Roman marble busts of Greek philosophers. Plato’s Myth of the Metals imagines an ideal society governed not by wealth or birth, but by wisdom and character.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
What did Plato mean by the Myth of the Metals? Why did he defend the ‘Noble Lie’, and what does it imply about merit, political authority, and the ideal state?
Among the most famous—and controversial—passages in Plato’s Republic is the Myth of the Metals, also known as the Noble Lie (gennaion pseudos).
In it, Socrates proposes a fictional account of human nature and society. Although known to be false, the story serves a higher purpose: to foster loyalty to the state and encourage each citizen to embrace the role for which he or she is naturally best suited.
To modern readers, this may sound like an unapologetic defence of political propaganda. However, Plato’s myth is more subtle than it first appears. Beneath it all lies a serious question: what entitles one person or class to govern over another?
More than two thousand years later, the Myth of the Metals continues to provoke debate about merit, education, political authority, and the stories that bind us together.
The Myth of the Metals
By Book III of the Republic, Socrates has divided his ideal state into three classes: rulers or guardians, auxiliaries (soldiers), and producers such as farmers, craftsmen, and merchants.
Now he asks: how is this order to endure?
His solution is a ‘noble lie’: a founding myth taught from childhood to every citizen.
All people are born from the earth itself. Since the land is their common mother, every citizen is a brother or sister with a shared duty to the community from which they arose.
But although equal in origin, they differ in nature. When creating each soul, God mixed a particular metal into it.
These metals do not represent material wealth; in fact, it is the class of the merchants that might be expected to be the wealthiest. Rather, they symbolise the qualities needed for each role within the state.
Merit Among the Metals
At first sight, the Myth of the Metals appears to enforce a rigid social hierarchy. But in the detail, Plato is much more nuanced.
Children usually inherit the same metal as their parents, but not always. A child born to bronze parents may possess a golden soul and should therefore be redirected as a ruler, while a child of rulers may prove better suited to farming or craftsmanship.
In other words, social positions, though generally indicated by birth, should depend on ability rather than birth itself.
Socrates insists that every generation must be carefully observed and educated so that each person’s true nature can emerge. If those with golden souls are overlooked, or those with bronze souls permitted to rule simply because of their parentage, the state will fall into decline.
Thus, the Myth of the Metals is surprisingly meritocratic. Birth creates an expectation, but never a guarantee. What qualifies a person to govern is wisdom and character, not ancestry, wealth, or popularity.
Wealth in the Ideal State
Those with the greatest power must also accept the greatest sacrifices.
Rulers and auxiliaries should own no private property, accumulate no wealth, and live together in simple accommodation. They should receive from the citizens only the bare necessities of life.
The aim is not economic equality for its own sake. Rather, Plato fears the corrupting influence of wealth. Someone with land, money, or possessions may begin serving private interests ahead of the public good. By owning nothing, guardians remain servants of the state rather than masters over it.
The same principle applies to society as a whole. Plato argues that both wealth and poverty corrupt human character: ‘The one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.’
A flourishing society avoids both extremes.
Interpreting the Myth
The Myth of the Metals has divided readers since antiquity.
Some regard it as one of the earliest justifications for political propaganda. Plato appears willing to permit governments to propagate a falsehood if doing so strengthens social cohesion and serves the common good.
Others read the myth less as a practical proposal than as a philosophical allegory. On this view, the metals symbolise the different capacities people possess, while the Noble Lie illustrates the shared stories upon which every political community ultimately depends.
In either case, Plato’s central claim remains the same. Political authority should rest neither on birth nor wealth, but on wisdom, education, and moral character. His rulers are not privileged; they are burdened with the responsibility of placing the common good above their own interests.
In Summary
The Myth of the Metals is Plato’s attempt to explain how an ideal society might achieve both unity and justice. Through the fiction of souls made of gold, silver, bronze, or iron, he argues that citizens should perform the roles for which they are naturally best suited, while recognising that genuine ability may appear in any family.
Whether understood as political propaganda or philosophical allegory, the myth raises questions that remain as pressing today as they were in ancient Athens. Should political authority rest on birth, wealth, popular opinion, or merit? Can any society flourish without a shared story about itself?
Plato’s answers remain controversial, but the questions have lost none of their force.
The Surprising Affinities Between Greek and Indian Philosophy
Odilon Redon, Apollo’s Chariot (c. 1910). Both Plato and the Katha Upanishad compared the human soul to a chariot.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 14 August 2026.
Western philosophy and Indian philosophy are presented as two quite separate traditions. Yet go back to their beginnings and the distinction starts to break down. Some of the earliest Greek philosophers held ideas that today we would be more likely to call ‘Eastern’ than ‘Western’.
At almost the same moment in history, Greek and Indian thinkers began asking many of the same questions, and, sometimes, coming up with remarkably similar answers.
How are we to explain these affinities? And if the two traditions began so close together, how did they end up so far apart?
Pythagoras
Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570-c. 495 BCE) was a near contemporary of Anaximander and Anaximenes, as well as the Buddha. He might even have met Thales of Miletus—‘the first scientist’—who, it is said, advised him to travel to Memphis to take instruction from Egyptian priests.
In antiquity, Pythagoras was better known as a philosopher than a mathematician. Although he may have introduced it to the West, the theorem that came to bear his name had been discovered centuries earlier by the Babylonians and Indians. His association with this theorem hints at some kind of Eastern connection.
At the age of 40, Pythagoras left Samos for Croton in southern Italy, where he established a philosophically minded religious community. Unusually for the time, Pythagoras admitted men and women alike. Of the 235 famous Pythagoreans listed by Iamblichus, 17 are women.
The men and women who entered the community’s inner circle were governed by a strict set of ascetic and ethical rules, forsaking personal possessions, assuming a mainly vegetarian diet, and—since words are so often careless and misleading—observing the strictest silence.
In India, at around the same time, the Buddha’s followers were organising into monasteries. The Buddha delivered many of his discourses in the monastery of Jetavana in Shravasti, which had been donated to him by the banker Anathapindada. Buddhist monks could eat meat if it was offered to them, but only after ensuring that the animal had not been slaughtered on their behalf. At her insistence, the Buddha’s aunt Mahapajapati became the first of many Buddhist nuns.
The first Buddhist monasteries served as a prototype for the world’s first residential university at Nalanda, just as Pythagoras’ community served as a model for philosophical institutions such as Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, and, later, for the monastic life and associated early universities.
Music played an important role in Pythagoras’ community. Pythagoreans recited poetry, sang hymns to Apollo, and played on the lyre to cure illnesses of body and soul. One day, or so the story goes, Pythagoras passed by some blacksmiths at work, and found that their hammering produced especially pleasing sounds. He then noticed that their anvils were simple ratios of one another, one being half the size of the first, another twice the size, and so on.
This insight led to his ‘harmony of the spheres,’ according to which the movements of the heavenly bodies are in a mathematical relationship akin to that between musical notes, and, together, amount to a grand cosmic symphony.
Pythagoras (the name means ‘Oracle among the people’) never divorced religion from philosophy and science, which, even in his day, left him open to accusations of mysticism. No doubt under the influence of Orphism, a mystery religion rooted in pre-Hellenic beliefs and the Thracian cult of Zagreus, Pythagoras came to believe in metempsychosis, that is, in the transmigration of the soul at death into a new body of the same or a different species, until such a time as it became moral.
He himself claimed to have lived four lives and to remember them all in detail: in his first life, he had had the good fortune of being Aethalides, son of Hermes, who had given him the faculty of remembering everything even through death.
Taken together, vegetarianism, asceticism, a mixed community devoted to spiritual discipline, cosmic harmonies, and a belief in the transmigration of souls look rather more like a school of Indian religion than the beginning of Western philosophy.
But similarity does not prove influence. Ideas could have travelled through Persia and the wider networks connecting the Mediterranean with India, or they could reflect a deeper Indo-European inheritance. Or it may all be a simple coincidence. My own suspicion is that these similarities owe something to ideas travelling, indirectly and often imperceptibly, between East and West. Maybe Parmenides can help us figure it out.
Parmenides
After Pythagoras’ death in c. 495 BCE, the Pythagoreans deified him, and attributed him with a golden thigh and the gift of bilocation (being in two places at once).
In India, the first Upanishads, the Chandogya Upanishad and Great Forest Upanishad, had by then already been written. The central vision of the Upanishads is one of pantheism (all is God), with God hidden in nature ‘even as the silkworm is hidden in the web of silk he made’. God is Brahman and the part or aspect of Brahman that is in us is Atman. The aim then becomes to achieve the knowledge and unity of Atman and Brahman, which is wisdom, salvation, and liberation (moksha). When Socrates argued for self-knowledge over knowledge, he made the same turn as the Upanishads.
The student of Western philosophy might be reminded of Parmenides (c. 515-c. 440 BCE), who was still young when Pythagoras died. In his poem, On Nature, Parmenides contrasted the Way of Truth to the Way of Opinion. Through a chain of strict a priori deductive arguments from premises deemed incontrovertible, Parmenides argued that, despite appearances (the Way of Opinion), the universe must consist of a single undifferentiated and indivisible unity, which he called ‘the One’—comparable, of course, to Brahman.
In both East and West, we are asked to distrust the multiplicity presented by the senses and seek, behind it, a deeper and indivisible reality. As the Katha Upanishad puts it: ‘Who sees the many and not the one, wanders on from death to death.’
Plato, who might be considered the great systemiser of Western philosophy, was heavily influenced by both Pythagoras and Parmenides.
Plato
In the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that Plato’s teachings owed much to those of the Pythagoreans; so much, in fact, that Bertrand Russell upheld not Plato but Pythagoras as the most influential of all Western philosophers. Pythagoras’ influence is perhaps most evident in Plato’s mystical approach to the soul and in his emphasis on mathematics, and, more generally, reason and abstract thought, as a secure basis for the practice of philosophy.
Just as Plato (c. 427-c. 347 BCE) leaned upon Heraclitus and his theory of flux (‘No one ever steps twice into the same river’) for his conception of the sensible or phenomenal world, so he leaned upon Parmenides for his conception of the intelligible or noumenal world, which he rendered as the ideal, immutable realm of the forms.
Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates discusses the immortality of the soul with a pair of Pythagorean philosophers, is essentially an Upanishad in both form and content. Socrates argues that the forms cannot be apprehended by the senses, but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks in as far as possible to separate soul from body. As death is the complete separation of soul and body, the philosopher aims at death, and can be said to be almost dead.
Although the Phaedo is at the root of Western psychology, philosophy, and theology, it is also deeply Eastern in advocating supreme detachment and ego suppression or disintegration as the route to salvation.
In the Meno, Plato argues that learning is really recollection (anamnesis): the soul already possesses knowledge, and philosophical enquiry merely helps it to remember. Socrates demonstrates the point by questioning an uneducated slave boy until he works out a geometrical problem for himself. The truth, it seems, is not simply out there waiting to be discovered, but somehow already within us—a thought that sits remarkably well with the Upanishadic turn inward towards Atman and self-knowledge.
Underlying Plato’s theory of recollection is the idea that the soul existed before birth. Across the Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Republic, he repeatedly returns to the transmigration of the soul through successive lives, with its fate after death depending upon how it has lived. In the Myth of Er at the end of the Republic, the dead are rewarded or punished before choosing their next lives and drinking from the River of Forgetfulness prior to rebirth. Odysseus, having learnt from the sufferings of his former life, chooses the quiet life of an ordinary man—which he found easily, because neglected by everybody else. The parallels with the Indian doctrines of reincarnation and karma are difficult to miss.
I’ve kept the most striking parallel for last. In the Phaedrus, Plato compares the soul to a chariot with a charioteer and two winged horses. The divine chariot has two tame horses, while the human chariot has one tame horse and one unruly one, making the charioteer’s ascent towards truth a constant struggle. The Katha Upanishad reaches for the very same image. This time, the body is the chariot, the Atman or true self its lord, reason the charioteer, the mind the reins, and the senses the horses. A person without understanding is ‘like a bad driver with wild horses’.
Stoicism
Centuries later, the Stoics, who were influenced by Plato, would once again develop ideas that seem remarkably close to Indian philosophy—especially, this time, Buddhism.
Both traditions warn against attachment and the tyranny of desire; both seek freedom by changing our relation to events rather than controlling events themselves; and both loosen the boundary between self and others in favour of a wider identification with humanity—or even with life as a whole.
In both East and West, then, philosophy could mean something much more demanding than thinking clearly or holding the right opinions. It was a discipline of the self: a way of transforming consciousness and attaining freedom.
Over time, however, philosophy and spiritual practice drifted apart in the West, while in India they remained more closely entwined. The Western tradition retained much from Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato, and the Stoics—mathematics, logic, metaphysics, rational argument—but gradually lost much of their conception of philosophy as a spiritual practice and path to liberation.
The great difference between Eastern and Western philosophy may therefore lie not so much in how they began, but in what happened to them afterwards.
Had that other strand prevailed, the division we now draw between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ philosophy might look very different.
Perhaps the Western mind did take an Eastern turn. It just didn’t stay the course.
The Uncanny Parallels Between Plato and the Upanishads
Know the Self as the rider in the chariot, the body as the chariot itself; know the intellect as the charioteer, and the mind as the reins. —Katha Upanishad
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 14 August 2026.
Coming to Indian philosophy after having written three books on Greek philosophy, I have been struck by the parallels. And I have been asking myself: are the similarities between Greek and Indian thought the result of direct or indirect communication, or are they the result of a common source or common grammar (Sanskrit being closely related to Greek)? Or are they rather a universal product of the human mind?
The possibility of contact cannot be dismissed. By Plato’s lifetime, the Persian Empire had brought the Greeks and Indians within the same vast political and commercial sphere. Ideas, like goods and people, could travel great distances. But possibility is not proof, and there is no evidence that Plato himself encountered the Upanishads.
Introduction to the Upanishads
‘Upanishad’ means something like ‘hidden connections’, ‘secret teaching’, or ‘esoteric doctrine’, literally, ‘a sitting at (the feet of the teacher)’. Although part of the Vedas, the Upanishads tend to take a dim, if diplomatic, view of what went before. ‘Of what use,’ asks the Svetashvatara Upanishad, ‘is the Rig Veda to one who does not know the Spirit from whom the Rig Veda comes?’ By a strict definition, there are around 108 Upanishads, but the first dozen are the most important.
Like the writings of the pre-Socratic philosophers, some of these mukhya (major) Upanishads are in prose, others are in verse.
Although it is the philosophy and poetry that are retained, the content of the Upanishads is very diverse. The Upanishads fit into the Vedic tradition, and, like older layers of the Vedas, may include mantras, rituals, creation myths, lineages of teachers, historical narratives, and the like. At their best and most original, they take the form of a philosophical dialogue, not unlike those of Plato, with named interlocutors presenting and debating various viewpoints.
For example, in the Great Forest Upanishad (which is the oldest Upanishad, dating from around or before the sixth century BCE), the sage Yajnavalya engages in philosophical debate with, among others, his wife Maitreyi, the sage Gargi (another, rare, woman), and King Janaka of Videha—who salutes Yajnavalya with ‘namaste’. In the Chandogya Upanishad, the sage Uddalaka Aruni—the guru (teacher) of Yajnavalya—engages in debate with his son, Svetaketu.
Yajnavalya, Uddalaka, and Svetaketu are among the first philosophers in recorded history.
Brahman and Atman
This being philosophy, there is a tendency to abstraction, to reach ‘at the truth behind the truth’ (satyasya satyam).
The central vision is one of pantheism (all is God) or panentheism (all is in God), with God hidden in nature ‘even as the silkworm is hidden in the web of silk he made’. God is Brahman and the part or aspect of Brahman that is in us is Atman.
The aim then becomes to achieve the knowledge and unity of Atman and Brahman, which is wisdom, salvation, and liberation (moksha).
These ideas are neatly encapsulated in this passage from the Mundaka Upanishad:
As rivers flowing into the ocean find their final peace and their name and form disappear, even so the wise become free from name and form and enter into the radiance of the Supreme Spirit who is greater than all greatness. In truth who knows God becomes God.
Parallels With Parmenides and Greek Philosophy
The student of Western philosophy might be reminded of the pre-Socratic Parmenides (d. c. 400 BCE), who, in his poem, On Nature, contrasted the way of truth to the way of opinion. Through a chain of strict a priori deductive arguments from premises deemed incontrovertible, Parmenides argued that, despite appearances (the way of Opinion), the universe must consist of a single, undifferentiated, and indivisible unity, which he called ‘the One’.
These verses from the Katha Upanishad could credibly have been penned by Parmenides:
Who sees the many and not the one, wanders on from death to death. Even by the mind this truth is to be learned: there are not many but one. Who sees variety and not unity wanders on from death to death.
To bolster the philosophy of Parmenides, his student and lover Zeno of Elea produced a set of paradoxical arguments, including the famous Achilles and the Tortoise, designed to undermine ordinary assumptions about motion, space, time, and plurality.
Just as Plato (d. 348 BCE) leaned upon Heraclitus and his theory of flux (‘No one ever steps twice into the same river’) for his conception of the sensible or phenomenal world, so he leaned upon Parmenides for his conception of the intelligible or noumenal world, which he rendered as the ideal, immutable realm of the Forms.
Already, Greek and Indian thought appear to be circling around the same fundamental problem: are the change and multiplicity presented to our senses real, or are they merely manifestations of something single, eternal, and unchanging?
Parallels With Plato
Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates discusses the immortality of the soul with a pair of Pythagorean philosophers, is essentially an Upanishad in both form and content. The philosopher, says Socrates, who is soon to drink of the hemlock, aims at truth, but his body is constantly deceiving and distracting him:
The body keeps us busy in a thousand ways because of its need for nurture… It fills us with needs, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense…
Absolute justice, absolute beauty, or absolute good cannot be apprehended by the senses but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks as far as possible to separate the soul from the body. As death is the complete separation of body and soul, the philosopher aims at death and can be said to be almost dead.
This idea of the soul being waylaid by the body is also found in the Maitri Upanishad, which was written at around the same time as the Phaedo:
The human soul rules the body; but the immortal spiritual soul is pure like a drop of water on a lotus leaf. The soul is under the power of the three constituents and conditions of nature and thus it falls into confusion. Because of this confusion the soul cannot become conscious of the God who dwells within and whose power gives us power to work.
In the Meno, Plato argues that learning is really recollection (anamnesis): the soul already possesses knowledge, and philosophical enquiry merely helps it to remember. Socrates demonstrates the point by questioning an uneducated slave boy until he works out a geometrical problem for himself. The truth, it seems, is not simply out there waiting to be discovered, but somehow already within us—a thought that sits remarkably well with the Upanishadic turn inward towards Atman and self-knowledge.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates, having established its immortality, compares the soul to a chariot with a charioteer and two winged horses. Whereas the chariot of a god has two tame horses, that of a mortal has one tame horse and one unruly one, which is the cause of much hardship for the charioteer.
This passage from the Katha Upanishad appears almost to be elucidating Plato’s chariot allegory:
Know the Atman as the Lord of a chariot; and the body as the chariot itself. Know that reason is the charioteer; and the mind indeed is the reins. The horses, they say, are the senses; and their paths are the objects of sense. He who has not right understanding, and whose mind is never steady is not the ruler of his life, like a bad driver with wild horses.
The two allegories are not identical. Plato divides the soul between charioteer and horses, whereas the Katha splits differently. Yet both arrive at the same extraordinary image: human life as an exercise in charioteering, in which the mind must somehow govern forces that threaten to derail us.
The Form of the Good
For more than two millennia, Western philosophers have been poring over Plato’s elusive Form of the Good. Plato himself devised three interconnected allegories (the sun, line, and cave) merely to point at it. But I can tell you what it is in just one word: Brahman.
Both Brahman and the Form of the Good point beyond the changing world of appearances towards an ultimate principle upon which truth and reality depend. Just as Brahman stands behind the multiplicity of the world as its ultimate ground, so the Form of the Good stands beyond the other Forms as the source of their intelligibility.
Plato even has a theory of reincarnation, leading us to suppose that he must, in a previous life, have been a Brahmin.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 18 August 2026.
Tyranny is back on the table, but the ancients thought hard about how to avoid it. One of their most interesting arguments is that the one who suffers most in a tyranny is… the tyrant himself.
When Lydia (in modern-day Turkey) was conquered by Persia in around 540 BCE, the Greek cities of Ionia, along the Aegean coast, were ruled by tyrants nominated by the Persian satrap in Sardis, the former Lydian capital. These tyrants, backed by the Persian power, had no need to moderate their rule, and began to give tyranny, and Persia, a bad name to the Greeks.
King vs Tyrant
The definition of ‘tyrant’ is malleable, and has shifted many times over the centuries. All in all, a tyrant is an absolute ruler who is illegitimate and/or unrestrained by law. To maintain himself in such a precarious position, he (for it is invariably a ‘he’) usually resorts to oppression and cruelty. Even then, ‘the strangest thing to see is an aged tyrant’—as the philosopher Thales of Miletus (a city of Ionia) noted more than 2,500 years ago.
In On Clemency, written for the emperor Nero, the Roman philosopher Seneca (d. 65 CE) says that clemency is the quality that most distinguishes a king from a tyrant: ‘A tyrant differs from a king in his behaviour, not his title … It’s because of clemency that there’s a big difference between a king and a tyrant.’ For Seneca, a ruler’s glory depends not on his power, but on its proper exercise. Moreover, if people can see that their ruler is ‘for them as much as he is above them’, they will be loyal to him and act as his eyes and ears. Clemency, then, not only ennobles rulers but keeps them safe: ‘It is at one and the same time an adornment of supreme power and its surest security.’
Fear and Trembling
The calm and deliberate exercise of power, says Seneca, is like a clear and brilliant sky, but when the ruler is unrestrained all becomes murk and shadows: ‘People on every side tremble and start at sudden sounds, and not even the one who causes all the alarm is left unshaken.’ The tyrant is then caught in a vicious circle: he is hated because he is feared, and must make himself feared because he is hated. For everyone he kills, there are fathers and sons, brothers and friends, who will rise up in their stead. In time, the tyrant cannot travel freely, sleep soundly, eat confidently, speak openly, or trust even those closest to him.
In 68 CE, abandoned by the Praetorian Guard and declared a public enemy by the Senate, Nero fled Rome. As soldiers approached to arrest him, he preferred suicide to capture. But he did not have the courage to wield the dagger himself, and his freedman Epaphroditus helped him drive it into his throat. His last, deluded words were, Qualis artifex pereo: ‘What an artist dies in me!’
Socrates on Tyranny
One of Socrates’ most famous arguments is that no one ever knowingly does evil. People do wrong not because their ethics are overwhelmed by a desire for pleasure, as is often thought, but because they are unable to weigh up pleasures and pains. They act with recklessness or cowardice or foolishness or vice (which are really all one and the same thing) because, from their limited perspective, it seems like the right or best thing to do. But in the longer term, their actions undermine both their and our happiness—and never more so than if they happen to be a tyrant.
In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates makes the case that the tyrant is the most miserable of men because he is in a stronger position to harm himself and others—which is why those whom Homer has in Hades suffering eternal torment are not ordinary people but potentates such as Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Tityus.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates ranks people according to how much of the ideal Forms their souls are supposed to have seen, with philosophers, artists, and true lovers in the first class, followed by kings and generals in the second class … and tyrants in the ninth and final class.
In Book 9 of the Republic, Socrates calculates that the king is precisely 729 times happier than the tyrant. He derives this number, which happens to be the cube of 9, through some fanciful Platonic arithmetic, following his argument that there are three kinds of pleasure corresponding to the three parts of the soul.
Plato and Aristotle on Tyranny
The best rulers are those who are most reluctant to govern, and the most eager the worst—said Plato.
Plato did not care for Athenian democracy, but the tyranny of his own aristocratic relatives had proven much worse. In the Republic, he claims that the degeneration of the ideal state ends in democracy, followed by tyranny.
The transition from democracy to tyranny is one of the most striking passages in the Republic. Democracy prizes freedom above all else, until freedom itself becomes excessive: children cease to respect their parents, pupils their teachers, and citizens any form of authority or restraint. Into this disorder steps a popular champion who promises to protect people from their enemies. He accuses his opponents, disposes of rivals, redistributes property, and, when threatened in return, asks the people for a bodyguard. The protector has turned tyrant.
In Book 9 of the Republic, Plato gives a detailed account of the origins, mindset, and modus operandi of the tyrant, thereby demonstrating that this most unjust of men is also the most slavish and unhappy. The soul of the tyrant is so disordered that he is unable to do, or even know, what it truly desires—which is, of course, to be happy, and therefore good.
Plato begins his psychological portrait with our dreams. Even in respectable people, he says, there is a ‘terrible, savage, and lawless’ element that emerges during sleep, entertaining desires that reason would never permit in waking life. In the tyrannical man, these lawless desires have escaped from the night and taken command of the day.
At first, the tyrannical man spends his money satisfying them. When the money runs out, he borrows. When borrowing is no longer enough, he cheats and steals. He exploits his parents, betrays his friends, and eventually becomes capable of any crime. The man who appeared to be supremely free has become the slave of his strongest appetite.
And what happens within the individual, Plato argues, also happens within the state. The political tyrant must continually manufacture enemies, because conflict makes the people dependent upon their leader. He must remove anyone courageous, intelligent, wealthy, or independent enough to threaten him. As the better sort disappear, he becomes increasingly dependent upon flatterers, mercenaries, and slaves. Power progressively deprives him of the very people whom he might have trusted.
The tyrant has conquered everyone except himself.
The life of the political tyrant is even more wretched than that of the private tyrant, first, because the political tyrant is in a better position to feed his disordered desires, and, second, because he is everywhere surrounded and watched by his enemies, of whom he is, in effect, the prisoner.
The Republic ends with the Myth of Er, according to which the souls of tyrants and murderers are barred from reincarnation and condemned to an eternity in the underworld.
Aristotle too suggested that there is no worse criminal than the tyrant: ‘Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence honour is bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills a tyrant…’
In Book 2 of the Politics, Aristotle says that the Carthaginian constitution is so superior to any Greek one that the Carthaginians have never suffered a rebellion or been ruled by a tyrant.
How to Protect against Tyrants
So, what might the ancient philosophers have to say about today’s democracies?
First, we need to ensure that a life spent in politics remains an attractive prospect, or at the very least a tolerable one, or else sensible people will be put off from going into politics, hollowing out the centre and leaving us to be governed, or misgoverned, by disturbed and power-hungry fanatics.
Second, we need to think more carefully about education, and what it means to be educated. Unless we transform ourselves by carrying out the work of the mind, we could be rich, powerful, and famous, like Nero, or Putin, and still be utterly miserable. Playing the tyrant, and taking everyone down with us, is not, as Seneca reminds us, what human beings are for. The best bulwark against tyranny is the existence of a large and historically aware middle class.
It is not merely that educated people know more facts. A population with some knowledge of history is more likely to recognise the old methods when they return: the invention of internal enemies, the attack on independent institutions, the demand for personal loyalty, the contempt for established restraints, and the insistence that one man can save us. Tyranny changes its garb more readily than its methods.
The Internet once promised to become the greatest educational tool in history. Instead, it has also become the demagogue’s greatest megaphone, enabling him to bypass traditional institutions and appeal directly to the fears and resentments of millions.
Third, a country’s constitution or political settlement must contain sufficient safeguards to prevent or arrest the rise of a potential tyrant, or simply of a less than decent or competent leader. This is not the case in the U.S. and no longer the case in the U.K. where recent changes to how the main political parties select their leaders have enabled the rise of such improbable figures as Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson, who, as prime minister, purged his party of competent moderates and attempted to prorogue Parliament.
Of course, constitutions are only as strong as the people prepared to uphold them. Safeguards can be ignored or circumvented, offices captured, institutions intimidated. So it is not simply a matter of writing a fail-safe constitution.
Since the time of Plato, humanity has made great strides in science and technology, but far less progress in politics. The world, now armed with nuclear weapons, and faced with problems that Plato could scarcely have imagined, is still crying out for fail-safe systems of government.
Not content with discussing courage, Socrates also demonstrated it on the battlefield.
While discussing philosophy in the public square, Socrates would also have been training as a hoplite, a heavily armed foot soldier that fought in the close phalanx formation. Practicing maneuvers in heavy armor would have developed his strength and agility. The pyrrhike war dance, so ancient as to have been performed by Achilles around the burning pyre of Patroclus, is described by Plato in the Laws, and involved imitating movements of attack and defense “in a direct and manly style.”
In Plato’s Apology, Socrates proudly tells the jury that, just as he did not desert his post at the battles of Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis for fear of dying, so he will not now abandon the life of the philosopher. The earlier of the three battles, the Battle of Potidaea, took place in 432 B.C.E., when Socrates would have been around 38 years old, suggesting that he may also have taken part in other, earlier campaigns.
Unlike predecessors such as Pythagoras and Empedocles, who had a pacifist outlook, Socrates did not particularly question warfare, which he looked upon as his patriotic duty. However, he did refuse to carry out unjust orders, and, like Jesus four centuries later, rejected the ancestral law of retaliation, stating, in the Crito, that “we ought not retaliate or render evil to anyone, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.” In the Laws, Plato goes further still, arguing that war ought only to be waged for the sake of peace.
The Battle of Potidaea
The siege of Potidaea, a city-state that had rebelled against Athens, lasted until 429. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades says that Socrates singlehandedly saved his life at Potidaea, and took the hardships of the campaign “much better than anyone in the whole army.” At the same time, no one enjoyed a festival more than he did; if compelled, he could drink everyone under the table, yet no one had ever seen him drunk.
During a severe frost, he marched barefoot and, even then, outdid his shod comrades, who “looked daggers at him because he seemed to despise them.” Although Socrates had saved his life, it is Alcibiades, on account of his birth and rank, who received the prize for valour. When Alcibiades remonstrated with the generals that the prize ought to go to Socrates, he was more eager than anyone that Alcibiades should have it.
The Battle of Delium
The Battle of Delium, in Boetia, took place in 424, about five years after Potidaea, and ended in a costly defeat for Athens. In Plato’s Laches, the general Laches says that Socrates was his companion in the retreat from Delium, and that if only others could have been like him, “the honour of our country would have been upheld, and the great defeat would never have occurred.” In tribute to his valour at Delium, Laches invites Socrates to teach and contradict him as much as he likes, without regard for his superior age and rank.
During the retreat from Delium, Alcibiades, who was on horseback, chanced upon Socrates and Laches. In Plato’s Symposium, he says that, even in retreating, Socrates appeared so calm and confident and imposing that no one dared attack him or his companions, preferring instead to pursue those who had turned in headlong fight.
The Battle of Amphipolis
The Battle of Amphipolis took place in 422, two years after the Battle of Delium when Socrates would have been around 48 years old—very old for a shield-carrying hoplite. The year before, Aristophanes had staged a comedy, The Clouds, which lampooned Socrates as a subversive atheist, and it is possible that Socrates’ notoriety, especially among ordinary people, rested as much on his bravery in battle as on his more intellectual pursuits.
At Amphipolis, Athens was once again routed, but the deaths of Kleon on the Athenian side and Brasidas on the Spartan side prepared the ground for the Peace of Nicias and, for Socrates, a return to the philosophy of the street.
Socrates and Plato on Courage
In the Laches, also known as On Courage, the general Nicias concludes that courage amounts to knowledge of the fearful and hopeful in war and every other sphere and situation. Socrates says that if Nicias means that courage is knowledge of the grounds of fear and hope, then courage is very rare among men, while animals could never be called “courageous” but at most “fearless”—as ordinary language use seems to confirm. Nicias concurs, adding that the same is also true of children: “Or do you really suppose I call all children courageous, who fear nothing because they have no sense?”
Socrates next proposes to investigate the grounds of fear and hope. Fear, he says, arises from anticipated evil things, but not from evil things that have happened or that are happening; hope, in contrast, arises from anticipated good things, or, at least, anticipated non-evil things or less evil things.
But, in any field of study, there is not one science of the future, one science of the past, and one science of the present: knowledge of the past, present, and future are all the same type of knowledge. Therefore, courage is not merely knowledge of the fearful and the hopeful, but knowledge of all things, including those that are in the past and in the present. A person who had such knowledge could not be said to be lacking in courage, but neither could she be said to be lacking in any of the other virtues— justice, temperance, and piety.
Socrates points out that, in trying to define courage, he, Laches, and Nicias, have succeeded in defining virtue herself. Virtue is knowledge, which is why people with some measure of one virtue usually have a similar measure of the other virtues and of virtue in general—a thesis known as the Unity of the Virtues.
Laches and Nicias are suitably impressed, but Socrates insists that he does not as yet fully understand the nature of either courage or virtue.
In the Laches, then, Socrates defines courage as knowledge or knowledge of the good. But knowledge of the good is not enough. What we also need is the Socratic strength to persevere with our conviction through pleasures, desires, and, above all, fears. Thus, in the Republic, the mature Plato redefines courage as “the conservation of the conviction …. about fearful things.”
It’s quite a thought that, had Socrates fallen in battle, we today would be living in different minds.
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