ABSTRACT
One of Plato’s late dialogues, the Statesman has been the object of much discussion due to three important digressions and long narratives that, in a different manner to other dialogues, do not look well integrated into a single logical structure. The central problem of the dialogue concerns the question: ‘who must rule?’. Plato establishes the concept of rule as a relationship that acknowledges the inequality between the ruler and the ruled. The task in this dialogue is to see whether we can reasonably expect that even in the absence of divine supervision there can be forms of expertise and knowledge by which a statesman can rule human beings by consent.
