The Republic describes a three-class system of artisans on …

The Republic describes a three-class system of artisans on the bottom, a military class in the middle, and a council of philosopher kings on top. This system resembles the two-class system that I have used to describe the real ancient Greek civilization, except that there is a third class on top. So it is as if, first, pastorals invaded agriculturalists and became human herders that ruled by force; and then a group of philosophers invaded next and ruled both classes by way of their power over ideas. This, indeed, is what I interpret Plato as proposing in the Republic. Plato was the descendant of a raider and grew up in a society of human herders, but was not, himself, a great military man. He saw weakness in his fellow men in their reliance on nomos and he saw in weakness the opportunity to exploit both the upper and lower class of his society using the power of myth. The well-known myth of the cave depicts ordinary people as imprisoned underground and unable to escape because of being entranced by shadows. To modernize this myth, an ordinary person is like someone who has been watching a movie and who doesn't know that he can get up and leave the movie theater. These are the people who follow nomos, like Euthyphro and prisoners in the cave are what Plato is imagining when he sees people believe the myth that social institutions were consecrated by the gods. Plato says that a philosopher can escape the cave of illusion and can also show other people out of the cave of illusion. However, Plato also observed that not everyone wants out of the cave of illusion. In fact, people may become violent when they are pointed towards the exit, as he saw with Socrates. Plato described these people as lacking an independent sense of justice and proposed that philosophers can rule these people by creating their own illusions. Plato called this the noble lie. Thus, the result is a society not based on nomos, but on illusion. In fact, it would appear that in Plato's version of events, which locates the republic as a past state perfect justice, what we call nomos would actually be a degeneration of the inventions of ancient philosophers.