User:Who wathes the Watchman, baby?

=Who watches the Watchmen, baby?= ==Or, more accordingly, But who will guard the guardians themselves!?.



Well, beware please...
This question, if treated seriously, bring to us all an unevitable anxiety - if people, who (theoretically) have to be the very guardians of the laws, the overall order of world and civilisation, start to set these laws themselves and for their own advantages and making themselves "more equal" than "the equal people of their organised community (and especially, the country), then NOTHING is there which would be able to stop them!.

Although in its modern usage the phrase has universal, timeless applications to concepts such as tyrannical governments and uncontrollably oppressive dictatorships, in context within Juvenal's poem it refers to the impossibility of enforcing moral behaviour on women when the enforcers (custodes) are corruptible (Satire 6.346–348):



"pone seram, cohibe." sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? cauta est et ab illis incipit uxor. "Bolt her in, constrain her!" But who will guard the guardians? The wife plans ahead and begins with them!. However, modern editors regard these three lines as an interpolation inserted into the text. In 1899 an undergraduate student at Oxford, E.O. Winstedt, discovered a manuscript (now known as O, for Oxoniensis) containing 34 lines which some believe to have been omitted from other texts of Juvenal's poem. The debate on this manuscript is ongoing, but even if the poem is not by Juvenal, it is likely that it preserves the original context of the phrase. If so, the original context is as follows (O 29–33):
 * audio quid ueteres olim moneatis amici,
 * I hear always the admonishment of my friends:
 * }



consilia et ueteres quaecumque monetis amici, "pone seram, cohibes!". Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Qui nunc lasciuae furta puellae hac mercede silent crimen commune tacetur! the plan that my friends always advise me to adopt: "Bolt her in, constrain her!" But who will watch the watchmen themselves? They keep quiet about the girl's secrets and get her as their payment; everyone hushes it up!==
 * ... noui
 * … I know
 * }

Źródło (the source):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F#Origin