members of a society if those people rule who are best suited to rule. And in Plato's opinion that is only a tiny minority. Plato has Socrates say that the majority is better suited to other tasks, such as national defense, trade, manufacture, etc., and if everybody does what he can do best, that is best for everyone. This view can also be sensed in Schiller's poem Lied von der Glocke (Song of the Bell): "The master can break open the form / with a careful hand at the proper time / But beware, if in flaming streams /the glowing metal frees itself!" Fiesco's problem is also that he would perhaps rather be the "fox" than the "lion" (the "masterly" and thus legitimate ruler in the fable), in other words, he asks himself whether he is really "better" than the "large, fierce dog". In the play Fiesco is himself unable to decide between republican and monarchic ideals, and almost gives in to the urging of his wife Leonore to give up his desire to rule in favor of love and conventional family life, but only almost. He is a tragic hero in the Aristotelian sense to the extent that he also has shortcomings, and in the play's original conclusion these actually bring about his downfall (he is murdered). In the later stage version, Schiller altered the tragic end into a surprisingly happy one, in which Fiesco does without a crown and the monarchy becomes a republic. After 1790 this was interpreted as a stand in favor of revolution, and this version of the play was accordingly often prohibited. Schiller’s understanding of historical veracity on the stage Schiller immersed himself in historical accounts while working on Fiesco; he pored over trade statistics and studied documents about the daily life of the time in order to obtain a feeling for the historical veracity of the conspiracy of 1547, something which had interested him already as he was writing his third dissertation. For reasons similar to Sallust in The Conspiracy of Catiline, apparently, whom he quotes right at the beginning of the piece. Nam id facinus inprimis ego memorabile existimo sceleris atque periculi novitate. (Because I consider it an undertaking absolutely worthy of recording, due to the unusual nature of his guilt and what threatens him.) However, different from the historian Sallust, Schiller was not concerned with the historical events in order to