[4] So, just as a real musician will make use of every instrument harmoniously, adapting it skilfully and striking each one with regard to its natural tunefulness, and yet, following Plato’s advice,
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will give up guitars, banjoes, psalteries with their many sounds, harps and string triangles and prefer the lyre and the cithara; in the same way the real statesman will manage successfully the oligarchy that Lycurgus established at Sparta, adapting to himself the colleagues who have equal power and honour and quietly forcing them to do his will; he will also get on well in a democracy with its many sounds and strings by loosening the strings in some matters of government and tightening them in others, relaxing at the proper time and then again holding fast mightily, knowing how to resist the masses and to hold his ground against them. But if he were given the choice among governments, like so many tools, he would follow Plato’s advice and choose no other than monarchy, the only one which is able to sustain that top note of virtue, high in the highest sense, and never let it be tuned down under compulsion or expediency. For the other forms of government in a certain sense, although controlled by the statesman, control him, and although carried along by him, carry him along, since he has no firmly established strength to oppose those from whom his strength is derived, but is often compelled to exclaim in the words of Aeschylus
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which Demetrius the City-stormer employed against Fortune after he had lost his hegemony,
Thou fanst my flame, methinks thou burnst me up.
De unius in republica dominatione, populari statu, et paucorum imperio. Plutarch. Harold North Fowler (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1936.
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