Plato's Statesman is a strange dialogue, possibly the strangest he wrote. In it an anonymous Eleatic Stranger not merely argues that a statesman is defined by his knowledge alone, and that it does not matter whether this “statesman” ever puts that knowledge into practice, even simply as an advisor to a ruler. The Eleatic goes so far as to suggest that human beings ought to be understood not in terms of our distinctive ability to reason or speak, but as featherless bipeds or two-legged pigs. He even asks his auditors to suppose that there was a time long in the past when the cosmos reversed the direction of its movements so that the cycle of the generation of animals was also reversed. Human beings sprouted from the earth full grown with gray beards and gradually became younger and younger until their seeds wasted away and the direction of the movement of the cosmos again changed.

Readers might be tempted to conclude that the dialogue is one big, if rather weird, joke. Such a conclusion would be rash, however, because Plato says more in the Statesman about the actual possibilities and limitations of political practice than in either of his other two dialogues explicitly devoted to politics: the Republic and the Laws.