This is completely false. The *gennaios pseudos* (better translated as "big whopper" by the way) has nothing to do with "social hierarchies" in any real-world sense. Its sole purpose is as Sokrates's ironic answer to the question why the Guardians (by which Plato referred to the "rational" and "emotional" parts of the *psyche*) should accept what to most Greeks was a grossly *inferior* socvial position--why, for instance, they should be deprived of monetary wealth (not to mention every other form of private property or family life). They should not seek gold and silver because they already possessed them in their very being.
>There is in reality no basis for this sorting because talent and
>skilli is randomly distributed among all people, including women...
This must be a very hard, if not impossible, assertion to justify, proclaiming as it does that *homo sapiens sapiens* is somehow unique among living species (perhaps because it was created by a God Who Likes To Play Dice) in that natural endowments are random rather than correlated with the presence of like endowments in ancestral stock. No Greek would have thought the idea anything but ridiculous.
Shane Mage
"When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even downright silly.
When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N. Weiner)
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