irits by handing them over to the enemy.
Then comes unpopularity; some of his old associates have the courage to
oppose him. The consequence is, that he has to make a purgation of the
State; but, unlike the physician who purges away the bad, he must get
rid of the high-spirited, the wise and the wealthy; for he has no choice
between death and a life of shame and dishonour. And the more hated he
is, the more he will require trusty guards; but how will he obtain them?
'They will come flocking like birds--for pay.' Will he not rather obtain
them on the spot? He will take the slaves from their owners and make
them his body-guard; these are his trusted friends, who admire and
look up to him. Are not the tragic poets wise who magnify and exalt the
tyrant, and say that he is wise by association with the wise? And are
not their praises of tyranny alone a sufficient reason why we should
exclude them from our State? They may go to other cities, and gather the
mob about them with fine words, and change commonwealths into tyrannies
and democracies, receiving honours and rewards for their services; but
the higher they and their friends ascend constitution hill, the more
their honour will fail and become 'too asthmatic to mount.' To return to
the tyrant--How will he support that rare army of his? First, by robbing
the temples of their treasures, which will enable him to lighten the
taxes; then he will take all his father's property, and spend it on
his companions, male or female. Now his father is the demus, and if the
demus gets angry, and says that a great hulking son ought not to be a
burden on his parents, and bids him and his riotous crew begone, then
will the parent know what a monster he has been nurturing, and that the
son whom he would fain expel is too strong for him. 'You do not mean to
say that he will beat his father?' Yes, he will, after having taken away
his arms. 'Then he is a parricide and a cruel, unnatural son.' And the
people have jumped from the fear of slavery into slavery, out of the
smoke into the fire. Thus liberty, when out of all order and reason,
passes into the worst form of servitude...

In the previous books Plato has described the ideal State; now he
returns to the perverted or declining forms, on which he had lightly
touched at the end of Book IV. These he describes in a succession of
parallels between the individuals and the States, tracing the origin of
either in the State or individual which has pre