Key Arguments

• A tyrant-ruled city is 'more completely enslaved' with most citizens degraded; by analogy, the tyrannical soul’s best parts are enslaved under a small, worst, maddest ruling part.
• The tyrannical soul is least able to do what it desires, 'goaded' by internal conflict and remorse.
• Such a city is poor; likewise the tyrannical soul is 'always poor and insatiable.'
• Both city and soul live in fear and suffer 'lamentation and sorrow and groaning and pain.'
• Thus, the tyrannical man, consumed by furious passions, suffers the greatest misery.

Source Quotes

Beginning with the State, I replied, would you say that a city which is governed by a tyrant is free or enslaved? No city, he said, can be more completely enslaved. And yet, as you see, there are freemen as well as masters in such a State?

Yes, he said, I see that there are—a few; but the people, speaking generally, and the best of them are miserably degraded and enslaved. Then if the man is like the State, I said, must not the same rule prevail? his soul is full of meanness and vulgarity—the best elements in him are enslaved; and there is a small ruling part, which is also the worst and maddest. Inevitably.

Utterly incapable. And also the soul which is under a tyrant (I am speaking of the soul taken as a whole) is least capable of doing what she desires; there is a gadfly which goads her, and she is full of trouble and remorse? Certainly.

Poor. And the tyrannical soul must be always poor and insatiable? True.

Yes, indeed. Is there any State in which you will find more of lamentation and sorrow and groaning and pain? Certainly not.

And when you see the same evils in the tyrannical man, what do you say of him? I say that he is by far the most miserable of all men. There, I said, I think that you are beginning to go wrong.

Key Concepts

• No city, he said, can be more completely enslaved.
• his soul is full of meanness and vulgarity—the best elements in him are enslaved; and there is a small ruling part, which is also the worst and maddest.
• there is a gadfly which goads her, and she is full of trouble and remorse
• the tyrannical soul must be always poor and insatiable?
• Is there any State in which you will find more of lamentation and sorrow and groaning and pain?
• he is by far the most miserable of all men.

Context

Direct application of the city–soul analogy to characterize the tyrannical condition before introducing a further distinction between private and public tyranny (Part 9).

Perspectives

Plato

Affirms the normative city–soul isomorphism: enslavement of reason and spirit by appetite yields poverty, fear, and psychic disintegration.

Socrates

Uses the analogy and symptomatic markers (fear, remorse, insatiability) to conclude the tyrannical life is maximally wretched.