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The manner in which he speaks of them would rather tend to render

doubtful his ever having 'consorted' with them, or entertained

the schemes, which are attributed to him in the Epistles, of

regenerating Sicily by their help.

Plato in a hyperbolical and serio-comic vein exaggerates the

follies of democracy which he also sees reflected in social life.

To him democracy is a state of individualism or dissolution; in

which every one is doing what is right in his own eyes. Of a

people animated by a common spirit of liberty, rising as one man

to repel the Persian host, which is the leading idea of democracy

in Herodotus and Thucydides, he never seems to think. But if he

is not a believer in liberty, still less is he a lover of

tyranny. His deeper and more serious condemnation is reserved for

the tyrant, who is the ideal of wickedness and also of weakness,

and who in his utter helplessness and suspiciousness is leading

an almost impossible existence, without that remnant of good

which, in Plato's opinion, was required to give power to evil

(Book I).