YOUNG SOCRATES: What?
STRANGER: Do you think, I mean, that we have really fulfilled our intention?—There has been a sort of discussion, and yet the investigation seems to me not to be perfectly worked out: this is where the enquiry fails.
YOUNG SOCRATES: I do not understand.
STRANGER: I will try to make the thought, which is at this moment present in my mind, clearer to us both.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Let me hear.
STRANGER: There were many arts of shepherding, and one of them was the political, which had the charge of one particular herd?
YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes.
STRANGER: And this the argument defined to be the art of rearing, not horses or other brutes, but the art of rearing man collectively?
YOUNG SOCRATES: True.
STRANGER: Note, however, a difference which distinguishes the king from all other shepherds.