Ring of Gyges

Rain had been falling on the Lydian hills for days when the ground moved. Where a shepherd stood with his flock, the wet earth split along a seam and went down past the reach of daylight. He climbed in. Cold came up at him out of the dark, the sour cold of a place that has never been opened, and at the bottom he found a horse cast in bronze, hollow, standing there with small doors set into its side. He stooped and looked through them. Inside lay a dead man of more than human size, wearing nothing whatever except a gold ring on his hand.

He took the ring off the corpse’s finger and climbed back out to his sheep. The tellings do not say what he thought about on the way up.

The shepherds of Lydia met once a month to put together their report on the flocks for the king. He came to the assembly with the ring on, sat down among the smell of wool and damp cloaks, and turned it on his finger the way a man fiddles with a new thing without noticing he is doing it. The collet came round toward his palm. The conversation went on over the top of him. After a moment he understood that they were speaking about him in the past tense, as though he had got up and gone home.

He turned the bezel back out and reappeared. Then he tried it again, and again, to be certain of it: inward and he was gone, outward and he was there.

What he did next took no imagination at all. He arranged to be picked as one of the messengers sent down to the court. He seduced the queen. With her help he attacked the king, killed him, and took the kingdom, clearing away anyone else who looked likely to be a problem. Nobody caught him.

The reason the story exists is that Glaucon is telling it to Socrates as a trap. Suppose there were two such rings, he says, and you gave one to a just man and one to an unjust one. No one is of such iron nature that he would keep his hands off what was not his when he could take anything he liked out of the market, walk into any house, kill or release from prison whomever he wanted, and be like a god among men. The just man would arrive at exactly the same place as the unjust one. Justice, on this reading, is something people practise unwillingly and only because they cannot get away with the alternative. Glaucon presses the knife in further: a man who had the ring and never once used it would be thought a pitiable fool by everyone watching, and praised to his face only because they were all afraid of each other.

The ring itself is barely described. Gold, with a bezel that swivels in its band, later Greek calling that setting the sphendone, the sling. No stone, no engraving, no smith, no provenance, nothing about how it came to be on the hand of a giant sealed inside a bronze animal. Four sentences of use and it is done.

There is a reason for that thinness, and it is worth saying plainly: the ring does not appear anywhere before Plato. Herodotus, writing a century earlier, tells a Gyges story with no ring in it at all. His Gyges is the king’s bodyguard, and it is Candaules the king who insists that Gyges hide in the bedchamber and look at the queen naked, on the grounds that men trust their ears less than their eyes. She sees him leaving, says nothing that night, and the next morning offers him two roads: kill the king or die. Nicolaus of Damascus, drawing on Xanthus the Lydian, tells it differently again, and again without a ring. Archilochus, who was alive while Gyges was, mentions only his gold and his tyranny. The proverb about the ring of Gyges turns up solely in writers who came after the Republic. The object arrives in the record with Plato and has no ancestors.

It may not even be Gyges’ ring. The manuscripts at 359d read “to the ancestor of Gyges the Lydian,” and modern editors print the phrase between daggers as damaged text. James Adam argued that Plato meant a real great-grandfather of the same name, founder of the Mermnad house. Simon Slings argued the opposite, that the word for ancestor was never Plato’s at all: gyges in Lydian meant grandfather, the lexicographer Hesychius glosses gygai as pappoi, grandfathers, and the Lydian name underneath the Greek is Kukas, which means the same thing. Somebody, on this account, wrote the meaning of the name in a margin, and a later hand walked it into the sentence. By the last book of the dialogue Socrates has stopped hedging and calls it simply the ring of Gyges.

Its powers are exactly one power, and its limits follow from that. It removes the wearer from sight while leaving his own eyes working, a detail Cicero was careful to keep when he retold the story in Latin four hundred years later: invisible to everyone, while he himself saw everything. It confers no strength, no silence, no protection, no long life. It cannot be broken by a hero or lost down a river or bargained away, because the story never tests it that way. The only thing in the world it acts on is the character of the man who puts it on, and Socrates says as much at the end of the Republic, where he insists the soul ought to do justice whether it holds the ring of Gyges or the helmet of Hades into the bargain. Cicero’s version of the answer is blunter. A wise man with that ring on his finger would not imagine he was any freer to do wrong than without it, since good men are trying to secure not secrecy but the right.

The story travelled a long way from the Lydian hills. Six centuries after Cicero, the Persian poet Nizami has a hot vapour tear open the ground, a hollow horse of tin and copper with a fissure in its side, an old man asleep inside with a gold ring on his finger, and a shepherd who works out what the seal does when he turns it toward his palm. No Gyges anywhere in it. Cowell suggested in 1861 that the tale reached Nizami through an Arabic translation of the Republic.

Nobody ever explains the giant. Plato does not say who he was, why he was buried inside a bronze horse under a Lydian hillside, or what a ring that erases its wearer was doing on the hand of a man who had clearly stopped needing it. The story looks at him for one sentence and then goes off to commit a murder.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Ring of Gyges?

The Ring of Gyges is a gold ring in Plato’s Republic that makes its wearer invisible when the bezel is turned inward toward the palm and visible again when it is turned back out. A Lydian shepherd finds it on a giant corpse inside a hollow bronze horse, exposed by an earthquake. He uses it to seduce the queen, murder the king and seize the kingdom.

Who was Gyges?

Gyges was a real king of Lydia in western Anatolia who reigned from roughly 680 to 644 BC and founded the Mermnad dynasty. Herodotus tells how he came to power by killing King Candaules at the queen’s insistence, in a version that contains no ring at all. Plato’s manuscripts complicate matters further by attributing the ring not to Gyges but to an unnamed ancestor of his.

What does the Ring of Gyges do?

It does one thing: it makes the wearer unseen while leaving his own sight completely unaffected. Cicero preserved that detail, describing the wearer as invisible to everyone while he himself saw everything. The ring grants no strength, no protection and no silence, and the story never tests whether it can be destroyed or taken away.

Is the Ring of Gyges a real Greek myth?

The ring appears nowhere in Greek literature before Plato wrote the Republic in the fourth century BC. Herodotus, Archilochus and Nicolaus of Damascus all tell stories about Gyges without it, and the proverb about the ring is used only by authors writing after Plato. The Lydian king is historical, but the ring looks like a philosopher’s invention attached to a famous name.

What is the answer to the Ring of Gyges argument?

Socrates argues that justice is good for the soul in itself, so a person should act justly whether or not they hold the ring of Gyges or the helmet of Hades. Cicero puts the same reply more bluntly in De Officiis, saying a wise man with such a ring would not think himself any freer to do wrong, because good men are aiming at what is right rather than at not being seen.

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