Plato, Republic

[552a] financiers and soldiers all in one? Do you think that is right?” “By no manner of means.” “Consider now whether this polity is not the first that admits that which is the greatest of all such evils.” “What?” “The allowing a man to sell all his possessions,¹ which another is permitted to acquire, and after selling them to go on living in the city, but as no part of it,² neither a money-maker, nor a craftsman, nor a knight, nor a foot-soldier, but classified only as a pauper³ and a dependent.” [552b] “This is the first,” he said. “There certainly is no prohibition of that sort of thing in oligarchical states. Otherwise some of their citizens would not be excessively rich, and others out and out paupers.” “Right.” “ But observe this. When such a fellow was spending his wealth, was he then of any more use to the state in the matters of which we were speaking, or did he merely seem to belong to the ruling class, while in reality he was neither ruler nor helper in the state, but only a consumer of goods⁴?” “It is so,” he said; “he only seemed, but was [552c] just a spendthrift.” “Shall we, then, say of him that as the drone⁵ springs up in the cell, a pest of the hive, so such a man grows up in his home, a pest of the state?” “By all means, Socrates,” he said. “And has not God, Adeimantus, left the drones which have wings and fly stingless one and all, while of the drones here who travel afoot he has made some stingless but has armed others with terrible stings? And from the stingless finally issue beggars in old age,⁶ [552d] but from those furnished with stings all that are denominated⁷ malefactors?” “Most true,” he said. “It is plain, then,” said I, “that wherever you see beggars in a city, there are somewhere in the neighborhood concealed thieves and cutpurses and temple-robbers and similar artists in crime.” “Clearly,” he said. “Well, then, in oligarchical cities do you not see beggars?” “Nearly all are such,” he said, “except the ruling class.” “Are we not to suppose, then, [552e] that there are also many criminals in them furnished with stings, whom the rulers by their surveillance forcibly⁸ restrain?” “We must think so,” he said. “And shall we not say that the presence of such citizens is the result of a defective culture and bad breeding and a wrong constitution of the state?” “We shall.” “Well, at any rate such would be the character of the oligarchical state, and these, or perhaps even more than these, would be the evils that afflict it.” “Pretty nearly these,” he said.