[506a]
in a
matter of this quality and moment, can we, I ask you, allow a like blindness
and obscurity in those best citizens1 to whose hands we are to entrust all
things?” “Least of all,” he said. “I
fancy, at any rate,” said I, “that the just and the
honorable, if their relation and reference to the good is not known,2
will not have secured a guardian3 of much worth in the
man thus ignorant, and my surmise is that no one will understand them
adequately before he knows this.” “You surmise
well,” he said. “Then our constitution
1 As in the “longer way” Plato is careful not to commit himself to a definition of the ideal or the sanction, but postulates it for his guardians.
2 The personal or ab urbe condita construction. Cf. Theaet. 169 E.
3 the guardians must be able to give a reason, which they can do only by reference to the sanction. For the idea that the statesman must know better than other men. Cf. Laws 968 A, 964 C, 858 C-E, 817 C, Xen Mem. iii. 6. 8.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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