ABSTRACT
The first intermission turns to a dialogue of Plato’s contemporary, Xenophon. Xenophon’s dialogue Hiero present a treatment of tyranny, in some ways similar, and in some ways different, from that of Plato’s Republic. The Republic and the Hiero interestingly seem to agree about their assessment of the nature of the tyrannical soul, with the description of the tyrant in the last books of the Republic sounding just as dire as Hiero’s pathetic disparagement of the tyrant’s life.
