evils such as these will not he who is ill-governed in his own
person--the tyrannical man, I mean--whom you just now decided to be the
most miserable of all--will not he be yet more miserable when, instead
of leading a private life, he is constrained by fortune to be a public
tyrant? He has to be master of others when he is not master of himself:
he is like a diseased or paralytic man who is compelled to pass his
life, not in retirement, but fighting and combating with other men.

Yes, he said, the similitude is most exact.

Is not his case utterly miserable? and does not the actual tyrant lead a
worse life than he whose life you determined to be the worst?

Certainly.

He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real slave,
and is obliged to practise the greatest adulation and servility, and to
be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind. He has desires which he is
utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly
poor, if you know how to inspect the whole soul of him: all his life
long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions and distractions,
even as the State which he resembles: and surely the resemblance holds?

Very true, he said.

Moreover, as we were saying before, he grows worse from having power: he
becomes and is of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust,
more friendless, more impious, than he was at first; he is the purveyor
and cherisher of every sort of vice, and the consequence is that he is
supremely miserable, and that he makes everybody else as miserable as
himself.

No man of any sense will dispute your words.

Come then, I said, and as the general umpire in theatrical contests
proclaims the result, do you also decide who in your opinion is first
in the scale of happiness, and who second, and in what order the others
follow: there are five of them in all--they are the royal, timocratical,
oligarchical, democratical, tyrannical.

The decision will be easily given, he replied; they shall be choruses
coming on the stage, and I must judge them in the order in which they
enter, by the criterion of virtue and vice, happiness and misery.

Need we hire a herald, or shall I announce, that the son of Ariston (the
best) has decided that the best and justest is also the happiest, and
that this is he who is the most royal man and king over himself; and
that the worst and most unjust man is also the most miserable, and that
this is he who being the