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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: He is struck by the observation 'quam parva sapientia regitur mundus,' and
is touched with a feeling of the ills which afflict states. The condition
of Megara before and during the Peloponnesian War, of Athens under the
Thirty and afterwards, of Syracuse and the other Sicilian cities in their
alternations of democratic excess and tyranny, might naturally suggest such
reflections. Some states he sees already shipwrecked, others foundering
for want of a pilot; and he wonders not at their destruction, but at their
endurance. For they ought to have perished long ago, if they had depended
on the wisdom of their rulers. The mingled pathos and satire of this
remark is characteristic of Plato's later style.
The king is the personification of political science. And yet he is
Statesman |
