in the lives
of mediaeval saints or mythic heroes, the conduct and actions of one
were attributed to another in order to fill up the outline. There was
no enormity which the Greek was not today to believe of them; the tyrant
was the negation of government and law; his assassination was glorious;
there was no crime, however unnatural, which might not with probability
be attributed to him. In this, Plato was only following the common
thought of his countrymen, which he embellished and exaggerated with all
the power of his genius. There is no need to suppose that he drew
from life; or that his knowledge of tyrants is derived from a personal
acquaintance with Dionysius. The manner in which he speaks of them would
rather tend to render doubtful his ever having 'consorted' with them, or
entertained the schemes, which are attributed to him in the Epistles, of
regenerating Sicily by their help.

Plato in a hyperbolical and serio-comic vein exaggerates the follies of
democracy which he also sees reflected in social life. To him democracy
is a state of individualism or dissolution; in which every one is doing
what is right in his own eyes. Of a people animated by a common spirit
of liberty, rising as one man to repel the Persian host, which is the
leading idea of democracy in Herodotus and Thucydides, he never seems to
think. But if he is not a believer in liberty, still less is he a lover
of tyranny. His deeper and more serious condemnation is reserved for the
tyrant, who is the ideal of wickedness and also of weakness, and who
in his utter helplessness and suspiciousness is leading an almost
impossible existence, without that remnant of good which, in Plato's
opinion, was required to give power to evil (Book I). This ideal of
wickedness living in helpless misery, is the reverse of that other
portrait of perfect injustice ruling in happiness and splendour, which
first of all Thrasymachus, and afterwards the sons of Ariston had drawn,
and is also the reverse of the king whose rule of life is the good of
his subjects.

Each of these governments and individuals has a corresponding
ethical gradation: the ideal State is under the rule of reason, not
extinguishing but harmonizing the passions, and training them in virtue;
in the timocracy and the timocratic man the constitution, whether of the
State or of the individual, is based, first, upon courage, and secondly,
upon the love of honour; this latter virtue, which is hardly to be