The modern Thrasymachos is as frank in his hatred of philosophers as the ancient. He compares their enthusiasm in favour of freedom to the virus imparted by the bite of a mad dog, imagining that nothing is so sedulously to be guarded against as liberty. He would, if possible, have the study of ancient statesmen and historians prohibited, or at least that care should be taken to counteract their maxims by the teaching of discreet sophists. “I cannot imagine,” he says, “how anything can be more prejudicial to a monarchy than the allowing of such books to be publicly read, without present applying such correctives of discreet masters, as are fit to take away their venom; which venom I will not doubt to compare to the biting of a mad dog, which is a disease the physicians call _hydrophobia_, or _fear of water_. For, as he that is so bitten has a continual torment of thirst, and yet abhorreth water, and is in such an estate, as if the poison endeavoured to convert him into a dog; so, when a monarchy is once bitten to the quick, by those democratical writers, that continually snarl at that estate, it wanteth nothing more than a strong monarch, which, nevertheless, out of a certain _tyrannophobia_ or fear of being strongly governed, when they have him, they abhor.”—Leviathan, Pt. ii. c. 29. iii. 315. Count Capo D’Istrias, if he was ignorant of the language of ancient Greece, appears at least to have understood something of the spirit of ancient philosophy, for, designing to establish a tyranny, he prohibited the reading of Plato in the public schools. He may possibly have learned his maxims of government from Hobbes, as well as that the master of the academy deserved his hatred.—Thiersch. Etat. Act. de la Grèce, ii. 121. Footnote 839: Plat. Rep. i. § 11. t. i. p. 41. Stallb. Footnote 840: Ἔρανος. Cf. Sympos. t. iv. p. 379. Bekk. It was, in fact, a part of the sophistical doctrine, to maintain in politics, what Hobbes afterwards advocated, the right of the stronger:— —--"The good old rule, the simple plan, That they should take who have the power, And they should keep who can." But because there is in every man’s heart a rooted prejudice in favour of justice, they were fain to argue that all governors, in as far as they deserved the name, would ordain what was best for themselves, and that, whatever it might be, was just:[841] a very satisfactory doctrine, which has never grown wholly out of fashion. They laughed to scorn, as persons who required nurses to look after them and wipe their noses,[842] whomsoever they found entertaining the notion that governments were instituted for the good of the governed. Footnote 841: