Plato and Xenophon had different perspectives on the better governance. In this paper, I study the notion of tyranny in Plato's Republic and Xenophon's Hiero to trace their views on the aptitude of philosophy to redeem the tyrant and indicate some intertextual points. On this basis, I analyse the meaning and extent of Simonides’ proposal in the Hiero rejecting the idea of a mere pragmatic approach. Finally, I examine the platonic Hipparchusto find a key to figure out the election of (...) Simonides as Xenophon’s spokesperson. Paying attention to the context of the discussions among the Socratics, this approach enhances our understanding of these authors, regarding tyranny, the possibility of its abandonment, and the role of the intellectuals in this process. (shrink)

Are people at bottom motivated entirely by self-interest? Or do they act only sometimes out of self-interest, and sometimes for other reasons—say, to help out a friend for her own sake, with no expectation of being benefitted in return? Scholars have often thought they could discern in the works of classical Greek thinkers a commitment to psychological egoism, the thesis that one is motivated to act only by considerations of the expected benefits and harms that will accrue to oneself. For (...) instance, a host of influential interpreters have taken Plato to be wedded to psychological egoism throughout his corpus. Often, the commitment is thought to run so deep that Plato rarely, if ever, manages to articulate it explicitly, let alone to examine it critically and defend it. That kind of approach obviously invites challenges, and lately there has been a small but growing resistance to the egoistic interpretation of Plato. The challenges are especially welcome given the general lack of support for psychological egoism in the present intellectual climate: egoistic readings have increasingly seemed to imply a crippling weakness in the Platonic system. (shrink)