Now, if you wanted to figure out the most just possible way of running a city, how would you do it? An obvious strategy would be by choosing an existing city which seems to do well and modeling your theory on that city; or by learning from the mistakes of cities that do badly. But this is not how Plato does it. In this way he is very unlike Thucydides. As a historian, Thucydides does convey ideas about how cities should be run, how wars should be prosecuted. But he does this by artfully framing actual history, for instance, by showing us the consequences of the swaggering imperialism of
...more
