piracy of
the extreme oligarchs in 404 which led to the rule of the 'Thirty
Tyrants'; but the experience sickened him of such methods. There was no
hope unless, by some lucky combination, a philosopher should become a
king or some young king turn philosopher. 'Give me a city governed by a
tyrant,' he says in the _Laws_,[84:1] 'and let the tyrant be young, with
a good memory, quick at learning, of high courage, and a generous
nature. . . . And besides, let him have a wise counsellor!' Ironical
fortune granted him an opportunity to try the experiment himself at the
court of Syracuse, first with the elder and then, twenty years later,
with the younger Dionysius (387 and 367 B. C.). It is a story of
disappointment, of course; bitter, humiliating and ludicrous
disappointment, but with a touch of that sublimity which seems so often
to hang about the errors of the wise. One can study them in Seneca at
the court of Nero, or in Turgot with Louis; not so well perhaps in
Voltaire with Frederick. Plato failed in his enterprise, but he did
keep faith with the 'Righteous City'.

Another of the Socratic circle turned in a different direction.
Xenophon, an exile from his country, a brilliant soldier and adventurer
as well as a man of letters, is perhaps the first Greek on record who
openly lost interest in the city. He thought less about cities and
constitutions than about great men and nations, or generals and armies.
To him it was idle to spin cobweb formations of ideal laws and
communities. Society is right enough if you have a really fine man to
lead it. It may be that his ideal was formed in childhood by stories of
Pericles and the great age when Athens was 'in name a democracy but in
truth an empire of one leading man'. He gave form to his dream in the
_Education of Cyrus_, an imaginary account of the training which formed
Cyrus the Great into an ideal king and soldier. The _Cyropaedeia_ is
said to have been intended as a counterblast to Plato's _Republic_, and
it may have provoked Plato's casual remark in the _Laws_ that 'Cyrus
never so much as touched education'. No doubt the book suffered in
persuasiveness from being so obviously fictitious.[85:1] For example,
the Cyrus of Xenophon dies peacefully in his bed after much affectionate
and edifying advice to his family, whereas all Athens knew from
Herodotus how the real Cyrus had been killed in a war against the
Massagetae, and his head, to slake its thirst for that liquid, plung