tance from true or natural
pleasure, and the king at the least?

Certainly.

But if so, the tyrant will live most unpleasantly, and the king most
pleasantly?

Inevitably.

Would you know the measure of the interval which separates them?

Will you tell me?

There appear to be three pleasures, one genuine and two spurious: now
the transgression of the tyrant reaches a point beyond the spurious; he
has run away from the region of law and reason, and taken up his abode
with certain slave pleasures which are his satellites, and the measure
of his inferiority can only be expressed in a figure.

How do you mean?

I assume, I said, that the tyrant is in the third place from the
oligarch; the democrat was in the middle?

Yes.

And if there is truth in what has preceded, he will be wedded to an
image of pleasure which is thrice removed as to truth from the pleasure
of the oligarch?

He will.

And the oligarch is third from the royal; since we count as one royal
and aristocratical?

Yes, he is third.

Then the tyrant is removed from true pleasure by the space of a number
which is three times three?

Manifestly.

The shadow then of tyrannical pleasure determined by the number of
length will be a plane figure.

Certainly.

And if you raise the power and make the plane a solid, there is no
difficulty in seeing how vast is the interval by which the tyrant is
parted from the king.

Yes; the arithmetician will easily do the sum.

Or if some person begins at the other end and measures the interval by
which the king is parted from the tyrant in truth of pleasure, he will
find him, when the multiplication is complete, living 729 times more
pleasantly, and the tyrant more painfully by this same interval.

What a wonderful calculation! And how enormous is the distance which
separates the just from the unjust in regard to pleasure and pain!

Yet a true calculation, I said, and a number which nearly concerns
human life, if human beings are concerned with days and nights and
months and years.

Yes, he said, human life is certainly concerned with them.

Then if the good and just man be thus superior in pleasure to the evil
and unjust, his superiority will be infinitely greater in propriety of
life and in beauty and virtue?

Immeasurably greater.

Well, I said, and now having arrived at this stage of the argument, we
may revert to the words which brought us hither: Was not some one
saying that injustice wa