  But still some readers, especially Leo Strauss (see Strauss 1964) and his followers (e.g., Bloom 1968 and Bloom 1977), want to  distance the Republic’s take-home political message from  Kallipolis. They typically appeal to three considerations that are  supposed to indicate Plato’s awareness that the political ideal is  impossible or ruinous. First, they note that the philosophers have to be compelled to rule the ideal city. But this involves no  impossibility. The founders of the ideal city would have to make a  law compelling those educated as philosophers to rule (cf.   section 2.3  above), but founders could make such a law. If philosophers have to  be compelled to sustain the maximally happy city, one might wonder  why anyone would found such a city. But one might wonder why anyone  was inspired to compose the Oresteia, as well. People sometimes do remarkable things. Second, Straussian readers appeal to the ideal  city’s predicted demise, and they assert that the rulers’ eventual  inability to calculate “the marriage number” (546a–547a) shows an  ineliminable conflict between the eros in human nature and the  mathematical perfection of a political ideal. But it is also possible to blame the anticipated degeneration on sense-perception (see  546b2–3), not calculation, and to see in Kallipolis’ demise a common  fact of life for perceptible entities (546a2). After all, Socrates does not say that eros makes the creation or maintenance of Kallipolis  impossible. Finally, the Straussians note that Kallipolis is not  sketched as an ideal in a political treatise, exactly, but proposed  by Socrates in a long dramatic conversation, which includes twists  and turns that come after he stops discussing Kallipolis.  This is true, and it renders difficult inferences from what is said  in the Republic to what Plato thinks. But it does not  provide any reason for thinking that Plato rejects the ideal that Socrates constructs in the Republic.