You have missed the point. It is not a question of the transliteration but the fact that it is a Greek not a Roman term. As I said, oi polloi and hoi polloi are both English transliterations. Whichever one you prefer makes no difference. You really have blown this out of proportion. It was a comment made in relation to the fact that you left Athens off your list. When talking about great civilizations what Rome owes Athens should not be ignored.Lets transliterate this Greek term into English letter by letter and see what we find…
But none of this is what motivated your tirade, is it? A friendly word of advice: if you are going to launch a polemical attack , a "challenge to the forum", you should not make yourself so vulnerable by making your weakness so obvious. It makes you very easy to manipulate. You will not understand this if you think it has anything to do with the content of our discussion rather than what prompted you to go off in the way you have here and elsewhere.
Where does he say this? I found only one reference to Cimon and Miltiades in the Socratic literature. It is from Plato’s Gorgias:For example, when Socrates refers to Milides and Cimon as leaders of the "oi oligoi", he means that they were the leaders of the "better classes" of society
Whatever class they may have come from they are not considered to be good leaders by Plato's Socrates. Perhaps it is something from Plutarch? If so, two things must be taken into consideration: context and audience. Plutarch’s rhetoric should not be overlooked.Callicles:
Why, do you hear no mention of Themistocles and what a good man he was, and Cimon and Miltiades and the great Pericles, who has died recently and whom you have listened to yourself? (503c)
Socrates:
Or can it be, then, that you will let us see you concerning yourself with anything else in your management of the city's affairs than making us, the citizens, as good as possible? Have we not more than once already admitted that this is what the statesman ought to do? Have we admitted it or not? Answer. We have: I will answer for you. Then if this is what the good man ought to accomplish for his country, recall now those men whom you mentioned a little while ago, and tell me if you still consider that they showed themselves good citizens— Pericles and Cimon and Miltiades and Themistocles. (515c-d)
And now about Cimon once more, tell me, did not the people whom he tended ostracize him in order that they might not hear his voice for ten years? (516d)
And Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, they sentenced to be flung into the pit, and had it not been for the president, in he would have gone. And yet these men, had they been good in the way that you describe them, would never have met with such a fate. (516e)
My admirable friend, neither do I blame the latter, at least as servants of the state; indeed, I consider they have shown themselves more serviceable than those of our time, and more able to procure for the city the things she desired. But in diverting her desires another way instead of complying with them—in persuading or compelling her people to what would help them to be better they were scarcely, if at all, superior to their successors; and that is the only business of a good citizen. (517b-c)
And yet it was Socrates, of the hoi polloi, who Plato and Xenophon wrote about as the teacher of their aristocratic peers.… in contradistinction, the humble, the poor,the common/vulgar general assortment of "plebs" ( in English slang) who constituted the more populous lower, less dignified and less honourable or virtuous, rank/s of society. This was the point I was endeavouring making in my recent post relating to the natural phenomenon of ranked hierarchy that has characterized all stable and enduring civilized human societies past and present.
Nor was Jesus a member of the aristocracy. It is not the wealthy or the aristocracy but the meek who shall inherit the earth.
You are conflating the notion of a “natural aristocracy” with an economic or inherited aristocracy. The prevalence of hierarchical social structures does not establish a causal connection between social hierarchy and greatness or between social hierarchy and a well ordered society.
The hound has lost the scent. I am still waiting for your explication of the common principles that links Burke and Trump