For,
surely, the royal science is not like that of a master-workman, a science
presiding over lifeless objects;--the king has a nobler function, which is
the management and control of living beings.
YOUNG SOCRATES: True.
STRANGER: And the breeding and tending of living beings may be observed to
be sometimes a tending of the individual; in other cases, a common care of
creatures in flocks?
YOUNG SOCRATES: True.
STRANGER: But the statesman is not a tender of individuals--not like the
driver or groom of a single ox or horse; he is rather to be compared with
the keeper of a drove of horses or oxen.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes, I see, thanks to you.
STRANGER: Shall we call this art of tending many animals together, the art
of managing a herd, or the art of collective management?
YOUNG SOCRATES: No matter;--whichever suggests itself to us in the course
of conversation.
STRANGER: Very good, Socrates; and, if you continue to be not too
particular about names, you will be all the richer in wisdom when you are
an old man. And now, as you say, leaving the discussion of the name,--can
you see a way in which a person, by showing the art of herding to be of two
kinds, may cause that which is now sought amongst twice the number of
things, to be then sought amongst half that number?
YOUNG SOCRATES: I will try;--there appears to me to be one management of
men and another of beasts.
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