To an Uneducated Ruler (intro-1)

The brief essay To an Uneducated Ruler may have formed part of a lecture, or it may, as its traditional title suggests, have been composed as a letter to some person in authority. There is nothing in it to prove either assumption. No striking or unusual precepts or doctrines are here promulgated, but the essay is enlivened by a few interesting tales and, considering its brevity, by a somewhat unusual number of rather elaborate similes. As usual Plutarch depends upon earlier writers for most of his material. The ending is so abrupt as to warrant the belief that the essay, in its present form, is only a fragment.

Plato was asked by the Cyrenaeans[*] to compose a set of laws and leave it for them and to give them a well-ordered government; but he refused, saying that it was difficult to make laws for the Cyrenaeans because they were so prosperous.

For nothing is so haughty

harsh, and ungovernable

by nature as a man,[*]

when he possesses what he regards as prosperity. And that is why it is difficult to give advice to rulers in matters of government, for they are afraid to accept reason as a ruler over them, lest it curtail the advantage of their power by making them slaves to duty. For they are not familiar with the saying of Theopompus, the King of Sparta who first made the Ephors[*] associates of the Kings; then, when his wife reproached him because he would hand down to his children a less powerful office than that which he had received he said: Nay, more powerful rather, inasmuch as it is more secure. For by giving up that which was excessive and absolute in it he avoided both the envy and the danger. And yet Theopompus, by diverting to a different body the vast stream of his royal authority, deprived himself of as much as he gave to others. But when philosophical reason derived from philosophy has been established as the ruler’s coadjutor and guardian, it removes the hazardous element from his power, as a surgeon removes that which threatens a patient’s health and leaves that which is sound.