An Analysis of Gyges and the Cave. Part IV.

This question, especially in examining the tale of Gyges and his ring, has bothered me for some time, and because of this, I have searched in the tale of Gyges and his ring for some defeater that Plato hid within this tale to show why he thought that Gyges would not be happy in reality, and in comparing this story to the Analogy of the Cave, some interesting observations can be made. First, it can be noted that both stories heavily involve caves or openings into the earth, which were commonly believed in ancient times to be passages into Hades. Here, differences in the stories begin to develop. In the Analogy of the Cave, all of humanity lives in this underworld, and the just man—the philosopher-king—must venture out into the light of the sun and bring that light back down into the darkness, first ascending to the Good, then descending back into the cave, bringing the light of the Good to the masses for the benefit of the masses. In the tale of Gyges, Gyges ventures from the light down into the chasm, then comes back up, ascending eventually up to the throne, bringing with him what he finds down there—descending first into the darkness, then ascending up into the light bringing with him a piece of the darkness. Instead of revealing, illuminating, and making known, as does the light of the Good, Gyges’ ring acts as the darkness does—it conceals who he truly is, allowing him to rise above the shepherd he was previously. I am unsure of this, but I do not believe that this necessarily means that Gyges would not flourish as the tyrant—it could, but I am not convinced by this alone. At the least, it merely casts a shadow on his means of attaining the throne.

What seems to me to be the best possible defeater of Gyges’ happiness in the tale is the description of how he came to find this ring of invisibility. Glaucon first describes Gyges finding a “hollow bronze horse with little doors.” I am unaware of the specific cultural context and significance of this, if there is any, but it sounds dubious at best—perhaps reminiscent of another nice-looking horse in Greek mythology. Glaucon continues recounting the story, saying that when Gyges looked inside this horse, he saw “a corpse within, as it seemed, of more than mortal stature,” who wore nothing else but a ring on its finger. Whether “more than mortal stature” simply means the corpse’s height or general build was greater than a normal human’s, or the corpse still had about it the power of a demigod even after death, one would think that Gyges’ realization of this fact should have set off some bells in his head—not to mention the fact that this ring, though golden, is the only remaining possession of a dead demigod, a corpse who was even more than human. It does not seem ridiculous to assume that this could have served as a warning of the power that was present in this ring—a ring that could very well have been the demise of this demigod; a warning that screamed the Lydian equivalent of, “You can’t handle this!” and, “I am not good news!”

Therefore, the direct correlation of this ring to death and the underworld seems to be the strongest possible defeater that exists in Plato’s version of the tale of Gyges the Lydian. However, I am still not completely convinced that this defeater accomplishes I had proposed for it: to undermine the claim that a very unjust man and/or tyrant can be happy—can flourish as a tyrant, and at the moment, I am still unsure what to make of this predicament.