[600d]
to impress upon their contemporaries
the conviction that they will not be capable of governing their homes or the
city1 unless
they put them in charge of their education, and make themselves so beloved
for this wisdom2 that their companions all but3 carry them about on their shoulders,4
yet, forsooth, that Homer's contemporaries, if he had been able to help men
to achieve excellence,5 would have suffered him or Hesiod
to roam about rhapsodizing and would not have clung to them far rather than
to their gold,6 and constrained them to
dwell with them7 in their homes,
1 For διοικεῖν Cf. Protag. 318 E.
2 See Thompson on Meno 70 B.
3 On μόνον οὐκ Cf. Menex. 235 C, Ax. 365 B.
4 Stallbaum refers to Themist.Orat. xxii. p. 254 Aὃν ἡμεῖς διὰ ταύτην τὴν φαντασίαν μόνον οὐκ ἐπὶ ταῖς κεφαλαῖς περιφέρομεν, Erasmus, Chiliad iv. Cent. 7 n. 98 p. 794, and the German idiom “einen auf den Händen tragen.”
5 Cf. Protag. 328 B.
6 The article perhaps gives the word a contemptuous significance. So Meno 89 Bτὸ χρυσίον.
7 οἴκοι εἶναι: J. J. Hartman, Ad Platonis Remp. 600 E, Mnem. 1916, p. 45, would change εἶναι to μεῖναι. But cf. Cic.Att. vii. 10 “erimus una.”
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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