 Before turning to those arguments, it is worth asking what Thrasymachus’ ideal of the ruler in the strict sense adds to his account of justice. It seems to confirm that he is no conventionalist: conventionalism involves treating all socially recognised laws as equal, whereas on Thrasymachus’ account not every ruler or act of legislation counts as the real thing. A trickier point is that Thrasymachus’ glorification of tyranny renders retroactively ambiguous his slogan, ‘Justice is the advantage of the stronger’. As initially presented, the point of this seemed to be the claim noted earlier about the standard effects of just behavior: just persons are the victims of everyone who is willing to take advantage of them, and the ruling class in particular. But Thrasymachus’ praise of the expert tyrant (343b–c) suggests another interpretation. Perhaps his slogan also stands for a revisionist normative claim: that it really is right and proper, part of the correct order of things, for the strong to take advantage of the weak. This is precisely the claim that, as we will see, is expressed in the Gorgias by Callicles’ theory of ‘natural justice’. If Thrasymachus too means to make this claim then he, like Callicles, turns out to have a substantive normative ethical theory—a view about how the world ought to be. However, as we have seen, Thrasymachus only flirts with the revision of ordinary moral language which this view would entail; when Socrates suggests that according to him justice is a vice and injustice a virtue, he at first attempts to eschew such moral categories altogether, reverting again to the pose of the cynical sociological observer (348c–d). This hesitation seems to mark Thrasymachus as caught in a delicate, unstable dialectical way-station, in between a debunking of Hesiodic tradition (and for that matter conventionalism) and a full-blown Calliclean reversal of moral values. Thrasymachus occupies a position at which the traditional language of ‘justice’ has been debunked as merely a tool of the powerful, but no convincing redeployment replacement has been found.