Main Text

Glaucon has been telling a fascinated Socrates that nobody acts honourably and with self-restraint by choice. Only the severity of the law keeps us righteous: without it, we’d all be dirty rotten scoundrels — and all the more manly for it, because only a simpleton would refuse to take any advantage he had in life. Take a just man and an unjust man, says Glaucon, and give each of them complete freedom of action — in no time, we won’t be able to tell them apart.

Paraphrased.

Précis

In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon tells Socrates that if a just man and an unjust man were given the same kind of scope for wickedness, both would take full advantage. He illustrates his point with the tale of Gyges, a shepherd of olden times, who came by a magic ring that could make him invisible. As soon as he realised what he possessed, Gyges used the ring to seduce the queen, murder the king, and take his crown. No man, said Glaucon, could resist such temptation; at heart, all of us are the same.

Suppose the freedom I’m talking about [said Glaucon] was as much as the power once granted to to Gyges the Lydian.⁠ Or so they say. The story goes that he was a shepherd in the service of the ruler of Lydia at the time; that a storm brought floods, then an earthquake tore a rent in the earth, and a chasm opened where the flock was being pastured. When Gyges saw this he was dumbfounded. He climbed down; and among other wonders, he saw — this is the tale they spin — a brazen horse, hollow, with little openings. He bent down and peered in, and saw a dead body, which looked bigger than man-size, and nothing else apart from a ring of gold on its finger. He took it, and climbed back out.

The shepherds used to hold a regular assembly, a preparation for making their monthly report to the king about the flocks. At the next meeting, Gyges joined them, wearing his ring. As he sat there among the rest, twiddling his ring, he happened to turn the collet⁠ toward himself, palmwards; and when he did so, they say, he became invisible to those sitting with him, so that they spoke about him as people talk about someone in his absence. Amazed, he felt again for the ring, turned the collet back outwards, and as he did so he became visible once more. Now on the alert, Gyges now made some experiments to see if the ring really did have this power, and he confirmed it: by turning the collet palmwards he became invisible, and outwards, visible again.

Once he had fully grasped what was happening, Gyges lost no time in ensuring that he was one of those chosen to carry the shepherds’ monthly report to the king; and no sooner had he arrived, than he seduced the queen, and conspired with her to grab the king, murder him, and so seize his kingdom.

Imagine there were two such rings, and a righteous man put on one, and an unrighteous man put on the other. No man born could possibly expect to be made of such stern stuff that he would stand firm in his righteousness. No man born could keep his hands off other people’s property, given that he could help himself with impunity even to goods in the market, break into houses, seduce anyone he pleased, murder, let people out of gaol, and generally behave like a god among men. And in doing things like that, there would be no difference between them: they would both walk down the same road.

Footnotes

Footnote

Gyges the Lydian

The Greek text says that the man we are about to hear of was ‘an ancestor of Gyges’, not Gyges himself. Gyges was a name known to legend as the first great ruler of Lydia (a region that lies today in south west Turkey), and the story is much better if it is a tale of how Gyges himself acquired his throne, rather than a tale of how an unnamed person acquired an unnamed kingdom. Moreover, in Book 10, Plato refers in passing to ‘the ring of Gyges’, not to ‘the ring of Gyges’s ancestor’. Many modern translators therefore do as I have done in my paraphrase, and ‘correct’ the text in Book 2. Others very properly keep to it, with the downside that they make Plato’s reference in Book 10 seem a bit careless.

Footnote

Collet

A collet is the part of a ring that holds the gem, typically with little claws. No doubt the ring fitted very loosely: we recall that Gyges took it from the hand of an unusually large man.

Author Details

By Clay Lane
Based on Plato ?428 BC – ?348 BC
Source
Paraphrased from
Republic by Plato (?428 BC – ?328 BC), in Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet (Oxford University Press, 1903).

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See Also

See also The Verdict of History, in which historian Lord Acton thoroughly agrees with Glaucon about the maleficent effect of power, but isn’t inclined to congratulate anyone who takes advantage of it.