The young man drawn to tyranny is the illustration of Aristotle's maxims that man is both the best and the worst of animals, and that the man living outside the city (in the sense of not participating in its law) must be either a god or a beast. In the Republic Socrates has included both god and beast in the city, and this accounts for the difference between his political science and Aristotle's. Socrates, unlike Aristotle, makes eros a political principle.

--Allan Bloom

This suggests some interesting reflections I haven't quite worked out yet. In particular I wonder what Aristotle would have made of the monastic movement beginning in the fourth and fifth centuries. The divine eros leads a man to forsake the city in aspirations of rising above the human to become a god. Well, sages had long done this, perhaps always. In some ways St Anthony of the Desert was like Buddha or Plotinus. But what happens when such a man is followed by thousands more, giving rise to entire "otherworldly" communities which begin to require their own systems of laws and organisation? And then when these communities are in various degrees absorbed back into the city, or rather, the empire?

This is one of the things that makes Byzantine civilization so strange and interesting: its entrenched commitment to both a worldly and and an otherworldly orientation, attempting to have both a secular and a sacred reality in a single imperial-ecclesiastical structure. If Bloom is correct some explanation may be found in Byzantium's culturally Platonist roots, as opposed to the openness to Aristotelianism of the West, where Church-state relations were generally more ambiguous and difficult.

I wonder if it would be worthwhile to try to work out a more coherent story to tell about this. Of course, chances are it's already been done. Political philosophy is not my forté and I wouldn't know.