He is still looking for a city in which kings are either
philosophers or gods (compare Laws).
The Statesman has lost the grace and beauty of the earlier dialogues. The
mind of the writer seems to be so overpowered in the effort of thought as
to impair his style; at least his gift of expression does not keep up with
the increasing difficulty of his theme. The idea of the king or statesman
and the illustration of method are connected, not like the love and
rhetoric of the Phaedrus, by 'little invisible pegs,' but in a confused and
inartistic manner, which fails to produce any impression of a whole on the
mind of the reader. Plato apologizes for his tediousness, and acknowledges
that the improvement of his audience has been his only aim in some of his
digressions. His own image may be used as a motto of his style: like an
inexpert statuary he has made the figure or outline too large, and is
unable to give the proper colours or proportions to his work. He makes
mistakes only to correct them--this seems to be his way of drawing
attention to common dialectical errors. The Eleatic stranger, here, as in
the Sophist, has no appropriate character, and appears only as the
expositor of a political ideal, in the delineation of which he is
frequently interrupted by purely logical illustrations.
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