280 but Who Will Guard the Guardians ?

In posing the famous question,2 the Roman author, Juvenal, was suggesting that wives cannot be trusted, and keeping them under guard is not a solution − because the guards cannot be trusted either. Half a millennium or so earlier, Plato3 in The Republic expressed a more optimistic view regarding the guardians or rulers of the city-state, namely that one should be able to trust them to behave properly; that it was absurd to suppose that they should require oversight. Socrates, referring to an earlier statement4 that “drunkenness is most unbefitting guardians,” says: “From intoxication we said that they must abstain. For a guardian is surely the last person in the world to whom it is allowable to get drunk and not know where on earth he is.” To which Glaucon, Socrates’ interlocutor, replies: “Yes, it would be absurd5 that a guardian should need a guard.” Instead of Juvenal’s later pessimism, indeed cynicism, Plato − through Glaucon − expresses the optimistic view that one should be able to trust the city’s guardians and rulers to behave properly; that they should require oversight is an absurdity.