Seeing Citizens: Rereading Gyges’s Ring of Invisibility

The myth of the ring of Gyges’ ancestor in Book II of Plato’s Republic is intended as a provocation by Glaucon, who narrates it, and by Plato as the external narrator exploring questions of civic justice. A ring that makes the (un)ethical subject invisible is problematic for any civic community, and to read this myth in the American present is to confront the issue of the visibility and invisibility of citizens and the relationship between citizenship and the visual realm. In the process, strategic invisibility merges as a potent and troubling theme for democratic theory, ancient and modern.