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2. The number of the interval which separates the king from the

tyrant, and royal from tyrannical pleasures, is 729, the cube of

9. Which Plato characteristically designates as a number

concerned with human life, because NEARLY equivalent to the

number of days and nights in the year. He is desirous of

proclaiming that the interval between them is immeasurable, and

invents a formula to give expression to his idea. Those who spoke

of justice as a cube, of virtue as an art of measuring (Prot.),

saw no inappropriateness in conceiving the soul under the figure

of a line, or the pleasure of the tyrant as separated from the

pleasure of the king by the numerical interval of 729. And in

modern times we sometimes use metaphorically what Plato employed

as a philosophical formula. 'It is not easy to estimate the loss

of the tyrant, except perhaps in this way,' says Plato.