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 rings would behave the same, that justice is merely fear of punishment, and that anyone who refused to exploit the ring would be praised publicly and privately mocked as an idiot. It then presents Socrates’ response that the ring’s user enslaves himself by feeding appetite and starving reason, compares this to addiction, follows the story into Cicero’s On Duties, and traces its influence on Tolkien’s One Ring, with Gollum and Frodo embodying the two sides of the debate.

• How the historical assassination and the mythical one differ and why the myth needed a nobody
• The mechanics of twisting the ring’s collet inward to vanish and outward to reappear
• Glaucon’s claim that everyone secretly believes injustice is more profitable than justice
• Why Socrates argues that self-control, not immunity, is the only real freedom
• Online anonymity as a digital ring of Gyges and the question of who you are when no one is watching