4
But, you say, do not States put in office men who live licentiously and wantonly? They do, and pregnant women often long for stones, and seasick persons for salt pickles and the like, which then a little later they spew out and detest. So the people of democracies, because of the luxury of their own lives or through sheer perversity, or for lack of better leaders, make use of those who happen to turn up, though they loathe and despise them, then take pleasure in hearing such things said about them as the comic poet Plato puts into the mouth of the People itself: Take, take my hand as quickly as you can; I’m going to choose Agyrrhius generalKock, Com. Att. Frag. i. p. 652, no. 185; on Agyrrhius cf. Aristophanes, Plutus, 176.; and again, when he makes the People ask for a basin and a feather in order to vomit and then say, Beside my platform Mantias takes his stand,From the same play as the preceding. and It feeds foul Cephalus, most hateful pest.From the same play as the preceding. And the Roman people, when Carbo promised something and confirmed his promise with an oath and a curse, unanimously took a counter-oath that it did not trust him. And at Lacedaemon, when a dissolute man named Demosthenes made a desirable motion, the people rejected it, but the ephors chose by lot one of the elders and told him to make that same motion, in order that it might be made acceptable to the people, thus pouring, as it were, from a dirty vessel into a clean one. So great is the importance, in a free State, of confidence or lack of confidence in a man’s character.
