To vindicate his claim that ‘justice is the greatest good’, and ‘injustice the worst thing a soul can have in it’, Socrates must show that the tyrant is the least happy of all in the city, although he has committed the whole of injustice and secured the maximum amount of power and wealth for himself. The defense of the just life is cast as choice: between the life of the perfectly just man with an unearned reputation for the worst injustice, and the life of a perfectly unjust man with an undeserved reputation for perfect justice.
He gets the best of both worlds, and can even placate the gods with pleasant prayers and sacrifices: stories of Hades won't stay his hand and deter him from committing the ‘whole of injustice’ ( hê holê adikia): kidnapping and enslaving the citizens and installing himself as tyrant (344b-c). In this way, the unjust man can reap the rewards of complete injustice while enjoying the benefits of a reputation for perfect justice. 3 3 The fox is ‘ kerdalea kai poikilê’ – wily and artful in securing gain ( kerdos) for himself (see Archilochus 89.5). , an unjust person can enjoy them in full, if he ‘creates a façade of illusory virtue’ around himself and ‘deceives those who come near’, while keeping behind the façade ‘the greedy and crafty fox of the wise Archilochus’, as Adeimantus puts it (365c). Reeve, Blindness and Reorientation in Plato's Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) p. Since these rewards are ‘simulator accessible’ 2 2 C. To explain the effects of justice ‘because of its very self’, Socrates must determine what justice is – its ‘nature and origins’ – and thereby show that we always have reason to prefer the just life over the unjust, regardless of the rewards and reputations that follow from being thought to be just. Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999). 1 1 I quote Grube's translation of Plato's Republic (revised by Reeve), in J. He has been challenged to explain how justice, because of its very self, benefits its possessor and how injustice harms them (367d), and why ‘injustice is the worst thing a soul can have in it’ and ‘justice is the greatest good’ (366e). Plato's portrait of the tyrant in book IX of the Republic marks the culmination of Socrates’ defense of the just life.
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