affairs of State, and by whom the State is best administered, and who at the same time have other honours and another and a better life than that of politics?
They are the men, and I will choose them, he replied.
And now shall we consider in what way such guardians will be produced, and how they are to be brought from darkness to light,—as some are said to have ascended from the world below to the gods?
By all means, he replied.
The training of the guardians. The process, I said, is not the turning over of an oyster-shell2, but the turning round of a soul passing from a day which is little better than night to the true day of being, that is, the ascent from below3, which we affirm to be true philosophy?
Quite so.
And