So again the Milesians, Herodotus tells us,
were long troubled by civil discord, till they asked help from Paros,
and the Parians sent ten commissioners who gave Miletus a new
constitution. So the Athenians, when they were founding their model
new colony at Thurii, employed Hippodamus of Miletus, whom Aristotle
mentions in Book II, as the best expert in town-planning, to plan the
streets of the city, and Protagoras as the best expert in law-making,
to give the city its laws. In the Laws Plato represents one of the
persons of the dialogue as having been asked by the people of Gortyna
to draw up laws for a colony which they were founding. The situation
described must have occurred frequently in actual life. The Greeks
thought administration should be democratic and law-making the work of
experts. We think more naturally of law-making as the special right of
the people and administration as necessarily confined to experts.
Aristotle's Politics, then, is a handbook for the legislator, the
expert who is to be called in when a state wants help. We have called
him a state doctor. It is one of the most marked characteristics of
Greek political theory that Plato and Aristotle think of the statesman
as one who has knowledge of what ought to be done, and can help those
who call him in to prescribe for them, rather than one who has power
to control the forces of society. The desire of society for the
statesman's advice is taken for granted, Plato in the Republic says
that a good constitution is only possible when the ruler does not want
to rule; where men contend for power, where they have not learnt to
distinguish between the art of getting hold of the helm of state and
the art of steering, which alone is statesmanship, true politics is
impossible.
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