And last we come to tyranny and the tyrannical man. Democratic license develops into sheer anarchy. Jack is as good as his master. The predatory population becomes demagogues; they squeeze the decent citizens, and drive them to adopt oligarchical methods; then the friend of the people appears; the protector, champion, and hero, by a familiar process becomes a military autocrat, who himself battens, as must also his mercenary soldiery, on the citizens; and our unhappy Demos finds that it has jumped out of the reek into the fire. Now our democratical man was swayed by the devices and moods of the moment; his son will be swayed by the most irrational and most bestial of his appetites; be bully and tyrant, while slave of his own lusts. Your thorough blackguard of every species comes of this type, and the worst of all is he who achieves the tyranny of a state. See, then, how, even as the tyrannic state is the most utterly enslaved, so the tyrannic man is of all men the least free; and, beyond all others, the tyrant of a state. He is like a slave-owner, who is at the mercy of his slaves—the passions which he must pamper, or die, yet cannot satisfy. Surely such an one is the veriest slave—yea, the most wretched of men. It follows that he who is the most complete opposite of the tyrant is the happiest—the individual who corresponds to our state. Proclaim it, then, son of Ariston, that the most just of men is he who is master of himself, and is of all men the most miserable, whether gods and men recognise him or no.
VII.—Of the Happiness of the Just
Now for a second proof. Three kinds of pleasure correspond to the three elements of the soul—reason, spirit, desire. In each man one of the three is in the ascendant. One counts knowledge vain in comparison with the advantages of riches, another with those of honour; to the philosopher only truth counts. But he is the only one of them who makes his choice from experience of all three kinds. And he, the only qualified judge, places the satisfaction of the spirit second, and of desire lowest. And yet a third proof: I fancy the only quite real pleasures are those of the philosopher. There is an intermediate state between pleasure and pain. To pass into this from pleasure is painful, and from pain is pleasurable. Now, the pleasures of the body are really nothing more than reliefs from pains of one kind or another. And, next, the pleasures of the soul, being of the eternal order, are necessarily more real than those of the body, which are fleeting—in fact, mere shadows of pleasure.
Much as I love and admire Homer, I think our regulations as to poetry were particularly sound; but we must inquire further into the meaning of imitation. We saw before that all particular things are the presentations of some universal idea. There is one ultimate idea of bed, or chair, or table. What the joiner makes is a copy of that. All ideas are the creation of the master artificer, the demiurge; of his creations all material things are copies. We can all create things in a way by catching reflections of them in a mirror. But these are only copies of particular things from one point of view, partial copies of copies of the idea. Such precisely are the creations of the painter, and in like manner of the poet. What they know and depict is not the realities, but mere appearances. If the poets knew the realities they would have left us something other than imitations of copies. Moreover, what they imitate is not the highest but the lower; not the truth of reason, but emotions of all sorts, which it should be our business not to excite but to control and allay. So we continue to prohibit the poetry which is imitation, however supreme, and allow only hymns to the gods, and praises of great men. We must no more admit the allurements of poesy than the attractions of ambition or of riches.
Greater far are the rewards of virtue than all we have yet shown; for an immortal soul should heed nothing that is less than eternal. "What, is the soul then immortal? Can you prove that?" Yes, of a surety. In all things there is good and evil; a thing perishes of its own corruption, not of the corruption of aught external to it. If disease or injury of the body cannot corrupt the soul, a fortiori they cannot slay it; but injustice, the corruption of the soul, is not induced by injury to the body. If, then, the soul be not destroyed by sin, nothing else can destroy it, and it is immortal. The number of existing souls must then be constant; none perish, none are added, for additional immortal souls would have to come out of what is mortal, which is absurd. Now, hitherto we have shown only that justice is in itself best for the soul, but now we see that its rewards, too, are unspeakably great. The gods, to whom the just are known, will reward them hereafter, if not here; and even in this world they have the better lot in the long run. But of this nothing is comparable to their rewards in the hereafter, revealed to us in the mythos of Er, called the Armenian, whose body being slain in battle, his soul was said to have returned to it from the under-world—renewing its life—a messenger to men of what he had there beheld. For a thousand years the souls, being judged, enjoyed or suffered a tenfold retribution for all they had done of good or evil in this life, and some for a second term, or it might be for terms without end. Then for the most part they were given again, after the thousand years, a choice of another lot on the earth, being guided therein by their experience in their last life; and so, having drunk of the waters of forgetfulness, came back to earth once more, unconscious of their past.
Let us, then, believing that the soul is indeed immortal, hold fast to knowledge and justice, that it may be well with us both here and hereafter.