A Wolf in the City: Tyranny and the Tyrant in Plato's Republic

The problem of tyranny preoccupied Plato, and its discussion both begins and ends his famous Republic. Though philosophers have mined the Republic for millennia, Cinzia Arruzza is the first to devote a full book to the study of tyranny and of the tyrant's soul in Plato's Republic.

In A Wolf in the City, Arruzza argues that Plato's critique of tyranny intervenes in an ancient debate concerning the sources of the crisis of Athenian democracy and the relation between political leaders and demos...