Today on Ascend, we open Book Two of Plato’s Republic with one of the most striking passages in the whole work: the myth of the Ring of Gyges. Glaucon does not simply disagree with Socrates. He says he has been talked to death by Thrasymachus and countless others, and he wants to know whether Socrates is trying to persuade him or only to seem to persuade him. He then restores the argument for injustice in its strongest form. Justice, he says, is a compact struck by the weak. Those who practice it do so unwillingly. And the life of the unjust man is, after all, far better than that of the just. To make the claim vivid he tells the story of Gyges, who finds a ring that makes him invisible, seduces the queen, kills the king, and takes the throne.
Dr. Jennifer Frey joins me to walk through the argument, and she is clear that this is no mere academic exercise. Plato is mapping the options that are still with us. The seeds of Machiavelli and Hobbes are already here.
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What makes the section so powerful is the way Glaucon strips justice of every external reward. He imagines a man of perfect injustice who has a reputation for justice, and then a man of perfect justice who has a reputation for injustice. The just man, they will say, will be whipped, racked, bound, have both his eyes burned out, and at the end, when he has undergone every sort of evil, he will be crucified. Dr. Frey notes that he will be treated like Christ. Plato is writing about his master, Socrates, but the parallel is unavoidable. The question the passage forces on the reader is simple and severe: is justice good in itself, or only for its effects? Glaucon wants the second kind of good. He wants to be shown that justice is desirable for its own sake and for what comes from it. Everything that follows in the Republic is an attempt to answer him.
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If you are reading the Republic with us, this is the section that sets the stakes. The drama is part of the pedagogy. You cannot extract the argument and leave the myth behind. The question is first (i) what is justice and second (ii) is justice more profitable for the soul than injustice. That is the problem Book Two places before us, and it is the problem the rest of the dialogue will try to solve—at least on its face.
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Dcn. Harrison Garlick lives in rural Oklahoma with his wife and five children. He serves as a deacon at Holy Family Cathedral and as Chancellor & General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. Follow him on X at Dcn. Garlick or Ascend.
