eeds to clear a temple. Meanwhile the old opinions which he had
when a child, and which gave judgment about good and evil, are
overthrown by those others which have just been emancipated, and are
now the bodyguard of love and share his empire. These in his
democratic days, when he was still subject to the laws and to his
father, were only let loose in the dreams of sleep. But now that he is
under the dominion of love, he becomes always and in waking reality
what he was then very rarely and in a dream only; he will commit the
foulest murder, or eat forbidden food, or be guilty of any other horrid
act. Love is his tyrant, and lives lordly in him and lawlessly, and
being himself a king, leads him on, as a tyrant leads a State, to the
performance of any reckless deed by which he can maintain himself and
the rabble of his associates, whether those whom evil communications
have brought in from without, or those whom he himself has allowed to
break loose within him by reason of a similar evil nature in himself.
Have we not here a picture of his way of life?

Yes, indeed, he said.

And if there are only a few of them in the State, the rest of the
people are well disposed, they go away and become the bodyguard or
mercenary soldiers of some other tyrant who may probably want them for
a war; and if there is no war, they stay at home and do many little
pieces of mischief in the city.

What sort of mischief?

For example, they are the thieves, burglars, cutpurses, footpads,
robbers of temples, man-stealers of the community; or if they are able
to speak they turn informers, and bear false witness, and take bribes.

A small catalogue of evils, even if the perpetrators of them are few in
number.

Yes, I said; but small and great are comparative terms, and all these
things, in the misery and evil which they inflict upon a State, do not
come within a thousand miles of the tyrant; when this noxious class and
their followers grow numerous and become conscious of their strength,
assisted by the infatuation of the people, they choose from among
themselves the one who has most of the tyrant in his own soul, and him
they create their tyrant.

Yes, he said, and he will be the most fit to be a tyrant.

If the people yield, well and good; but if they resist him, as he began
by beating his own father and mother, so now, if he has the power, he
beats them, and will keep his dear old fatherland or motherland, as the
Cretans say, in sub