But the true art of government,
first preparing the material by education, weaves the two elements into
one, maintaining authority over the carders of the wool, and selecting
the proper subsidiary arts which are necessary for making the web. The
royal science is queen of educators, and begins by choosing the natures
which she is to train, punishing with death and exterminating those who
are violently carried away to atheism and injustice, and enslaving those
who are wallowing in the mire of ignorance. The rest of the citizens she
blends into one, combining the stronger element of courage, which we
may call the warp, with the softer element of temperance, which we
may imagine to be the woof. These she binds together, first taking
the eternal elements of the honourable, the good, and the just, and
fastening them with a divine cord in a heaven-born nature, and then
fastening the animal elements with a human cord. The good legislator can
implant by education the higher principles; and where they exist there
is no difficulty in inserting the lesser human bonds, by which the State
is held together; these are the laws of intermarriage, and of union for
the sake of offspring. Most persons in their marriages seek after
wealth or power; or they are clannish, and choose those who are like
themselves,--the temperate marrying the temperate, and the courageous
the courageous. The two classes thrive and flourish at first, but they
soon degenerate; the one become mad, and the other feeble and useless.
This would not have been the case, if they had both originally held
the same notions about the honourable and the good; for then they
never would have allowed the temperate natures to be separated from the
courageous, but they would have bound them together by common honours
and reputations, by intermarriages, and by the choice of rulers who
combine both qualities. The temperate are careful and just, but are
wanting in the power of action; the courageous fall short of them in
justice, but in action are superior to them: and no state can prosper in
which either of these qualities is wanting. The noblest and best of all
webs or states is that which the royal science weaves, combining the two
sorts of natures in a single texture, and in this enfolding freeman and
slave and every other social element, and presiding over them all.

'Your picture, Stranger, of the king and statesman, no less than of the
Sophist, is quite perfect.'

...

The