[abecedarius]

Yes, it's a passage in the Republic that I'm particularly thinking of. I have only the vaguest memory now, something like that only a few of the oldest and wisest should be told the real reasons for rules, and the rest should get various levels of cover stories?

Agreed that there's a deliberate indirection in dialogs; that's why I included the caveat. But to take another example, the Turtle is not always Hoftstadter's mouthpiece, yet Hofstadter doesn't seem especially manipulative to me. Plato (at least in translation) does. The passage I brought up just crystallized that reaction. I started out reading Plato from the usual charitable standpoint, and ended feeling that's a mistake: whatever's he's up to, it's not primarily to help the reader become a better independent thinker, or to accurately report events.

I've read less Aristotle, but he gives a different impression: someone with faults like overconfidence, but who's honestly pitching in to the project of improving collective knowledge and thinking.