On Plato's Gorgias

CALLICLES:  What! Did you never hear that Themistocles was a good man, and Cimon and Miltiades and Pericles, who is just lately dead, and whom you heard yourself?   

SOCRATES:  Yes, Callicles, they were good men, if, as you said at first, true virtue consists only in the satisfaction of our own desires and those of others; but if not, and if, as we were afterwards compelled to acknowledge, the satisfaction of some desires makes us better, and of others, worse, and we ought to gratify the one and not the other, and there is an art in distinguishing them,--can you tell me of any of these statesmen who did distinguish them? 

CALLICLES:  No, indeed, I cannot.  A good shepherd does not make his flock worse, but better. These leaders made their followers so terrible in vice that the multitude finally turned on them to destroy them.  

SOCRATES:  But what I am going to tell you now is not mere hearsay, but well known both to you and me:  that at first, Pericles was glorious and his character unimpeached by any verdict of the Athenians--this was during the time when they were not so good - yet afterwards, when they had been made good and gentle by him, at the very end of his life they convicted him of theft, and almost put him to death, clearly under the notion that he was a malefactor.   

CALLICLES:  Well, but how does that prove Pericles' badness?

SOCRATES:  Why, surely you would say that he was a bad manager of asses or horses or oxen, who had received them originally neither kicking nor butting nor biting him, and implanted in them all these savage tricks?    

A little bit of humor and sarcasm there heighten the effect of the argument. Therefore, let it not be taken as a virtue of democracy that George Bush and Tony Blair may be impeached or have to resign or be unelected next time: such outcomes would not prove democracy a good thing.    

Furthermore, people speak disparagingly of indirect democracy: if a few men have to represent millions, goes the latest argument, then the people are not responsible for their misdeeds. Remember, however, that when Socrates was in his heyday, democracy was direct, not representative. And yet we find that demagogues and rhetoricians practiced on the people, who were not good because they had not been taught by someone like Socrates (it was his divine mission to improve the moral character of his citizens, character which must have been indeed very poor to need such a god-sent gad-fly) and thus led them astray.  

The people themselves were bad, so Plato was to conclude, taking his mentor's premises to their logical conclusion. 

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