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Articles

Aristotle & The Good Ruler

Maxwell Cameron wants politicians to take a lesson from Aristotle’s book.

Odysseus was a good captain, so he took care not to mention the six-headed monster ready to snatch his sailors and devour them alive. He worried that his crew would be so terrified that they would “leave the oars in a panic and huddle down below” (The Odyssey). The goddess Circe had warned him that this beast, Scylla, had “twelve flapping feet, and six necks enormously long, and at the end of each neck a horrible head with three rows of teeth set thick and close, full of black death.” She also advised him that hewing close to Scylla’s cave was better than entering the other side of the channel, where a terrible sea monster, Charybdis, could swallow the entire ship and crew. “To lose six of your crew is much better than to lose them all at once,” she advised.

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