here are three.
The difficulty increases with the increase, and diminishes with the
diminution of the number.

CLEINIAS: You mean to say, I suppose, that the best government is
produced from a tyranny, and originates in a good lawgiver and an
orderly tyrant, and that the change from such a tyranny into a perfect
form of government takes place most easily; less easily when from an
oligarchy; and, in the third degree, from a democracy: is not that your
meaning?

ATHENIAN: Not so; I mean rather to say that the change is best made out
of a tyranny; and secondly, out of a monarchy; and thirdly, out of
some sort of democracy: fourth, in the capacity for improvement, comes
oligarchy, which has the greatest difficulty in admitting of such
a change, because the government is in the hands of a number of
potentates. I am supposing that the legislator is by nature of the true
sort, and that his strength is united with that of the chief men of the
state; and when the ruling element is numerically small, and at the
same time very strong, as in a tyranny, there the change is likely to be
easiest and most rapid.

CLEINIAS: How? I do not understand.

ATHENIAN: And yet I have repeated what I am saying a good many times;
but I suppose that you have never seen a city which is under a tyranny?

CLEINIAS: No, and I cannot say that I have any great desire to see one.

ATHENIAN: And yet, where there is a tyranny, you might certainly see
that of which I am now speaking.

CLEINIAS: What do you mean?

ATHENIAN: I mean that you might see how, without trouble and in no very
long period of time, the tyrant, if he wishes, can change the manners
of a state: he has only to go in the direction of virtue or of vice,
whichever he prefers, he himself indicating by his example the lines of
conduct, praising and rewarding some actions and reproving others, and
degrading those who disobey.

CLEINIAS: But how can we imagine that the citizens in general will at
once follow the example set to them; and how can he have this power both
of persuading and of compelling them?

ATHENIAN: Let no one, my friends, persuade us that there is any quicker
and easier way in which states change their laws than when the rulers
lead: such changes never have, nor ever will, come to pass in any other
way. The real impossibility or difficulty is of another sort, and is
rarely surmounted in the course of ages; but when once it is surmounted,
ten thousand or rather all b