The Organization of Plato's "Statesman" and the Statesman's Rule as a Herdsman

Abstract

D ISCERNING THE ORGANIZATION OF THE DIALOGUE IS A FIRST PUZZLE for an interpreter of one of Plato's dialogues. The Statesman presents an especially compelling puzzle because it combines seemingly disparate topics-including some that seem hardly political-in strange ways. Its organization seems particularly obscure early in the dialogue when the Visitor leads his interlocutor in an attempt to determine what divides human beings from other creatures by bizarre diaeresis, and gives mythical account of the cycles in human history that emphasizes-surely this is odd in dialogue about the statesman!-the age before human beings have acquired for themselves the art of politics. However, the Statesman seems disjointed and confused even when, in its final two-fifths, the conversation of the Visitor and young Socrates turns to matters that obviously political, such as legislation. No dialogue seems to be less well conceived than the Statesman. It discusses briefly what interests us politically, and it discovers at length what holds no interest for philosophy, Seth Benardete remarked (1984, 1986: xiv). The effect of this bizarre organization of the dialogue is that it may seem to reader (Ryle 1966: 285). While the Statesman seems haphazard and disorganized upon first reading, many readers have been not weary but especially curious about why chose to compose this dialogue in such strange way. And, in fact, the Statesman has recently been interpreted as having carefully crafted order by C. J. Rowe, who argues that the Statesman is a perhaps peculiarly directed, and single-minded piece of writing ... [in which] there is single, well-defined path leading from beginning to end, with only occasional diversions and number of stops along the way (1996: 155). Rowe's judgment that this dialogue has single line of argument accords with the view that Plato's late dialogues closer to treatises than to the lively dialogues of his earlier writings: for example, A. E. Taylor wrote that the Statesman and other late dialogues are formal expositions of doctrine by leading character speaking with authority (1960: 371).1 Other scholars too have offered interpretations of the organization of the Statesman,2 and their understanding of its organization has colored their interpretations of the teaching of the dialogue. Thus, for example, Rowe interprets the Statesman as dialogue in which Plato