justice, but in action are superior to them: and no state can prosper in
which either of these qualities is wanting. The noblest and best of all
webs or states is that which the royal science weaves, combining the two
sorts of natures in a single texture, and in this enfolding freeman and
slave and every other social element, and presiding over them all.

'Your picture, Stranger, of the king and statesman, no less than of the
Sophist, is quite perfect.'

...

The principal subjects in the Statesman may be conveniently embraced under
six or seven heads:--(1) the myth; (2) the dialectical interest; (3) the
political aspects of the dialogue; (4) the satirical and paradoxical vein;
(5) the necessary imperfection of law; (6) the relation of the work to the
other writings of Plato; lastly (7), we may briefly consider the
genuineness of the Sophist and Statesman, which can hardly be assumed
without proof, since the two dialogues have been questioned by three such
eminent Platonic scholars as Socher, Schaarschmidt, and Ueberweg.

I. The hand of the master is clearly visible in the myth. First in the
connection with mythology;--he wins a kind of verisimilitude for this as
for his other myths, by adopting received traditions, of which he pretends
to find an explanation in his own larger conception (compare Introduction
to Critias). The young Socrates has heard of the sun rising in the west
and setting in the east, and of the earth-born men; but he has never heard
the origin of these remarkable phenomena. Nor is Plato, here or elsewhere,
wanting in denunciations of the incredulity of 'this latter age,' on which
the lovers of the marvellous have always delighted to enlarge. And he is
not without express testimony to the truth of his narrative;--such