[577a]
“to
ask you to accept as the only proper judge of the two men the one who is
able in thought to enter with understanding into the very soul and temper of
a man, and who is not like a child viewing him from outside, overawed by the
tyrants' great attendance,1 and the pomp and circumstance which they assume2 in the eyes of the world,
but is able to see through it all? And what if I should assume, then, that
the man to whom we ought all to listen is he who has this capacity of
judgement and who has lived under the same roof with a tyrant3 and
has witnessed his conduct in his own home and observed in person
1 The word προστάσεως is frequent in Polybius. Cf. also Boethius iv. chap. 2. Cf. 1Maccabees xv. 32, “When he saw the glory of Simon, and the cupboard of gold and silver plate, and his great attendance [παράστασιν].” Cf. also Isoc. ii. 32ὄψιν, and Shakes.Measure for MeasureII. ii. 59 “ceremony that to great ones ’longs,”Henry V.IV. i. 280 “farced title running ’fore the king.”
2 For σχηματίζονται cf. Xen.Oecon. 2. 4.σὸν σχῆμα ὁ σὺ περιβέβλησαι, Dio Cass. iii.fr. 13. 2σχηματίσας . . . ἑαυτόν and σχηματισμός, Rep. 425 B, 494 D.
3 It is easy conjecture that Plato is thinking of himself and Dionysius I. Cf. Laws 711 A.
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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