Plus ca change...

[NNadir]

From this review:

For about twenty years in the 4th century BC, the Athenian philosopher Plato visited the royal court of Syracuse, mainly as intellectual ornament to the tyrant Dionysius II and mentor-guest to the tyrant’s uncle Dion. Dionysius II was a vain, stupid, incompetent despot, hated by his sycophants and distrusted by his own armed forces, and for most of the time that Plato was shuttling back and forth to his court of toadies, Plato was working on Republic, his famous treatise on rulership. As James Romm writes in his completely captivating new book Plato and the Tyrant, Plato “believed that an enlightened strongman, unconstrained by law or limits on power, could solve the world’s ills, which he otherwise deemed insoluble.”

Plato believed this despite the fact that it had never once been even remotely true in any of the history with which he was familiar, never once true the years of his own life, never once true in any of the history he didn’t know, and has never once been true in the two thousand years since Plato blathered himself into his grave. The dramatic tension of Plato’s interactions with Dionysius II is parallel to that of Plato’s disciple Aristotle’s interactions with Alexander the Great: can the airy discussion-topic principles of the Academy be applied to the real world? Can a good and just ruler be shaped by a philosopher out of the otherwise-unpromising clay of human nature?

The part I put in bold, of course, could be, I suspect, be written today about the orange pedophile in the White House.

The cliche for our times: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

[BoRaGard]

1. G.O.P. kristofascist, inc. a-hole-style tyranny sucks elephant turds

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. You suspect correctly, my dear NNadir. I cannot agree more. n/t