Slide on a gold ring and become completely invisible, beyond every camera and every law. What is the first thing you do? This episode explores Gyges of Lydia, a real seventh-century BCE figure from what is now Turkey who, according to Herodotus, rose from trusted subordinate to founder of the Mermnad dynasty by assassinating King Candaules and taking his queen, in a kingdom credited with inventing coined money. It then examines how Plato, through his brother Glaucon in book two of The Republic, rewrote that political coup into the myth of a humble shepherd who finds a ring on a giant corpse inside a hollow bronze horse after an earthquake.

The conversation explains why Glaucon stripped away rank and politics to create a pure laboratory experiment on human nature, and lays out his cynical argument that a saint and a sinner given identical ri ...