If for Callicles the satisfaction of desire is to be found in domination over a polis, in the life of a tyrant, for Plato rational desire could be genuinely satisfied in no polis that actually existed in the physical world, but only in an ideal state with an ideal constitution. Thus the good to which rational desire aspires and the actual life of the city-state have to be sharply distinguished. What is politically attainable is unsatisfying; what is satisfying is attainable only by philosophy and not by politics.
