Plato, Republic

[579a] “And would he not forthwith find it necessary to fawn upon some of the slaves and make them many promises and emancipate them, though nothing would be further from his wish¹? And so he would turn out to be the flatterer of his own servants.” “He would certainly have to,” he said, “or else perish.” “But now suppose,” said I, “that god established round about him numerous neighbors who would not tolerate the claim of one man to be master of another,² but would inflict the utmost penalties on any such person on whom they could lay their hands.” “I think,” he said, [579b] “that his plight would be still more desperate, encompassed by nothing but enemies.” “And is not that the sort of prison-house in which the tyrant is pent, being of a nature such as we have described and filled with multitudinous and manifold terrors and appetites? Yet greedy³ and avid of spirit as he is, he only of the citizens may not travel abroad or view any of the sacred festivals⁴ that other freemen yearn to see, but he must live for the most part cowering in the recesses of his house like a woman,⁵ [579c] envying among the other citizens anyone who goes abroad and sees any good thing.” “Most certainly,” he said.

“And does not such a harvest of ills⁶ measure the difference between the man who is merely ill-governed in his own soul, the man of tyrannical temper, whom you just now judged to be most miserable, and the man who, having this disposition, does not live out his life in private station but is constrained by some ill hap to become an actual tyrant, and while unable to control himself⁷ attempts to rule over others, as if a man with a sick and incontinent body⁸ should not live the private life but should be compelled [579d] to pass his days in contention and strife with other persons?” “Your analogy is most apt and true,⁹ Socrates,” he said. “Is not that then, dear Glaucon,” said I, “a most unhappy experience in every way? And is not the tyrant's life still worse than that which was judged by you to be the worst?” “Precisely so,” he said. “Then it is the truth, though some may deny it,¹⁰ that the real tyrant is really enslaved [579e] to cringings and servitudes beyond compare, a flatterer of the basest men, and that, so far from finding even the least satisfaction for his desires, he is in need of most things, and is a poor man in very truth, as is apparent if one knows how to observe a soul in its entirety; and throughout his life he teems with terrors and is full of convulsions and pains, if in fact he resembles the condition of the city which he rules; and he is like it, is he not?”