III. The political aspects of the dialogue are closely connected with the
dialectical. As in the Cratylus, the legislator has 'the dialectician
standing on his right hand;' so in the Statesman, the king or statesman is
the dialectician, who, although he may be in a private station, is still a
king. Whether he has the power or not, is a mere accident; or rather he
has the power, for what ought to be is ('Was ist vernunftig, das ist
wirklich'); and he ought to be and is the true governor of mankind. There
is a reflection in this idealism of the Socratic 'Virtue is knowledge;'
and, without idealism, we may remark that knowledge is a great part of
power. Plato does not trouble himself to construct a machinery by which
'philosophers shall be made kings,' as in the Republic: he merely holds up
the ideal, and affirms that in some sense science is really supreme over
human life.

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
something more than this,--the perfectly good and wise tyrant of the Laws,
whose will is better than any law. He is the special providence who is
always interfering with and regulating all things. Such a conception has
sometimes been entertained by modern theologians, and by Plato himself, of