mplied in this answer. In a passage of the
Republic (492 b) Plato repudiates the notion that the sophists have a
corrupting moral influence upon young men. The public themselves,
he says, are the real sophists and the most complete and thorough
educators. No private education can hold out against the irresistible
force of public opinion and the ordinary moral standards of society.
But that makes it all the more essential that public opinion and
social environment should not be left to grow up at haphazard as they
ordinarily do, but should be made by the wise legislator the expression
of the good and be informed in all their details by his knowledge. The
legislator is the only possible teacher of virtue.

Such a programme for a treatise on government might lead us to expect in
the Politics mainly a description of a Utopia or ideal state which
might inspire poets or philosophers but have little direct effect upon
political institutions. Plato's Republic is obviously impracticable, for
its author had turned away in despair from existing politics. He has no
proposals, in that dialogue at least, for making the best of things as
they are. The first lesson his philosopher has to learn is to turn away
from this world of becoming and decay, and to look upon the unchanging
eternal world of ideas. Thus his ideal city is, as he says, a pattern
laid up in heaven by which the just man may rule his life, a pattern
therefore in the meantime for the individual and not for the statesman.
It is a city, he admits in the Laws, for gods or the children of gods,
not for men as they are.

Aristotle has none of the high enthusiasm or poetic imagination of
Plato. He is even unduly impatient of Plato's idealism, as is shown
by the criticisms in the second book. But he has a power to see the
possibilities of good in things that are imperfect, and the patience of
the true politician who has learned that if he would make men what
they ought to be, he must take them as he finds them. His ideal
is constructed not of pure reason or poetry, but from careful and
sympathetic study of a wide range of facts. His criticism of Plato in
the light of history, in Book II. chap, v., though as a criticism it is
curiously inept, reveals his own attitude admirably: "Let us remember
that we should not disregard the experience of ages; in the multitude
of years, these things, if they were good, would certainly not have been
unknown; for almost everything has been fou