The Tyrant (Book IX)

It remains, I said, to consider the tyrannical man himself: how he develops from the democratic man, what he is like, and whether his life is happy or wretched.

Among our unnecessary pleasures and desires, some are lawless. They appear in everyone, perhaps, but in some they are kept down by the laws and by the better desires, with the help of reason. They awake in sleep, when the rest of the soul, the reasonable, gentle and ruling part, slumbers, and the beastly and savage part, full of food and drink, leaps up and tries to go and satisfy its instincts. You know that in such dreams it shrinks from nothing, as if freed from all shame and reason: it does not hesitate to attempt sex with a mother, as it imagines, or with anyone else, man, god or beast; to commit any murder; to eat any food. There is in fact a terrible, savage and lawless kind of desire in every one of us, even those who seem most moderate; and it becomes plain in our dreams.

The tyrannical man is the son of a democratic man, drawn into every kind of lawlessness by those who call it freedom. They plant in his soul a great winged drone, a master passion, Eros, to lead all his idle desires. And Eros becomes a tyrant within him, surrounded by a bodyguard of madness, and drives out every decent belief and desire. What he once did only in dreams, he now does awake: no murder, no food, no deed is too terrible for him. He spends everything, then borrows, then robs his parents, then robs temples. Such men, if there are few of them in a city, serve as bodyguards to some tyrant elsewhere; if there are many, and the people lose their senses, they make the one who has the greatest tyrant in his soul the tyrant of the city.

Is the tyrant happy? Let us look, not dazzled by the one man and his few followers, but entering into the whole city. The city ruled by a tyrant is the most enslaved; it does least what it wants; it is poorest and most full of fear, lamentation and pain. So too the tyrannical soul is enslaved, with its best part enslaved to its worst; it is poor and insatiable, always full of fear. And the most wretched of all is not the tyrannical man who lives a private life, but the one whom misfortune makes an actual tyrant. He is like a rich man with many slaves, suddenly carried off by a god, with his wife and children, to a desert place where no free man can help him: he must flatter his own slaves, and live in terror. He cannot travel, cannot see the festivals other free men see, but lives shut up in his house like a woman. He is the real slave, the greatest flatterer of the worst men, never free, never satisfied.

So the first proof is done: the just man is happiest, the tyrant most wretched. Here is a second. The soul has three parts, and so there are three kinds of men and three kinds of pleasures: the lover of wisdom, the lover of honor and the lover of money. Each will say his own life is the most pleasant. Who is the best judge? The one who has the most experience, intelligence and reason. The philosopher has tasted the other pleasures, from childhood, but the others have never tasted the pleasure of learning the truth. So his judgment must be accepted, and the pleasure of the philosopher is the most pleasant.

And a third proof, the greatest. Most of what people call pleasure is only relief from pain, the calm in the middle, which seems pleasant by contrast, as grey seems white beside black. True pleasure is the filling of the soul with what truly is. Those who have no experience of wisdom and virtue, but are always feasting and the like, are carried down and back up to the middle, and wander there all their lives, never going higher, never looking up at the true heights. Like cattle, with their eyes always looking down, bent toward the earth and the table, they feed and fatten and breed, and kick and butt each other with horns and hoofs of iron, killing each other for insatiable greed.

If we calculate, I said, the tyrant is separated from the true pleasure of the king by a number. Counting the distance between them, the king lives seven hundred and twenty-nine times more pleasantly than the tyrant, and the tyrant lives the same number of times more painfully.

"What an overwhelming calculation!" said Glaucon.

Now let us make an image of the soul, so that the man who said injustice pays may see what he is saying. Picture a many-headed beast, with a ring of heads of tame and wild animals, which it can change and grow out of itself at will. Then a lion; then a man. Make the first by far the largest, the second next. Then join the three into one, and cover them with the outward image of a man, so that anyone who sees only the outside thinks it is one creature, a human being.

Whoever says that injustice pays is saying that it pays to feed the many-headed beast and the lion and make them strong, and to starve and weaken the man, so that he is dragged wherever either of the other two leads him, and lets them bite and fight and devour each other. Whoever praises justice says that we must so act that the man within has the most power, and cares for the many-headed beast like a farmer, nourishing and taming the gentle heads and preventing the wild ones from growing, and making the lion's nature his ally.

"Then he will not want to go into politics," Glaucon said, "if he cares about that."

In his own city he certainly will, I said, but perhaps not in the city of his birth, unless some divine chance brings it about.

"I understand," he said. "You mean the city we have been founding in our discussion, which exists only in words; for I don't think it exists anywhere on earth."

But perhaps, I said, there is a pattern of it laid up in heaven, for anyone who wishes to see it, and seeing it, to found a city within himself. It makes no difference whether it exists anywhere or ever will. He will live by its laws, and no other.

(End of Episode 9 — continued in Episode 10: The Myth of Er)