James Adam, The Republic of Plato

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566D - 569C The tyrant begins his reign with popular measures, but as soon as his position is secure, he impoverishes and oppresses the citizens by a continual succession of wars. All who expostulate, he ‘removes’: it is a sad necessity of his situation that he should purge the city of wealth and virtue. To provide against his growing unpopularity, he must increase his standing army by enlisting foreign mercenaries and the slaves of private citizens. These are his ‘new citizens’ forsooth! Euripides and other tragedians praise tyranny and its retinue: that is why we exclude them from our city. The higher they climb the hill of commonwealths, the more the honour paid to poets flags. As for the tyrant, after exhausting the property of temples and the proscribed, he will compel the Demos that begat him to support his rabble rout. All remonstrance is in vain. The Demos now learns what slavery means—slavery in its most cruel form, where slaves are masters.

ff. 26 διέλθωμεν δὴ κτλ. Throughout the whole of this picture, it is tolerably clear that Plato has Dionysius the first of Syracuse in his mind: see on 566 E, 567 B, E, 568 A, D. The reader should compare Aristotle's brief account of the three kinds of Tyranny in Pol. Δ 10. 1295^{a} 1—24. That which Plato describes is of course the worst variety ἥτις ἀνυπεύθυνος ἄρχει τῶν ὁμοίων καὶ βελτιόνων πάντων πρὸς τὸ σφέτερον αὐτῆς συμφέρον, ἀλλὰ μὴ πρὸς τὸ τῶν ἀρχομένων (ib. 20— 22).

βροτός: ‘creature’ (Jowett). The tyrant is something less than human.

πάντας ᾣ ἂν κτλ. For the grammatical concord cf. IV 426 C note The sense is well illustrated by Stallbaum from Eur. I. A. 337—342, where Menelaus says to Agamemnon: οἲσθ᾽ ὅτ᾽ ἐσπούδαζες ἄρχειν Δαναίδαις πρὸς Ἴλιον | —ὡς ταπεινὸς ἦσθα, πάσης δεξιᾶς προσθιγγάνων, | καὶ θύρας ἔχων ἀκλῄστους τῷ θέλοντι δημοτῶν, | καὶ διδοὺς πρόσρησιν ἑξῆς πᾶσι, κεἰ μήτις θέλοι, | τοῖς τρόποις ζητῶν πρίασθαι τὸ φιλότιμον ἐκ μέσου; On οὔτε followed by τε (neque—et) where the stress falls on the affirmative clause (non modo non— sed etiam) see IV 430 B note