The Republic — Plato

Clearly. Well, I said, and in oligarchical States do you not find paupers ? Yes, he said ; nearly everybody is a pauper who is not a ruler. And may we be so bold as to affirm that there are also many criminals to be found in them, rogues who have stings, and whom the authorities are careful to restrain by force ? Certainly, we may be so bold.

The existence of such persons is to be attributed to want of education, ill-training, and an evil constitution of the State ? True. Such, then, is the form and such are the evils of oligarchy ; and there may be many other evils. Very likely. Then oligarchy, or the form of government in which the rulers are elected for their wealth, may now be dismissed.

Let us next proceed to consider the nature and origin of the individual who answers to this State. By all means. Does not the timocratical man change into the oligarchical on this wise? How?

A time arrives when the representative of timocracy has a son : at first he begins by emulating his father and walking in his footsteps, but presently he sees him of a sudden foundering against the State as upon a sunken reef, and he and all that he has are lost; he may have been a general or some other high officer who is brought to trial under a prejudice raised by informers, and either put to death or exiled or deprived of the privileges of a citizen, and all his property taken from him.

Nothing more likely. And the son has seen and known all this — he is a ruined man, and his fear has taught him to knock ambition and passion headforemost from his bosom's throne ; humbled by poverty he takes to money-making, and by mean and miserly savings and hard work gets a fortune together.

Is not such a one likely to seat the concupiscent and covetous element on the vacant throne and to suffer it to play the great king within him, girt with tiara and chain and scimitar?

Most true, he replied. And when he has made reason and spirit sit down on the ground obediently on either side of their sovereign, and taught them to know their place, he compels the one to think only of how lesser sums may be turned into larger ones, and will not allow the other to worship and admire anything but riches and rich men, or to be ambitious of anything so much as the acquisition of wealth and the means of acquiring it.

Of all changes, he said, there is none so speedy or so sure as the conversion of the ambitious youth into the avaricious one. And the avaricious, I said, is the oligarchical youth ? Yes, he said ; at any rate the individual out of whom he came is like the State out of which oligarchy came. Let us then consider whether there is any likeness between them. Very good. First, then, they resemble one another in the value which they set upon wealth ?

Certainly. Also in their penurious, laborious character; the individual only satisfies his necessary appetites, and confines his expenditure to them ; his other desires he subdues, under the idea that they are unprofitable. True. He is a shabby fellow, who saves something out of everything and makes a purse for himself; and this is the sort of man whom the vulgar applaud. Is he not a true image of the State which he represents ?

He appears to me to be so; at any rate money is highly valued by him as well as by the State. You see that he is not a man of cultivation, I said. I imagine not, he said ; had he been educated he would never have made a blind god director of his chorus, or given him chief honor.^ Excellent ! I said.

Yet consider : Must we not further admit that owing to this want of cultivation there will be found in him drone-like desires as of pauper and rogue, which are forcibly kept down by his general habit of life? True. * Reading koX eTt>a inaKiara. EC, V &' iyd, according to Schneider's excellent emendation.

Do you know where you will have to look if you want to discover his rogueries ? Where must I look? You should see him where he has some great opportunity of acting dishonestly, as in the guardianship of an orphan. Aye.

It will be clear enough then that in his ordinary dealings which give him a reputation for honesty, he coerces his bad passions by an enforced virtue ; not making them see that they are wrong, or taming them by reason, but by necessity and fear constraining them, and because he trembles for his possessions. To be sure.

Yes, indeed, my dear friend, but you will find that the natural desires of the drone commonly exist in him all the same whenever he has to spend what is not his own. Yes, and they will be strong in him, too. The man, then, will be at war with himself; he will be two men, and not one; but, in general, his better desires will be found to prevail over his inferior ones. True.

For these reasons such a one will be more respectable than most people ; yet the true virtue of a unanimous and harmonious soul will flee far away and never come near him.

I should expect so. - And surely the miser individually will be an ignoble competitor in a State for any prize of victory, or other object of honorable ambition ; he will not spend his money in the contest for glory ; so afraid is he of awakening his expensive appetites and inviting them to help and join in the struggle ; in true oligarchical fashion he fights with a small part only of his resources, and the result commonly is that he loses the prize and saves his money.

Very true. Can we any longer doubt, then, that the miser and moneymaker answers to the oligarchical State ? There can be no doubt. Next comes democracy ; of this the origin and nature have still to be considered by us ; and then we will inquire into the ways of the democratic man, and bring him up for judgment.