove your pain and suffering by my hand, nor can I transfer my realizations to you."

"The only way I can help you is through giving teaching, and you should strive to liberate yourself."

- Buddha Shakymuni