Imlisanen Jamir
Polybius came to Rome around 167 BC as one of a thousand Achaean hostages and stayed about sixteen years. He used the time to work out how a republic of farmers and lawyers had come to dominate the Mediterranean in little more than half a century. His answer, set down in the sixth book of the Histories, was that the Roman constitution gave the consuls, the Senate and the people each a power the other two needed, so that any one of them wishing to act against the rest found the way blocked.
Plato had already told the story of the ship. Its captain is somewhat deaf and short-sighted, the sailors quarrel and scheme for the helm, and each is sure that steering requires no training. The parable is usually quoted against rule by the many, although the captain is no better qualified than his crew, and the ship goes down because everyone aboard trusts their own judgement and nobody checks it. Polybius made a sequence out of the same pessimism. Kings become tyrants, the best men become a self-serving few, and the people become a mob that hands itself to the first strong voice promising order, after which the wheel turns again.
Critics who call democracy the rule of an uncaring and politically illiterate mass have a point worth conceding. Voters do reward charm, and charm costs a candidate far less than competence. What such critics seldom examine is who they imagine holding power in the crowd's place. The case against the crowd usually carries a private assumption that the writer, or someone of the writer's acquaintance, would make a better captain, and Plato gave his ship a deaf captain to puncture exactly that assumption. Anyone confident enough to nominate a ruler who needs no supervision has already supplied the best argument for supervision.
Ignorance among voters is a real problem, but the record of governments suggests that it does far less damage where officials must answer to rivals who profit from exposing their mistakes, and that an educated public gets little protection from a government in which nobody has a reason to disagree with the person at the top. The lesson of Polybius therefore comes down to plumbing. It means courts that can overrule ministers, upper chambers that can delay lower ones, auditors who report to someone other than the officials they audit, a press free to print what the government dislikes, and an opposition with enough seats to say no and be heard saying it.
Each of these irritates whoever holds office, which is the reason they work, and each will at some point be described as an obstacle to efficiency or to national unity. A proposal to remove one of them deserves the suspicion that sailors would feel toward a captain who announces that the crew will no longer be needed to navigate.
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