Critias

There's even less to say about Critias than Timaeus, not least because Plato left the dialog unfinished after about 10 pages.  It was meant to be a sequel that continues the story which framed Timaeus' speech (which I did not discuss last time).  Timaeus opens with Socrates recounting the basic design of the Republic, as if Timaeus and Critias had been present for 'yesterday's' discussion of the just city (neither character is mentioned in the Republic, which was written years earlier).  Critias then proposes to tell a story which will dramatize the true Republic in action.  Before he does this however, Timaeus tells the story about the origins of the universe that we recounted last time.  Critias attempts to complete the earlier discussion and paint a picture of how the just city Socrates described actually behaves in practice.

As you might imagine, this is set to degenerate into a superhero movie about how amazing the one true Republic is.  Pow!  Look at that philosopher king go!  Mercifully, all Plato managed to write was the introduction.  The only aspect of the story at all notable is its semi-mythological setting.  Critias says that his grandfather heard from Solon that the Egyptians knew about a time long ago when Athens itself was governed by the structure laid out in the Republic.  So we don't have to invent a story about what the Republic might actually be like, we just have to re-tell the tale of the glory of ancient Athens.  It turns out that this tale was lost when all the Athenian warriors were killed in a fierce war with Atlantis.  Yep, that Atlantis.  While the Athenians triumphed and Atlantis sunk into the sea, no one was left to tell the tale.   The Egyptians only remember this stuff because they never suffered a dark age as the Greeks did. 

I did not know this, but it turns out that Plato is the original source of the myth of Atlantis.  In fact, the preliminary piece of the story we get in Critias, the one whose point will be how great ancient Athens was, spends more time describing Atlantis than anything else.  It's a pretty boring description, so it's beyond me how it managed to spark 2,500 years of 'lost continent' mania.  But, like so many other aspects of Western culture, this is where it all started.

THE END

Timaeus

I'll keep this discussion very short.  Timaeus relates a long semi-mythical story told by its namesake that describes the creation and structure of the universe.  The story encompasses everything from the demiurge who created the whole world in the image of the one true Living Thing, all the way down to the triangular parts used to construct human organs and provide an account of their operation.  In between, we get the creation of the gods and the heavens and the elements and such.  In other words, it's encyclopedic.  

Obviously, like any creation myth, the interesting thing to ask is not how accurate it is, but how it reveals the values of the author.  Here though, the details pretty boring, because they are exactly the things you would expect from Plato.  Identity is better than difference.  Stasis is better than change.  Soul is better than body.  Rotation is cool because it's the movement that most closely approximates non-movement.  No surprises here.  Perhaps the one thing that is interesting to note is the peculiar separation or reboot of the story that occurs midway through.

Now in all but a brief part of the discourse I have just completed I have presented what has been crafted by Intellect. But I need to match this account by providing a comparable one concerning the things that have come about by Necessity. For this ordered world is of mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union of Necessity and Intellect. Intellect prevailed over Necessity by persuading it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of this universe. So if I'm to tell the story of how it really came to be in this way, I'd also have to introduce the character of the Straying Cause—how it is its nature to set things adrift.  I shall have to retrace my steps, then, and, armed with a second starting point that also applies to these same things, I must go back once again to the beginning and start my present inquiry from there, just as I did with my earlier one. (48a-b)

This break cannot help but remind us of the way that the myth of the divine shepherd in the Statesman both constituted and contained a reversal between the top down and bottom up aspects of the dialectic.  In one direction, the turning of the world is divinely guided and tends towards order and purity.  Then, like a wind up toy that's been released, it re-turns towards disorder and mixture under its own power.  Something similar seems to be going on here.  The story begins by describing the harmony of the spheres, the way the heavens are ordered by an elaborate system of proportions that reveals the final goals of the Intelligence that created them.  After the break, the story continues by describing the way the universe functions mechanistically.  Timaeus describes a sort of geometrical atomism where everything is composed of triangles.  These triangles interact according to certain laws to produce the intermediate elements of fire, earth, water, and air, and these then combine into sense objects including human bodies.  One side of the story moves backwards from the final purpose, the other forwards from the means used to achieve it.  So in a sense, even this creation myth is dialectical, despite the fact that there is no argument or discussion here, just one long speech.  

You might expect that this dual approach would give Plato a chance to reflect on the various types of causes, and even begin to develop something like Aristotle's theory of four causes.  And indeed, there are a few passages about the "receptacle of becoming" (50b) and "space" (52b) that move in this direction and appear to break the 'mechanistic cause' into something like its material, formal, and efficient parts.  But these reflections seem tangential to the story and aren't developed into a full theory.  You might also expect that there would need to be some sort of epistemological angle here which accounts for the ability of the giant collection of triangles we call the human body to somehow move the soul to be able to perceive the beautiful proportions of the divine design.  And again, there is some mention that this is a problem (61d) and even a hint that the solution is for our "internal revolutions" to somehow mirror the proportions that govern the rotation of the heavens (90d).  But this opportunity too remains mostly unexplored, and the crucial issue of how body and soul, bottom-up and top-down, can interact un-dealt-with.

Philebus

Philebus is probably the driest and least stylistically interesting of any of the mature dialogs (ie. from Plato's middle and late period).  While the question it explores is classic Plato -- does the good life have more to do with knowledge or pleasure? -- it pursues it in a strictly analytical fashion to a very precise and rational conclusion.  While we encounter a few sub-questions that bring up more general philosophical issues along the way, the overall structure doggedly pursues the initial question without any hint of myth or rhetoric.  There isn't even a frame story here.  Apparently this was one of the last dialogs Plato wrote.  Perhaps he wanted to leave a systematic and rational summary of the themes that have occupied his late works.  Or maybe he was just in a hurry.  

The argument in the dialog is pretty easy to summarize in outline.  Socrates begins by asking the simple question of whether pleasure or knowledge provides the best guide to living.  But then he immediately goes on to make the contest more complex with two observations about the question.  First he suggests that the right answer might be neither.  Second, he points out that the question itself is too vague -- it's not clear that what we call pleasure or knowledge are one thing.  

This leads to a digression on the general issue of pluralism versus monism.  Socrates 'solves' this age old dilemma by pointing out that everything is both one and many, but that the important thing is to understand how the infinite many can be built from some basic units of identity.  The model he invokes for this is one we've seen several times in his later works (Theaetetus 202e, Sophist 253a, Statesman 277e) -- the alphabet.  Basically, what mediates between the one name we give something like pleasure, and the infinitely many pleasures this encompasses are the basic types of pleasures.  These measure or number the many the same way that letters measure the flow of speech.  

Having tackled the second sub-question, Socrates returns to the first and discovers that neither knowledge or pleasure alone leads to the good life.  After all, would we want to know everything but feel nothing?  And conversely, what good would it do us to feel the most intense pleasures if we didn't know them and weren't even conscious that we were feeling pleasure?  Only the good in itself is good by itself -- is perfect, self-sufficient, and desirable in itself.  This discovery leads Socrates to a metaphysical digression on the 4 kinds of things that make up the universe.  These are:

1. The unlimited -- by which he means any quality defined relatively and capable of continuous increase and decrease without limit.  For example, (in Plato's physics) hot just means "hotter than something colder" and we can of course always find something even hotter.  Pleasure obviously falls into this category.
2. The limited -- by which he means things defined absolutely and which have a number or measure.  The examples he mentions are 'double' and 'equal'.  It's tempting to interpret this category as just all the Forms (except the Good), but Plato doesn't make it completely clear whether Beauty and Courage and Moderation would belong here too, or whether he's just thinking of the 'mathematical' Forms.
3. Mixtures of 1 and 2 -- by which he means things where a limit has been imposed on something unlimited to produce a harmony or proportion in the material.  These mixtures seem to be equivalent to the same 'many' we saw in the first sub-question, but taken as numbered (or lettered, as the case may be).  In other words, the mixtures he's thinking of don't seem to be some random chaos created by Forms mixing with one another and with an unlimited qualitative material.  Instead, a mixture is something where a Form has been imposed on the unlimited to create a measure for it; a mixture is already ordered, proportioned.
4. The cause of the mixtures -- by which he means the final cause or ultimate purpose of the mixtures, not the efficient or mechanistic cause we typically think of today.  The cause is something that allows the limit to measure the unlimited.  It's the thing that generates the ordered mixtures by measuring and applying appropriate limits.  This category is explicitly the Good itself (26c).  Later we'll learn that knowledge and reason fall into this category, because of course the ordered progression of the universe reflects the knowledge and wisdom of the 'world soul'.

If we continue the alphabet metaphor introduced during the discussion of pluralism and monism, it appears that the unlimited maps to speech, the limited to the letters, the mixture to well formed and hence measured speech (ie. writing), and the cause of the mixture to what enables this measurement to happen -- the mind of the author.  You may notice though that these 4 categories sit rather uneasily with the 3 categories introduced earlier.  The unlimited is certainly the many, but since we refer to it as a single category, can also be thought of as one.  Though we might equate the limited with the Forms, it's trickier to identify them with the one, since we were told that somehow the one is also many.  Perhaps the solution to this is simply that each one, each Form, appears many times, though each time identical to itself?  This interpretation would fit well with the alphabet analogy -- 'A' is one thing no matter how many times or in how many ways I wrote it.  That is the nature of a combinatorial measuring or coding system.  The mixtures are then the various combinations of the limits that mediate between the one and the many, precisely numbering the infinite qualitative flux of becoming.  Finally then there must be a measurer who puts this whole system into effect, a fact which Socrates skipped over in his discussion of pluralism and monism.  

At any rate, we then return to a clarified version of the initial question. What we're really asking is what mixture of which aspects of pleasure and knowledge leads towards the Good, which is the unquestioned end that causes all this mixing/measuring/numbering/weaving to happen.  Pleasure and knowledge aren't unitary; they contain different types that we have to distinguish and 'take the measure of'.  And neither one alone will lead to a good life, which can only be produced by whatever mixes the correct proportions of the correct components of each.  Now at least we've uncovered the full problem that was at first inadequately posed and know what type of life we're searching for.  From here, we can continue to ask whether pleasure or knowledge (and which types) stands closer to this ideally good life.  

First, though, Socrates has to conduct parallel analyses of both pleasure and knowledge to discover their types.  Unsurprisingly, this primarily takes the form of uncovering pure pleasure and pure knowledge.  While it's not explicitly described this way, the analyses of the next two sections proceed by the same method of division we saw in the second half of the Statesman.  That is, they are concerned with purifying their respective material by separating off each of the metals that compose an alloy.  Though each of the analyses has some interesting points, they don't make for gripping reading, and I think I will just state the conclusions Socrates reaches.  Pleasure can be divided into two types.  Some, such as hunger and thirst, are mixed with or alternate with pain.  These are the pleasures and pains of a body maintaining its equilibrium through lack, expectation, and temporary satiation.  By contrast, the pleasures of the soul such as learning and contemplating a perfect circle are pure and unmixed with pain.  Likewise, knowledge can be divided into what we would today call the arts and sciences, the latter distinguished by their use of measure and number.  As you would expect, Plato goes on to consider a pure science that deals with number in itself, free of any application, and eventually the purest science of all -- the dialectic -- that must be something like the science of measuring and numbering being itself with words.  So knowledge too has grades of purity that depend on both the object contemplated (pure being vs. applied becoming) and the means employed (art vs. numerical science).  None of this analysis is particularly novel or unpredictable if you are already familiar with Plato's predilection for purity.  

The dialog concludes with Socrates laying out a final ordering of the types of life.  We've already concluded that the best type of (human) life is one that mixes pleasure and knowledge.  However, this life is directed and made possible only by the measuring and ordering Good that selects the materials and supervises their mixture.  The Form of the Good -- composed of Beauty, Truth, and Proportion -- is the cause of the mixture and the reason why it forms a good life.  In a way, the principle of this mixture is beyond life itself, with its coming to be and passing away.  Like we saw in the Statesman, the ideal is a divine image that self-sufficiently contains all the parts in an ordered whole.  All we humans can do is try to imitate the divine proportion by selecting pure elements and weaving them into a harmonious mixture.  So the types of life can finally be fully ranked according to their principle:

1. The Good as divine measure
2. A mixture of pleasure and knowledge according to the recipe provided by the Good.
3. Pure knowledge, reason, and intelligence.
4. Applied knowledge
5. Pure pleasures of the soul
6. etc ...

As you can see, this ranking answers the initial question and defends the life of knowledge as third best, but closer to the ideal than a life of careless physical pleasure.  Here in one of his final works, Plato seems to be updating Socrates' famous maxim from the Apology -- it's the unmeasured life that's not worth living.  

Statesman

Well, to continue my thought from the end of the Sophist post, with the Statesman, Plato seems to pull back from the moral confusion he opened up.  This dialog does continue the theme of the intermixing of Forms that seems to characterize Plato's later philosophy.  But it stops short of extending this logic to the most crucial distinction of all -- the good and the bad don't mix.  So in a sense, you could see the Statesman as an attempt to circle the wagons.  Despite the problems with knowledge opened up in Theaetetus, despite the confusion of supposed opposites that dominates the Sophist, Plato tries to come back and define the statesman (or king -- he uses these interchangeably) as straightforwardly as possible.  The statesman is distinguished by his expert knowledge of how to: 1) identify and purify the various types of virtue and expertise necessary in a city, and 2) weave these parts together into a seamless fabric.  While the statesman does mix together Forms, the materials he works with have already been purified and the bad elements discarded.  The delicate lurking question of how we figure out which elements are good and which will fit into an overall pattern in what proportions is basically shoved under the rug; this is simply assumed to be the art of kingship, one which borders on the divine.

The thing that's probably most interesting about the Statesman is the way it illustrates Plato's increasingly elaborate concept of the dialectic in both its structure and contents.  We've seen the idea of the dialectic appear in many places already, but the closest we've come to a definition was in Phaedrus (265d) and the Republic (533a).  It is the art of gathering together and splitting apart in such a way that:  

... when one perceives first the community between the members of a group of many things, one should not desist until one sees in it all those differences that are located in classes, and conversely, with the various unlikenesses, when they are seen in multitudes, one should be incapable of pulling a face and stopping before one has penned all the related things within one likeness and actually surrounded them in some real class. (Statesman 285b)

The search for the statesman falls exactly into these two parts, and they are both separated and joined by an interesting new Platonic myth.  The first section of the dialog occupies itself with a long string of "cuts" that we saw constituted the "method of division" in the Sophist.  Given that in this case, the first division of knowledge is between theoretical and practical, whereas is in searching for the sophist, the first distinction made was between production and acquisition, we immediately see (the Visitor even points it out) that the cuts we need to make are relative to the problem at hand, and not some absolute tree of classification.  The rest of the cuts that define distinct classes of knowledge are also completely different this time.  Here, the method results in a definition of the statesman as a "shepherd of featherless bipeds".  So this appears to be where the famous definition of man as a featherless biped, the one so effectively mocked by Diogenes, came from.  The statesman is an expert in rearing and herding, keeping and shepherding, humans.  While the conclusion is reached by a process of dividing knowledge into classes (see the outline below for these) this actually turns out to be the gathering phase of the dialectic.

The splitting phase begins with a question the Visitor brings up in the wake of his definition: who is the true "shepherd of men"?  It seems that many different people could contend with the statesman to fit this definition.  Doctors, farmers, bakers, and merchants can all plausibly claim that they are the ones who keep and care for humans, or at least that they have an essential role in the knowledge needed to rear a "human flock".  So it turns out that our class "shepherd" is too broad.  We will have to refine it further to find the statesman.  Now, you might expect that this would mean we should simply continue the method of division by classes.  But with the second phase of the operation, Plato completely changes both the metaphor and the procedure.  Instead of progressively slicing up a fixed space, we are now going to purify a mix of metals.

VISITOR: ... we seem to me to be in a situation similar to that of those who refine gold.
YOUNG SOCRATES: How so?
VISITOR: I imagine that these craftsmen also begin by separating out earth, and stones, and many different things; and after these, there remain commingled with the gold those things that are akin to it, precious things and only removable with the use of fire: copper, silver, and sometimes adamant, the removal of which through repeated smelting and testing leaves the 'unalloyed' gold that people talk about there for us to see, itself alone by itself. (303e)

And instead of proceeding by binary division into roughly equal parts, we'll fractionate off many contenders at once by using various procedures.  The other obvious (though anachronistic) metaphor here would be the process of distillation. The splitting phase of the dialectic is the process of purification of an alloy. 

Between the two phases, Plato inserts an interesting new myth about the reverse rotation of the universe.  While we're familiar with the importance of a circular movement from the various versions of the myth of metempsychosis (in Phaedrus, Gorgias, and Phaedo, and the Republic) this time the circle appears in a completely different light.  The myth tells us that, just like the dialectic, the history of the universe is divided into two phases.  In the first phase, everything rotated in the opposite direction we are accustomed to -- backwards in time.  Old men lost their wrinkles till they became young, then lost their beards till they became babies and eventually vanished.  Meanwhile, new men sprung alive again from the bones in the earth.  In this phase the "earth-born race" was watched over by a shepherd god that saw to all their needs.  Since it was a garden of Eden type situation, everything was ordered and unified and people lived in harmony with one another under direction of the nameless shepherd-god.  They didn't even need to have a political constitution.  At the end of this era of reverse time, there's an earth shattering tremor and apocalypse in the garden.  The gods, including the shepherd-of-men-god, who have been steering the world let go, and it changes direction and begins to rotate on its own in our conventional forward direction.  In a pretty good presentiment of the second law of thermodynamics, as this forward rotation progresses, the world gradually loses its order through a sort of entropic mixing.  Left to their own devices, humans had to fend for themselves by hunting, farming, and forming political collectives.  Finally, the whole joint gets to the point where it's such a mess that, with another tremor apocalypse, the gods take over again and the universe begins its reverse journey towards perfection.

Situated right between the two sides of our dialectical quest for the statesman, the myth clearly reflects in miniature the structure of the dialog as a whole.  It has a forward, splitting phase where everything tends towards diversity and difference, and a reverse, gathering phase where unity is reconstructed.  But at the same time, the myth also points to a curious intertwining or embedding of each side in the other.  The splitting phase moves towards diversity, but at the same time is a process of purifying the metals that make up the disordered alloy.  And the gathering phase proceeds towards unity, but is accomplished through dividing a single unity of knowledge into classes.  So there seems to be a sort of interweaving of the two poles of the dialectic, as if they were arranged in some sort of fractal yin-yang pattern.  The shepherd-god takes a diverse mixture, splits it into its pure components, and reconstitutes a lost unity that embraces this diversity.  

It will turn out that this is exactly what the true statesman does.  The shepherd-god of the myth provides us with an ideal image of the king who knows how to provide for every aspect of his flock at once.  In other words, the ideal king would know medicine, farming, baking and banking himself.  He would be a completely self-sufficient herdsman, and embody at once both the unity of the class we found by the method of division, and the diversity of possible contenders to this throne.  The one true king or statesman is the divine shepherd.

It was just for these reasons that we introduced our story, in b order that it might demonstrate, in relation to herd-rearing, not only that as things now stand everyone disputes this function with the person we are looking for, but also in order that we might see more plainly that other person himself whom alone, in accordance with the example of shepherds and cowherds, because he has charge of human rearing, it is appropriate to think worthy of this name, and this name alone (275b)

It seems that the closest a human king can come to this perfection is to follow the movement of the dialectic, of the cosmos, as it shuttles back and forth between splitting and gathering.  This interweaving forms the main theme of the second half of the dialog.  In fact, quite soon after the myth, the Visitor launches into a long, seemingly tangential, definition of, wait for it ... weaving.  Just like the myth, this section again recapitulates both parts of the dialectic, and actually functions as a kind of analytic, rational counterpart to the central story's synthetic and mythic part.  So it seems the Statesman is woven together at every level, constantly shuttling back and forth between opposites like splitting and gathering, top-down and bottom-up.  The definition of weaving proceeds by the method of class division until it reaches "the art of clothes making", and then begins to purify away parts like wool and needle manufacture till all that remains is just the knowledge of how to intertwine warp and weft.  

Finally, the knowledge of the statesman will be purified from the lump we called "the knowledge of shepherding men" (which is nevertheless a sort of divine lump) by an analogous method.  The Visitor slowly removes all the specialized knowledges needed in a city as contributing to the knowledge of the statesman, but not constituting that knowledge itself.  Eventually, having smelted away even the most similar metals like the general and the judge, he discovers the exact knowledge that characterizes the true (human) statesman -- the knowledge of how to weave together all the other knowledge to best effect.  In other words, like we saw in the Republic, the statesman has meta-knowledge of the good of other knowledge.  Now, however, it's not clear whether we should consider this One-Good that the statesman knows as a Form itself, or more a process of combination of many other Forms.  One can't help but imagine that Parmenides suggests the latter, though perhaps the ideal of the divine shepherd argues for the former.  

In any event, as I observed at the outset, the Statesman seems content to gloss over these complicated metaphysical questions.  It concludes in an entirely satisfying way, with no hint of the undermining in the Sophist.  The statesman weaves together diverse knowledges to approximate the complete knowledge of the divine shepherd.  And he weaves together the seemingly opposed components of virtue like courage and moderation to form a balanced social fabric.  The question of how he identifies those pure components in the messy mix of human society isn't asked, but merely assumed.              

VISITOR: Whether, I suppose, any of the sorts of expert knowledge that involve putting things together voluntarily puts together any at all of the things it produces, even of the lowliest kind, out of bad and good things, or whether every sort of expert knowledge everywhere throws away the bad so far as it can, and takes what is suitable and good, bringing all of this—both like and unlike—together into one, and so producing some single kind of thing with a single capacity. (308c)

This passage indicates what I meant when I said that the Statesman tries to avoid letting the metaphysical questions of the Sophist escape into the moral domain.  A grand dialectical theory of the interweaving of opposites is all well and good so long as we're not talking about weaving together good and bad.  Likewise, the presumption that the king simply knows which fabric to create with these elements goes unexplored.  What elements should you weave together?  What should you weave them together into?  Just follow the lead of the divine shepherd who knows both the beginning and ending of the universe and you should be fine!

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Here's the detailed outlined.  

257a-267c -- Finding the Statesman by the method of division.  Theory/Practice; Judging/Directing; Directions from others/Self-directing; inanimate/animate; solitary (wild)/herd animals (tame); water/land; winged/on foot; with/without horns; interbreeding between species/non-interbreeding; four/two feet; feathered/un-feathered.  The king or statesman is the herder of featherless bipeds.

262b-263c -- Digression on the classes used in the method of division.  They must be real classes, not just X and not-X.

267d-268e -- The definition isn't specific enough because there are many people like merchants, farmers, bakers, doctors, etc ... who would claim to be "shepherds and rearers of men".  We have to purify the statesman from this crowd of contenders.

269-274e -- The myth of the reverse rotation of the universe.  In the reverse direction, a shepherd god or divine statesman is in charge of every aspect of the human flock (ie. there are no other contenders), which springs spontaneously from the earth.  This direction moves toward order and purity.  In the forward direction, the world runs under its own power and humans have to care for themselves.  They do this using the gifts of fire, crafts, seeds and plants.  Context: The human statesman is the one who organizes the use of all these separate crafts.  In the forward direction everything runs from order to disorder, and all the pure and unified things (like the single herder god) are broken down into parts and mixed together.

275-277d -- Revising the definition in light of the story.  Herd "rearing" is too narrow to encompass both the human and divine shepherds, but herd "keeping" or "caring" would work.  Then we should divide by divine/human; enforced/voluntary.  This would exclude the tyrant as a statesman.  

277d- 279a -- We need a model to identify the statesman.  The model for how a model works is the alphabet.  The letters are models of sounds, and these can be combined to sound out complicated words.  The divine shepherd doesn't seem to be a model for the king, because models are simple and synthetic.

279b-283a -- Weaving will be our model for the statesman.  Using the method of division, we define weaving as "the art of clothes-making".  But there are still many rivals to this title who produce the wool, the tools to weave, etc ... The weaver needs to be separated from them as the person who intertwines their products (warp and woof) to create a fabric.

283b-287b -- Meta-discussion about the structure and purpose of discussions.  How long should a discussion be; how big should a class be?  In addition to the question of relative length, there is an absolute length that fits a given topic.  Similarly for the size of the classes used in the method of division.  These are the real classes that split off all unlike things and join together all like things (285b).  But the ultimate point of having discussions is not to answer the immediate question of "who is the statesman".  The point is to improve our dialectical skills.  The length of a discussion should be judged first from that perspective (286e).

287b-END How do we distinguish the statesman from the list of other contenders who claim to be a "shepherd of men"?

287d-289b -- There are 7 types of expertise which contribute to the knowledge need to have a city.  Production of commodities, tools, vessels, vehicles, defenses, playthings, and nourishment.  

289c-291c -- There are 3 classes of people in the city: slaves, merchants, and subordinates concerned with affairs of state (like heralds and orators).  The class of subordinates divides further into religious subordinates (diviners and priests) and political subordinates or sophists.  

291d-303d -- How can we separate the expertise of the sophist from the king?  Usually we divide constitutions by how many rule and whether people are free of not (276e).  But the real division is between a city run by an expert with true knowledge of how to rule and one run by non-experts.  We assume that the king has some expert knowledge that is difficult to obtain (hence there are few kings). If the king truly has knowledge of how to run a state, then there's no need for laws and they would only get in the way.  Laws aren't flexible enough to be adapted to individual circumstances that keep changing.  So the best state has no laws, which are just an imitation of governance.  The next best kind of state is one where there are laws for everything, but they are written by a committee of non-experts.  And the worst kind of state is one where no one even follows the non-expert laws at all.  So the tyrant is distinguished from the true king not by whether the subjects are free, but by whether he has knowledge of ruling.  We can divide constitutions by whether they are lawful abiding or not and by how many people rule.  The one true constitution is any number of rulers who have true knowledge.  After that comes rulers without knowledge but with laws: 1) king 2) aristocracy 3) democracy -- and then rulers without knowledge and without laws: 4) democracy 5) oligarchy 6) tyrant.

303e-306 -- How can we purify the knowledge of the statesmen from other related knowledge like the general, the judge, etc ... as we would purify gold in an alloy? The statesman has meta-knowledge of how to weave together all the other knowledges.  

306a-END -- The weaving of the statesman combines different Forms into the fabric of a virtuous city.  The Forms of virtue like courage and moderation do not always mix.  Some things need to be done quickly and aggressively while others are better done slowly and delicately.  The Statesman first has to direct the purification of each of these opposed virtues, then weave together the good ones into a good polis.  He creates alloys of previously purified metals.  His real expertise is knowing the right mix needed to produce the One-Good.