[578a]
be rich or poor?”
“Poor.” “Then the tyrant soul also must of
necessity always be needy1 and suffer from unfulfilled desire.” “So it
is,” he said. “And again, must not such a city, as well
as such a man, be full of terrors and alarms?” “It must
indeed.” “And do you think you will find more
lamentations and groans and wailing and anguish in any other
city?” “By no means.” “And so of
man, do you think these things will more abound in any other than in this
tyrant type, that is maddened by its desires and passions?”
“How could it be so?” he said. “In view of all
these
1 Cf. Laws 832 Aπεινῶσι τὴν ψυχήν, Xen.Symp. 4. 36πεινῶσι χρημάτων, Oecon. xiii. 9πεινῶσι γὰρ τοῦ ἐπαίνου, Aristot.Pol. 1277 a 24 “Jason said he was hungry when he was not a tyrant,” Shakes.TempestI. ii. 112 “so dry he was for sway.” Cf. Novotny, p. 1902, on Epist. vii. 335 B, also Max. Tyr.Diss. iv. 4τί γὰρ ἂν εἴη πενέστερον ἀνδρὸς ἐπιθυμοῦντος διηνεκῶς . . . ; Julian, Or. ii. 85 B, Teles (Hense), pp. 32-33. for the thought see also Gorg. 493-494. cf. also 521 A with 416 E, Phaedr. 279 C, and Epist. 355 C.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.