{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SCENE","Dialogue":"The Lyceum."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Who was the person, Socrates, with whom you were talking yesterday at the Lyceum? There was such a crowd around you that I could not get within hearing, but I caught a sight of him over their heads, and I made out, as I thought, that he was a stranger with whom you were talking: who was he?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There were two, Crito; which of them do you mean?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"The one whom I mean was seated second from you on the right-hand side. In the middle was Cleinias the young son of Axiochus, who has wonderfully grown; he is only about the age of my own Critobulus, but he is much forwarder and very good-looking: the other is thin and looks younger than he is."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He whom you mean, Crito, is Euthydemus; and on my left hand there was his brother Dionysodorus, who also took part in the conversation."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Neither of them are known to me, Socrates; they are a new importation of Sophists, as I should imagine. Of what country are they, and what is their line of wisdom?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"As to their origin, I believe that they are natives of this part of the world, and have migrated from Chios to Thurii; they were driven out of Thurii, and have been living for many years past in these regions. As to their wisdom, about which you ask, Crito, they are wonderful--consummate! I never knew what the true pancratiast was before; they are simply made up of fighting, not like the two Acarnanian brothers who fight with their bodies only, but this pair of heroes, besides being perfect in the use of their bodies, are invincible in every sort of warfare; for they are capital at fighting in armour, and will teach the art to any one who pays them; and also they are most skilful in legal warfare; they will plead themselves and teach others to speak and to compose speeches which will have an effect upon the courts. And this was only the beginning of their wisdom, but they have at last carried out the pancratiastic art to the very end, and have mastered the only mode of fighting which had been hitherto neglected by them; and now no one dares even to stand up against them: such is their skill in the war of words, that they can refute any proposition whether true or false. Now I am thinking, Crito, of placing myself in their hands; for they say that in a short time they can impart their skill to any one."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"But, Socrates, are you not too old? there may be reason to fear that."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Certainly not, Crito; as I will prove to you, for I have the consolation of knowing that they began this art of disputation which I covet, quite, as I may say, in old age; last year, or the year before, they had none of their new wisdom. I am only apprehensive that I may bring the two strangers into disrepute, as I have done Connus the son of Metrobius, the harp-player, who is still my music-master; for when the boys who go to him see me going with them, they laugh at me and call him grandpapa's master. Now I should not like the strangers to experience similar treatment; the fear of ridicule may make them unwilling to receive me; and therefore, Crito, I shall try and persuade some old men to accompany me to them, as I persuaded them to go with me to Connus, and I hope that you will make one: and perhaps we had better take your sons as a bait; they will want to have them as pupils, and for the sake of them willing to receive us."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"I see no objection, Socrates, if you like; but first I wish that you would give me a description of their wisdom, that I may know beforehand what we are going to learn."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In less than no time you shall hear; for I cannot say that I did not attend--I paid great attention to them, and I remember and will endeavour to repeat the whole story. Providentially I was sitting alone in the dressing-room of the Lyceum where you saw me, and was about to depart; when I was getting up I recognized the familiar divine sign: so I sat down again, and in a little while the two brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus came in, and several others with them, whom I believe to be their disciples, and they walked about in the covered court; they had not taken more than two or three turns when Cleinias entered, who, as you truly say, is very much improved: he was followed by a host of lovers, one of whom was Ctesippus the Paeanian, a well-bred youth, but also having the wildness of youth. Cleinias saw me from the entrance as I was sitting alone, and at once came and sat down on the right hand of me, as you describe; and Dionysodorus and Euthydemus, when they saw him, at first stopped and talked with one another, now and then glancing at us, for I particularly watched them; and then Euthydemus came and sat down by the youth, and the other by me on the left hand; the rest anywhere. I saluted the brothers, whom I had not seen for a long time; and then I said to Cleinias: Here are two wise men, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, Cleinias, wise not in a small but in a large way of wisdom, for they know all about war,--all that a good general ought to know about the array and command of an army, and the whole art of fighting in armour: and they know about law too, and can teach a man how to use the weapons of the courts when he is injured. They heard me say this, but only despised me. I observed that they looked at one another, and both of them laughed; and then Euthydemus said: Those, Socrates, are matters which we no longer pursue seriously; to us they are secondary occupations. Indeed, I said, if such occupations are regarded by you as secondary, what must the principal one be; tell me, I beseech you, what that noble study is? The teaching of virtue, Socrates, he replied, is our principal occupation; and we believe that we can impart it better and quicker than any man. My God! I said, and where did you learn that? I always thought, as I was saying just now, that your chief accomplishment was the art of fighting in armour; and I used to say as much of you, for I remember that you professed this when you were here before. But now if you really have the other knowledge, O forgive me: I address you as I would superior beings, and ask you to pardon the impiety of my former expressions. But are you quite sure about this, Dionysodorus and Euthydemus? the promise is so vast, that a feeling of incredulity steals over me. You may take our word, Socrates, for the fact. Then I think you happier in having such a treasure than the great king is in the possession of his kingdom. And please to tell me whether you intend to exhibit your wisdom; or what will you do? That is why we have come hither, Socrates; and our purpose is not only to exhibit, but also to teach any one who likes to learn. But I can promise you, I said, that every unvirtuous person will want to learn. I shall be the first; and there is the youth Cleinias, and Ctesippus: and here are several others, I said, pointing to the lovers of Cleinias, who were beginning to gather round us. Now Ctesippus was sitting at some distance from Cleinias; and when Euthydemus leaned forward in talking with me, he was prevented from seeing Cleinias, who was between us; and so, partly because he wanted to look at his love, and also because he was interested, he jumped up and stood opposite to us: and all the other admirers of Cleinias, as well as the disciples of Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, followed his example. And these were the persons whom I showed to Euthydemus, telling him that they were all eager to learn: to which Ctesippus and all of them with one voice vehemently assented, and bid him exhibit the power of his wisdom. Then I said: O Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, I earnestly request you to do myself and the company the favour to exhibit. There may be some trouble in giving the whole exhibition; but tell me one thing,--can you make a good man of him only who is already convinced that he ought to learn of you, or of him also who is not convinced, either because he imagines that virtue is a thing which cannot be taught at all, or that you are not the teachers of it? Has your art power to persuade him, who is of the latter temper of mind, that virtue can be taught; and that you are the men from whom he will best learn it? Certainly, Socrates, said Dionysodorus; our art will do both. And you and your brother, Dionysodorus, I said, of all men who are now living are the most likely to stimulate him to philosophy and to the study of virtue? Yes, Socrates, I rather think that we are. Then I wish that you would be so good as to defer the other part of the exhibition, and only try to persuade the youth whom you see here that he ought to be a philosopher and study virtue. Exhibit that, and you will confer a great favour on me and on every one present; for the fact is I and all of us are extremely anxious that he should become truly good. His name is Cleinias, and he is the son of Axiochus, and grandson of the old Alcibiades, cousin of the Alcibiades that now is. He is quite young, and we are naturally afraid that some one may get the start of us, and turn his mind in a wrong direction, and he may be ruined. Your visit, therefore, is most happily timed; and I hope that you will make a trial of the young man, and converse with him in our presence, if you have no objection. These were pretty nearly the expressions which I used; and Euthydemus, in a manly and at the same time encouraging tone, replied: There can be no objection, Socrates, if the young man is only willing to answer questions. He is quite accustomed to do so, I replied; for his friends often come and ask him questions and argue with him; and therefore he is quite at home in answering. What followed, Crito, how can I rightly narrate? For not slight is the task of rehearsing infinite wisdom, and therefore, like the poets, I ought to commence my relation with an invocation to Memory and the Muses. Now Euthydemus, if I remember rightly, began nearly as follows: O Cleinias, are those who learn the wise or the ignorant? The youth, overpowered by the question blushed, and in his perplexity looked at me for help; and I, knowing that he was disconcerted, said: Take courage, Cleinias, and answer like a man whichever you think; for my belief is that you will derive the greatest benefit from their questions. Whichever he answers, said Dionysodorus, leaning forward so as to catch my ear, his face beaming with laughter, I prophesy that he will be refuted, Socrates. While he was speaking to me, Cleinias gave his answer: and therefore I had no time to warn him of the predicament in which he was placed, and he answered that those who learned were the wise. Euthydemus proceeded: There are some whom you would call teachers, are there not? The boy assented. And they are the teachers of those who learn--the grammar-master and the lyre-master used to teach you and other boys; and you were the learners? Yes. And when you were learners you did not as yet know the things which you were learning? No, he said. And were you wise then? No, indeed, he said. But if you were not wise you were unlearned? Certainly. You then, learning what you did not know, were unlearned when you were learning? The youth nodded assent. Then the unlearned learn, and not the wise, Cleinias, as you imagine. At these words the followers of Euthydemus, of whom I spoke, like a chorus at the bidding of their director, laughed and cheered. Then, before the youth had time to recover his breath, Dionysodorus cleverly took him in hand, and said: Yes, Cleinias; and when the grammar-master dictated anything to you, were they the wise boys or the unlearned who learned the dictation? The wise, replied Cleinias. Then after all the wise are the learners and not the unlearned; and your last answer to Euthydemus was wrong. Then once more the admirers of the two heroes, in an ecstasy at their wisdom, gave vent to another peal of laughter, while the rest of us were silent and amazed. Euthydemus, observing this, determined to persevere with the youth; and in order to heighten the effect went on asking another similar question, which might be compared to the double turn of an expert dancer. Do those, said he, who learn, learn what they know, or what they do not know? Again Dionysodorus whispered to me: That, Socrates, is just another of the same sort. Good heavens, I said; and your last question was so good! Like all our other questions, Socrates, he replied--inevitable. I see the reason, I said, why you are in such reputation among your disciples. Meanwhile Cleinias had answered Euthydemus that those who learned learn what they do not know; and he put him through a series of questions the same as before. Do you not know letters? He assented. All letters? Yes. But when the teacher dictates to you, does he not dictate letters? To this also he assented. Then if you know all letters, he dictates that which you know? This again was admitted by him. Then, said the other, you do not learn that which he dictates; but he only who does not know letters learns? Nay, said Cleinias; but I do learn. Then, said he, you learn what you know, if you know all the letters? He admitted that. Then, he said, you were wrong in your answer. The word was hardly out of his mouth when Dionysodorus took up the argument, like a ball which he caught, and had another throw at the youth. Cleinias, he said, Euthydemus is deceiving you. For tell me now, is not learning acquiring knowledge of that which one learns? Cleinias assented. And knowing is having knowledge at the time? He agreed. And not knowing is not having knowledge at the time? He admitted that. And are those who acquire those who have or have not a thing? Those who have not. And have you not admitted that those who do not know are of the number of those who have not? He nodded assent. Then those who learn are of the class of those who acquire, and not of those who have? He agreed. Then, Cleinias, he said, those who do not know learn, and not those who know. Euthydemus was proceeding to give the youth a third fall; but I knew that he was in deep water, and therefore, as I wanted to give him a respite lest he should be disheartened, I said to him consolingly: You must not be surprised, Cleinias, at the singularity of their mode of speech: this I say because you may not understand what the two strangers are doing with you; they are only initiating you after the manner of the Corybantes in the mysteries; and this answers to the enthronement, which, if you have ever been initiated, is, as you will know, accompanied by dancing and sport; and now they are just prancing and dancing about you, and will next proceed to initiate you; imagine then that you have gone through the first part of the sophistical ritual, which, as Prodicus says, begins with initiation into the correct use of terms. The two foreign gentlemen, perceiving that you did not know, wanted to explain to you that the word 'to learn' has two meanings, and is used, first, in the sense of acquiring knowledge of some matter of which you previously have no knowledge, and also, when you have the knowledge, in the sense of reviewing this matter, whether something done or spoken by the light of this newly-acquired knowledge; the latter is generally called 'knowing' rather than 'learning,' but the word 'learning' is also used; and you did not see, as they explained to you, that the term is employed of two opposite sorts of men, of those who know, and of those who do not know. There was a similar trick in the second question, when they asked you whether men learn what they know or what they do not know. These parts of learning are not serious, and therefore I say that the gentlemen are not serious, but are only playing with you. For if a man had all that sort of knowledge that ever was, he would not be at all the wiser; he would only be able to play with men, tripping them up and oversetting them with distinctions of words. He would be like a person who pulls away a stool from some one when he is about to sit down, and then laughs and makes merry at the sight of his friend overturned and laid on his back. And you must regard all that has hitherto passed between you and them as merely play. But in what is to follow I am certain that they will exhibit to you their serious purpose, and keep their promise (I will show them how); for they promised to give me a sample of the hortatory philosophy, but I suppose that they wanted to have a game with you first. And now, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, I think that we have had enough of this. Will you let me see you explaining to the young man how he is to apply himself to the study of virtue and wisdom? And I will first show you what I conceive to be the nature of the task, and what sort of a discourse I desire to hear; and if I do this in a very inartistic and ridiculous manner, do not laugh at me, for I only venture to improvise before you because I am eager to hear your wisdom: and I must therefore ask you and your disciples to refrain from laughing. And now, O son of Axiochus, let me put a question to you: Do not all men desire happiness? And yet, perhaps, this is one of those ridiculous questions which I am afraid to ask, and which ought not to be asked by a sensible man: for what human being is there who does not desire happiness? There is no one, said Cleinias, who does not. Well, then, I said, since we all of us desire happiness, how can we be happy?--that is the next question. Shall we not be happy if we have many good things? And this, perhaps, is even a more simple question than the first, for there can be no doubt of the answer. He assented. And what things do we esteem good? No solemn sage is required to tell us this, which may be easily answered; for every one will say that wealth is a good. Certainly, he said. And are not health and beauty goods, and other personal gifts? He agreed. Can there be any doubt that good birth, and power, and honours in one's own land, are goods? He assented. And what other goods are there? I said. What do you say of temperance, justice, courage: do you not verily and indeed think, Cleinias, that we shall be more right in ranking them as goods than in not ranking them as goods? For a dispute might possibly arise about this. What then do you say? They are goods, said Cleinias. Very well, I said; and where in the company shall we find a place for wisdom--among the goods or not? Among the goods. And now, I said, think whether we have left out any considerable goods. I do not think that we have, said Cleinias. Upon recollection, I said, indeed I am afraid that we have left out the greatest of them all. What is that? he asked. Fortune, Cleinias, I replied; which all, even the most foolish, admit to be the greatest of goods. True, he said. On second thoughts, I added, how narrowly, O son of Axiochus, have you and I escaped making a laughing-stock of ourselves to the strangers. Why do you say so? Why, because we have already spoken of good-fortune, and are but repeating ourselves. What do you mean? I mean that there is something ridiculous in again putting forward good-fortune, which has a place in the list already, and saying the same thing twice over. He asked what was the meaning of this, and I replied: Surely wisdom is good-fortune; even a child may know that. The simple-minded youth was amazed; and, observing his surprise, I said to him: Do you not know, Cleinias, that flute-players are most fortunate and successful in performing on the flute? He assented. And are not the scribes most fortunate in writing and reading letters? Certainly. Amid the dangers of the sea, again, are any more fortunate on the whole than wise pilots? None, certainly. And if you were engaged in war, in whose company would you rather take the risk--in company with a wise general, or with a foolish one? With a wise one. And if you were ill, whom would you rather have as a companion in a dangerous illness--a wise physician, or an ignorant one? A wise one. You think, I said, that to act with a wise man is more fortunate than to act with an ignorant one? He assented. Then wisdom always makes men fortunate: for by wisdom no man would ever err, and therefore he must act rightly and succeed, or his wisdom would be wisdom no longer. We contrived at last, somehow or other, to agree in a general conclusion, that he who had wisdom had no need of fortune. I then recalled to his mind the previous state of the question. You remember, I said, our making the admission that we should be happy and fortunate if many good things were present with us? He assented. And should we be happy by reason of the presence of good things, if they profited us not, or if they profited us? If they profited us, he said. And would they profit us, if we only had them and did not use them? For example, if we had a great deal of food and did not eat, or a great deal of drink and did not drink, should we be profited? Certainly not, he said. Or would an artisan, who had all the implements necessary for his work, and did not use them, be any the better for the possession of them? For example, would a carpenter be any the better for having all his tools and plenty of wood, if he never worked? Certainly not, he said. And if a person had wealth and all the goods of which we were just now speaking, and did not use them, would he be happy because he possessed them? No indeed, Socrates. Then, I said, a man who would be happy must not only have the good things, but he must also use them; there is no advantage in merely having them? True. Well, Cleinias, but if you have the use as well as the possession of good things, is that sufficient to confer happiness? Yes, in my opinion. And may a person use them either rightly or wrongly? He must use them rightly. That is quite true, I said. And the wrong use of a thing is far worse than the non-use; for the one is an evil, and the other is neither a good nor an evil. You admit that? He assented. Now in the working and use of wood, is not that which gives the right use simply the knowledge of the carpenter? Nothing else, he said. And surely, in the manufacture of vessels, knowledge is that which gives the right way of making them? He agreed. And in the use of the goods of which we spoke at first--wealth and health and beauty, is not knowledge that which directs us to the right use of them, and regulates our practice about them? He assented. Then in every possession and every use of a thing, knowledge is that which gives a man not only good-fortune but success? He again assented. And tell me, I said, O tell me, what do possessions profit a man, if he have neither good sense nor wisdom? Would a man be better off, having and doing many things without wisdom, or a few things with wisdom? Look at the matter thus: If he did fewer things would he not make fewer mistakes? if he made fewer mistakes would he not have fewer misfortunes? and if he had fewer misfortunes would he not be less miserable? Certainly, he said. And who would do least--a poor man or a rich man? A poor man. A weak man or a strong man? A weak man. A noble man or a mean man? A mean man. And a coward would do less than a courageous and temperate man? Yes. And an indolent man less than an active man? He assented. And a slow man less than a quick; and one who had dull perceptions of seeing and hearing less than one who had keen ones? All this was mutually allowed by us. Then, I said, Cleinias, the sum of the matter appears to be that the goods of which we spoke before are not to be regarded as goods in themselves, but the degree of good and evil in them depends on whether they are or are not under the guidance of knowledge: under the guidance of ignorance, they are greater evils than their opposites, inasmuch as they are more able to minister to the evil principle which rules them; and when under the guidance of wisdom and prudence, they are greater goods: but in themselves they are nothing? That, he replied, is obvious. What then is the result of what has been said? Is not this the result--that other things are indifferent, and that wisdom is the only good, and ignorance the only evil? He assented. Let us consider a further point, I said: Seeing that all men desire happiness, and happiness, as has been shown, is gained by a use, and a right use, of the things of life, and the right use of them, and good-fortune in the use of them, is given by knowledge,--the inference is that everybody ought by all means to try and make himself as wise as he can? Yes, he said. And when a man thinks that he ought to obtain this treasure, far more than money, from a father or a guardian or a friend or a suitor, whether citizen or stranger--the eager desire and prayer to them that they would impart wisdom to you, is not at all dishonourable, Cleinias; nor is any one to be blamed for doing any honourable service or ministration to any man, whether a lover or not, if his aim is to get wisdom. Do you agree? I said. Yes, he said, I quite agree, and think that you are right. Yes, I said, Cleinias, if only wisdom can be taught, and does not come to man spontaneously; for this is a point which has still to be considered, and is not yet agreed upon by you and me-- But I think, Socrates, that wisdom can be taught, he said. Best of men, I said, I am delighted to hear you say so; and I am also grateful to you for having saved me from a long and tiresome investigation as to whether wisdom can be taught or not. But now, as you think that wisdom can be taught, and that wisdom only can make a man happy and fortunate, will you not acknowledge that all of us ought to love wisdom, and you individually will try to love her? Certainly, Socrates, he said; I will do my best. I was pleased at hearing this; and I turned to Dionysodorus and Euthydemus and said: That is an example, clumsy and tedious I admit, of the sort of exhortations which I would have you give; and I hope that one of you will set forth what I have been saying in a more artistic style: or at least take up the enquiry where I left off, and proceed to show the youth whether he should have all knowledge; or whether there is one sort of knowledge only which will make him good and happy, and what that is. For, as I was saying at first, the improvement of this young man in virtue and wisdom is a matter which we have very much at heart. Thus I spoke, Crito, and was all attention to what was coming. I wanted to see how they would approach the question, and where they would start in their exhortation to the young man that he should practise wisdom and virtue. Dionysodorus, who was the elder, spoke first. Everybody's eyes were directed towards him, perceiving that something wonderful might shortly be expected. And certainly they were not far wrong; for the man, Crito, began a remarkable discourse well worth hearing, and wonderfully persuasive regarded as an exhortation to virtue. Tell me, he said, Socrates and the rest of you who say that you want this young man to become wise, are you in jest or in real earnest? I was led by this to imagine that they fancied us to have been jesting when we asked them to converse with the youth, and that this made them jest and play, and being under this impression, I was the more decided in saying that we were in profound earnest. Dionysodorus said: Reflect, Socrates; you may have to deny your words. I have reflected, I said; and I shall never deny my words. Well, said he, and so you say that you wish Cleinias to become wise? Undoubtedly. And he is not wise as yet? At least his modesty will not allow him to say that he is. You wish him, he said, to become wise and not, to be ignorant? That we do. You wish him to be what he is not, and no longer to be what he is? I was thrown into consternation at this. Taking advantage of my consternation he added: You wish him no longer to be what he is, which can only mean that you wish him to perish. Pretty lovers and friends they must be who want their favourite not to be, or to perish! When Ctesippus heard this he got very angry (as a lover well might) and said: Stranger of Thurii--if politeness would allow me I should say, A plague upon you! What can make you tell such a lie about me and the others, which I hardly like to repeat, as that I wish Cleinias to perish? Euthydemus replied: And do you think, Ctesippus, that it is possible to tell a lie? Yes, said Ctesippus; I should be mad to say anything else. And in telling a lie, do you tell the thing of which you speak or not? You tell the thing of which you speak. And he who tells, tells that thing which he tells, and no other? Yes, said Ctesippus. And that is a distinct thing apart from other things? Certainly. And he who says that thing says that which is? Yes. And he who says that which is, says the truth. And therefore Dionysodorus, if he says that which is, says the truth of you and no lie. Yes, Euthydemus, said Ctesippus; but in saying this, he says what is not. Euthydemus answered: And that which is not is not? True. And that which is not is nowhere? Nowhere. And can any one do anything about that which has no existence, or do to Cleinias that which is not and is nowhere? I think not, said Ctesippus. Well, but do rhetoricians, when they speak in the assembly, do nothing? Nay, he said, they do something. And doing is making? Yes. And speaking is doing and making? He agreed. Then no one says that which is not, for in saying what is not he would be doing something; and you have already acknowledged that no one can do what is not. And therefore, upon your own showing, no one says what is false; but if Dionysodorus says anything, he says what is true and what is. Yes, Euthydemus, said Ctesippus; but he speaks of things in a certain way and manner, and not as they really are. Why, Ctesippus, said Dionysodorus, do you mean to say that any one speaks of things as they are? Yes, he said--all gentlemen and truth-speaking persons. And are not good things good, and evil things evil? He assented. And you say that gentlemen speak of things as they are? Yes. Then the good speak evil of evil things, if they speak of them as they are? Yes, indeed, he said; and they speak evil of evil men. And if I may give you a piece of advice, you had better take care that they do not speak evil of you, since I can tell you that the good speak evil of the evil. And do they speak great things of the great, rejoined Euthydemus, and warm things of the warm? To be sure they do, said Ctesippus; and they speak coldly of the insipid and cold dialectician. You are abusive, Ctesippus, said Dionysodorus, you are abusive! Indeed, I am not, Dionysodorus, he replied; for I love you and am giving you friendly advice, and, if I could, would persuade you not like a boor to say in my presence that I desire my beloved, whom I value above all men, to perish. I saw that they were getting exasperated with one another, so I made a joke with him and said: O Ctesippus, I think that we must allow the strangers to use language in their own way, and not quarrel with them about words, but be thankful for what they give us. If they know how to destroy men in such a way as to make good and sensible men out of bad and foolish ones--whether this is a discovery of their own, or whether they have learned from some one else this new sort of death and destruction which enables them to get rid of a bad man and turn him into a good one--if they know this (and they do know this--at any rate they said just now that this was the secret of their newly-discovered art)--let them, in their phraseology, destroy the youth and make him wise, and all of us with him. But if you young men do not like to trust yourselves with them, then fiat experimentum in corpore senis; I will be the Carian on whom they shall operate. And here I offer my old person to Dionysodorus; he may put me into the pot, like Medea the Colchian, kill me, boil me, if he will only make me good. Ctesippus said: And I, Socrates, am ready to commit myself to the strangers; they may skin me alive, if they please (and I am pretty well skinned by them already), if only my skin is made at last, not like that of Marsyas, into a leathern bottle, but into a piece of virtue. And here is Dionysodorus fancying that I am angry with him, when really I am not angry at all; I do but contradict him when I think that he is speaking improperly to me: and you must not confound abuse and contradiction, O illustrious Dionysodorus; for they are quite different things. Contradiction! said Dionysodorus; why, there never was such a thing. Certainly there is, he replied; there can be no question of that. Do you, Dionysodorus, maintain that there is not? You will never prove to me, he said, that you have heard any one contradicting any one else. Indeed, said Ctesippus; then now you may hear me contradicting Dionysodorus. Are you prepared to make that good? Certainly, he said. Well, have not all things words expressive of them? Yes. Of their existence or of their non-existence? Of their existence. Yes, Ctesippus, and we just now proved, as you may remember, that no man could affirm a negative; for no one could affirm that which is not. And what does that signify? said Ctesippus; you and I may contradict all the same for that. But can we contradict one another, said Dionysodorus, when both of us are describing the same thing? Then we must surely be speaking the same thing? He assented. Or when neither of us is speaking of the same thing? For then neither of us says a word about the thing at all? He granted that proposition also. But when I describe something and you describe another thing, or I say something and you say nothing--is there any contradiction? How can he who speaks contradict him who speaks not? Here Ctesippus was silent; and I in my astonishment said: What do you mean, Dionysodorus? I have often heard, and have been amazed to hear, this thesis of yours, which is maintained and employed by the disciples of Protagoras, and others before them, and which to me appears to be quite wonderful, and suicidal as well as destructive, and I think that I am most likely to hear the truth about it from you. The dictum is that there is no such thing as falsehood; a man must either say what is true or say nothing. Is not that your position? He assented. But if he cannot speak falsely, may he not think falsely? No, he cannot, he said. Then there is no such thing as false opinion? No, he said. Then there is no such thing as ignorance, or men who are ignorant; for is not ignorance, if there be such a thing, a mistake of fact? Certainly, he said. And that is impossible? Impossible, he replied. Are you saying this as a paradox, Dionysodorus; or do you seriously maintain no man to be ignorant? Refute me, he said. But how can I refute you, if, as you say, to tell a falsehood is impossible? Very true, said Euthydemus. Neither did I tell you just now to refute me, said Dionysodorus; for how can I tell you to do that which is not? O Euthydemus, I said, I have but a dull conception of these subtleties and excellent devices of wisdom; I am afraid that I hardly understand them, and you must forgive me therefore if I ask a very stupid question: if there be no falsehood or false opinion or ignorance, there can be no such thing as erroneous action, for a man cannot fail of acting as he is acting--that is what you mean? Yes, he replied. And now, I said, I will ask my stupid question: If there is no such thing as error in deed, word, or thought, then what, in the name of goodness, do you come hither to teach? And were you not just now saying that you could teach virtue best of all men, to any one who was willing to learn? And are you such an old fool, Socrates, rejoined Dionysodorus, that you bring up now what I said at first--and if I had said anything last year, I suppose that you would bring that up too--but are non-plussed at the words which I have just uttered? Why, I said, they are not easy to answer; for they are the words of wise men: and indeed I know not what to make of this word 'nonplussed,' which you used last: what do you mean by it, Dionysodorus? You must mean that I cannot refute your argument. Tell me if the words have any other sense. No, he replied, they mean what you say. And now answer. What, before you, Dionysodorus? I said. Answer, said he. And is that fair? Yes, quite fair, he said. Upon what principle? I said. I can only suppose that you are a very wise man who comes to us in the character of a great logician, and who knows when to answer and when not to answer--and now you will not open your mouth at all, because you know that you ought not. You prate, he said, instead of answering. But if, my good sir, you admit that I am wise, answer as I tell you. I suppose that I must obey, for you are master. Put the question. Are the things which have sense alive or lifeless? They are alive. And do you know of any word which is alive? I cannot say that I do. Then why did you ask me what sense my words had? Why, because I was stupid and made a mistake. And yet, perhaps, I was right after all in saying that words have a sense;--what do you say, wise man? If I was not in error, even you will not refute me, and all your wisdom will be non-plussed; but if I did fall into error, then again you are wrong in saying that there is no error,--and this remark was made by you not quite a year ago. I am inclined to think, however, Dionysodorus and Euthydemus, that this argument lies where it was and is not very likely to advance: even your skill in the subtleties of logic, which is really amazing, has not found out the way of throwing another and not falling yourself, now any more than of old. Ctesippus said: Men of Chios, Thurii, or however and whatever you call yourselves, I wonder at you, for you seem to have no objection to talking nonsense. Fearing that there would be high words, I again endeavoured to soothe Ctesippus, and said to him: To you, Ctesippus, I must repeat what I said before to Cleinias--that you do not understand the ways of these philosophers from abroad. They are not serious, but, like the Egyptian wizard, Proteus, they take different forms and deceive us by their enchantments: and let us, like Menelaus, refuse to let them go until they show themselves to us in earnest. When they begin to be in earnest their full beauty will appear: let us then beg and entreat and beseech them to shine forth. And I think that I had better once more exhibit the form in which I pray to behold them; it might be a guide to them. I will go on therefore where I left off, as well as I can, in the hope that I may touch their hearts and move them to pity, and that when they see me deeply serious and interested, they also may be serious. You, Cleinias, I said, shall remind me at what point we left off. Did we not agree that philosophy should be studied? and was not that our conclusion? Yes, he replied. And philosophy is the acquisition of knowledge? Yes, he said. And what knowledge ought we to acquire? May we not answer with absolute truth--A knowledge which will do us good? Certainly, he said. And should we be any the better if we went about having a knowledge of the places where most gold was hidden in the earth? Perhaps we should, he said. But have we not already proved, I said, that we should be none the better off, even if without trouble and digging all the gold which there is in the earth were ours? And if we knew how to convert stones into gold, the knowledge would be of no value to us, unless we also knew how to use the gold? Do you not remember? I said. I quite remember, he said. Nor would any other knowledge, whether of money-making, or of medicine, or of any other art which knows only how to make a thing, and not to use it when made, be of any good to us. Am I not right? He agreed. And if there were a knowledge which was able to make men immortal, without giving them the knowledge of the way to use the immortality, neither would there be any use in that, if we may argue from the analogy of the previous instances? To all this he agreed. Then, my dear boy, I said, the knowledge which we want is one that uses as well as makes? True, he said. And our desire is not to be skilful lyre-makers, or artists of that sort--far otherwise; for with them the art which makes is one, and the art which uses is another. Although they have to do with the same, they are divided: for the art which makes and the art which plays on the lyre differ widely from one another. Am I not right? He agreed. And clearly we do not want the art of the flute-maker; this is only another of the same sort? He assented. But suppose, I said, that we were to learn the art of making speeches--would that be the art which would make us happy? I should say, no, rejoined Cleinias. And why should you say so? I asked. I see, he replied, that there are some composers of speeches who do not know how to use the speeches which they make, just as the makers of lyres do not know how to use the lyres; and also some who are of themselves unable to compose speeches, but are able to use the speeches which the others make for them; and this proves that the art of making speeches is not the same as the art of using them. Yes, I said; and I take your words to be a sufficient proof that the art of making speeches is not one which will make a man happy. And yet I did think that the art which we have so long been seeking might be discovered in that direction; for the composers of speeches, whenever I meet them, always appear to me to be very extraordinary men, Cleinias, and their art is lofty and divine, and no wonder. For their art is a part of the great art of enchantment, and hardly, if at all, inferior to it: and whereas the art of the enchanter is a mode of charming snakes and spiders and scorpions, and other monsters and pests, this art of their's acts upon dicasts and ecclesiasts and bodies of men, for the charming and pacifying of them. Do you agree with me? Yes, he said, I think that you are quite right. Whither then shall we go, I said, and to what art shall we have recourse? I do not see my way, he said. But I think that I do, I replied. And what is your notion? asked Cleinias. I think that the art of the general is above all others the one of which the possession is most likely to make a man happy. I do not think so, he said. Why not? I said. The art of the general is surely an art of hunting mankind. What of that? I said. Why, he said, no art of hunting extends beyond hunting and capturing; and when the prey is taken the huntsman or fisherman cannot use it; but they hand it over to the cook, and the geometricians and astronomers and calculators (who all belong to the hunting class, for they do not make their diagrams, but only find out that which was previously contained in them)--they, I say, not being able to use but only to catch their prey, hand over their inventions to the dialectician to be applied by him, if they have any sense in them. Good, I said, fairest and wisest Cleinias. And is this true? Certainly, he said; just as a general when he takes a city or a camp hands over his new acquisition to the statesman, for he does not know how to use them himself; or as the quail-taker transfers the quails to the keeper of them. If we are looking for the art which is to make us blessed, and which is able to use that which it makes or takes, the art of the general is not the one, and some other must be found."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"And do you mean, Socrates, that the youngster said all this?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are you incredulous, Crito?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Indeed, I am; for if he did say so, then in my opinion he needs neither Euthydemus nor any one else to be his instructor."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Perhaps I may have forgotten, and Ctesippus was the real answerer."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Ctesippus! nonsense."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"All I know is that I heard these words, and that they were not spoken either by Euthydemus or Dionysodorus. I dare say, my good Crito, that they may have been spoken by some superior person: that I heard them I am certain."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed, Socrates, by some one a good deal superior, as I should be disposed to think. But did you carry the search any further, and did you find the art which you were seeking?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Find! my dear sir, no indeed. And we cut a poor figure; we were like children after larks, always on the point of catching the art, which was always getting away from us. But why should I repeat the whole story? At last we came to the kingly art, and enquired whether that gave and caused happiness, and then we got into a labyrinth, and when we thought we were at the end, came out again at the beginning, having still to seek as much as ever."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"How did that happen, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will tell you; the kingly art was identified by us with the political."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Well, and what came of that?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"To this royal or political art all the arts, including the art of the general, seemed to render up the supremacy, that being the only one which knew how to use what they produce. Here obviously was the very art which we were seeking--the art which is the source of good government, and which may be described, in the language of Aeschylus, as alone sitting at the helm of the vessel of state, piloting and governing all things, and utilizing them."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"And were you not right, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You shall judge, Crito, if you are willing to hear what followed; for we resumed the enquiry, and a question of this sort was asked: Does the kingly art, having this supreme authority, do anything for us? To be sure, was the answer. And would not you, Crito, say the same?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes, I should."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what would you say that the kingly art does? If medicine were supposed to have supreme authority over the subordinate arts, and I were to ask you a similar question about that, you would say--it produces health?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what of your own art of husbandry, supposing that to have supreme authority over the subject arts--what does that do? Does it not supply us with the fruits of the earth?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what does the kingly art do when invested with supreme power? Perhaps you may not be ready with an answer?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Indeed I am not, Socrates."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No more were we, Crito. But at any rate you know that if this is the art which we were seeking, it ought to be useful."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And surely it ought to do us some good?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Certainly, Socrates."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And Cleinias and I had arrived at the conclusion that knowledge of some kind is the only good."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes, that was what you were saying."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"All the other results of politics, and they are many, as for example, wealth, freedom, tranquillity, were neither good nor evil in themselves; but the political science ought to make us wise, and impart knowledge to us, if that is the science which is likely to do us good, and make us happy."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes; that was the conclusion at which you had arrived, according to your report of the conversation."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does the kingly art make men wise and good?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Why not, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What, all men, and in every respect? and teach them all the arts,--carpentering, and cobbling, and the rest of them?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"I think not, Socrates."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But then what is this knowledge, and what are we to do with it? For it is not the source of any works which are neither good nor evil, and gives no knowledge, but the knowledge of itself; what then can it be, and what are we to do with it? Shall we say, Crito, that it is the knowledge by which we are to make other men good?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in what will they be good and useful? Shall we repeat that they will make others good, and that these others will make others again, without ever determining in what they are to be good; for we have put aside the results of politics, as they are called. This is the old, old song over again; and we are just as far as ever, if not farther, from the knowledge of the art or science of happiness."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Indeed, Socrates, you do appear to have got into a great perplexity."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Thereupon, Crito, seeing that I was on the point of shipwreck, I lifted up my voice, and earnestly entreated and called upon the strangers to save me and the youth from the whirlpool of the argument; they were our Castor and Pollux, I said, and they should be serious, and show us in sober earnest what that knowledge was which would enable us to pass the rest of our lives in happiness."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"And did Euthydemus show you this knowledge?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed; he proceeded in a lofty strain to the following effect: Would you rather, Socrates, said he, that I should show you this knowledge about which you have been doubting, or shall I prove that you already have it? What, I said, are you blessed with such a power as this? Indeed I am. Then I would much rather that you should prove me to have such a knowledge; at my time of life that will be more agreeable than having to learn. Then tell me, he said, do you know anything? Yes, I said, I know many things, but not anything of much importance. That will do, he said: And would you admit that anything is what it is, and at the same time is not what it is? Certainly not. And did you not say that you knew something? I did. If you know, you are knowing. Certainly, of the knowledge which I have. That makes no difference;--and must you not, if you are knowing, know all things? Certainly not, I said, for there are many other things which I do not know. And if you do not know, you are not knowing. Yes, friend, of that which I do not know. Still you are not knowing, and you said just now that you were knowing; and therefore you are and are not at the same time, and in reference to the same things. A pretty clatter, as men say, Euthydemus, this of yours! and will you explain how I possess that knowledge for which we were seeking? Do you mean to say that the same thing cannot be and also not be; and therefore, since I know one thing, that I know all, for I cannot be knowing and not knowing at the same time, and if I know all things, then I must have the knowledge for which we are seeking--May I assume this to be your ingenious notion? Out of your own mouth, Socrates, you are convicted, he said. Well, but, Euthydemus, I said, has that never happened to you? for if I am only in the same case with you and our beloved Dionysodorus, I cannot complain. Tell me, then, you two, do you not know some things, and not know others? Certainly not, Socrates, said Dionysodorus. What do you mean, I said; do you know nothing? Nay, he replied, we do know something. Then, I said, you know all things, if you know anything? Yes, all things, he said; and that is as true of you as of us. O, indeed, I said, what a wonderful thing, and what a great blessing! And do all other men know all things or nothing? Certainly, he replied; they cannot know some things, and not know others, and be at the same time knowing and not knowing. Then what is the inference? I said. They all know all things, he replied, if they know one thing. O heavens, Dionysodorus, I said, I see now that you are in earnest; hardly have I got you to that point. And do you really and truly know all things, including carpentering and leather-cutting? Certainly, he said. And do you know stitching? Yes, by the gods, we do, and cobbling, too. And do you know things such as the numbers of the stars and of the sand? Certainly; did you think we should say No to that? By Zeus, said Ctesippus, interrupting, I only wish that you would give me some proof which would enable me to know whether you speak truly. What proof shall I give you? he said. Will you tell me how many teeth Euthydemus has? and Euthydemus shall tell how many teeth you have. Will you not take our word that we know all things? Certainly not, said Ctesippus: you must further tell us this one thing, and then we shall know that you are speak the truth; if you tell us the number, and we count them, and you are found to be right, we will believe the rest. They fancied that Ctesippus was making game of them, and they refused, and they would only say in answer to each of his questions, that they knew all things. For at last Ctesippus began to throw off all restraint; no question in fact was too bad for him; he would ask them if they knew the foulest things, and they, like wild boars, came rushing on his blows, and fearlessly replied that they did. At last, Crito, I too was carried away by my incredulity, and asked Euthydemus whether Dionysodorus could dance. Certainly, he replied. And can he vault among swords, and turn upon a wheel, at his age? has he got to such a height of skill as that? He can do anything, he said. And did you always know this? Always, he said. When you were children, and at your birth? They both said that they did. This we could not believe. And Euthydemus said: You are incredulous, Socrates. Yes, I said, and I might well be incredulous, if I did not know you to be wise men. But if you will answer, he said, I will make you confess to similar marvels. Well, I said, there is nothing that I should like better than to be self-convicted of this, for if I am really a wise man, which I never knew before, and you will prove to me that I know and have always known all things, nothing in life would be a greater gain to me. Answer then, he said. Ask, I said, and I will answer. Do you know something, Socrates, or nothing? Something, I said. And do you know with what you know, or with something else? With what I know; and I suppose that you mean with my soul? Are you not ashamed, Socrates, of asking a question when you are asked one? Well, I said; but then what am I to do? for I will do whatever you bid; when I do not know what you are asking, you tell me to answer nevertheless, and not to ask again. Why, you surely have some notion of my meaning, he said. Yes, I replied. Well, then, answer according to your notion of my meaning. Yes, I said; but if the question which you ask in one sense is understood and answered by me in another, will that please you--if I answer what is not to the point? That will please me very well; but will not please you equally well, as I imagine. I certainly will not answer unless I understand you, I said. You will not answer, he said, according to your view of the meaning, because you will be prating, and are an ancient. Now I saw that he was getting angry with me for drawing distinctions, when he wanted to catch me in his springes of words. And I remembered that Connus was always angry with me when I opposed him, and then he neglected me, because he thought that I was stupid; and as I was intending to go to Euthydemus as a pupil, I reflected that I had better let him have his way, as he might think me a blockhead, and refuse to take me. So I said: You are a far better dialectician than myself, Euthydemus, for I have never made a profession of the art, and therefore do as you say; ask your questions once more, and I will answer. Answer then, he said, again, whether you know what you know with something, or with nothing. Yes, I said; I know with my soul. The man will answer more than the question; for I did not ask you, he said, with what you know, but whether you know with something. Again I replied, Through ignorance I have answered too much, but I hope that you will forgive me. And now I will answer simply that I always know what I know with something. And is that something, he rejoined, always the same, or sometimes one thing, and sometimes another thing? Always, I replied, when I know, I know with this. Will you not cease adding to your answers? My fear is that this word 'always' may get us into trouble. You, perhaps, but certainly not us. And now answer: Do you always know with this? Always; since I am required to withdraw the words 'when I know.' You always know with this, or, always knowing, do you know some things with this, and some things with something else, or do you know all things with this? All that I know, I replied, I know with this. There again, Socrates, he said, the addition is superfluous. Well, then, I said, I will take away the words 'that I know.' Nay, take nothing away; I desire no favours of you; but let me ask: Would you be able to know all things, if you did not know all things? Quite impossible. And now, he said, you may add on whatever you like, for you confess that you know all things. I suppose that is true, I said, if my qualification implied in the words 'that I know' is not allowed to stand; and so I do know all things. And have you not admitted that you always know all things with that which you know, whether you make the addition of 'when you know them' or not? for you have acknowledged that you have always and at once known all things, that is to say, when you were a child, and at your birth, and when you were growing up, and before you were born, and before the heaven and earth existed, you knew all things, if you always know them; and I swear that you shall always continue to know all things, if I am of the mind to make you. But I hope that you will be of that mind, reverend Euthydemus, I said, if you are really speaking the truth, and yet I a little doubt your power to make good your words unless you have the help of your brother Dionysodorus; then you may do it. Tell me now, both of you, for although in the main I cannot doubt that I really do know all things, when I am told so by men of your prodigious wisdom--how can I say that I know such things, Euthydemus, as that the good are unjust; come, do I know that or not? Certainly, you know that. What do I know? That the good are not unjust. Quite true, I said; and that I have always known; but the question is, where did I learn that the good are unjust? Nowhere, said Dionysodorus. Then, I said, I do not know this. You are ruining the argument, said Euthydemus to Dionysodorus; he will be proved not to know, and then after all he will be knowing and not knowing at the same time. Dionysodorus blushed. I turned to the other, and said, What do you think, Euthydemus? Does not your omniscient brother appear to you to have made a mistake? What, replied Dionysodorus in a moment; am I the brother of Euthydemus? Thereupon I said, Please not to interrupt, my good friend, or prevent Euthydemus from proving to me that I know the good to be unjust; such a lesson you might at least allow me to learn. You are running away, Socrates, said Dionysodorus, and refusing to answer. No wonder, I said, for I am not a match for one of you, and a fortiori I must run away from two. I am no Heracles; and even Heracles could not fight against the Hydra, who was a she-Sophist, and had the wit to shoot up many new heads when one of them was cut off; especially when he saw a second monster of a sea-crab, who was also a Sophist, and appeared to have newly arrived from a sea-voyage, bearing down upon him from the left, opening his mouth and biting. When the monster was growing troublesome he called Iolaus, his nephew, to his help, who ably succoured him; but if my Iolaus, who is my brother Patrocles (the statuary), were to come, he would only make a bad business worse. And now that you have delivered yourself of this strain, said Dionysodorus, will you inform me whether Iolaus was the nephew of Heracles any more than he is yours? I suppose that I had best answer you, Dionysodorus, I said, for you will insist on asking--that I pretty well know--out of envy, in order to prevent me from learning the wisdom of Euthydemus. Then answer me, he said. Well then, I said, I can only reply that Iolaus was not my nephew at all, but the nephew of Heracles; and his father was not my brother Patrocles, but Iphicles, who has a name rather like his, and was the brother of Heracles. And is Patrocles, he said, your brother? Yes, I said, he is my half-brother, the son of my mother, but not of my father. Then he is and is not your brother. Not by the same father, my good man, I said, for Chaeredemus was his father, and mine was Sophroniscus. And was Sophroniscus a father, and Chaeredemus also? Yes, I said; the former was my father, and the latter his. Then, he said, Chaeredemus is not a father. He is not my father, I said. But can a father be other than a father? or are you the same as a stone? I certainly do not think that I am a stone, I said, though I am afraid that you may prove me to be one. Are you not other than a stone? I am. And being other than a stone, you are not a stone; and being other than gold, you are not gold? Very true. And so Chaeredemus, he said, being other than a father, is not a father? I suppose that he is not a father, I replied. For if, said Euthydemus, taking up the argument, Chaeredemus is a father, then Sophroniscus, being other than a father, is not a father; and you, Socrates, are without a father. Ctesippus, here taking up the argument, said: And is not your father in the same case, for he is other than my father? Assuredly not, said Euthydemus. Then he is the same? He is the same. I cannot say that I like the connection; but is he only my father, Euthydemus, or is he the father of all other men? Of all other men, he replied. Do you suppose the same person to be a father and not a father? Certainly, I did so imagine, said Ctesippus. And do you suppose that gold is not gold, or that a man is not a man? They are not 'in pari materia,' Euthydemus, said Ctesippus, and you had better take care, for it is monstrous to suppose that your father is the father of all. But he is, he replied. What, of men only, said Ctesippus, or of horses and of all other animals? Of all, he said. And your mother, too, is the mother of all? Yes, our mother too. Yes; and your mother has a progeny of sea-urchins then? Yes; and yours, he said. And gudgeons and puppies and pigs are your brothers? And yours too. And your papa is a dog? And so is yours, he said. If you will answer my questions, said Dionysodorus, I will soon extract the same admissions from you, Ctesippus. You say that you have a dog. Yes, a villain of a one, said Ctesippus. And he has puppies? Yes, and they are very like himself. And the dog is the father of them? Yes, he said, I certainly saw him and the mother of the puppies come together. And is he not yours? To be sure he is. Then he is a father, and he is yours; ergo, he is your father, and the puppies are your brothers. Let me ask you one little question more, said Dionysodorus, quickly interposing, in order that Ctesippus might not get in his word: You beat this dog? Ctesippus said, laughing, Indeed I do; and I only wish that I could beat you instead of him. Then you beat your father, he said. I should have far more reason to beat yours, said Ctesippus; what could he have been thinking of when he begat such wise sons? much good has this father of you and your brethren the puppies got out of this wisdom of yours. But neither he nor you, Ctesippus, have any need of much good. And have you no need, Euthydemus? he said. Neither I nor any other man; for tell me now, Ctesippus, if you think it good or evil for a man who is sick to drink medicine when he wants it; or to go to war armed rather than unarmed. Good, I say. And yet I know that I am going to be caught in one of your charming puzzles. That, he replied, you will discover, if you answer; since you admit medicine to be good for a man to drink, when wanted, must it not be good for him to drink as much as possible; when he takes his medicine, a cartload of hellebore will not be too much for him? Ctesippus said: Quite so, Euthydemus, that is to say, if he who drinks is as big as the statue of Delphi. And seeing that in war to have arms is a good thing, he ought to have as many spears and shields as possible? Very true, said Ctesippus; and do you think, Euthydemus, that he ought to have one shield only, and one spear? I do. And would you arm Geryon and Briareus in that way? Considering that you and your companion fight in armour, I thought that you would have known better...Here Euthydemus held his peace, but Dionysodorus returned to the previous answer of Ctesippus and said:-- Do you not think that the possession of gold is a good thing? Yes, said Ctesippus, and the more the better. And to have money everywhere and always is a good? Certainly, a great good, he said. And you admit gold to be a good? Certainly, he replied. And ought not a man then to have gold everywhere and always, and as much as possible in himself, and may he not be deemed the happiest of men who has three talents of gold in his belly, and a talent in his pate, and a stater of gold in either eye? Yes, Euthydemus, said Ctesippus; and the Scythians reckon those who have gold in their own skulls to be the happiest and bravest of men (that is only another instance of your manner of speaking about the dog and father), and what is still more extraordinary, they drink out of their own skulls gilt, and see the inside of them, and hold their own head in their hands. And do the Scythians and others see that which has the quality of vision, or that which has not? said Euthydemus. That which has the quality of vision clearly. And you also see that which has the quality of vision? he said. [Note: the ambiguity of (Greek), 'things visible and able to see,' (Greek), 'the speaking of the silent,' the silent denoting either the speaker or the subject of the speech, cannot be perfectly rendered in English.] Compare Aristot. Soph. Elenchi (Poste's translation):-- 'Of ambiguous propositions the following are instances:-- 'I hope that you the enemy may slay. 'Whom one knows, he knows. Either the person knowing or the person known is here affirmed to know. 'What one sees, that one sees: one sees a pillar: ergo, that one pillar sees. 'What you ARE holding, that you are: you are holding a stone: ergo, a stone you are. 'Is a speaking of the silent possible? \"The silent\" denotes either the speaker are the subject of speech. 'There are three kinds of ambiguity of term or proposition. The first is when there is an equal linguistic propriety in several interpretations; the second when one is improper but customary; the third when the ambiguity arises in the combination of elements that are in themselves unambiguous, as in \"knowing letters.\" \"Knowing\" and \"letters\" are perhaps separately unambiguous, but in combination may imply either that the letters are known, or that they themselves have knowledge. Such are the modes in which propositions and terms may be ambiguous.' Yes, I do. Then do you see our garments? Yes. Then our garments have the quality of vision. They can see to any extent, said Ctesippus. What can they see? Nothing; but you, my sweet man, may perhaps imagine that they do not see; and certainly, Euthydemus, you do seem to me to have been caught napping when you were not asleep, and that if it be possible to speak and say nothing--you are doing so. And may there not be a silence of the speaker? said Dionysodorus. Impossible, said Ctesippus. Or a speaking of the silent? That is still more impossible, he said. But when you speak of stones, wood, iron bars, do you not speak of the silent? Not when I pass a smithy; for then the iron bars make a tremendous noise and outcry if they are touched: so that here your wisdom is strangely mistaken; please, however, to tell me how you can be silent when speaking (I thought that Ctesippus was put upon his mettle because Cleinias was present). When you are silent, said Euthydemus, is there not a silence of all things? Yes, he said. But if speaking things are included in all things, then the speaking are silent. What, said Ctesippus; then all things are not silent? Certainly not, said Euthydemus. Then, my good friend, do they all speak? Yes; those which speak. Nay, said Ctesippus, but the question which I ask is whether all things are silent or speak? Neither and both, said Dionysodorus, quickly interposing; I am sure that you will be 'non-plussed' at that answer. Here Ctesippus, as his manner was, burst into a roar of laughter; he said, That brother of yours, Euthydemus, has got into a dilemma; all is over with him. This delighted Cleinias, whose laughter made Ctesippus ten times as uproarious; but I cannot help thinking that the rogue must have picked up this answer from them; for there has been no wisdom like theirs in our time. Why do you laugh, Cleinias, I said, at such solemn and beautiful things? Why, Socrates, said Dionysodorus, did you ever see a beautiful thing? Yes, Dionysodorus, I replied, I have seen many. Were they other than the beautiful, or the same as the beautiful? Now I was in a great quandary at having to answer this question, and I thought that I was rightly served for having opened my mouth at all: I said however, They are not the same as absolute beauty, but they have beauty present with each of them. And are you an ox because an ox is present with you, or are you Dionysodorus, because Dionysodorus is present with you? God forbid, I replied. But how, he said, by reason of one thing being present with another, will one thing be another? Is that your difficulty? I said. For I was beginning to imitate their skill, on which my heart was set. Of course, he replied, I and all the world are in a difficulty about the non-existent. What do you mean, Dionysodorus? I said. Is not the honourable honourable and the base base? That, he said, is as I please. And do you please? Yes, he said. And you will admit that the same is the same, and the other other; for surely the other is not the same; I should imagine that even a child will hardly deny the other to be other. But I think, Dionysodorus, that you must have intentionally missed the last question; for in general you and your brother seem to me to be good workmen in your own department, and to do the dialectician's business excellently well. What, said he, is the business of a good workman? tell me, in the first place, whose business is hammering? The smith's. And whose the making of pots? The potter's. And who has to kill and skin and mince and boil and roast? The cook, I said. And if a man does his business he does rightly? Certainly. And the business of the cook is to cut up and skin; you have admitted that? Yes, I have admitted that, but you must not be too hard upon me. Then if some one were to kill, mince, boil, roast the cook, he would do his business, and if he were to hammer the smith, and make a pot of the potter, he would do their business. Poseidon, I said, this is the crown of wisdom; can I ever hope to have such wisdom of my own? And would you be able, Socrates, to recognize this wisdom when it has become your own? Certainly, I said, if you will allow me. What, he said, do you think that you know what is your own? Yes, I do, subject to your correction; for you are the bottom, and Euthydemus is the top, of all my wisdom. Is not that which you would deem your own, he said, that which you have in your own power, and which you are able to use as you would desire, for example, an ox or a sheep--would you not think that which you could sell and give and sacrifice to any god whom you pleased, to be your own, and that which you could not give or sell or sacrifice you would think not to be in your own power? Yes, I said (for I was certain that something good would come out of the questions, which I was impatient to hear); yes, such things, and such things only are mine. Yes, he said, and you would mean by animals living beings? Yes, I said. You agree then, that those animals only are yours with which you have the power to do all these things which I was just naming? I agree. Then, after a pause, in which he seemed to be lost in the contemplation of something great, he said: Tell me, Socrates, have you an ancestral Zeus? Here, anticipating the final move, like a person caught in a net, who gives a desperate twist that he may get away, I said: No, Dionysodorus, I have not. What a miserable man you must be then, he said; you are not an Athenian at all if you have no ancestral gods or temples, or any other mark of gentility. Nay, Dionysodorus, I said, do not be rough; good words, if you please; in the way of religion I have altars and temples, domestic and ancestral, and all that other Athenians have. And have not other Athenians, he said, an ancestral Zeus? That name, I said, is not to be found among the Ionians, whether colonists or citizens of Athens; an ancestral Apollo there is, who is the father of Ion, and a family Zeus, and a Zeus guardian of the phratry, and an Athene guardian of the phratry. But the name of ancestral Zeus is unknown to us. No matter, said Dionysodorus, for you admit that you have Apollo, Zeus, and Athene. Certainly, I said. And they are your gods, he said. Yes, I said, my lords and ancestors. At any rate they are yours, he said, did you not admit that? I did, I said; what is going to happen to me? And are not these gods animals? for you admit that all things which have life are animals; and have not these gods life? They have life, I said. Then are they not animals? They are animals, I said. And you admitted that of animals those are yours which you could give away or sell or offer in sacrifice, as you pleased? I did admit that, Euthydemus, and I have no way of escape. Well then, said he, if you admit that Zeus and the other gods are yours, can you sell them or give them away or do what you will with them, as you would with other animals? At this I was quite struck dumb, Crito, and lay prostrate. Ctesippus came to the rescue. Bravo, Heracles, brave words, said he. Bravo Heracles, or is Heracles a Bravo? said Dionysodorus. Poseidon, said Ctesippus, what awful distinctions. I will have no more of them; the pair are invincible. Then, my dear Crito, there was universal applause of the speakers and their words, and what with laughing and clapping of hands and rejoicings the two men were quite overpowered; for hitherto their partisans only had cheered at each successive hit, but now the whole company shouted with delight until the columns of the Lyceum returned the sound, seeming to sympathize in their joy. To such a pitch was I affected myself, that I made a speech, in which I acknowledged that I had never seen the like of their wisdom; I was their devoted servant, and fell to praising and admiring of them. What marvellous dexterity of wit, I said, enabled you to acquire this great perfection in such a short time? There is much, indeed, to admire in your words, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, but there is nothing that I admire more than your magnanimous disregard of any opinion--whether of the many, or of the grave and reverend seigniors--you regard only those who are like yourselves. And I do verily believe that there are few who are like you, and who would approve of such arguments; the majority of mankind are so ignorant of their value, that they would be more ashamed of employing them in the refutation of others than of being refuted by them. I must further express my approval of your kind and public-spirited denial of all differences, whether of good and evil, white or black, or any other; the result of which is that, as you say, every mouth is sewn up, not excepting your own, which graciously follows the example of others; and thus all ground of offence is taken away. But what appears to me to be more than all is, that this art and invention of yours has been so admirably contrived by you, that in a very short time it can be imparted to any one. I observed that Ctesippus learned to imitate you in no time. Now this quickness of attainment is an excellent thing; but at the same time I would advise you not to have any more public entertainments; there is a danger that men may undervalue an art which they have so easy an opportunity of acquiring; the exhibition would be best of all, if the discussion were confined to your two selves; but if there must be an audience, let him only be present who is willing to pay a handsome fee;--you should be careful of this;--and if you are wise, you will also bid your disciples discourse with no man but you and themselves. For only what is rare is valuable; and 'water,' which, as Pindar says, is the 'best of all things,' is also the cheapest. And now I have only to request that you will receive Cleinias and me among your pupils. Such was the discussion, Crito; and after a few more words had passed between us we went away. I hope that you will come to them with me, since they say that they are able to teach any one who will give them money; no age or want of capacity is an impediment. And I must repeat one thing which they said, for your especial benefit,--that the learning of their art did not at all interfere with the business of money-making."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Truly, Socrates, though I am curious and ready to learn, yet I fear that I am not like-minded with Euthydemus, but one of the other sort, who, as you were saying, would rather be refuted by such arguments than use them in refutation of others. And though I may appear ridiculous in venturing to advise you, I think that you may as well hear what was said to me by a man of very considerable pretensions--he was a professor of legal oratory--who came away from you while I was walking up and down. 'Crito,' said he to me, 'are you giving no attention to these wise men?' 'No, indeed,' I said to him; 'I could not get within hearing of them--there was such a crowd.' 'You would have heard something worth hearing if you had.' 'What was that?' I said. 'You would have heard the greatest masters of the art of rhetoric discoursing.' 'And what did you think of them?' I said. 'What did I think of them?' he said:--'theirs was the sort of discourse which anybody might hear from men who were playing the fool, and making much ado about nothing.' That was the expression which he used. 'Surely,' I said, 'philosophy is a charming thing.' 'Charming!' he said; 'what simplicity! philosophy is nought; and I think that if you had been present you would have been ashamed of your friend--his conduct was so very strange in placing himself at the mercy of men who care not what they say, and fasten upon every word. And these, as I was telling you, are supposed to be the most eminent professors of their time. But the truth is, Crito, that the study itself and the men themselves are utterly mean and ridiculous.' Now censure of the pursuit, Socrates, whether coming from him or from others, appears to me to be undeserved; but as to the impropriety of holding a public discussion with such men, there, I confess that, in my opinion, he was in the right."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"O Crito, they are marvellous men; but what was I going to say? First of all let me know;--What manner of man was he who came up to you and censured philosophy; was he an orator who himself practises in the courts, or an instructor of orators, who makes the speeches with which they do battle?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"He was certainly not an orator, and I doubt whether he had ever been into court; but they say that he knows the business, and is a clever man, and composes wonderful speeches."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now I understand, Crito; he is one of an amphibious class, whom I was on the point of mentioning--one of those whom Prodicus describes as on the border-ground between philosophers and statesmen--they think that they are the wisest of all men, and that they are generally esteemed the wisest; nothing but the rivalry of the philosophers stands in their way; and they are of the opinion that if they can prove the philosophers to be good for nothing, no one will dispute their title to the palm of wisdom, for that they are themselves really the wisest, although they are apt to be mauled by Euthydemus and his friends, when they get hold of them in conversation. This opinion which they entertain of their own wisdom is very natural; for they have a certain amount of philosophy, and a certain amount of political wisdom; there is reason in what they say, for they argue that they have just enough of both, and so they keep out of the way of all risks and conflicts and reap the fruits of their wisdom."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"What do you say of them, Socrates? There is certainly something specious in that notion of theirs."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Crito, there is more speciousness than truth; they cannot be made to understand the nature of intermediates. For all persons or things, which are intermediate between two other things, and participate in both of them--if one of these two things is good and the other evil, are better than the one and worse than the other; but if they are in a mean between two good things which do not tend to the same end, they fall short of either of their component elements in the attainment of their ends. Only in the case when the two component elements which do not tend to the same end are evil is the participant better than either. Now, if philosophy and political action are both good, but tend to different ends, and they participate in both, and are in a mean between them, then they are talking nonsense, for they are worse than either; or, if the one be good and the other evil, they are better than the one and worse than the other; only on the supposition that they are both evil could there be any truth in what they say. I do not think that they will admit that their two pursuits are either wholly or partly evil; but the truth is, that these philosopher-politicians who aim at both fall short of both in the attainment of their respective ends, and are really third, although they would like to stand first. There is no need, however, to be angry at this ambition of theirs--which may be forgiven; for every man ought to be loved who says and manfully pursues and works out anything which is at all like wisdom: at the same time we shall do well to see them as they really are."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"I have often told you, Socrates, that I am in a constant difficulty about my two sons. What am I to do with them? There is no hurry about the younger one, who is only a child; but the other, Critobulus, is getting on, and needs some one who will improve him. I cannot help thinking, when I hear you talk, that there is a sort of madness in many of our anxieties about our children:--in the first place, about marrying a wife of good family to be the mother of them, and then about heaping up money for them--and yet taking no care about their education. But then again, when I contemplate any of those who pretend to educate others, I am amazed. To me, if I am to confess the truth, they all seem to be such outrageous beings: so that I do not know how I can advise the youth to study philosophy."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Dear Crito, do you not know that in every profession the inferior sort are numerous and good for nothing, and the good are few and beyond all price: for example, are not gymnastic and rhetoric and money-making and the art of the general, noble arts?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Certainly they are, in my judgment."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and do you not see that in each of these arts the many are ridiculous performers?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed, that is very true."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will you on this account shun all these pursuits yourself and refuse to allow them to your son?"}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"That would not be reasonable, Socrates."}
{"Book":"euthydemus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you then be reasonable, Crito, and do not mind whether the teachers of philosophy are good or bad, but think only of philosophy herself. Try and examine her well and truly, and if she be evil seek to turn away all men from her, and not your sons only; but if she be what I believe that she is, then follow her and serve her, you and your house, as the saying is, and be of good cheer. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUTHYDEMUS *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"critias","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"How thankful I am, Socrates, that I have arrived at last, and, like a weary traveller after a long journey, may be at rest! And I pray the being who always was of old, and has now been by me revealed, to grant that my words may endure in so far as they have been spoken truly and acceptably to him; but if unintentionally I have said anything wrong, I pray that he will impose upon me a just retribution, and the just retribution of him who errs is that he should be set right. Wishing, then, to speak truly in future concerning the generation of the gods, I pray him to give me knowledge, which of all medicines is the most perfect and best. And now having offered my prayer I deliver up the argument to Critias, who is to speak next according to our agreement. (Tim.)"}
{"Book":"critias","Speaker":"CRITIAS","Dialogue":"And I, Timaeus, accept the trust, and as you at first said that you were going to speak of high matters, and begged that some forbearance might be shown to you, I too ask the same or greater forbearance for what I am about to say. And although I very well know that my request may appear to be somewhat ambitious and discourteous, I must make it nevertheless. For will any man of sense deny that you have spoken well? I can only attempt to show that I ought to have more indulgence than you, because my theme is more difficult; and I shall argue that to seem to speak well of the gods to men is far easier than to speak well of men to men: for the inexperience and utter ignorance of his hearers about any subject is a great assistance to him who has to speak of it, and we know how ignorant we are concerning the gods. But I should like to make my meaning clearer, if you will follow me. All that is said by any of us can only be imitation and representation. For if we consider the likenesses which painters make of bodies divine and heavenly, and the different degrees of gratification with which the eye of the spectator receives them, we shall see that we are satisfied with the artist who is able in any degree to imitate the earth and its mountains, and the rivers, and the woods, and the universe, and the things that are and move therein, and further, that knowing nothing precise about such matters, we do not examine or analyze the painting; all that is required is a sort of indistinct and deceptive mode of shadowing them forth. But when a person endeavours to paint the human form we are quick at finding out defects, and our familiar knowledge makes us severe judges of any one who does not render every point of similarity. And we may observe the same thing to happen in discourse; we are satisfied with a picture of divine and heavenly things which has very little likeness to them; but we are more precise in our criticism of mortal and human things. Wherefore if at the moment of speaking I cannot suitably express my meaning, you must excuse me, considering that to form approved likenesses of human things is the reverse of easy. This is what I want to suggest to you, and at the same time to beg, Socrates, that I may have not less, but more indulgence conceded to me in what I am about to say. Which favour, if I am right in asking, I hope that you will be ready to grant."}
{"Book":"critias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Certainly, Critias, we will grant your request, and we will grant the same by anticipation to Hermocrates, as well as to you and Timaeus; for I have no doubt that when his turn comes a little while hence, he will make the same request which you have made. In order, then, that he may provide himself with a fresh beginning, and not be compelled to say the same things over again, let him understand that the indulgence is already extended by anticipation to him. And now, friend Critias, I will announce to you the judgment of the theatre. They are of opinion that the last performer was wonderfully successful, and that you will need a great deal of indulgence before you will be able to take his place."}
{"Book":"critias","Speaker":"HERMOCRATES","Dialogue":"The warning, Socrates, which you have addressed to him, I must also take to myself. But remember, Critias, that faint heart never yet raised a trophy; and therefore you must go and attack the argument like a man. First invoke Apollo and the Muses, and then let us hear you sound the praises and show forth the virtues of your ancient citizens."}
{"Book":"critias","Speaker":"CRITIAS","Dialogue":"Friend Hermocrates, you, who are stationed last and have another in front of you, have not lost heart as yet; the gravity of the situation will soon be revealed to you; meanwhile I accept your exhortations and encouragements. But besides the gods and goddesses whom you have mentioned, I would specially invoke Mnemosyne; for all the important part of my discourse is dependent on her favour, and if I can recollect and recite enough of what was said by the priests and brought hither by Solon, I doubt not that I shall satisfy the requirements of this theatre. And now, making no more excuses, I will proceed. Let me begin by observing first of all, that nine thousand was the sum of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken place between those who dwelt outside the pillars of Heracles and all who dwelt within them; this war I am going to describe. Of the combatants on the one side, the city of Athens was reported to have been the leader and to have fought out the war; the combatants on the other side were commanded by the kings of Atlantis, which, as I was saying, was an island greater in extent than Libya and Asia, and when afterwards sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean. The progress of the history will unfold the various nations of barbarians and families of Hellenes which then existed, as they successively appear on the scene; but I must describe first of all the Athenians of that day, and their enemies who fought with them, and then the respective powers and governments of the two kingdoms. Let us give the precedence to Athens. In the days of old, the gods had the whole earth distributed among them by allotment (Cp. Polit.) There was no quarrelling; for you cannot rightly suppose that the gods did not know what was proper for each of them to have, or, knowing this, that they would seek to procure for themselves by contention that which more properly belonged to others. They all of them by just apportionment obtained what they wanted, and peopled their own districts; and when they had peopled them they tended us, their nurselings and possessions, as shepherds tend their flocks, excepting only that they did not use blows or bodily force, as shepherds do, but governed us like pilots from the stern of the vessel, which is an easy way of guiding animals, holding our souls by the rudder of persuasion according to their own pleasure;--thus did they guide all mortal creatures. Now different gods had their allotments in different places which they set in order. Hephaestus and Athene, who were brother and sister, and sprang from the same father, having a common nature, and being united also in the love of philosophy and art, both obtained as their common portion this land, which was naturally adapted for wisdom and virtue; and there they implanted brave children of the soil, and put into their minds the order of government; their names are preserved, but their actions have disappeared by reason of the destruction of those who received the tradition, and the lapse of ages. For when there were any survivors, as I have already said, they were men who dwelt in the mountains; and they were ignorant of the art of writing, and had heard only the names of the chiefs of the land, but very little about their actions. The names they were willing enough to give to their children; but the virtues and the laws of their predecessors, they knew only by obscure traditions; and as they themselves and their children lacked for many generations the necessaries of life, they directed their attention to the supply of their wants, and of them they conversed, to the neglect of events that had happened in times long past; for mythology and the enquiry into antiquity are first introduced into cities when they begin to have leisure (Cp. Arist. Metaphys.), and when they see that the necessaries of life have already been provided, but not before. And this is the reason why the names of the ancients have been preserved to us and not their actions. This I infer because Solon said that the priests in their narrative of that war mentioned most of the names which are recorded prior to the time of Theseus, such as Cecrops, and Erechtheus, and Erichthonius, and Erysichthon, and the names of the women in like manner. Moreover, since military pursuits were then common to men and women, the men of those days in accordance with the custom of the time set up a figure and image of the goddess in full armour, to be a testimony that all animals which associate together, male as well as female, may, if they please, practise in common the virtue which belongs to them without distinction of sex. Now the country was inhabited in those days by various classes of citizens;--there were artisans, and there were husbandmen, and there was also a warrior class originally set apart by divine men. The latter dwelt by themselves, and had all things suitable for nurture and education; neither had any of them anything of their own, but they regarded all that they had as common property; nor did they claim to receive of the other citizens anything more than their necessary food. And they practised all the pursuits which we yesterday described as those of our imaginary guardians. Concerning the country the Egyptian priests said what is not only probable but manifestly true, that the boundaries were in those days fixed by the Isthmus, and that in the direction of the continent they extended as far as the heights of Cithaeron and Parnes; the boundary line came down in the direction of the sea, having the district of Oropus on the right, and with the river Asopus as the limit on the left. The land was the best in the world, and was therefore able in those days to support a vast army, raised from the surrounding people. Even the remnant of Attica which now exists may compare with any region in the world for the variety and excellence of its fruits and the suitableness of its pastures to every sort of animal, which proves what I am saying; but in those days the country was fair as now and yielded far more abundant produce. How shall I establish my words? and what part of it can be truly called a remnant of the land that then was? The whole country is only a long promontory extending far into the sea away from the rest of the continent, while the surrounding basin of the sea is everywhere deep in the neighbourhood of the shore. Many great deluges have taken place during the nine thousand years, for that is the number of years which have elapsed since the time of which I am speaking; and during all this time and through so many changes, there has never been any considerable accumulation of the soil coming down from the mountains, as in other places, but the earth has fallen away all round and sunk out of sight. The consequence is, that in comparison of what then was, there are remaining only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called, as in the case of small islands, all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left. But in the primitive state of the country, its mountains were high hills covered with soil, and the plains, as they are termed by us, of Phelleus were full of rich earth, and there was abundance of wood in the mountains. Of this last the traces still remain, for although some of the mountains now only afford sustenance to bees, not so very long ago there were still to be seen roofs of timber cut from trees growing there, which were of a size sufficient to cover the largest houses; and there were many other high trees, cultivated by man and bearing abundance of food for cattle. Moreover, the land reaped the benefit of the annual rainfall, not as now losing the water which flows off the bare earth into the sea, but, having an abundant supply in all places, and receiving it into herself and treasuring it up in the close clay soil, it let off into the hollows the streams which it absorbed from the heights, providing everywhere abundant fountains and rivers, of which there may still be observed sacred memorials in places where fountains once existed; and this proves the truth of what I am saying. Such was the natural state of the country, which was cultivated, as we may well believe, by true husbandmen, who made husbandry their business, and were lovers of honour, and of a noble nature, and had a soil the best in the world, and abundance of water, and in the heaven above an excellently attempered climate. Now the city in those days was arranged on this wise. In the first place the Acropolis was not as now. For the fact is that a single night of excessive rain washed away the earth and laid bare the rock; at the same time there were earthquakes, and then occurred the extraordinary inundation, which was the third before the great destruction of Deucalion. But in primitive times the hill of the Acropolis extended to the Eridanus and Ilissus, and included the Pnyx on one side, and the Lycabettus as a boundary on the opposite side to the Pnyx, and was all well covered with soil, and level at the top, except in one or two places. Outside the Acropolis and under the sides of the hill there dwelt artisans, and such of the husbandmen as were tilling the ground near; the warrior class dwelt by themselves around the temples of Athene and Hephaestus at the summit, which moreover they had enclosed with a single fence like the garden of a single house. On the north side they had dwellings in common and had erected halls for dining in winter, and had all the buildings which they needed for their common life, besides temples, but there was no adorning of them with gold and silver, for they made no use of these for any purpose; they took a middle course between meanness and ostentation, and built modest houses in which they and their children's children grew old, and they handed them down to others who were like themselves, always the same. But in summer-time they left their gardens and gymnasia and dining halls, and then the southern side of the hill was made use of by them for the same purpose. Where the Acropolis now is there was a fountain, which was choked by the earthquake, and has left only the few small streams which still exist in the vicinity, but in those days the fountain gave an abundant supply of water for all and of suitable temperature in summer and in winter. This is how they dwelt, being the guardians of their own citizens and the leaders of the Hellenes, who were their willing followers. And they took care to preserve the same number of men and women through all time, being so many as were required for warlike purposes, then as now--that is to say, about twenty thousand. Such were the ancient Athenians, and after this manner they righteously administered their own land and the rest of Hellas; they were renowned all over Europe and Asia for the beauty of their persons and for the many virtues of their souls, and of all men who lived in those days they were the most illustrious. And next, if I have not forgotten what I heard when I was a child, I will impart to you the character and origin of their adversaries. For friends should not keep their stories to themselves, but have them in common. Yet, before proceeding further in the narrative, I ought to warn you, that you must not be surprised if you should perhaps hear Hellenic names given to foreigners. I will tell you the reason of this: Solon, who was intending to use the tale for his poem, enquired into the meaning of the names, and found that the early Egyptians in writing them down had translated them into their own language, and he recovered the meaning of the several names and when copying them out again translated them into our language. My great-grandfather, Dropides, had the original writing, which is still in my possession, and was carefully studied by me when I was a child. Therefore if you hear names such as are used in this country, you must not be surprised, for I have told how they came to be introduced. The tale, which was of great length, began as follows:-- I have before remarked in speaking of the allotments of the gods, that they distributed the whole earth into portions differing in extent, and made for themselves temples and instituted sacrifices. And Poseidon, receiving for his lot the island of Atlantis, begat children by a mortal woman, and settled them in a part of the island, which I will describe. Looking towards the sea, but in the centre of the whole island, there was a plain which is said to have been the fairest of all plains and very fertile. Near the plain again, and also in the centre of the island at a distance of about fifty stadia, there was a mountain not very high on any side. In this mountain there dwelt one of the earth-born primeval men of that country, whose name was Evenor, and he had a wife named Leucippe, and they had an only daughter who was called Cleito. The maiden had already reached womanhood, when her father and mother died; Poseidon fell in love with her and had intercourse with her, and breaking the ground, inclosed the hill in which she dwelt all round, making alternate zones of sea and land larger and smaller, encircling one another; there were two of land and three of water, which he turned as with a lathe, each having its circumference equidistant every way from the centre, so that no man could get to the island, for ships and voyages were not as yet. He himself, being a god, found no difficulty in making special arrangements for the centre island, bringing up two springs of water from beneath the earth, one of warm water and the other of cold, and making every variety of food to spring up abundantly from the soil. He also begat and brought up five pairs of twin male children; and dividing the island of Atlantis into ten portions, he gave to the first-born of the eldest pair his mother's dwelling and the surrounding allotment, which was the largest and best, and made him king over the rest; the others he made princes, and gave them rule over many men, and a large territory. And he named them all; the eldest, who was the first king, he named Atlas, and after him the whole island and the ocean were called Atlantic. To his twin brother, who was born after him, and obtained as his lot the extremity of the island towards the pillars of Heracles, facing the country which is now called the region of Gades in that part of the world, he gave the name which in the Hellenic language is Eumelus, in the language of the country which is named after him, Gadeirus. Of the second pair of twins he called one Ampheres, and the other Evaemon. To the elder of the third pair of twins he gave the name Mneseus, and Autochthon to the one who followed him. Of the fourth pair of twins he called the elder Elasippus, and the younger Mestor. And of the fifth pair he gave to the elder the name of Azaes, and to the younger that of Diaprepes. All these and their descendants for many generations were the inhabitants and rulers of divers islands in the open sea; and also, as has been already said, they held sway in our direction over the country within the pillars as far as Egypt and Tyrrhenia. Now Atlas had a numerous and honourable family, and they retained the kingdom, the eldest son handing it on to his eldest for many generations; and they had such an amount of wealth as was never before possessed by kings and potentates, and is not likely ever to be again, and they were furnished with everything which they needed, both in the city and country. For because of the greatness of their empire many things were brought to them from foreign countries, and the island itself provided most of what was required by them for the uses of life. In the first place, they dug out of the earth whatever was to be found there, solid as well as fusile, and that which is now only a name and was then something more than a name, orichalcum, was dug out of the earth in many parts of the island, being more precious in those days than anything except gold. There was an abundance of wood for carpenter's work, and sufficient maintenance for tame and wild animals. Moreover, there were a great number of elephants in the island; for as there was provision for all other sorts of animals, both for those which live in lakes and marshes and rivers, and also for those which live in mountains and on plains, so there was for the animal which is the largest and most voracious of all. Also whatever fragrant things there now are in the earth, whether roots, or herbage, or woods, or essences which distil from fruit and flower, grew and thrived in that land; also the fruit which admits of cultivation, both the dry sort, which is given us for nourishment and any other which we use for food--we call them all by the common name of pulse, and the fruits having a hard rind, affording drinks and meats and ointments, and good store of chestnuts and the like, which furnish pleasure and amusement, and are fruits which spoil with keeping, and the pleasant kinds of dessert, with which we console ourselves after dinner, when we are tired of eating--all these that sacred island which then beheld the light of the sun, brought forth fair and wondrous and in infinite abundance. With such blessings the earth freely furnished them; meanwhile they went on constructing their temples and palaces and harbours and docks. And they arranged the whole country in the following manner:-- First of all they bridged over the zones of sea which surrounded the ancient metropolis, making a road to and from the royal palace. And at the very beginning they built the palace in the habitation of the god and of their ancestors, which they continued to ornament in successive generations, every king surpassing the one who went before him to the utmost of his power, until they made the building a marvel to behold for size and for beauty. And beginning from the sea they bored a canal of three hundred feet in width and one hundred feet in depth and fifty stadia in length, which they carried through to the outermost zone, making a passage from the sea up to this, which became a harbour, and leaving an opening sufficient to enable the largest vessels to find ingress. Moreover, they divided at the bridges the zones of land which parted the zones of sea, leaving room for a single trireme to pass out of one zone into another, and they covered over the channels so as to leave a way underneath for the ships; for the banks were raised considerably above the water. Now the largest of the zones into which a passage was cut from the sea was three stadia in breadth, and the zone of land which came next of equal breadth; but the next two zones, the one of water, the other of land, were two stadia, and the one which surrounded the central island was a stadium only in width. The island in which the palace was situated had a diameter of five stadia. All this including the zones and the bridge, which was the sixth part of a stadium in width, they surrounded by a stone wall on every side, placing towers and gates on the bridges where the sea passed in. The stone which was used in the work they quarried from underneath the centre island, and from underneath the zones, on the outer as well as the inner side. One kind was white, another black, and a third red, and as they quarried, they at the same time hollowed out double docks, having roofs formed out of the native rock. Some of their buildings were simple, but in others they put together different stones, varying the colour to please the eye, and to be a natural source of delight. The entire circuit of the wall, which went round the outermost zone, they covered with a coating of brass, and the circuit of the next wall they coated with tin, and the third, which encompassed the citadel, flashed with the red light of orichalcum. The palaces in the interior of the citadel were constructed on this wise:--In the centre was a holy temple dedicated to Cleito and Poseidon, which remained inaccessible, and was surrounded by an enclosure of gold; this was the spot where the family of the ten princes first saw the light, and thither the people annually brought the fruits of the earth in their season from all the ten portions, to be an offering to each of the ten. Here was Poseidon's own temple which was a stadium in length, and half a stadium in width, and of a proportionate height, having a strange barbaric appearance. All the outside of the temple, with the exception of the pinnacles, they covered with silver, and the pinnacles with gold. In the interior of the temple the roof was of ivory, curiously wrought everywhere with gold and silver and orichalcum; and all the other parts, the walls and pillars and floor, they coated with orichalcum. In the temple they placed statues of gold: there was the god himself standing in a chariot--the charioteer of six winged horses--and of such a size that he touched the roof of the building with his head; around him there were a hundred Nereids riding on dolphins, for such was thought to be the number of them by the men of those days. There were also in the interior of the temple other images which had been dedicated by private persons. And around the temple on the outside were placed statues of gold of all the descendants of the ten kings and of their wives, and there were many other great offerings of kings and of private persons, coming both from the city itself and from the foreign cities over which they held sway. There was an altar too, which in size and workmanship corresponded to this magnificence, and the palaces, in like manner, answered to the greatness of the kingdom and the glory of the temple. In the next place, they had fountains, one of cold and another of hot water, in gracious plenty flowing; and they were wonderfully adapted for use by reason of the pleasantness and excellence of their waters. They constructed buildings about them and planted suitable trees, also they made cisterns, some open to the heaven, others roofed over, to be used in winter as warm baths; there were the kings' baths, and the baths of private persons, which were kept apart; and there were separate baths for women, and for horses and cattle, and to each of them they gave as much adornment as was suitable. Of the water which ran off they carried some to the grove of Poseidon, where were growing all manner of trees of wonderful height and beauty, owing to the excellence of the soil, while the remainder was conveyed by aqueducts along the bridges to the outer circles; and there were many temples built and dedicated to many gods; also gardens and places of exercise, some for men, and others for horses in both of the two islands formed by the zones; and in the centre of the larger of the two there was set apart a race-course of a stadium in width, and in length allowed to extend all round the island, for horses to race in. Also there were guard-houses at intervals for the guards, the more trusted of whom were appointed to keep watch in the lesser zone, which was nearer the Acropolis; while the most trusted of all had houses given them within the citadel, near the persons of the kings. The docks were full of triremes and naval stores, and all things were quite ready for use. Enough of the plan of the royal palace. Leaving the palace and passing out across the three harbours, you came to a wall which began at the sea and went all round: this was everywhere distant fifty stadia from the largest zone or harbour, and enclosed the whole, the ends meeting at the mouth of the channel which led to the sea. The entire area was densely crowded with habitations; and the canal and the largest of the harbours were full of vessels and merchants coming from all parts, who, from their numbers, kept up a multitudinous sound of human voices, and din and clatter of all sorts night and day. I have described the city and the environs of the ancient palace nearly in the words of Solon, and now I must endeavour to represent to you the nature and arrangement of the rest of the land. The whole country was said by him to be very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea, but the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain, itself surrounded by mountains which descended towards the sea; it was smooth and even, and of an oblong shape, extending in one direction three thousand stadia, but across the centre inland it was two thousand stadia. This part of the island looked towards the south, and was sheltered from the north. The surrounding mountains were celebrated for their number and size and beauty, far beyond any which still exist, having in them also many wealthy villages of country folk, and rivers, and lakes, and meadows supplying food enough for every animal, wild or tame, and much wood of various sorts, abundant for each and every kind of work. I will now describe the plain, as it was fashioned by nature and by the labours of many generations of kings through long ages. It was for the most part rectangular and oblong, and where falling out of the straight line followed the circular ditch. The depth, and width, and length of this ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that a work of such extent, in addition to so many others, could never have been artificial. Nevertheless I must say what I was told. It was excavated to the depth of a hundred feet, and its breadth was a stadium everywhere; it was carried round the whole of the plain, and was ten thousand stadia in length. It received the streams which came down from the mountains, and winding round the plain and meeting at the city, was there let off into the sea. Further inland, likewise, straight canals of a hundred feet in width were cut from it through the plain, and again let off into the ditch leading to the sea: these canals were at intervals of a hundred stadia, and by them they brought down the wood from the mountains to the city, and conveyed the fruits of the earth in ships, cutting transverse passages from one canal into another, and to the city. Twice in the year they gathered the fruits of the earth--in winter having the benefit of the rains of heaven, and in summer the water which the land supplied by introducing streams from the canals. As to the population, each of the lots in the plain had to find a leader for the men who were fit for military service, and the size of a lot was a square of ten stadia each way, and the total number of all the lots was sixty thousand. And of the inhabitants of the mountains and of the rest of the country there was also a vast multitude, which was distributed among the lots and had leaders assigned to them according to their districts and villages. The leader was required to furnish for the war the sixth portion of a war-chariot, so as to make up a total of ten thousand chariots; also two horses and riders for them, and a pair of chariot-horses without a seat, accompanied by a horseman who could fight on foot carrying a small shield, and having a charioteer who stood behind the man-at-arms to guide the two horses; also, he was bound to furnish two heavy-armed soldiers, two archers, two slingers, three stone-shooters and three javelin-men, who were light-armed, and four sailors to make up the complement of twelve hundred ships. Such was the military order of the royal city--the order of the other nine governments varied, and it would be wearisome to recount their several differences. As to offices and honours, the following was the arrangement from the first. Each of the ten kings in his own division and in his own city had the absolute control of the citizens, and, in most cases, of the laws, punishing and slaying whomsoever he would. Now the order of precedence among them and their mutual relations were regulated by the commands of Poseidon which the law had handed down. These were inscribed by the first kings on a pillar of orichalcum, which was situated in the middle of the island, at the temple of Poseidon, whither the kings were gathered together every fifth and every sixth year alternately, thus giving equal honour to the odd and to the even number. And when they were gathered together they consulted about their common interests, and enquired if any one had transgressed in anything, and passed judgment, and before they passed judgment they gave their pledges to one another on this wise:--There were bulls who had the range of the temple of Poseidon; and the ten kings, being left alone in the temple, after they had offered prayers to the god that they might capture the victim which was acceptable to him, hunted the bulls, without weapons, but with staves and nooses; and the bull which they caught they led up to the pillar and cut its throat over the top of it so that the blood fell upon the sacred inscription. Now on the pillar, besides the laws, there was inscribed an oath invoking mighty curses on the disobedient. When therefore, after slaying the bull in the accustomed manner, they had burnt its limbs, they filled a bowl of wine and cast in a clot of blood for each of them; the rest of the victim they put in the fire, after having purified the column all round. Then they drew from the bowl in golden cups, and pouring a libation on the fire, they swore that they would judge according to the laws on the pillar, and would punish him who in any point had already transgressed them, and that for the future they would not, if they could help, offend against the writing on the pillar, and would neither command others, nor obey any ruler who commanded them, to act otherwise than according to the laws of their father Poseidon. This was the prayer which each of them offered up for himself and for his descendants, at the same time drinking and dedicating the cup out of which he drank in the temple of the god; and after they had supped and satisfied their needs, when darkness came on, and the fire about the sacrifice was cool, all of them put on most beautiful azure robes, and, sitting on the ground, at night, over the embers of the sacrifices by which they had sworn, and extinguishing all the fire about the temple, they received and gave judgment, if any of them had an accusation to bring against any one; and when they had given judgment, at daybreak they wrote down their sentences on a golden tablet, and dedicated it together with their robes to be a memorial. There were many special laws affecting the several kings inscribed about the temples, but the most important was the following: They were not to take up arms against one another, and they were all to come to the rescue if any one in any of their cities attempted to overthrow the royal house; like their ancestors, they were to deliberate in common about war and other matters, giving the supremacy to the descendants of Atlas. And the king was not to have the power of life and death over any of his kinsmen unless he had the assent of the majority of the ten. Such was the vast power which the god settled in the lost island of Atlantis; and this he afterwards directed against our land for the following reasons, as tradition tells: For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another, whereas by too great regard and respect for them, they are lost and friendship with them. By such reflections and by the continuance in them of a divine nature, the qualities which we have described grew and increased among them; but when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power. Zeus, the god of gods, who rules according to law, and is able to see into such things, perceiving that an honourable race was in a woeful plight, and wanting to inflict punishment on them, that they might be chastened and improve, collected all the gods into their most holy habitation, which, being placed in the centre of the world, beholds all created things. And when he had called them together, he spake as follows--[*] * The rest of the Dialogue of Critias has been lost. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITIAS *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LYSIMACHUS","Dialogue":"You have seen the exhibition of the man fighting in armour, Nicias and Laches, but we did not tell you at the time the reason why my friend Melesias and I asked you to go with us and see him. I think that we may as well confess what this was, for we certainly ought not to have any reserve with you. The reason was, that we were intending to ask your advice. Some laugh at the very notion of advising others, and when they are asked will not say what they think. They guess at the wishes of the person who asks them, and answer according to his, and not according to their own, opinion. But as we know that you are good judges, and will say exactly what you think, we have taken you into our counsels. The matter about which I am making all this preface is as follows: Melesias and I have two sons; that is his son, and he is named Thucydides, after his grandfather; and this is mine, who is also called after his grandfather, Aristides. Now, we are resolved to take the greatest care of the youths, and not to let them run about as they like, which is too often the way with the young, when they are no longer children, but to begin at once and do the utmost that we can for them. And knowing you to have sons of your own, we thought that you were most likely to have attended to their training and improvement, and, if perchance you have not attended to them, we may remind you that you ought to have done so, and would invite you to assist us in the fulfilment of a common duty. I will tell you, Nicias and Laches, even at the risk of being tedious, how we came to think of this. Melesias and I live together, and our sons live with us; and now, as I was saying at first, we are going to confess to you. Both of us often talk to the lads about the many noble deeds which our own fathers did in war and peace--in the management of the allies, and in the administration of the city; but neither of us has any deeds of his own which he can show. The truth is that we are ashamed of this contrast being seen by them, and we blame our fathers for letting us be spoiled in the days of our youth, while they were occupied with the concerns of others; and we urge all this upon the lads, pointing out to them that they will not grow up to honour if they are rebellious and take no pains about themselves; but that if they take pains they may, perhaps, become worthy of the names which they bear. They, on their part, promise to comply with our wishes; and our care is to discover what studies or pursuits are likely to be most improving to them. Some one commended to us the art of fighting in armour, which he thought an excellent accomplishment for a young man to learn; and he praised the man whose exhibition you have seen, and told us to go and see him. And we determined that we would go, and get you to accompany us; and we were intending at the same time, if you did not object, to take counsel with you about the education of our sons. That is the matter which we wanted to talk over with you; and we hope that you will give us your opinion about this art of fighting in armour, and about any other studies or pursuits which may or may not be desirable for a young man to learn. Please to say whether you agree to our proposal."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"As far as I am concerned, Lysimachus and Melesias, I applaud your purpose, and will gladly assist you; and I believe that you, Laches, will be equally glad."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Certainly, Nicias; and I quite approve of the remark which Lysimachus made about his own father and the father of Melesias, and which is applicable, not only to them, but to us, and to every one who is occupied with public affairs. As he says, such persons are too apt to be negligent and careless of their own children and their private concerns. There is much truth in that remark of yours, Lysimachus. But why, instead of consulting us, do you not consult our friend Socrates about the education of the youths? He is of the same deme with you, and is always passing his time in places where the youth have any noble study or pursuit, such as you are enquiring after."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LYSIMACHUS","Dialogue":"Why, Laches, has Socrates ever attended to matters of this sort?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Certainly, Lysimachus."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"That I have the means of knowing as well as Laches; for quite lately he supplied me with a teacher of music for my sons,--Damon, the disciple of Agathocles, who is a most accomplished man in every way, as well as a musician, and a companion of inestimable value for young men at their age."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LYSIMACHUS","Dialogue":"Those who have reached my time of life, Socrates and Nicias and Laches, fall out of acquaintance with the young, because they are generally detained at home by old age; but you, O son of Sophroniscus, should let your fellow demesman have the benefit of any advice which you are able to give. Moreover I have a claim upon you as an old friend of your father; for I and he were always companions and friends, and to the hour of his death there never was a difference between us; and now it comes back to me, at the mention of your name, that I have heard these lads talking to one another at home, and often speaking of Socrates in terms of the highest praise; but I have never thought to ask them whether the son of Sophroniscus was the person whom they meant. Tell me, my boys, whether this is the Socrates of whom you have often spoken?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SON","Dialogue":"Certainly, father, this is he."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LYSIMACHUS","Dialogue":"I am delighted to hear, Socrates, that you maintain the name of your father, who was a most excellent man; and I further rejoice at the prospect of our family ties being renewed."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Indeed, Lysimachus, you ought not to give him up; for I can assure you that I have seen him maintaining, not only his father's, but also his country's name. He was my companion in the retreat from Delium, and I can tell you that if others had only been like him, the honour of our country would have been upheld, and the great defeat would never have occurred."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LYSIMACHUS","Dialogue":"That is very high praise which is accorded to you, Socrates, by faithful witnesses and for actions like those which they praise. Let me tell you the pleasure which I feel in hearing of your fame; and I hope that you will regard me as one of your warmest friends. You ought to have visited us long ago, and made yourself at home with us; but now, from this day forward, as we have at last found one another out, do as I say--come and make acquaintance with me, and with these young men, that I may continue your friend, as I was your father's. I shall expect you to do so, and shall venture at some future time to remind you of your duty. But what say you of the matter of which we were beginning to speak--the art of fighting in armour? Is that a practice in which the lads may be advantageously instructed?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will endeavour to advise you, Lysimachus, as far as I can in this matter, and also in every way will comply with your wishes; but as I am younger and not so experienced, I think that I ought certainly to hear first what my elders have to say, and to learn of them, and if I have anything to add, then I may venture to give my opinion to them as well as to you. Suppose, Nicias, that one or other of you begin."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"I have no objection, Socrates; and my opinion is that the acquirement of this art is in many ways useful to young men. It is an advantage to them that among the favourite amusements of their leisure hours they should have one which tends to improve and not to injure their bodily health. No gymnastics could be better or harder exercise; and this, and the art of riding, are of all arts most befitting to a freeman; for they only who are thus trained in the use of arms are the athletes of our military profession, trained in that on which the conflict turns. Moreover in actual battle, when you have to fight in a line with a number of others, such an acquirement will be of some use, and will be of the greatest whenever the ranks are broken and you have to fight singly, either in pursuit, when you are attacking some one who is defending himself, or in flight, when you have to defend yourself against an assailant. Certainly he who possessed the art could not meet with any harm at the hands of a single person, or perhaps of several; and in any case he would have a great advantage. Further, this sort of skill inclines a man to the love of other noble lessons; for every man who has learned how to fight in armour will desire to learn the proper arrangement of an army, which is the sequel of the lesson: and when he has learned this, and his ambition is once fired, he will go on to learn the complete art of the general. There is no difficulty in seeing that the knowledge and practice of other military arts will be honourable and valuable to a man; and this lesson may be the beginning of them. Let me add a further advantage, which is by no means a slight one,--that this science will make any man a great deal more valiant and self-possessed in the field. And I will not disdain to mention, what by some may be thought to be a small matter;--he will make a better appearance at the right time; that is to say, at the time when his appearance will strike terror into his enemies. My opinion then, Lysimachus, is, as I say, that the youths should be instructed in this art, and for the reasons which I have given. But Laches may take a different view; and I shall be very glad to hear what he has to say."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"I should not like to maintain, Nicias, that any kind of knowledge is not to be learned; for all knowledge appears to be a good: and if, as Nicias and as the teachers of the art affirm, this use of arms is really a species of knowledge, then it ought to be learned; but if not, and if those who profess to teach it are deceivers only; or if it be knowledge, but not of a valuable sort, then what is the use of learning it? I say this, because I think that if it had been really valuable, the Lacedaemonians, whose whole life is passed in finding out and practising the arts which give them an advantage over other nations in war, would have discovered this one. And even if they had not, still these professors of the art would certainly not have failed to discover that of all the Hellenes the Lacedaemonians have the greatest interest in such matters, and that a master of the art who was honoured among them would be sure to make his fortune among other nations, just as a tragic poet would who is honoured among ourselves; which is the reason why he who fancies that he can write a tragedy does not go about itinerating in the neighbouring states, but rushes hither straight, and exhibits at Athens; and this is natural. Whereas I perceive that these fighters in armour regard Lacedaemon as a sacred inviolable territory, which they do not touch with the point of their foot; but they make a circuit of the neighbouring states, and would rather exhibit to any others than to the Spartans; and particularly to those who would themselves acknowledge that they are by no means first-rate in the arts of war. Further, Lysimachus, I have encountered a good many of these gentlemen in actual service, and have taken their measure, which I can give you at once; for none of these masters of fence have ever been distinguished in war,--there has been a sort of fatality about them; while in all other arts the men of note have been always those who have practised the art, they appear to be a most unfortunate exception. For example, this very Stesilaus, whom you and I have just witnessed exhibiting in all that crowd and making such great professions of his powers, I have seen at another time making, in sober truth, an involuntary exhibition of himself, which was a far better spectacle. He was a marine on board a ship which struck a transport vessel, and was armed with a weapon, half spear, half scythe; the singularity of this weapon was worthy of the singularity of the man. To make a long story short, I will only tell you what happened to this notable invention of the scythe spear. He was fighting, and the scythe was caught in the rigging of the other ship, and stuck fast; and he tugged, but was unable to get his weapon free. The two ships were passing one another. He first ran along his own ship holding on to the spear; but as the other ship passed by and drew him after as he was holding on, he let the spear slip through his hand until he retained only the end of the handle. The people in the transport clapped their hands, and laughed at his ridiculous figure; and when some one threw a stone, which fell on the deck at his feet, and he quitted his hold of the scythe-spear, the crew of his own trireme also burst out laughing; they could not refrain when they beheld the weapon waving in the air, suspended from the transport. Now I do not deny that there may be something in such an art, as Nicias asserts, but I tell you my experience; and, as I said at first, whether this be an art of which the advantage is so slight, or not an art at all, but only an imposition, in either case such an acquirement is not worth having. For my opinion is, that if the professor of this art be a coward, he will be likely to become rash, and his character will be only more notorious; or if he be brave, and fail ever so little, other men will be on the watch, and he will be greatly traduced; for there is a jealousy of such pretenders; and unless a man be pre-eminent in valour, he cannot help being ridiculous, if he says that he has this sort of skill. Such is my judgment, Lysimachus, of the desirableness of this art; but, as I said at first, ask Socrates, and do not let him go until he has given you his opinion of the matter."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LYSIMACHUS","Dialogue":"I am going to ask this favour of you, Socrates; as is the more necessary because the two councillors disagree, and some one is in a manner still needed who will decide between them. Had they agreed, no arbiter would have been required. But as Laches has voted one way and Nicias another, I should like to hear with which of our two friends you agree."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What, Lysimachus, are you going to accept the opinion of the majority?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LYSIMACHUS","Dialogue":"Why, yes, Socrates; what else am I to do?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you do so too, Melesias? If you were deliberating about the gymnastic training of your son, would you follow the advice of the majority of us, or the opinion of the one who had been trained and exercised under a skilful master?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"MELESIAS","Dialogue":"The latter, Socrates; as would surely be reasonable."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"His one vote would be worth more than the vote of all us four?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"MELESIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And for this reason, as I imagine,--because a good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"MELESIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Must we not then first of all ask, whether there is any one of us who has knowledge of that about which we are deliberating? If there is, let us take his advice, though he be one only, and not mind the rest; if there is not, let us seek further counsel. Is this a slight matter about which you and Lysimachus are deliberating? Are you not risking the greatest of your possessions? For children are your riches; and upon their turning out well or ill depends the whole order of their father's house."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"MELESIAS","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Great care, then, is required in this matter?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"MELESIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Suppose, as I was just now saying, that we were considering, or wanting to consider, who was the best trainer. Should we not select him who knew and had practised the art, and had the best teachers?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"MELESIAS","Dialogue":"I think that we should."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But would there not arise a prior question about the nature of the art of which we want to find the masters?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"MELESIAS","Dialogue":"I do not understand."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me try to make my meaning plainer then. I do not think that we have as yet decided what that is about which we are consulting, when we ask which of us is or is not skilled in the art, and has or has not had a teacher of the art."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Why, Socrates, is not the question whether young men ought or ought not to learn the art of fighting in armour?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Nicias; but there is also a prior question, which I may illustrate in this way: When a person considers about applying a medicine to the eyes, would you say that he is consulting about the medicine or about the eyes?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"About the eyes."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when he considers whether he shall set a bridle on a horse and at what time, he is thinking of the horse and not of the bridle?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in a word, when he considers anything for the sake of another thing, he thinks of the end and not of the means?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when you call in an adviser, you should see whether he too is skilful in the accomplishment of the end which you have in view?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And at present we have in view some knowledge, of which the end is the soul of youth?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And we are enquiring, Which of us is skilful or successful in the treatment of the soul, and which of us has had good teachers?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Well but, Socrates; did you never observe that some persons, who have had no teachers, are more skilful than those who have, in some things?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Laches, I have observed that; but you would not be very willing to trust them if they only professed to be masters of their art, unless they could show some proof of their skill or excellence in one or more works."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And therefore, Laches and Nicias, as Lysimachus and Melesias, in their anxiety to improve the minds of their sons, have asked our advice about them, we too should tell them who our teachers were, if we say that we have had any, and prove them to be in the first place men of merit and experienced trainers of the minds of youth and also to have been really our teachers. Or if any of us says that he has no teacher, but that he has works of his own to show; then he should point out to them what Athenians or strangers, bond or free, he is generally acknowledged to have improved. But if he can show neither teachers nor works, then he should tell them to look out for others; and not run the risk of spoiling the children of friends, and thereby incurring the most formidable accusation which can be brought against any one by those nearest to him. As for myself, Lysimachus and Melesias, I am the first to confess that I have never had a teacher of the art of virtue; although I have always from my earliest youth desired to have one. But I am too poor to give money to the Sophists, who are the only professors of moral improvement; and to this day I have never been able to discover the art myself, though I should not be surprised if Nicias or Laches may have discovered or learned it; for they are far wealthier than I am, and may therefore have learnt of others. And they are older too; so that they have had more time to make the discovery. And I really believe that they are able to educate a man; for unless they had been confident in their own knowledge, they would never have spoken thus decidedly of the pursuits which are advantageous or hurtful to a young man. I repose confidence in both of them; but I am surprised to find that they differ from one another. And therefore, Lysimachus, as Laches suggested that you should detain me, and not let me go until I answered, I in turn earnestly beseech and advise you to detain Laches and Nicias, and question them. I would have you say to them: Socrates avers that he has no knowledge of the matter--he is unable to decide which of you speaks truly; neither discoverer nor student is he of anything of the kind. But you, Laches and Nicias, should each of you tell us who is the most skilful educator whom you have ever known; and whether you invented the art yourselves, or learned of another; and if you learned, who were your respective teachers, and who were their brothers in the art; and then, if you are too much occupied in politics to teach us yourselves, let us go to them, and present them with gifts, or make interest with them, or both, in the hope that they may be induced to take charge of our children and of yours; and then they will not grow up inferior, and disgrace their ancestors. But if you are yourselves original discoverers in that field, give us some proof of your skill. Who are they who, having been inferior persons, have become under your care good and noble? For if this is your first attempt at education, there is a danger that you may be trying the experiment, not on the 'vile corpus' of a Carian slave, but on your own sons, or the sons of your friend, and, as the proverb says, 'break the large vessel in learning to make pots.' Tell us then, what qualities you claim or do not claim. Make them tell you that, Lysimachus, and do not let them off."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LYSIMACHUS","Dialogue":"I very much approve of the words of Socrates, my friends; but you, Nicias and Laches, must determine whether you will be questioned, and give an explanation about matters of this sort. Assuredly, I and Melesias would be greatly pleased to hear you answer the questions which Socrates asks, if you will: for I began by saying that we took you into our counsels because we thought that you would have attended to the subject, especially as you have children who, like our own, are nearly of an age to be educated. Well, then, if you have no objection, suppose that you take Socrates into partnership; and do you and he ask and answer one another's questions: for, as he has well said, we are deliberating about the most important of our concerns. I hope that you will see fit to comply with our request."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"I see very clearly, Lysimachus, that you have only known Socrates' father, and have no acquaintance with Socrates himself: at least, you can only have known him when he was a child, and may have met him among his fellow-wardsmen, in company with his father, at a sacrifice, or at some other gathering. You clearly show that you have never known him since he arrived at manhood."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LYSIMACHUS","Dialogue":"Why do you say that, Nicias?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Because you seem not to be aware that any one who has an intellectual affinity to Socrates and enters into conversation with him is liable to be drawn into an argument; and whatever subject he may start, he will be continually carried round and round by him, until at last he finds that he has to give an account both of his present and past life; and when he is once entangled, Socrates will not let him go until he has completely and thoroughly sifted him. Now I am used to his ways; and I know that he will certainly do as I say, and also that I myself shall be the sufferer; for I am fond of his conversation, Lysimachus. And I think that there is no harm in being reminded of any wrong thing which we are, or have been, doing: he who does not fly from reproof will be sure to take more heed of his after-life; as Solon says, he will wish and desire to be learning so long as he lives, and will not think that old age of itself brings wisdom. To me, to be cross-examined by Socrates is neither unusual nor unpleasant; indeed, I knew all along that where Socrates was, the argument would soon pass from our sons to ourselves; and therefore, I say that for my part, I am quite willing to discourse with Socrates in his own manner; but you had better ask our friend Laches what his feeling may be."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"I have but one feeling, Nicias, or (shall I say?) two feelings, about discussions. Some would think that I am a lover, and to others I may seem to be a hater of discourse; for when I hear a man discoursing of virtue, or of any sort of wisdom, who is a true man and worthy of his theme, I am delighted beyond measure: and I compare the man and his words, and note the harmony and correspondence of them. And such an one I deem to be the true musician, attuned to a fairer harmony than that of the lyre, or any pleasant instrument of music; for truly he has in his own life a harmony of words and deeds arranged, not in the Ionian, or in the Phrygian mode, nor yet in the Lydian, but in the true Hellenic mode, which is the Dorian, and no other. Such an one makes me merry with the sound of his voice; and when I hear him I am thought to be a lover of discourse; so eager am I in drinking in his words. But a man whose actions do not agree with his words is an annoyance to me; and the better he speaks the more I hate him, and then I seem to be a hater of discourse. As to Socrates, I have no knowledge of his words, but of old, as would seem, I have had experience of his deeds; and his deeds show that free and noble sentiments are natural to him. And if his words accord, then I am of one mind with him, and shall be delighted to be interrogated by a man such as he is, and shall not be annoyed at having to learn of him: for I too agree with Solon, 'that I would fain grow old, learning many things.' But I must be allowed to add 'of the good only.' Socrates must be willing to allow that he is a good teacher, or I shall be a dull and uncongenial pupil: but that the teacher is younger, or not as yet in repute--anything of that sort is of no account with me. And therefore, Socrates, I give you notice that you may teach and confute me as much as ever you like, and also learn of me anything which I know. So high is the opinion which I have entertained of you ever since the day on which you were my companion in danger, and gave a proof of your valour such as only the man of merit can give. Therefore, say whatever you like, and do not mind about the difference of our ages."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I cannot say that either of you show any reluctance to take counsel and advise with me."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LYSIMACHUS","Dialogue":"But this is our proper business; and yours as well as ours, for I reckon you as one of us. Please then to take my place, and find out from Nicias and Laches what we want to know, for the sake of the youths, and talk and consult with them: for I am old, and my memory is bad; and I do not remember the questions which I am going to ask, or the answers to them; and if there is any interruption I am quite lost. I will therefore beg of you to carry on the proposed discussion by your selves; and I will listen, and Melesias and I will act upon your conclusions."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us, Nicias and Laches, comply with the request of Lysimachus and Melesias. There will be no harm in asking ourselves the question which was first proposed to us: 'Who have been our own instructors in this sort of training, and whom have we made better?' But the other mode of carrying on the enquiry will bring us equally to the same point, and will be more like proceeding from first principles. For if we knew that the addition of something would improve some other thing, and were able to make the addition, then, clearly, we must know how that about which we are advising may be best and most easily attained. Perhaps you do not understand what I mean. Then let me make my meaning plainer in this way. Suppose we knew that the addition of sight makes better the eyes which possess this gift, and also were able to impart sight to the eyes, then, clearly, we should know the nature of sight, and should be able to advise how this gift of sight may be best and most easily attained; but if we knew neither what sight is, nor what hearing is, we should not be very good medical advisers about the eyes or the ears, or about the best mode of giving sight and hearing to them."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"That is true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are not our two friends, Laches, at this very moment inviting us to consider in what way the gift of virtue may be imparted to their sons for the improvement of their minds?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then must we not first know the nature of virtue? For how can we advise any one about the best mode of attaining something of which we are wholly ignorant?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"I do not think that we can, Socrates."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, Laches, we may presume that we know the nature of virtue?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that which we know we must surely be able to tell?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I would not have us begin, my friend, with enquiring about the whole of virtue; for that may be more than we can accomplish; let us first consider whether we have a sufficient knowledge of a part; the enquiry will thus probably be made easier to us."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Let us do as you say, Socrates."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then which of the parts of virtue shall we select? Must we not select that to which the art of fighting in armour is supposed to conduce? And is not that generally thought to be courage?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, Laches, suppose that we first set about determining the nature of courage, and in the second place proceed to enquire how the young men may attain this quality by the help of studies and pursuits. Tell me, if you can, what is courage."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Indeed, Socrates, I see no difficulty in answering; he is a man of courage who does not run away, but remains at his post and fights against the enemy; there can be no mistake about that."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good, Laches; and yet I fear that I did not express myself clearly; and therefore you have answered not the question which I intended to ask, but another."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will endeavour to explain; you would call a man courageous who remains at his post, and fights with the enemy?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Certainly I should."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And so should I; but what would you say of another man, who fights flying, instead of remaining?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"How flying?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, as the Scythians are said to fight, flying as well as pursuing; and as Homer says in praise of the horses of Aeneas, that they knew 'how to pursue, and fly quickly hither and thither'; and he passes an encomium on Aeneas himself, as having a knowledge of fear or flight, and calls him 'an author of fear or flight.'"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, and there Homer is right: for he was speaking of chariots, as you were speaking of the Scythian cavalry, who have that way of fighting; but the heavy-armed Greek fights, as I say, remaining in his rank."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet, Laches, you must except the Lacedaemonians at Plataea, who, when they came upon the light shields of the Persians, are said not to have been willing to stand and fight, and to have fled; but when the ranks of the Persians were broken, they turned upon them like cavalry, and won the battle of Plataea."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That was my meaning when I said that I was to blame in having put my question badly, and that this was the reason of your answering badly. For I meant to ask you not only about the courage of heavy-armed soldiers, but about the courage of cavalry and every other style of soldier; and not only who are courageous in war, but who are courageous in perils by sea, and who in disease, or in poverty, or again in politics, are courageous; and not only who are courageous against pain or fear, but mighty to contend against desires and pleasures, either fixed in their rank or turning upon their enemy. There is this sort of courage--is there not, Laches?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Certainly, Socrates."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And all these are courageous, but some have courage in pleasures, and some in pains: some in desires, and some in fears, and some are cowards under the same conditions, as I should imagine."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now I was asking about courage and cowardice in general. And I will begin with courage, and once more ask, What is that common quality, which is the same in all these cases, and which is called courage? Do you now understand what I mean?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Not over well."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean this: As I might ask what is that quality which is called quickness, and which is found in running, in playing the lyre, in speaking, in learning, and in many other similar actions, or rather which we possess in nearly every action that is worth mentioning of arms, legs, mouth, voice, mind;--would you not apply the term quickness to all of them?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And suppose I were to be asked by some one: What is that common quality, Socrates, which, in all these uses of the word, you call quickness? I should say the quality which accomplishes much in a little time--whether in running, speaking, or in any other sort of action."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"You would be quite correct."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, Laches, do you try and tell me in like manner, What is that common quality which is called courage, and which includes all the various uses of the term when applied both to pleasure and pain, and in all the cases to which I was just now referring?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"I should say that courage is a sort of endurance of the soul, if I am to speak of the universal nature which pervades them all."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But that is what we must do if we are to answer the question. And yet I cannot say that every kind of endurance is, in my opinion, to be deemed courage. Hear my reason: I am sure, Laches, that you would consider courage to be a very noble quality."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Most noble, certainly."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you would say that a wise endurance is also good and noble?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Very noble."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But what would you say of a foolish endurance? Is not that, on the other hand, to be regarded as evil and hurtful?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is anything noble which is evil and hurtful?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"I ought not to say that, Socrates."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you would not admit that sort of endurance to be courage--for it is not noble, but courage is noble?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"You are right."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, according to you, only the wise endurance is courage?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But as to the epithet 'wise,'--wise in what? In all things small as well as great? For example, if a man shows the quality of endurance in spending his money wisely, knowing that by spending he will acquire more in the end, do you call him courageous?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Assuredly not."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or, for example, if a man is a physician, and his son, or some patient of his, has inflammation of the lungs, and begs that he may be allowed to eat or drink something, and the other is firm and refuses; is that courage?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"No; that is not courage at all, any more than the last."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Again, take the case of one who endures in war, and is willing to fight, and wisely calculates and knows that others will help him, and that there will be fewer and inferior men against him than there are with him; and suppose that he has also advantages of position; would you say of such a one who endures with all this wisdom and preparation, that he, or some man in the opposing army who is in the opposite circumstances to these and yet endures and remains at his post, is the braver?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"I should say that the latter, Socrates, was the braver."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But, surely, this is a foolish endurance in comparison with the other?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you would say that he who in an engagement of cavalry endures, having the knowledge of horsemanship, is not so courageous as he who endures, having no such knowledge?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"So I should say."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who endures, having a knowledge of the use of the sling, or the bow, or of any other art, is not so courageous as he who endures, not having such a knowledge?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who descends into a well, and dives, and holds out in this or any similar action, having no knowledge of diving, or the like, is, as you would say, more courageous than those who have this knowledge?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Why, Socrates, what else can a man say?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nothing, if that be what he thinks."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"But that is what I do think."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet men who thus run risks and endure are foolish, Laches, in comparison of those who do the same things, having the skill to do them."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But foolish boldness and endurance appeared before to be base and hurtful to us."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Whereas courage was acknowledged to be a noble quality."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now on the contrary we are saying that the foolish endurance, which was before held in dishonour, is courage."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are we right in saying so?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Indeed, Socrates, I am sure that we are not right."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then according to your statement, you and I, Laches, are not attuned to the Dorian mode, which is a harmony of words and deeds; for our deeds are not in accordance with our words. Any one would say that we had courage who saw us in action, but not, I imagine, he who heard us talking about courage just now."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"That is most true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is this condition of ours satisfactory?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Quite the reverse."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Suppose, however, that we admit the principle of which we are speaking to a certain extent."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"To what extent and what principle do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The principle of endurance. We too must endure and persevere in the enquiry, and then courage will not laugh at our faint-heartedness in searching for courage; which after all may, very likely, be endurance."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"I am ready to go on, Socrates; and yet I am unused to investigations of this sort. But the spirit of controversy has been aroused in me by what has been said; and I am really grieved at being thus unable to express my meaning. For I fancy that I do know the nature of courage; but, somehow or other, she has slipped away from me, and I cannot get hold of her and tell her nature."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But, my dear friend, should not the good sportsman follow the track, and not be lazy?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Certainly, he should."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And shall we invite Nicias to join us? he may be better at the sport than we are. What do you say?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"I should like that."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Come then, Nicias, and do what you can to help your friends, who are tossing on the waves of argument, and at the last gasp: you see our extremity, and may save us and also settle your own opinion, if you will tell us what you think about courage."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"I have been thinking, Socrates, that you and Laches are not defining courage in the right way; for you have forgotten an excellent saying which I have heard from your own lips."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What is it, Nicias?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"I have often heard you say that 'Every man is good in that in which he is wise, and bad in that in which he is unwise.'"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is certainly true, Nicias."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"And therefore if the brave man is good, he is also wise."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you hear him, Laches?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Yes, I hear him, but I do not very well understand him."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think that I understand him; and he appears to me to mean that courage is a sort of wisdom."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"What can he possibly mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is a question which you must ask of himself."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Tell him then, Nicias, what you mean by this wisdom; for you surely do not mean the wisdom which plays the flute?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor the wisdom which plays the lyre?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But what is this knowledge then, and of what?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"I think that you put the question to him very well, Socrates; and I would like him to say what is the nature of this knowledge or wisdom."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"I mean to say, Laches, that courage is the knowledge of that which inspires fear or confidence in war, or in anything."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"How strangely he is talking, Socrates."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why do you say so, Laches?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Why, surely courage is one thing, and wisdom another."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is just what Nicias denies."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Yes, that is what he denies; but he is so silly."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Suppose that we instruct instead of abusing him?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Laches does not want to instruct me, Socrates; but having been proved to be talking nonsense himself, he wants to prove that I have been doing the same."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Very true, Nicias; and you are talking nonsense, as I shall endeavour to show. Let me ask you a question: Do not physicians know the dangers of disease? or do the courageous know them? or are the physicians the same as the courageous?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Not at all."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"No more than the husbandmen who know the dangers of husbandry, or than other craftsmen, who have a knowledge of that which inspires them with fear or confidence in their own arts, and yet they are not courageous a whit the more for that."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What is Laches saying, Nicias? He appears to be saying something of importance."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, he is saying something, but it is not true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Why, because he does not see that the physician's knowledge only extends to the nature of health and disease: he can tell the sick man no more than this. Do you imagine, Laches, that the physician knows whether health or disease is the more terrible to a man? Had not many a man better never get up from a sick bed? I should like to know whether you think that life is always better than death. May not death often be the better of the two?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Yes certainly so in my opinion."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"And do you think that the same things are terrible to those who had better die, and to those who had better live?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"And do you suppose that the physician or any other artist knows this, or any one indeed, except he who is skilled in the grounds of fear and hope? And him I call the courageous."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you understand his meaning, Laches?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Yes; I suppose that, in his way of speaking, the soothsayers are courageous. For who but one of them can know to whom to die or to live is better? And yet Nicias, would you allow that you are yourself a soothsayer, or are you neither a soothsayer nor courageous?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"What! do you mean to say that the soothsayer ought to know the grounds of hope or fear?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Indeed I do: who but he?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Much rather I should say he of whom I speak; for the soothsayer ought to know only the signs of things that are about to come to pass, whether death or disease, or loss of property, or victory, or defeat in war, or in any sort of contest; but to whom the suffering or not suffering of these things will be for the best, can no more be decided by the soothsayer than by one who is no soothsayer."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"I cannot understand what Nicias would be at, Socrates; for he represents the courageous man as neither a soothsayer, nor a physician, nor in any other character, unless he means to say that he is a god. My opinion is that he does not like honestly to confess that he is talking nonsense, but that he shuffles up and down in order to conceal the difficulty into which he has got himself. You and I, Socrates, might have practised a similar shuffle just now, if we had only wanted to avoid the appearance of inconsistency. And if we had been arguing in a court of law there might have been reason in so doing; but why should a man deck himself out with vain words at a meeting of friends such as this?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I quite agree with you, Laches, that he should not. But perhaps Nicias is serious, and not merely talking for the sake of talking. Let us ask him just to explain what he means, and if he has reason on his side we will agree with him; if not, we will instruct him."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Do you, Socrates, if you like, ask him: I think that I have asked enough."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I do not see why I should not; and my question will do for both of us."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then tell me, Nicias, or rather tell us, for Laches and I are partners in the argument: Do you mean to affirm that courage is the knowledge of the grounds of hope and fear?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And not every man has this knowledge; the physician and the soothsayer have it not; and they will not be courageous unless they acquire it--that is what you were saying?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"I was."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then this is certainly not a thing which every pig would know, as the proverb says, and therefore he could not be courageous."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"I think not."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Clearly not, Nicias; not even such a big pig as the Crommyonian sow would be called by you courageous. And this I say not as a joke, but because I think that he who assents to your doctrine, that courage is the knowledge of the grounds of fear and hope, cannot allow that any wild beast is courageous, unless he admits that a lion, or a leopard, or perhaps a boar, or any other animal, has such a degree of wisdom that he knows things which but a few human beings ever know by reason of their difficulty. He who takes your view of courage must affirm that a lion, and a stag, and a bull, and a monkey, have equally little pretensions to courage."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Capital, Socrates; by the gods, that is truly good. And I hope, Nicias, that you will tell us whether these animals, which we all admit to be courageous, are really wiser than mankind; or whether you will have the boldness, in the face of universal opinion, to deny their courage."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Why, Laches, I do not call animals or any other things which have no fear of dangers, because they are ignorant of them, courageous, but only fearless and senseless. Do you imagine that I should call little children courageous, which fear no dangers because they know none? There is a difference, to my way of thinking, between fearlessness and courage. I am of opinion that thoughtful courage is a quality possessed by very few, but that rashness and boldness, and fearlessness, which has no forethought, are very common qualities possessed by many men, many women, many children, many animals. And you, and men in general, call by the term 'courageous' actions which I call rash;--my courageous actions are wise actions."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Behold, Socrates, how admirably, as he thinks, he dresses himself out in words, while seeking to deprive of the honour of courage those whom all the world acknowledges to be courageous."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Not so, Laches, but do not be alarmed; for I am quite willing to say of you and also of Lamachus, and of many other Athenians, that you are courageous and therefore wise."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"I could answer that; but I would not have you cast in my teeth that I am a haughty Aexonian."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do not answer him, Laches; I rather fancy that you are not aware of the source from which his wisdom is derived. He has got all this from my friend Damon, and Damon is always with Prodicus, who, of all the Sophists, is considered to be the best puller to pieces of words of this sort."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; and the examination of such niceties is a much more suitable employment for a Sophist than for a great statesman whom the city chooses to preside over her."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my sweet friend, but a great statesman is likely to have a great intelligence. And I think that the view which is implied in Nicias' definition of courage is worthy of examination."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Then examine for yourself, Socrates."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is what I am going to do, my dear friend. Do not, however, suppose I shall let you out of the partnership; for I shall expect you to apply your mind, and join with me in the consideration of the question."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"I will if you think that I ought."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, I do; but I must beg of you, Nicias, to begin again. You remember that we originally considered courage to be a part of virtue."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you yourself said that it was a part; and there were many other parts, all of which taken together are called virtue."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you agree with me about the parts? For I say that justice, temperance, and the like, are all of them parts of virtue as well as courage. Would you not say the same?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well then, so far we are agreed. And now let us proceed a step, and try to arrive at a similar agreement about the fearful and the hopeful: I do not want you to be thinking one thing and myself another. Let me then tell you my own opinion, and if I am wrong you shall set me right: in my opinion the terrible and the hopeful are the things which do or do not create fear, and fear is not of the present, nor of the past, but is of future and expected evil. Do you not agree to that, Laches?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, entirely."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is my view, Nicias; the terrible things, as I should say, are the evils which are future; and the hopeful are the good or not evil things which are future. Do you or do you not agree with me?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the knowledge of these things you call courage?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Precisely."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now let me see whether you agree with Laches and myself as to a third point."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"What is that?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will tell you. He and I have a notion that there is not one knowledge or science of the past, another of the present, a third of what is likely to be best and what will be best in the future; but that of all three there is one science only: for example, there is one science of medicine which is concerned with the inspection of health equally in all times, present, past, and future; and one science of husbandry in like manner, which is concerned with the productions of the earth in all times. As to the art of the general, you yourselves will be my witnesses that he has an excellent foreknowledge of the future, and that he claims to be the master and not the servant of the soothsayer, because he knows better what is happening or is likely to happen in war: and accordingly the law places the soothsayer under the general, and not the general under the soothsayer. Am I not correct in saying so, Laches?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"Quite correct."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you, Nicias, also acknowledge that the same science has understanding of the same things, whether future, present, or past?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed Socrates; that is my opinion."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And courage, my friend, is, as you say, a knowledge of the fearful and of the hopeful?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the fearful, and the hopeful, are admitted to be future goods and future evils?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same science has to do with the same things in the future or at any time?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then courage is not the science which is concerned with the fearful and hopeful, for they are future only; courage, like the other sciences, is concerned not only with good and evil of the future, but of the present and past, and of any time?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"That, as I suppose, is true."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the answer which you have given, Nicias, includes only a third part of courage; but our question extended to the whole nature of courage: and according to your view, that is, according to your present view, courage is not only the knowledge of the hopeful and the fearful, but seems to include nearly every good and evil without reference to time. What do you say to that alteration in your statement?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"I agree, Socrates."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But then, my dear friend, if a man knew all good and evil, and how they are, and have been, and will be produced, would he not be perfect, and wanting in no virtue, whether justice, or temperance, or holiness? He would possess them all, and he would know which were dangers and which were not, and guard against them whether they were supernatural or natural; and he would provide the good, as he would know how to deal both with gods or men."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"I think, Socrates, that there is a great deal of truth in what you say."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But then, Nicias, courage, according to this new definition of yours, instead of being a part of virtue only, will be all virtue?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"It would seem so."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But we were saying that courage is one of the parts of virtue?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, that was what we were saying."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that is in contradiction with our present view?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"That appears to be the case."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, Nicias, we have not discovered what courage is."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"We have not."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"And yet, friend Nicias, I imagined that you would have made the discovery, when you were so contemptuous of the answers which I made to Socrates. I had very great hopes that you would have been enlightened by the wisdom of Damon."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"I perceive, Laches, that you think nothing of having displayed your ignorance of the nature of courage, but you look only to see whether I have not made a similar display; and if we are both equally ignorant of the things which a man who is good for anything should know, that, I suppose, will be of no consequence. You certainly appear to me very like the rest of the world, looking at your neighbour and not at yourself. I am of opinion that enough has been said on the subject which we have been discussing; and if anything has been imperfectly said, that may be hereafter corrected by the help of Damon, whom you think to laugh down, although you have never seen him, and with the help of others. And when I am satisfied myself, I will freely impart my satisfaction to you, for I think that you are very much in want of knowledge."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LACHES","Dialogue":"You are a philosopher, Nicias; of that I am aware: nevertheless I would recommend Lysimachus and Melesias not to take you and me as advisers about the education of their children; but, as I said at first, they should ask Socrates and not let him off; if my own sons were old enough, I would have asked him myself."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"NICIAS","Dialogue":"To that I quite agree, if Socrates is willing to take them under his charge. I should not wish for any one else to be the tutor of Niceratus. But I observe that when I mention the matter to him he recommends to me some other tutor and refuses himself. Perhaps he may be more ready to listen to you, Lysimachus."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LYSIMACHUS","Dialogue":"He ought, Nicias: for certainly I would do things for him which I would not do for many others. What do you say, Socrates--will you comply? And are you ready to give assistance in the improvement of the youths?"}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Indeed, Lysimachus, I should be very wrong in refusing to aid in the improvement of anybody. And if I had shown in this conversation that I had a knowledge which Nicias and Laches have not, then I admit that you would be right in inviting me to perform this duty; but as we are all in the same perplexity, why should one of us be preferred to another? I certainly think that no one should; and under these circumstances, let me offer you a piece of advice (and this need not go further than ourselves). I maintain, my friends, that every one of us should seek out the best teacher whom he can find, first for ourselves, who are greatly in need of one, and then for the youth, regardless of expense or anything. But I cannot advise that we remain as we are. And if any one laughs at us for going to school at our age, I would quote to them the authority of Homer, who says, that 'Modesty is not good for a needy man.' Let us then, regardless of what may be said of us, make the education of the youths our own education."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"LYSIMACHUS","Dialogue":"I like your proposal, Socrates; and as I am the oldest, I am also the most eager to go to school with the boys. Let me beg a favour of you: Come to my house to-morrow at dawn, and we will advise about these matters. For the present, let us make an end of the conversation."}
{"Book":"laches","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will come to you to-morrow, Lysimachus, as you propose, God willing. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LACHES *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"lysis","Speaker":"SCENE","Dialogue":"A newly-erected Palaestra outside the walls of Athens. I was going from the Academy straight to the Lyceum, intending to take the outer road, which is close under the wall. When I came to the postern gate of the city, which is by the fountain of Panops, I fell in with Hippothales, the son of Hieronymus, and Ctesippus the Paeanian, and a company of young men who were standing with them. Hippothales, seeing me approach, asked whence I came and whither I was going. I am going, I replied, from the Academy straight to the Lyceum. Then come straight to us, he said, and put in here; you may as well. Who are you, I said; and where am I to come? He showed me an enclosed space and an open door over against the wall. And there, he said, is the building at which we all meet: and a goodly company we are. And what is this building, I asked; and what sort of entertainment have you? The building, he replied, is a newly erected Palaestra; and the entertainment is generally conversation, to which you are welcome. Thank you, I said; and is there any teacher there? Yes, he said, your old friend and admirer, Miccus. Indeed, I replied; he is a very eminent professor. Are you disposed, he said, to go with me and see them? Yes, I said; but I should like to know first, what is expected of me, and who is the favourite among you? Some persons have one favourite, Socrates, and some another, he said. And who is yours? I asked: tell me that, Hippothales. At this he blushed; and I said to him, O Hippothales, thou son of Hieronymus! do not say that you are, or that you are not, in love; the confession is too late; for I see that you are not only in love, but are already far gone in your love. Simple and foolish as I am, the Gods have given me the power of understanding affections of this kind. Whereupon he blushed more and more. Ctesippus said: I like to see you blushing, Hippothales, and hesitating to tell Socrates the name; when, if he were with you but for a very short time, you would have plagued him to death by talking about nothing else. Indeed, Socrates, he has literally deafened us, and stopped our ears with the praises of Lysis; and if he is a little intoxicated, there is every likelihood that we may have our sleep murdered with a cry of Lysis. His performances in prose are bad enough, but nothing at all in comparison with his verse; and when he drenches us with his poems and other compositions, it is really too bad; and worse still is his manner of singing them to his love; he has a voice which is truly appalling, and we cannot help hearing him: and now having a question put to him by you, behold he is blushing. Who is Lysis? I said: I suppose that he must be young; for the name does not recall any one to me. Why, he said, his father being a very well-known man, he retains his patronymic, and is not as yet commonly called by his own name; but, although you do not know his name, I am sure that you must know his face, for that is quite enough to distinguish him. But tell me whose son he is, I said. He is the eldest son of Democrates, of the deme of Aexone. Ah, Hippothales, I said; what a noble and really perfect love you have found! I wish that you would favour me with the exhibition which you have been making to the rest of the company, and then I shall be able to judge whether you know what a lover ought to say about his love, either to the youth himself, or to others. Nay, Socrates, he said; you surely do not attach any importance to what he is saying. Do you mean, I said, that you disown the love of the person whom he says that you love? No; but I deny that I make verses or address compositions to him. He is not in his right mind, said Ctesippus; he is talking nonsense, and is stark mad. O Hippothales, I said, if you have ever made any verses or songs in honour of your favourite, I do not want to hear them; but I want to know the purport of them, that I may be able to judge of your mode of approaching your fair one. Ctesippus will be able to tell you, he said; for if, as he avers, the sound of my words is always dinning in his ears, he must have a very accurate knowledge and recollection of them. Yes, indeed, said Ctesippus; I know only too well; and very ridiculous the tale is: for although he is a lover, and very devotedly in love, he has nothing particular to talk about to his beloved which a child might not say. Now is not that ridiculous? He can only speak of the wealth of Democrates, which the whole city celebrates, and grandfather Lysis, and the other ancestors of the youth, and their stud of horses, and their victory at the Pythian games, and at the Isthmus, and at Nemea with four horses and single horses--these are the tales which he composes and repeats. And there is greater twaddle still. Only the day before yesterday he made a poem in which he described the entertainment of Heracles, who was a connexion of the family, setting forth how in virtue of this relationship he was hospitably received by an ancestor of Lysis; this ancestor was himself begotten of Zeus by the daughter of the founder of the deme. And these are the sort of old wives' tales which he sings and recites to us, and we are obliged to listen to him. When I heard this, I said: O ridiculous Hippothales! how can you be making and singing hymns in honour of yourself before you have won? But my songs and verses, he said, are not in honour of myself, Socrates. You think not? I said. Nay, but what do you think? he replied. Most assuredly, I said, those songs are all in your own honour; for if you win your beautiful love, your discourses and songs will be a glory to you, and may be truly regarded as hymns of praise composed in honour of you who have conquered and won such a love; but if he slips away from you, the more you have praised him, the more ridiculous you will look at having lost this fairest and best of blessings; and therefore the wise lover does not praise his beloved until he has won him, because he is afraid of accidents. There is also another danger; the fair, when any one praises or magnifies them, are filled with the spirit of pride and vain-glory. Do you not agree with me? Yes, he said. And the more vain-glorious they are, the more difficult is the capture of them? I believe you. What should you say of a hunter who frightened away his prey, and made the capture of the animals which he is hunting more difficult? He would be a bad hunter, undoubtedly. Yes; and if, instead of soothing them, he were to infuriate them with words and songs, that would show a great want of wit: do you not agree. Yes. And now reflect, Hippothales, and see whether you are not guilty of all these errors in writing poetry. For I can hardly suppose that you will affirm a man to be a good poet who injures himself by his poetry. Assuredly not, he said; such a poet would be a fool. And this is the reason why I take you into my counsels, Socrates, and I shall be glad of any further advice which you may have to offer. Will you tell me by what words or actions I may become endeared to my love? That is not easy to determine, I said; but if you will bring your love to me, and will let me talk with him, I may perhaps be able to show you how to converse with him, instead of singing and reciting in the fashion of which you are accused. There will be no difficulty in bringing him, he replied; if you will only go with Ctesippus into the Palaestra, and sit down and talk, I believe that he will come of his own accord; for he is fond of listening, Socrates. And as this is the festival of the Hermaea, the young men and boys are all together, and there is no separation between them. He will be sure to come: but if he does not, Ctesippus with whom he is familiar, and whose relation Menexenus is his great friend, shall call him. That will be the way, I said. Thereupon I led Ctesippus into the Palaestra, and the rest followed. Upon entering we found that the boys had just been sacrificing; and this part of the festival was nearly at an end. They were all in their white array, and games at dice were going on among them. Most of them were in the outer court amusing themselves; but some were in a corner of the Apodyterium playing at odd and even with a number of dice, which they took out of little wicker baskets. There was also a circle of lookers-on; among them was Lysis. He was standing with the other boys and youths, having a crown upon his head, like a fair vision, and not less worthy of praise for his goodness than for his beauty. We left them, and went over to the opposite side of the room, where, finding a quiet place, we sat down; and then we began to talk. This attracted Lysis, who was constantly turning round to look at us--he was evidently wanting to come to us. For a time he hesitated and had not the courage to come alone; but first of all, his friend Menexenus, leaving his play, entered the Palaestra from the court, and when he saw Ctesippus and myself, was going to take a seat by us; and then Lysis, seeing him, followed, and sat down by his side; and the other boys joined. I should observe that Hippothales, when he saw the crowd, got behind them, where he thought that he would be out of sight of Lysis, lest he should anger him; and there he stood and listened. I turned to Menexenus, and said: Son of Demophon, which of you two youths is the elder? That is a matter of dispute between us, he said. And which is the nobler? Is that also a matter of dispute? Yes, certainly. And another disputed point is, which is the fairer? The two boys laughed. I shall not ask which is the richer of the two, I said; for you are friends, are you not? Certainly, they replied. And friends have all things in common, so that one of you can be no richer than the other, if you say truly that you are friends. They assented. I was about to ask which was the juster of the two, and which was the wiser of the two; but at this moment Menexenus was called away by some one who came and said that the gymnastic-master wanted him. I supposed that he had to offer sacrifice. So he went away, and I asked Lysis some more questions. I dare say, Lysis, I said, that your father and mother love you very much. Certainly, he said. And they would wish you to be perfectly happy. Yes. But do you think that any one is happy who is in the condition of a slave, and who cannot do what he likes? I should think not indeed, he said. And if your father and mother love you, and desire that you should be happy, no one can doubt that they are very ready to promote your happiness. Certainly, he replied. And do they then permit you to do what you like, and never rebuke you or hinder you from doing what you desire? Yes, indeed, Socrates; there are a great many things which they hinder me from doing. What do you mean? I said. Do they want you to be happy, and yet hinder you from doing what you like? for example, if you want to mount one of your father's chariots, and take the reins at a race, they will not allow you to do so--they will prevent you? Certainly, he said, they will not allow me to do so. Whom then will they allow? There is a charioteer, whom my father pays for driving. And do they trust a hireling more than you? and may he do what he likes with the horses? and do they pay him for this? They do. But I dare say that you may take the whip and guide the mule-cart if you like;--they will permit that? Permit me! indeed they will not. Then, I said, may no one use the whip to the mules? Yes, he said, the muleteer. And is he a slave or a free man? A slave, he said. And do they esteem a slave of more value than you who are their son? And do they entrust their property to him rather than to you? and allow him to do what he likes, when they prohibit you? Answer me now: Are you your own master, or do they not even allow that? Nay, he said; of course they do not allow it. Then you have a master? Yes, my tutor; there he is. And is he a slave? To be sure; he is our slave, he replied. Surely, I said, this is a strange thing, that a free man should be governed by a slave. And what does he do with you? He takes me to my teachers. You do not mean to say that your teachers also rule over you? Of course they do. Then I must say that your father is pleased to inflict many lords and masters on you. But at any rate when you go home to your mother, she will let you have your own way, and will not interfere with your happiness; her wool, or the piece of cloth which she is weaving, are at your disposal: I am sure that there is nothing to hinder you from touching her wooden spathe, or her comb, or any other of her spinning implements. Nay, Socrates, he replied, laughing; not only does she hinder me, but I should be beaten if I were to touch one of them. Well, I said, this is amazing. And did you ever behave ill to your father or your mother? No, indeed, he replied. But why then are they so terribly anxious to prevent you from being happy, and doing as you like?--keeping you all day long in subjection to another, and, in a word, doing nothing which you desire; so that you have no good, as would appear, out of their great possessions, which are under the control of anybody rather than of you, and have no use of your own fair person, which is tended and taken care of by another; while you, Lysis, are master of nobody, and can do nothing? Why, he said, Socrates, the reason is that I am not of age. I doubt whether that is the real reason, I said; for I should imagine that your father Democrates, and your mother, do permit you to do many things already, and do not wait until you are of age: for example, if they want anything read or written, you, I presume, would be the first person in the house who is summoned by them. Very true. And you would be allowed to write or read the letters in any order which you please, or to take up the lyre and tune the notes, and play with the fingers, or strike with the plectrum, exactly as you please, and neither father nor mother would interfere with you. That is true, he said. Then what can be the reason, Lysis, I said, why they allow you to do the one and not the other? I suppose, he said, because I understand the one, and not the other. Yes, my dear youth, I said, the reason is not any deficiency of years, but a deficiency of knowledge; and whenever your father thinks that you are wiser than he is, he will instantly commit himself and his possessions to you. I think so. Aye, I said; and about your neighbour, too, does not the same rule hold as about your father? If he is satisfied that you know more of housekeeping than he does, will he continue to administer his affairs himself, or will he commit them to you? I think that he will commit them to me. Will not the Athenian people, too, entrust their affairs to you when they see that you have wisdom enough to manage them? Yes. And oh! let me put another case, I said: There is the great king, and he has an eldest son, who is the Prince of Asia;--suppose that you and I go to him and establish to his satisfaction that we are better cooks than his son, will he not entrust to us the prerogative of making soup, and putting in anything that we like while the pot is boiling, rather than to the Prince of Asia, who is his son? To us, clearly. And we shall be allowed to throw in salt by handfuls, whereas the son will not be allowed to put in as much as he can take up between his fingers? Of course. Or suppose again that the son has bad eyes, will he allow him, or will he not allow him, to touch his own eyes if he thinks that he has no knowledge of medicine? He will not allow him. Whereas, if he supposes us to have a knowledge of medicine, he will allow us to do what we like with him--even to open the eyes wide and sprinkle ashes upon them, because he supposes that we know what is best? That is true. And everything in which we appear to him to be wiser than himself or his son he will commit to us? That is very true, Socrates, he replied. Then now, my dear Lysis, I said, you perceive that in things which we know every one will trust us,--Hellenes and barbarians, men and women,--and we may do as we please about them, and no one will like to interfere with us; we shall be free, and masters of others; and these things will be really ours, for we shall be benefited by them. But in things of which we have no understanding, no one will trust us to do as seems good to us--they will hinder us as far as they can; and not only strangers, but father and mother, and the friend, if there be one, who is dearer still, will also hinder us; and we shall be subject to others; and these things will not be ours, for we shall not be benefited by them. Do you agree? He assented. And shall we be friends to others, and will any others love us, in as far as we are useless to them? Certainly not. Neither can your father or mother love you, nor can anybody love anybody else, in so far as they are useless to them? No. And therefore, my boy, if you are wise, all men will be your friends and kindred, for you will be useful and good; but if you are not wise, neither father, nor mother, nor kindred, nor any one else, will be your friends. And in matters of which you have as yet no knowledge, can you have any conceit of knowledge? That is impossible, he replied. And you, Lysis, if you require a teacher, have not yet attained to wisdom. True. And therefore you are not conceited, having nothing of which to be conceited. Indeed, Socrates, I think not. When I heard him say this, I turned to Hippothales, and was very nearly making a blunder, for I was going to say to him: That is the way, Hippothales, in which you should talk to your beloved, humbling and lowering him, and not as you do, puffing him up and spoiling him. But I saw that he was in great excitement and confusion at what had been said, and I remembered that, although he was in the neighbourhood, he did not want to be seen by Lysis; so upon second thoughts I refrained. In the meantime Menexenus came back and sat down in his place by Lysis; and Lysis, in a childish and affectionate manner, whispered privately in my ear, so that Menexenus should not hear: Do, Socrates, tell Menexenus what you have been telling me. Suppose that you tell him yourself, Lysis, I replied; for I am sure that you were attending. Certainly, he replied. Try, then, to remember the words, and be as exact as you can in repeating them to him, and if you have forgotten anything, ask me again the next time that you see me. I will be sure to do so, Socrates; but go on telling him something new, and let me hear, as long as I am allowed to stay. I certainly cannot refuse, I said, since you ask me; but then, as you know, Menexenus is very pugnacious, and therefore you must come to the rescue if he attempts to upset me. Yes, indeed, he said; he is very pugnacious, and that is the reason why I want you to argue with him. That I may make a fool of myself? No, indeed, he said; but I want you to put him down. That is no easy matter, I replied; for he is a terrible fellow--a pupil of Ctesippus. And there is Ctesippus himself: do you see him? Never mind, Socrates, you shall argue with him. Well, I suppose that I must, I replied. Hereupon Ctesippus complained that we were talking in secret, and keeping the feast to ourselves. I shall be happy, I said, to let you have a share. Here is Lysis, who does not understand something that I was saying, and wants me to ask Menexenus, who, as he thinks, is likely to know. And why do you not ask him? he said. Very well, I said, I will; and do you, Menexenus, answer. But first I must tell you that I am one who from my childhood upward have set my heart upon a certain thing. All people have their fancies; some desire horses, and others dogs; and some are fond of gold, and others of honour. Now, I have no violent desire of any of these things; but I have a passion for friends; and I would rather have a good friend than the best cock or quail in the world: I would even go further, and say the best horse or dog. Yea, by the dog of Egypt, I should greatly prefer a real friend to all the gold of Darius, or even to Darius himself: I am such a lover of friends as that. And when I see you and Lysis, at your early age, so easily possessed of this treasure, and so soon, he of you, and you of him, I am amazed and delighted, seeing that I myself, although I am now advanced in years, am so far from having made a similar acquisition, that I do not even know in what way a friend is acquired. But I want to ask you a question about this, for you have experience: tell me then, when one loves another, is the lover or the beloved the friend; or may either be the friend? Either may, I should think, be the friend of either. Do you mean, I said, that if only one of them loves the other, they are mutual friends? Yes, he said; that is my meaning. But what if the lover is not loved in return? which is a very possible case. Yes. Or is, perhaps, even hated? which is a fancy which sometimes is entertained by lovers respecting their beloved. Nothing can exceed their love; and yet they imagine either that they are not loved in return, or that they are hated. Is not that true? Yes, he said, quite true. In that case, the one loves, and the other is loved? Yes. Then which is the friend of which? Is the lover the friend of the beloved, whether he be loved in return, or hated; or is the beloved the friend; or is there no friendship at all on either side, unless they both love one another? There would seem to be none at all. Then this notion is not in accordance with our previous one. We were saying that both were friends, if one only loved; but now, unless they both love, neither is a friend. That appears to be true. Then nothing which does not love in return is beloved by a lover? I think not. Then they are not lovers of horses, whom the horses do not love in return; nor lovers of quails, nor of dogs, nor of wine, nor of gymnastic exercises, who have no return of love; no, nor of wisdom, unless wisdom loves them in return. Or shall we say that they do love them, although they are not beloved by them; and that the poet was wrong who sings-- 'Happy the man to whom his children are dear, and steeds having single hoofs, and dogs of chase, and the stranger of another land'? I do not think that he was wrong. You think that he is right? Yes. Then, Menexenus, the conclusion is, that what is beloved, whether loving or hating, may be dear to the lover of it: for example, very young children, too young to love, or even hating their father or mother when they are punished by them, are never dearer to them than at the time when they are being hated by them. I think that what you say is true. And, if so, not the lover, but the beloved, is the friend or dear one? Yes. And the hated one, and not the hater, is the enemy? Clearly. Then many men are loved by their enemies, and hated by their friends, and are the friends of their enemies, and the enemies of their friends. Yet how absurd, my dear friend, or indeed impossible is this paradox of a man being an enemy to his friend or a friend to his enemy. I quite agree, Socrates, in what you say. But if this cannot be, the lover will be the friend of that which is loved? True. And the hater will be the enemy of that which is hated? Certainly. Yet we must acknowledge in this, as in the preceding instance, that a man may be the friend of one who is not his friend, or who may be his enemy, when he loves that which does not love him or which even hates him. And he may be the enemy of one who is not his enemy, and is even his friend: for example, when he hates that which does not hate him, or which even loves him. That appears to be true. But if the lover is not a friend, nor the beloved a friend, nor both together, what are we to say? Whom are we to call friends to one another? Do any remain? Indeed, Socrates, I cannot find any. But, O Menexenus! I said, may we not have been altogether wrong in our conclusions? I am sure that we have been wrong, Socrates, said Lysis. And he blushed as he spoke, the words seeming to come from his lips involuntarily, because his whole mind was taken up with the argument; there was no mistaking his attentive look while he was listening. I was pleased at the interest which was shown by Lysis, and I wanted to give Menexenus a rest, so I turned to him and said, I think, Lysis, that what you say is true, and that, if we had been right, we should never have gone so far wrong; let us proceed no further in this direction (for the road seems to be getting troublesome), but take the other path into which we turned, and see what the poets have to say; for they are to us in a manner the fathers and authors of wisdom, and they speak of friends in no light or trivial manner, but God himself, as they say, makes them and draws them to one another; and this they express, if I am not mistaken, in the following words:-- 'God is ever drawing like towards like, and making them acquainted.' I dare say that you have heard those words. Yes, he said; I have. And have you not also met with the treatises of philosophers who say that like must love like? they are the people who argue and write about nature and the universe. Very true, he replied. And are they right in saying this? They may be. Perhaps, I said, about half, or possibly, altogether, right, if their meaning were rightly apprehended by us. For the more a bad man has to do with a bad man, and the more nearly he is brought into contact with him, the more he will be likely to hate him, for he injures him; and injurer and injured cannot be friends. Is not that true? Yes, he said. Then one half of the saying is untrue, if the wicked are like one another? That is true. But the real meaning of the saying, as I imagine, is, that the good are like one another, and friends to one another; and that the bad, as is often said of them, are never at unity with one another or with themselves; for they are passionate and restless, and anything which is at variance and enmity with itself is not likely to be in union or harmony with any other thing. Do you not agree? Yes, I do. Then, my friend, those who say that the like is friendly to the like mean to intimate, if I rightly apprehend them, that the good only is the friend of the good, and of him only; but that the evil never attains to any real friendship, either with good or evil. Do you agree? He nodded assent. Then now we know how to answer the question 'Who are friends?' for the argument declares 'That the good are friends.' Yes, he said, that is true. Yes, I replied; and yet I am not quite satisfied with this answer. By heaven, and shall I tell you what I suspect? I will. Assuming that like, inasmuch as he is like, is the friend of like, and useful to him--or rather let me try another way of putting the matter: Can like do any good or harm to like which he could not do to himself, or suffer anything from his like which he would not suffer from himself? And if neither can be of any use to the other, how can they be loved by one another? Can they now? They cannot. And can he who is not loved be a friend? Certainly not. But say that the like is not the friend of the like in so far as he is like; still the good may be the friend of the good in so far as he is good? True. But then again, will not the good, in so far as he is good, be sufficient for himself? Certainly he will. And he who is sufficient wants nothing--that is implied in the word sufficient. Of course not. And he who wants nothing will desire nothing? He will not. Neither can he love that which he does not desire? He cannot. And he who loves not is not a lover or friend? Clearly not. What place then is there for friendship, if, when absent, good men have no need of one another (for even when alone they are sufficient for themselves), and when present have no use of one another? How can such persons ever be induced to value one another? They cannot. And friends they cannot be, unless they value one another? Very true. But see now, Lysis, whether we are not being deceived in all this--are we not indeed entirely wrong? How so? he replied. Have I not heard some one say, as I just now recollect, that the like is the greatest enemy of the like, the good of the good?--Yes, and he quoted the authority of Hesiod, who says: 'Potter quarrels with potter, bard with bard, Beggar with beggar;' and of all other things he affirmed, in like manner, 'That of necessity the most like are most full of envy, strife, and hatred of one another, and the most unlike, of friendship. For the poor man is compelled to be the friend of the rich, and the weak requires the aid of the strong, and the sick man of the physician; and every one who is ignorant, has to love and court him who knows.' And indeed he went on to say in grandiloquent language, that the idea of friendship existing between similars is not the truth, but the very reverse of the truth, and that the most opposed are the most friendly; for that everything desires not like but that which is most unlike: for example, the dry desires the moist, the cold the hot, the bitter the sweet, the sharp the blunt, the void the full, the full the void, and so of all other things; for the opposite is the food of the opposite, whereas like receives nothing from like. And I thought that he who said this was a charming man, and that he spoke well. What do the rest of you say? I should say, at first hearing, that he is right, said Menexenus. Then we are to say that the greatest friendship is of opposites? Exactly. Yes, Menexenus; but will not that be a monstrous answer? and will not the all-wise eristics be down upon us in triumph, and ask, fairly enough, whether love is not the very opposite of hate; and what answer shall we make to them--must we not admit that they speak the truth? We must. They will then proceed to ask whether the enemy is the friend of the friend, or the friend the friend of the enemy? Neither, he replied. Well, but is a just man the friend of the unjust, or the temperate of the intemperate, or the good of the bad? I do not see how that is possible. And yet, I said, if friendship goes by contraries, the contraries must be friends. They must. Then neither like and like nor unlike and unlike are friends. I suppose not. And yet there is a further consideration: may not all these notions of friendship be erroneous? but may not that which is neither good nor evil still in some cases be the friend of the good? How do you mean? he said. Why really, I said, the truth is that I do not know; but my head is dizzy with thinking of the argument, and therefore I hazard the conjecture, that 'the beautiful is the friend,' as the old proverb says. Beauty is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature which easily slips in and permeates our souls. For I affirm that the good is the beautiful. You will agree to that? Yes. This I say from a sort of notion that what is neither good nor evil is the friend of the beautiful and the good, and I will tell you why I am inclined to think so: I assume that there are three principles--the good, the bad, and that which is neither good nor bad. You would agree--would you not? I agree. And neither is the good the friend of the good, nor the evil of the evil, nor the good of the evil;--these alternatives are excluded by the previous argument; and therefore, if there be such a thing as friendship or love at all, we must infer that what is neither good nor evil must be the friend, either of the good, or of that which is neither good nor evil, for nothing can be the friend of the bad. True. But neither can like be the friend of like, as we were just now saying. True. And if so, that which is neither good nor evil can have no friend which is neither good nor evil. Clearly not. Then the good alone is the friend of that only which is neither good nor evil. That may be assumed to be certain. And does not this seem to put us in the right way? Just remark, that the body which is in health requires neither medical nor any other aid, but is well enough; and the healthy man has no love of the physician, because he is in health. He has none. But the sick loves him, because he is sick? Certainly. And sickness is an evil, and the art of medicine a good and useful thing? Yes. But the human body, regarded as a body, is neither good nor evil? True. And the body is compelled by reason of disease to court and make friends of the art of medicine? Yes. Then that which is neither good nor evil becomes the friend of good, by reason of the presence of evil? So we may infer. And clearly this must have happened before that which was neither good nor evil had become altogether corrupted with the element of evil--if itself had become evil it would not still desire and love the good; for, as we were saying, the evil cannot be the friend of the good. Impossible. Further, I must observe that some substances are assimilated when others are present with them; and there are some which are not assimilated: take, for example, the case of an ointment or colour which is put on another substance. Very good. In such a case, is the substance which is anointed the same as the colour or ointment? What do you mean? he said. This is what I mean: Suppose that I were to cover your auburn locks with white lead, would they be really white, or would they only appear to be white? They would only appear to be white, he replied. And yet whiteness would be present in them? True. But that would not make them at all the more white, notwithstanding the presence of white in them--they would not be white any more than black? No. But when old age infuses whiteness into them, then they become assimilated, and are white by the presence of white. Certainly. Now I want to know whether in all cases a substance is assimilated by the presence of another substance; or must the presence be after a peculiar sort? The latter, he said. Then that which is neither good nor evil may be in the presence of evil, but not as yet evil, and that has happened before now? Yes. And when anything is in the presence of evil, not being as yet evil, the presence of good arouses the desire of good in that thing; but the presence of evil, which makes a thing evil, takes away the desire and friendship of the good; for that which was once both good and evil has now become evil only, and the good was supposed to have no friendship with the evil? None. And therefore we say that those who are already wise, whether Gods or men, are no longer lovers of wisdom; nor can they be lovers of wisdom who are ignorant to the extent of being evil, for no evil or ignorant person is a lover of wisdom. There remain those who have the misfortune to be ignorant, but are not yet hardened in their ignorance, or void of understanding, and do not as yet fancy that they know what they do not know: and therefore those who are the lovers of wisdom are as yet neither good nor bad. But the bad do not love wisdom any more than the good; for, as we have already seen, neither is unlike the friend of unlike, nor like of like. You remember that? Yes, they both said. And so, Lysis and Menexenus, we have discovered the nature of friendship--there can be no doubt of it: Friendship is the love which by reason of the presence of evil the neither good nor evil has of the good, either in the soul, or in the body, or anywhere. They both agreed and entirely assented, and for a moment I rejoiced and was satisfied like a huntsman just holding fast his prey. But then a most unaccountable suspicion came across me, and I felt that the conclusion was untrue. I was pained, and said, Alas! Lysis and Menexenus, I am afraid that we have been grasping at a shadow only. Why do you say so? said Menexenus. I am afraid, I said, that the argument about friendship is false: arguments, like men, are often pretenders. How do you mean? he asked. Well, I said; look at the matter in this way: a friend is the friend of some one; is he not? Certainly he is. And has he a motive and object in being a friend, or has he no motive and object? He has a motive and object. And is the object which makes him a friend, dear to him, or neither dear nor hateful to him? I do not quite follow you, he said. I do not wonder at that, I said. But perhaps, if I put the matter in another way, you will be able to follow me, and my own meaning will be clearer to myself. The sick man, as I was just now saying, is the friend of the physician--is he not? Yes. And he is the friend of the physician because of disease, and for the sake of health? Yes. And disease is an evil? Certainly. And what of health? I said. Is that good or evil, or neither? Good, he replied. And we were saying, I believe, that the body being neither good nor evil, because of disease, that is to say because of evil, is the friend of medicine, and medicine is a good: and medicine has entered into this friendship for the sake of health, and health is a good. True. And is health a friend, or not a friend? A friend. And disease is an enemy? Yes. Then that which is neither good nor evil is the friend of the good because of the evil and hateful, and for the sake of the good and the friend? Clearly. Then the friend is a friend for the sake of the friend, and because of the enemy? That is to be inferred. Then at this point, my boys, let us take heed, and be on our guard against deceptions. I will not again repeat that the friend is the friend of the friend, and the like of the like, which has been declared by us to be an impossibility; but, in order that this new statement may not delude us, let us attentively examine another point, which I will proceed to explain: Medicine, as we were saying, is a friend, or dear to us for the sake of health? Yes. And health is also dear? Certainly. And if dear, then dear for the sake of something? Yes. And surely this object must also be dear, as is implied in our previous admissions? Yes. And that something dear involves something else dear? Yes. But then, proceeding in this way, shall we not arrive at some first principle of friendship or dearness which is not capable of being referred to any other, for the sake of which, as we maintain, all other things are dear, and, having there arrived, we shall stop? True. My fear is that all those other things, which, as we say, are dear for the sake of another, are illusions and deceptions only, but where that first principle is, there is the true ideal of friendship. Let me put the matter thus: Suppose the case of a great treasure (this may be a son, who is more precious to his father than all his other treasures); would not the father, who values his son above all things, value other things also for the sake of his son? I mean, for instance, if he knew that his son had drunk hemlock, and the father thought that wine would save him, he would value the wine? He would. And also the vessel which contains the wine? Certainly. But does he therefore value the three measures of wine, or the earthen vessel which contains them, equally with his son? Is not this rather the true state of the case? All his anxiety has regard not to the means which are provided for the sake of an object, but to the object for the sake of which they are provided. And although we may often say that gold and silver are highly valued by us, that is not the truth; for there is a further object, whatever it may be, which we value most of all, and for the sake of which gold and all our other possessions are acquired by us. Am I not right? Yes, certainly. And may not the same be said of the friend? That which is only dear to us for the sake of something else is improperly said to be dear, but the truly dear is that in which all these so-called dear friendships terminate. That, he said, appears to be true. And the truly dear or ultimate principle of friendship is not for the sake of any other or further dear. True. Then we have done with the notion that friendship has any further object. May we then infer that the good is the friend? I think so. And the good is loved for the sake of the evil? Let me put the case in this way: Suppose that of the three principles, good, evil, and that which is neither good nor evil, there remained only the good and the neutral, and that evil went far away, and in no way affected soul or body, nor ever at all that class of things which, as we say, are neither good nor evil in themselves;--would the good be of any use, or other than useless to us? For if there were nothing to hurt us any longer, we should have no need of anything that would do us good. Then would be clearly seen that we did but love and desire the good because of the evil, and as the remedy of the evil, which was the disease; but if there had been no disease, there would have been no need of a remedy. Is not this the nature of the good--to be loved by us who are placed between the two, because of the evil? but there is no use in the good for its own sake. I suppose not. Then the final principle of friendship, in which all other friendships terminated, those, I mean, which are relatively dear and for the sake of something else, is of another and a different nature from them. For they are called dear because of another dear or friend. But with the true friend or dear, the case is quite the reverse; for that is proved to be dear because of the hated, and if the hated were away it would be no longer dear. Very true, he replied: at any rate not if our present view holds good. But, oh! will you tell me, I said, whether if evil were to perish, we should hunger any more, or thirst any more, or have any similar desire? Or may we suppose that hunger will remain while men and animals remain, but not so as to be hurtful? And the same of thirst and the other desires,--that they will remain, but will not be evil because evil has perished? Or rather shall I say, that to ask what either will be then or will not be is ridiculous, for who knows? This we do know, that in our present condition hunger may injure us, and may also benefit us:--Is not that true? Yes. And in like manner thirst or any similar desire may sometimes be a good and sometimes an evil to us, and sometimes neither one nor the other? To be sure. But is there any reason why, because evil perishes, that which is not evil should perish with it? None. Then, even if evil perishes, the desires which are neither good nor evil will remain? Clearly they will. And must not a man love that which he desires and affects? He must. Then, even if evil perishes, there may still remain some elements of love or friendship? Yes. But not if evil is the cause of friendship: for in that case nothing will be the friend of any other thing after the destruction of evil; for the effect cannot remain when the cause is destroyed. True. And have we not admitted already that the friend loves something for a reason? and at the time of making the admission we were of opinion that the neither good nor evil loves the good because of the evil? Very true. But now our view is changed, and we conceive that there must be some other cause of friendship? I suppose so. May not the truth be rather, as we were saying just now, that desire is the cause of friendship; for that which desires is dear to that which is desired at the time of desiring it? and may not the other theory have been only a long story about nothing? Likely enough. But surely, I said, he who desires, desires that of which he is in want? Yes. And that of which he is in want is dear to him? True. And he is in want of that of which he is deprived? Certainly. Then love, and desire, and friendship would appear to be of the natural or congenial. Such, Lysis and Menexenus, is the inference. They assented. Then if you are friends, you must have natures which are congenial to one another? Certainly, they both said. And I say, my boys, that no one who loves or desires another would ever have loved or desired or affected him, if he had not been in some way congenial to him, either in his soul, or in his character, or in his manners, or in his form. Yes, yes, said Menexenus. But Lysis was silent. Then, I said, the conclusion is, that what is of a congenial nature must be loved. It follows, he said. Then the lover, who is true and no counterfeit, must of necessity be loved by his love. Lysis and Menexenus gave a faint assent to this; and Hippothales changed into all manner of colours with delight. Here, intending to revise the argument, I said: Can we point out any difference between the congenial and the like? For if that is possible, then I think, Lysis and Menexenus, there may be some sense in our argument about friendship. But if the congenial is only the like, how will you get rid of the other argument, of the uselessness of like to like in as far as they are like; for to say that what is useless is dear, would be absurd? Suppose, then, that we agree to distinguish between the congenial and the like--in the intoxication of argument, that may perhaps be allowed. Very true. And shall we further say that the good is congenial, and the evil uncongenial to every one? Or again that the evil is congenial to the evil, and the good to the good; and that which is neither good nor evil to that which is neither good nor evil? They agreed to the latter alternative. Then, my boys, we have again fallen into the old discarded error; for the unjust will be the friend of the unjust, and the bad of the bad, as well as the good of the good. That appears to be the result. But again, if we say that the congenial is the same as the good, in that case the good and he only will be the friend of the good. True. But that too was a position of ours which, as you will remember, has been already refuted by ourselves. We remember. Then what is to be done? Or rather is there anything to be done? I can only, like the wise men who argue in courts, sum up the arguments:--If neither the beloved, nor the lover, nor the like, nor the unlike, nor the good, nor the congenial, nor any other of whom we spoke--for there were such a number of them that I cannot remember all--if none of these are friends, I know not what remains to be said. Here I was going to invite the opinion of some older person, when suddenly we were interrupted by the tutors of Lysis and Menexenus, who came upon us like an evil apparition with their brothers, and bade them go home, as it was getting late. At first, we and the by-standers drove them off; but afterwards, as they would not mind, and only went on shouting in their barbarous dialect, and got angry, and kept calling the boys--they appeared to us to have been drinking rather too much at the Hermaea, which made them difficult to manage--we fairly gave way and broke up the company. I said, however, a few words to the boys at parting: O Menexenus and Lysis, how ridiculous that you two boys, and I, an old boy, who would fain be one of you, should imagine ourselves to be friends--this is what the by-standers will go away and say--and as yet we have not been able to discover what is a friend! *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LYSIS *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. 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{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Welcome, Ion. Are you from your native city of Ephesus?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"No, Socrates; but from Epidaurus, where I attended the festival of Asclepius."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do the Epidaurians have contests of rhapsodes at the festival?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"O yes; and of all sorts of musical performers."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And were you one of the competitors--and did you succeed?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"I obtained the first prize of all, Socrates."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well done; and I hope that you will do the same for us at the Panathenaea."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"And I will, please heaven."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I often envy the profession of a rhapsode, Ion; for you have always to wear fine clothes, and to look as beautiful as you can is a part of your art. Then, again, you are obliged to be continually in the company of many good poets; and especially of Homer, who is the best and most divine of them; and to understand him, and not merely learn his words by rote, is a thing greatly to be envied. And no man can be a rhapsode who does not understand the meaning of the poet. For the rhapsode ought to interpret the mind of the poet to his hearers, but how can he interpret him well unless he knows what he means? All this is greatly to be envied."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Very true, Socrates; interpretation has certainly been the most laborious part of my art; and I believe myself able to speak about Homer better than any man; and that neither Metrodorus of Lampsacus, nor Stesimbrotus of Thasos, nor Glaucon, nor any one else who ever was, had as good ideas about Homer as I have, or as many."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am glad to hear you say so, Ion; I see that you will not refuse to acquaint me with them."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Certainly, Socrates; and you really ought to hear how exquisitely I render Homer. I think that the Homeridae should give me a golden crown."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I shall take an opportunity of hearing your embellishments of him at some other time. But just now I should like to ask you a question: Does your art extend to Hesiod and Archilochus, or to Homer only?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"To Homer only; he is in himself quite enough."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are there any things about which Homer and Hesiod agree?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes; in my opinion there are a good many."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can you interpret better what Homer says, or what Hesiod says, about these matters in which they agree?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"I can interpret them equally well, Socrates, where they agree."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But what about matters in which they do not agree?--for example, about divination, of which both Homer and Hesiod have something to say,--"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Very true:"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Would you or a good prophet be a better interpreter of what these two poets say about divination, not only when they agree, but when they disagree?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"A prophet."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if you were a prophet, would you not be able to interpret them when they disagree as well as when they agree?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But how did you come to have this skill about Homer only, and not about Hesiod or the other poets? Does not Homer speak of the same themes which all other poets handle? Is not war his great argument? and does he not speak of human society and of intercourse of men, good and bad, skilled and unskilled, and of the gods conversing with one another and with mankind, and about what happens in heaven and in the world below, and the generations of gods and heroes? Are not these the themes of which Homer sings?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Very true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do not the other poets sing of the same?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; but not in the same way as Homer."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What, in a worse way?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes, in a far worse."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And Homer in a better way?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"He is incomparably better."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet surely, my dear friend Ion, in a discussion about arithmetic, where many people are speaking, and one speaks better than the rest, there is somebody who can judge which of them is the good speaker?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who judges of the good will be the same as he who judges of the bad speakers?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"The same."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he will be the arithmetician?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and in discussions about the wholesomeness of food, when many persons are speaking, and one speaks better than the rest, will he who recognizes the better speaker be a different person from him who recognizes the worse, or the same?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Clearly the same."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And who is he, and what is his name?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"The physician."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And speaking generally, in all discussions in which the subject is the same and many men are speaking, will not he who knows the good know the bad speaker also? For if he does not know the bad, neither will he know the good when the same topic is being discussed."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is not the same person skilful in both?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you say that Homer and the other poets, such as Hesiod and Archilochus, speak of the same things, although not in the same way; but the one speaks well and the other not so well?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes; and I am right in saying so."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if you knew the good speaker, you would also know the inferior speakers to be inferior?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, my dear friend, can I be mistaken in saying that Ion is equally skilled in Homer and in other poets, since he himself acknowledges that the same person will be a good judge of all those who speak of the same things; and that almost all poets do speak of the same things?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Why then, Socrates, do I lose attention and go to sleep and have absolutely no ideas of the least value, when any one speaks of any other poet; but when Homer is mentioned, I wake up at once and am all attention and have plenty to say?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The reason, my friend, is obvious. No one can fail to see that you speak of Homer without any art or knowledge. If you were able to speak of him by rules of art, you would have been able to speak of all other poets; for poetry is a whole."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when any one acquires any other art as a whole, the same may be said of them. Would you like me to explain my meaning, Ion?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed, Socrates; I very much wish that you would: for I love to hear you wise men talk."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"O that we were wise, Ion, and that you could truly call us so; but you rhapsodes and actors, and the poets whose verses you sing, are wise; whereas I am a common man, who only speak the truth. For consider what a very commonplace and trivial thing is this which I have said--a thing which any man might say: that when a man has acquired a knowledge of a whole art, the enquiry into good and bad is one and the same. Let us consider this matter; is not the art of painting a whole?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there are and have been many painters good and bad?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And did you ever know any one who was skilful in pointing out the excellences and defects of Polygnotus the son of Aglaophon, but incapable of criticizing other painters; and when the work of any other painter was produced, went to sleep and was at a loss, and had no ideas; but when he had to give his opinion about Polygnotus, or whoever the painter might be, and about him only, woke up and was attentive and had plenty to say?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"No indeed, I have never known such a person."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or did you ever know of any one in sculpture, who was skilful in expounding the merits of Daedalus the son of Metion, or of Epeius the son of Panopeus, or of Theodorus the Samian, or of any individual sculptor; but when the works of sculptors in general were produced, was at a loss and went to sleep and had nothing to say?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"No indeed; no more than the other."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if I am not mistaken, you never met with any one among flute-players or harp-players or singers to the harp or rhapsodes who was able to discourse of Olympus or Thamyras or Orpheus, or Phemius the rhapsode of Ithaca, but was at a loss when he came to speak of Ion of Ephesus, and had no notion of his merits or defects?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"I cannot deny what you say, Socrates. Nevertheless I am conscious in my own self, and the world agrees with me in thinking that I do speak better and have more to say about Homer than any other man. But I do not speak equally well about others--tell me the reason of this."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I perceive, Ion; and I will proceed to explain to you what I imagine to be the reason of this. The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration. For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees, winging their way from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles. Many are the noble words in which poets speak concerning the actions of men; but like yourself when speaking about Homer, they do not speak of them by any rules of art: they are simply inspired to utter that to which the Muse impels them, and that only; and when inspired, one of them will make dithyrambs, another hymns of praise, another choral strains, another epic or iambic verses--and he who is good at one is not good at any other kind of verse: for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us. And Tynnichus the Chalcidian affords a striking instance of what I am saying: he wrote nothing that any one would care to remember but the famous paean which is in every one's mouth, one of the finest poems ever written, simply an invention of the Muses, as he himself says. For in this way the God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods by whom they are severally possessed. Was not this the lesson which the God intended to teach when by the mouth of the worst of poets he sang the best of songs? Am I not right, Ion?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed, Socrates, I feel that you are; for your words touch my soul, and I am persuaded that good poets by a divine inspiration interpret the things of the Gods to us."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you rhapsodists are the interpreters of the poets?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"There again you are right."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you are the interpreters of interpreters?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Precisely."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I wish you would frankly tell me, Ion, what I am going to ask of you: When you produce the greatest effect upon the audience in the recitation of some striking passage, such as the apparition of Odysseus leaping forth on the floor, recognized by the suitors and casting his arrows at his feet, or the description of Achilles rushing at Hector, or the sorrows of Andromache, Hecuba, or Priam,--are you in your right mind? Are you not carried out of yourself, and does not your soul in an ecstasy seem to be among the persons or places of which you are speaking, whether they are in Ithaca or in Troy or whatever may be the scene of the poem?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"That proof strikes home to me, Socrates. For I must frankly confess that at the tale of pity my eyes are filled with tears, and when I speak of horrors, my hair stands on end and my heart throbs."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, Ion, and what are we to say of a man who at a sacrifice or festival, when he is dressed in holiday attire, and has golden crowns upon his head, of which nobody has robbed him, appears weeping or panic-stricken in the presence of more than twenty thousand friendly faces, when there is no one despoiling or wronging him;--is he in his right mind or is he not?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"No indeed, Socrates, I must say that, strictly speaking, he is not in his right mind."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are you aware that you produce similar effects on most of the spectators?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Only too well; for I look down upon them from the stage, and behold the various emotions of pity, wonder, sternness, stamped upon their countenances when I am speaking: and I am obliged to give my very best attention to them; for if I make them cry I myself shall laugh, and if I make them laugh I myself shall cry when the time of payment arrives."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you know that the spectator is the last of the rings which, as I am saying, receive the power of the original magnet from one another? The rhapsode like yourself and the actor are intermediate links, and the poet himself is the first of them. Through all these the God sways the souls of men in any direction which he pleases, and makes one man hang down from another. Thus there is a vast chain of dancers and masters and under-masters of choruses, who are suspended, as if from the stone, at the side of the rings which hang down from the Muse. And every poet has some Muse from whom he is suspended, and by whom he is said to be possessed, which is nearly the same thing; for he is taken hold of. And from these first rings, which are the poets, depend others, some deriving their inspiration from Orpheus, others from Musaeus; but the greater number are possessed and held by Homer. Of whom, Ion, you are one, and are possessed by Homer; and when any one repeats the words of another poet you go to sleep, and know not what to say; but when any one recites a strain of Homer you wake up in a moment, and your soul leaps within you, and you have plenty to say; for not by art or knowledge about Homer do you say what you say, but by divine inspiration and by possession; just as the Corybantian revellers too have a quick perception of that strain only which is appropriated to the God by whom they are possessed, and have plenty of dances and words for that, but take no heed of any other. And you, Ion, when the name of Homer is mentioned have plenty to say, and have nothing to say of others. You ask, 'Why is this?' The answer is that you praise Homer not by art but by divine inspiration."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"That is good, Socrates; and yet I doubt whether you will ever have eloquence enough to persuade me that I praise Homer only when I am mad and possessed; and if you could hear me speak of him I am sure you would never think this to be the case."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should like very much to hear you, but not until you have answered a question which I have to ask. On what part of Homer do you speak well?--not surely about every part."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"There is no part, Socrates, about which I do not speak well: of that I can assure you."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Surely not about things in Homer of which you have no knowledge?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"And what is there in Homer of which I have no knowledge?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, does not Homer speak in many passages about arts? For example, about driving; if I can only remember the lines I will repeat them."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"I remember, and will repeat them."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Tell me then, what Nestor says to Antilochus, his son, where he bids him be careful of the turn at the horserace in honour of Patroclus."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"'Bend gently,' he says, 'in the polished chariot to the left of them, and urge the horse on the right hand with whip and voice; and slacken the rein. And when you are at the goal, let the left horse draw near, yet so that the nave of the well-wrought wheel may not even seem to touch the extremity; and avoid catching the stone (Il.).'"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Enough. Now, Ion, will the charioteer or the physician be the better judge of the propriety of these lines?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"The charioteer, clearly."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will the reason be that this is his art, or will there be any other reason?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"No, that will be the reason."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And every art is appointed by God to have knowledge of a certain work; for that which we know by the art of the pilot we do not know by the art of medicine?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor do we know by the art of the carpenter that which we know by the art of medicine?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this is true of all the arts;--that which we know with one art we do not know with the other? But let me ask a prior question: You admit that there are differences of arts?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You would argue, as I should, that when one art is of one kind of knowledge and another of another, they are different?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, surely; for if the subject of knowledge were the same, there would be no meaning in saying that the arts were different,--if they both gave the same knowledge. For example, I know that here are five fingers, and you know the same. And if I were to ask whether I and you became acquainted with this fact by the help of the same art of arithmetic, you would acknowledge that we did?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Tell me, then, what I was intending to ask you,--whether this holds universally? Must the same art have the same subject of knowledge, and different arts other subjects of knowledge?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"That is my opinion, Socrates."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who has no knowledge of a particular art will have no right judgment of the sayings and doings of that art?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then which will be a better judge of the lines which you were reciting from Homer, you or the charioteer?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"The charioteer."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, yes, because you are a rhapsode and not a charioteer."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the art of the rhapsode is different from that of the charioteer?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if a different knowledge, then a knowledge of different matters?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You know the passage in which Hecamede, the concubine of Nestor, is described as giving to the wounded Machaon a posset, as he says, 'Made with Pramnian wine; and she grated cheese of goat's milk with a grater of bronze, and at his side placed an onion which gives a relish to drink (Il.).' Now would you say that the art of the rhapsode or the art of medicine was better able to judge of the propriety of these lines?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"The art of medicine."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when Homer says, 'And she descended into the deep like a leaden plummet, which, set in the horn of ox that ranges in the fields, rushes along carrying death among the ravenous fishes (Il.),'-- will the art of the fisherman or of the rhapsode be better able to judge whether these lines are rightly expressed or not?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Clearly, Socrates, the art of the fisherman."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Come now, suppose that you were to say to me: 'Since you, Socrates, are able to assign different passages in Homer to their corresponding arts, I wish that you would tell me what are the passages of which the excellence ought to be judged by the prophet and prophetic art'; and you will see how readily and truly I shall answer you. For there are many such passages, particularly in the Odyssee; as, for example, the passage in which Theoclymenus the prophet of the house of Melampus says to the suitors:-- 'Wretched men! what is happening to you? Your heads and your faces and your limbs underneath are shrouded in night; and the voice of lamentation bursts forth, and your cheeks are wet with tears. And the vestibule is full, and the court is full, of ghosts descending into the darkness of Erebus, and the sun has perished out of heaven, and an evil mist is spread abroad (Od.).' And there are many such passages in the Iliad also; as for example in the description of the battle near the rampart, where he says:-- 'As they were eager to pass the ditch, there came to them an omen: a soaring eagle, holding back the people on the left, bore a huge bloody dragon in his talons, still living and panting; nor had he yet resigned the strife, for he bent back and smote the bird which carried him on the breast by the neck, and he in pain let him fall from him to the ground into the midst of the multitude. And the eagle, with a cry, was borne afar on the wings of the wind (Il.).' These are the sort of things which I should say that the prophet ought to consider and determine."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"And you are quite right, Socrates, in saying so."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Ion, and you are right also. And as I have selected from the Iliad and Odyssee for you passages which describe the office of the prophet and the physician and the fisherman, do you, who know Homer so much better than I do, Ion, select for me passages which relate to the rhapsode and the rhapsode's art, and which the rhapsode ought to examine and judge of better than other men."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"All passages, I should say, Socrates."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Not all, Ion, surely. Have you already forgotten what you were saying? A rhapsode ought to have a better memory."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Why, what am I forgetting?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you not remember that you declared the art of the rhapsode to be different from the art of the charioteer?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes, I remember."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you admitted that being different they would have different subjects of knowledge?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then upon your own showing the rhapsode, and the art of the rhapsode, will not know everything?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"I should exclude certain things, Socrates."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You mean to say that you would exclude pretty much the subjects of the other arts. As he does not know all of them, which of them will he know?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"He will know what a man and what a woman ought to say, and what a freeman and what a slave ought to say, and what a ruler and what a subject."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you mean that a rhapsode will know better than the pilot what the ruler of a sea-tossed vessel ought to say?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"No; the pilot will know best."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or will the rhapsode know better than the physician what the ruler of a sick man ought to say?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"He will not."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But he will know what a slave ought to say?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Suppose the slave to be a cowherd; the rhapsode will know better than the cowherd what he ought to say in order to soothe the infuriated cows?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"No, he will not."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But he will know what a spinning-woman ought to say about the working of wool?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"At any rate he will know what a general ought to say when exhorting his soldiers?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes, that is the sort of thing which the rhapsode will be sure to know."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but is the art of the rhapsode the art of the general?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"I am sure that I should know what a general ought to say."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, yes, Ion, because you may possibly have a knowledge of the art of the general as well as of the rhapsode; and you may also have a knowledge of horsemanship as well as of the lyre: and then you would know when horses were well or ill managed. But suppose I were to ask you: By the help of which art, Ion, do you know whether horses are well managed, by your skill as a horseman or as a performer on the lyre--what would you answer?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"I should reply, by my skill as a horseman."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if you judged of performers on the lyre, you would admit that you judged of them as a performer on the lyre, and not as a horseman?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in judging of the general's art, do you judge of it as a general or a rhapsode?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"To me there appears to be no difference between them."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What do you mean? Do you mean to say that the art of the rhapsode and of the general is the same?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Yes, one and the same."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who is a good rhapsode is also a good general?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Certainly, Socrates."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who is a good general is also a good rhapsode?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"No; I do not say that."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But you do say that he who is a good rhapsode is also a good general."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you are the best of Hellenic rhapsodes?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Far the best, Socrates."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are you the best general, Ion?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"To be sure, Socrates; and Homer was my master."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But then, Ion, what in the name of goodness can be the reason why you, who are the best of generals as well as the best of rhapsodes in all Hellas, go about as a rhapsode when you might be a general? Do you think that the Hellenes want a rhapsode with his golden crown, and do not want a general?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Why, Socrates, the reason is, that my countrymen, the Ephesians, are the servants and soldiers of Athens, and do not need a general; and you and Sparta are not likely to have me, for you think that you have enough generals of your own."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"My good Ion, did you never hear of Apollodorus of Cyzicus?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"Who may he be?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"One who, though a foreigner, has often been chosen their general by the Athenians: and there is Phanosthenes of Andros, and Heraclides of Clazomenae, whom they have also appointed to the command of their armies and to other offices, although aliens, after they had shown their merit. And will they not choose Ion the Ephesian to be their general, and honour him, if he prove himself worthy? Were not the Ephesians originally Athenians, and Ephesus is no mean city? But, indeed, Ion, if you are correct in saying that by art and knowledge you are able to praise Homer, you do not deal fairly with me, and after all your professions of knowing many glorious things about Homer, and promises that you would exhibit them, you are only a deceiver, and so far from exhibiting the art of which you are a master, will not, even after my repeated entreaties, explain to me the nature of it. You have literally as many forms as Proteus; and now you go all manner of ways, twisting and turning, and, like Proteus, become all manner of people at once, and at last slip away from me in the disguise of a general, in order that you may escape exhibiting your Homeric lore. And if you have art, then, as I was saying, in falsifying your promise that you would exhibit Homer, you are not dealing fairly with me. But if, as I believe, you have no art, but speak all these beautiful words about Homer unconsciously under his inspiring influence, then I acquit you of dishonesty, and shall only say that you are inspired. Which do you prefer to be thought, dishonest or inspired?"}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"ION","Dialogue":"There is a great difference, Socrates, between the two alternatives; and inspiration is by far the nobler."}
{"Book":"ion","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, Ion, I shall assume the nobler alternative; and attribute to you in your praises of Homer inspiration, and not art. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ION *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean? ATHENIAN STRANGER: I mean that he might watch them from the point of view of time, and observe the changes which take place in them during infinite ages."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How so? ATHENIAN STRANGER: Why, do you think that you can reckon the time which has elapsed since cities first existed and men were citizens of them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Hardly. ATHENIAN STRANGER: But you are quite sure that it must be vast and incalculable?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"No doubt. ATHENIAN STRANGER: And have there not been thousands and thousands of cities which have come into being and perished during this period? And has not every place had endless forms of government, and been sometimes rising, and at other times falling, and again improving or waning?\u201d Aristot. Metaph.:\u2014 \u201cAnd if a person should conceive the tales of mythology to mean only that men thought the gods to be the first essences of things, he would deem the reflection to have been inspired and would consider that, whereas probably every art and part of wisdom had been DISCOVERED AND LOST MANY TIMES OVER, such notions were but a remnant of the past which has survived to our day.\u201d) It can hardly be supposed that any traces of an original language still survive, any more than of the first huts or buildings which were constructed by man. Nor are we at all certain of the relation, if any, in which the greater families of languages stand to each other. The influence of individuals must always have been a disturbing element. Like great writers in later times, there may have been many a barbaric genius who taught the men of his tribe to sing or speak, showing them by example how to continue or divide their words, charming their souls with rhythm and accent and intonation, finding in familiar objects the expression of their confused fancies\u2014to whom the whole of language might in truth be said to be a figure of speech. One person may have introduced a new custom into the formation or pronunciation of a word; he may have been imitated by others, and the custom, or form, or accent, or quantity, or rhyme which he introduced in a single word may have become the type on which many other words or inflexions of words were framed, and may have quickly ran through a whole language. For like the other gifts which nature has bestowed upon man, that of speech has been conveyed to him through the medium, not of the many, but of the few, who were his \u201claw-givers\u201d\u2014\u201cthe legislator with the dialectician standing on his right hand,\u201d in Plato\u2019s striking image, who formed the manners of men and gave them customs, whose voice and look and behaviour, whose gesticulations and other peculiarities were instinctively imitated by them,\u2014the \u201cking of men\u201d who was their priest, almost their God...But these are conjectures only: so little do we know of the origin of language that the real scholar is indisposed to touch the subject at all. (2) There are other errors besides the figment of a primitive or original language which it is time to leave behind us. We no longer divide languages into synthetical and analytical, or suppose similarity of structure to be the safe or only guide to the affinities of them. We do not confuse the parts of speech with the categories of Logic. Nor do we conceive languages any more than civilisations to be in a state of dissolution; they do not easily pass away, but are far more tenacious of life than the tribes by whom they are spoken. \u201cWhere two or three are gathered together,\u201d they survive. As in the human frame, as in the state, there is a principle of renovation as well as of decay which is at work in all of them. Neither do we suppose them to be invented by the wit of man. With few exceptions, e.g. technical words or words newly imported from a foreign language, and the like, in which art has imitated nature, \u201cwords are not made but grow.\u201d Nor do we attribute to them a supernatural origin. The law which regulates them is like the law which governs the circulation of the blood, or the rising of the sap in trees; the action of it is uniform, but the result, which appears in the superficial forms of men and animals or in the leaves of trees, is an endless profusion and variety. The laws of vegetation are invariable, but no two plants, no two leaves of the forest are precisely the same. The laws of language are invariable, but no two languages are alike, no two words have exactly the same meaning. No two sounds are exactly of the same quality, or give precisely the same impression. It would be well if there were a similar consensus about some other points which appear to be still in dispute. Is language conscious or unconscious? In speaking or writing have we present to our minds the meaning or the sound or the construction of the words which we are using?\u2014No more than the separate drops of water with which we quench our thirst are present: the whole draught may be conscious, but not the minute particles of which it is made up: So the whole sentence may be conscious, but the several words, syllables, letters are not thought of separately when we are uttering them. Like other natural operations, the process of speech, when most perfect, is least observed by us. We do not pause at each mouthful to dwell upon the taste of it: nor has the speaker time to ask himself the comparative merits of different modes of expression while he is uttering them. There are many things in the use of language which may be observed from without, but which cannot be explained from within. Consciousness carries us but a little way in the investigation of the mind; it is not the faculty of internal observation, but only the dim light which makes such observation possible. What is supposed to be our consciousness of language is really only the analysis of it, and this analysis admits of innumerable degrees. But would it not be better if this term, which is so misleading, and yet has played so great a part in mental science, were either banished or used only with the distinct meaning of \u201cattention to our own minds,\u201d such as is called forth, not by familiar mental processes, but by the interruption of them? Now in this sense we may truly say that we are not conscious of ordinary speech, though we are commonly roused to attention by the misuse or mispronunciation of a word. Still less, even in schools and academies, do we ever attempt to invent new words or to alter the meaning of old ones, except in the case, mentioned above, of technical or borrowed words which are artificially made or imported because a need of them is felt. Neither in our own nor in any other age has the conscious effort of reflection in man contributed in an appreciable degree to the formation of language. \u201cWhich of us by taking thought\u201d can make new words or constructions? Reflection is the least of the causes by which language is affected, and is likely to have the least power, when the linguistic instinct is greatest, as in young children and in the infancy of nations. A kindred error is the separation of the phonetic from the mental element of language; they are really inseparable\u2014no definite line can be drawn between them, any more than in any other common act of mind and body. It is true that within certain limits we possess the power of varying sounds by opening and closing the mouth, by touching the palate or the teeth with the tongue, by lengthening or shortening the vocal instrument, by greater or less stress, by a higher or lower pitch of the voice, and we can substitute one note or accent for another. But behind the organs of speech and their action there remains the informing mind, which sets them in motion and works together with them. And behind the great structure of human speech and the lesser varieties of language which arise out of the many degrees and kinds of human intercourse, there is also the unknown or over-ruling law of God or nature which gives order to it in its infinite greatness, and variety in its infinitesimal minuteness\u2014both equally inscrutable to us. We need no longer discuss whether philology is to be classed with the Natural or the Mental sciences, if we frankly recognize that, like all the sciences which are concerned with man, it has a double aspect,\u2014inward and outward; and that the inward can only be known through the outward. Neither need we raise the question whether the laws of language, like the other laws of human action, admit of exceptions. The answer in all cases is the same\u2014that the laws of nature are uniform, though the consistency or continuity of them is not always perceptible to us. The superficial appearances of language, as of nature, are irregular, but we do not therefore deny their deeper uniformity. The comparison of the growth of language in the individual and in the nation cannot be wholly discarded, for nations are made up of individuals. But in this, as in the other political sciences, we must distinguish between collective and individual actions or processes, and not attribute to the one what belongs to the other. Again, when we speak of the hereditary or paternity of a language, we must remember that the parents are alive as well as the children, and that all the preceding generations survive (after a manner) in the latest form of it. And when, for the purposes of comparison, we form into groups the roots or terminations of words, we should not forget how casual is the manner in which their resemblances have arisen\u2014they were not first written down by a grammarian in the paradigms of a grammar and learned out of a book, but were due to many chance attractions of sound or of meaning, or of both combined. So many cautions have to be borne in mind, and so many first thoughts to be dismissed, before we can proceed safely in the path of philological enquiry. It might be well sometimes to lay aside figures of speech, such as the \u201croot\u201d and the \u201cbranches,\u201d the \u201cstem,\u201d the \u201cstrata\u201d of Geology, the \u201ccompounds\u201d of Chemistry, \u201cthe ripe fruit of pronouns dropping from verbs\u201d (see above), and the like, which are always interesting, but are apt to be delusive. Yet such figures of speech are far nearer the truth than the theories which attribute the invention and improvement of language to the conscious action of the human mind...Lastly, it is doubted by recent philologians whether climate can be supposed to have exercised any influence worth speaking of on a language: such a view is said to be unproven: it had better therefore not be silently assumed. \u201cNatural selection\u201d and the \u201csurvival of the fittest\u201d have been applied in the field of philology, as well as in the other sciences which are concerned with animal and vegetable life. And a Darwinian school of philologists has sprung up, who are sometimes accused of putting words in the place of things. It seems to be true, that whether applied to language or to other branches of knowledge, the Darwinian theory, unless very precisely defined, hardly escapes from being a truism. If by \u201cthe natural selection\u201d of words or meanings of words or by the \u201cpersistence and survival of the fittest\u201d the maintainer of the theory intends to affirm nothing more than this\u2014that the word \u201cfittest to survive\u201d survives, he adds not much to the knowledge of language. But if he means that the word or the meaning of the word or some portion of the word which comes into use or drops out of use is selected or rejected on the ground of economy or parsimony or ease to the speaker or clearness or euphony or expressiveness, or greater or less demand for it, or anything of this sort, he is affirming a proposition which has several senses, and in none of these senses can be assisted to be uniformly true. For the laws of language are precarious, and can only act uniformly when there is such frequency of intercourse among neighbours as is sufficient to enforce them. And there are many reasons why a man should prefer his own way of speaking to that of others, unless by so doing he becomes unintelligible. The struggle for existence among words is not of that fierce and irresistible kind in which birds, beasts and fishes devour one another, but of a milder sort, allowing one usage to be substituted for another, not by force, but by the persuasion, or rather by the prevailing habit, of a majority. The favourite figure, in this, as in some other uses of it, has tended rather to obscure than explain the subject to which it has been applied. Nor in any case can the struggle for existence be deemed to be the sole or principal cause of changes in language, but only one among many, and one of which we cannot easily measure the importance. There is a further objection which may be urged equally against all applications of the Darwinian theory. As in animal life and likewise in vegetable, so in languages, the process of change is said to be insensible: sounds, like animals, are supposed to pass into one another by imperceptible gradation. But in both cases the newly-created forms soon become fixed; there are few if any vestiges of the intermediate links, and so the better half of the evidence of the change is wanting. (3) Among the incumbrances or illusions of language may be reckoned many of the rules and traditions of grammar, whether ancient grammar or the corrections of it which modern philology has introduced. Grammar, like law, delights in definition: human speech, like human action, though very far from being a mere chaos, is indefinite, admits of degrees, and is always in a state of change or transition. Grammar gives an erroneous conception of language: for it reduces to a system that which is not a system. Its figures of speech, pleonasms, ellipses, anacolutha, pros to semainomenon, and the like have no reality; they do not either make conscious expressions more intelligible or show the way in which they have arisen; they are chiefly designed to bring an earlier use of language into conformity with the later. Often they seem intended only to remind us that great poets like Aeschylus or Sophocles or Pindar or a great prose writer like Thucydides are guilty of taking unwarrantable liberties with grammatical rules; it appears never to have occurred to the inventors of them that these real \u201cconditores linguae Graecae\u201d lived in an age before grammar, when \u201cGreece also was living Greece.\u201d It is the anatomy, not the physiology of language, which grammar seeks to describe: into the idiom and higher life of words it does not enter. The ordinary Greek grammar gives a complete paradigm of the verb, without suggesting that the double or treble forms of Perfects, Aorists, etc. are hardly ever contemporaneous. It distinguishes Moods and Tenses, without observing how much of the nature of one passes into the other. It makes three Voices, Active, Passive, and Middle, but takes no notice of the precarious existence and uncertain character of the last of the three. Language is a thing of degrees and relations and associations and exceptions: grammar ties it up in fixed rules. Language has many varieties of usage: grammar tries to reduce them to a single one. Grammar divides verbs into regular and irregular: it does not recognize that the irregular, equally with the regular, are subject to law, and that a language which had no exceptions would not be a natural growth: for it could not have been subjected to the influences by which language is ordinarily affected. It is always wanting to describe ancient languages in the terms of a modern one. It has a favourite fiction that one word is put in the place of another; the truth is that no word is ever put for another. It has another fiction, that a word has been omitted: words are omitted because they are no longer needed; and the omission has ceased to be observed. The common explanation of kata or some other preposition \u201cbeing understood\u201d in a Greek sentence is another fiction of the same kind, which tends to disguise the fact that under cases were comprehended originally many more relations, and that prepositions are used only to define the meaning of them with greater precision. These instances are sufficient to show the sort of errors which grammar introduces into language. We are not considering the question of its utility to the beginner in the study. Even to him the best grammar is the shortest and that in which he will have least to unlearn. It may be said that the explanations here referred to are already out of date, and that the study of Greek grammar has received a new character from comparative philology. This is true; but it is also true that the traditional grammar has still a great hold on the mind of the student. Metaphysics are even more troublesome than the figments of grammar, because they wear the appearance of philosophy and there is no test to which they can be subjected. They are useful in so far as they give us an insight into the history of the human mind and the modes of thought which have existed in former ages; or in so far as they furnish wider conceptions of the different branches of knowledge and of their relation to one another. But they are worse than useless when they outrun experience and abstract the mind from the observation of facts, only to envelope it in a mist of words. Some philologers, like Schleicher, have been greatly influenced by the philosophy of Hegel; nearly all of them to a certain extent have fallen under the dominion of physical science. Even Kant himself thought that the first principles of philosophy could be elicited from the analysis of the proposition, in this respect falling short of Plato. Westphal holds that there are three stages of language: (1) in which things were characterized independently, (2) in which they were regarded in relation to human thought, and (3) in relation to one another. But are not such distinctions an anachronism? for they imply a growth of abstract ideas which never existed in early times. Language cannot be explained by Metaphysics; for it is prior to them and much more nearly allied to sense. It is not likely that the meaning of the cases is ultimately resolvable into relations of space and time. Nor can we suppose the conception of cause and effect or of the finite and infinite or of the same and other to be latent in language at a time when in their abstract form they had never entered into the mind of man...If the science of Comparative Philology had possessed \u201cenough of Metaphysics to get rid of Metaphysics,\u201d it would have made far greater progress. (4) Our knowledge of language is almost confined to languages which are fully developed. They are of several patterns; and these become altered by admixture in various degrees,\u2014they may only borrow a few words from one another and retain their life comparatively unaltered, or they may meet in a struggle for existence until one of the two is overpowered and retires from the field. They attain the full rights and dignity of language when they acquire the use of writing and have a literature of their own; they pass into dialects and grow out of them, in proportion as men are isolated or united by locality or occupation. The common language sometimes reacts upon the dialects and imparts to them also a literary character. The laws of language can be best discerned in the great crises of language, especially in the transitions from ancient to modern forms of them, whether in Europe or Asia. Such changes are the silent notes of the world\u2019s history; they mark periods of unknown length in which war and conquest were running riot over whole continents, times of suffering too great to be endured by the human race, in which the masters became subjects and the subject races masters, in which driven by necessity or impelled by some instinct, tribes or nations left their original homes and but slowly found a resting-place. Language would be the greatest of all historical monuments, if it could only tell us the history of itself. (5) There are many ways in which we may approach this study. The simplest of all is to observe our own use of language in conversation or in writing, how we put words together, how we construct and connect sentences, what are the rules of accent and rhythm in verse or prose, the formation and composition of words, the laws of euphony and sound, the affinities of letters, the mistakes to which we are ourselves most liable of spelling or pronunciation. We may compare with our own language some other, even when we have only a slight knowledge of it, such as French or German. Even a little Latin will enable us to appreciate the grand difference between ancient and modern European languages. In the child learning to speak we may note the inherent strength of language, which like \u201ca mountain river\u201d is always forcing its way out. We may witness the delight in imitation and repetition, and some of the laws by which sounds pass into one another. We may learn something also from the falterings of old age, the searching for words, and the confusion of them with one another, the forgetfulness of proper names (more commonly than of other words because they are more isolated), aphasia, and the like. There are philological lessons also to be gathered from nicknames, from provincialisms, from the slang of great cities, from the argot of Paris (that language of suffering and crime, so pathetically described by Victor Hugo), from the imperfect articulation of the deaf and dumb, from the jabbering of animals, from the analysis of sounds in relation to the organs of speech. The phonograph affords a visible evidence of the nature and divisions of sound; we may be truly said to know what we can manufacture. Artificial languages, such as that of Bishop Wilkins, are chiefly useful in showing what language is not. The study of any foreign language may be made also a study of Comparative Philology. There are several points, such as the nature of irregular verbs, of indeclinable parts of speech, the influence of euphony, the decay or loss of inflections, the elements of syntax, which may be examined as well in the history of our own language as of any other. A few well-selected questions may lead the student at once into the heart of the mystery: such as, Why are the pronouns and the verb of existence generally more irregular than any other parts of speech? Why is the number of words so small in which the sound is an echo of the sense? Why does the meaning of words depart so widely from their etymology? Why do substantives often differ in meaning from the verbs to which they are related, adverbs from adjectives? Why do words differing in origin coalesce in the same sound though retaining their differences of meaning? Why are some verbs impersonal? Why are there only so many parts of speech, and on what principle are they divided? These are a few crucial questions which give us an insight from different points of view into the true nature of language. (6) Thus far we have been endeavouring to strip off from language the false appearances in which grammar and philology, or the love of system generally, have clothed it. We have also sought to indicate the sources of our knowledge of it and the spirit in which we should approach it, we may now proceed to consider some of the principles or natural laws which have created or modified it. i. The first and simplest of all the principles of language, common also to the animals, is imitation. The lion roars, the wolf howls in the solitude of the forest: they are answered by similar cries heard from a distance. The bird, too, mimics the voice of man and makes answer to him. Man tells to man the secret place in which he is hiding himself; he remembers and repeats the sound which he has heard. The love of imitation becomes a passion and an instinct to him. Primitive men learnt to speak from one another, like a child from its mother or nurse. They learnt of course a rudimentary, half-articulate language, the cry or song or speech which was the expression of what we now call human thoughts and feelings. We may still remark how much greater and more natural the exercise of the power is in the use of language than in any other process or action of the human mind. ii. Imitation provided the first material of language: but it was \u201cwithout form and void.\u201d During how many years or hundreds or thousands of years the imitative or half-articulate stage continued there is no possibility of determining. But we may reasonably conjecture that there was a time when the vocal utterance of man was intermediate between what we now call language and the cry of a bird or animal. Speech before language was a rudis indigestaque materies, not yet distributed into words and sentences, in which the cry of fear or joy mingled with more definite sounds recognized by custom as the expressions of things or events. It was the principle of analogy which introduced into this \u201cindigesta moles\u201d order and measure. It was Anaxagoras\u2019 omou panta chremata, eita nous elthon diekosmese: the light of reason lighted up all things and at once began to arrange them. In every sentence, in every word and every termination of a word, this power of forming relations to one another was contained. There was a proportion of sound to sound, of meaning to meaning, of meaning to sound. The cases and numbers of nouns, the persons, tenses, numbers of verbs, were generally on the same or nearly the same pattern and had the same meaning. The sounds by which they were expressed were rough-hewn at first; after a while they grew more refined\u2014the natural laws of euphony began to affect them. The rules of syntax are likewise based upon analogy. Time has an analogy with space, arithmetic with geometry. Not only in musical notes, but in the quantity, quality, accent, rhythm of human speech, trivial or serious, there is a law of proportion. As in things of beauty, as in all nature, in the composition as well as in the motion of all things, there is a similarity of relations by which they are held together. It would be a mistake to suppose that the analogies of language are always uniform: there may be often a choice between several, and sometimes one and sometimes another will prevail. In Greek there are three declensions of nouns; the forms of cases in one of them may intrude upon another. Similarly verbs in -omega and -mu iota interchange forms of tenses, and the completed paradigm of the verb is often made up of both. The same nouns may be partly declinable and partly indeclinable, and in some of their cases may have fallen out of use. Here are rules with exceptions; they are not however really exceptions, but contain in themselves indications of other rules. Many of these interruptions or variations of analogy occur in pronouns or in the verb of existence of which the forms were too common and therefore too deeply imbedded in language entirely to drop out. The same verbs in the same meaning may sometimes take one case, sometimes another. The participle may also have the character of an adjective, the adverb either of an adjective or of a preposition. These exceptions are as regular as the rules, but the causes of them are seldom known to us. Language, like the animal and vegetable worlds, is everywhere intersected by the lines of analogy. Like number from which it seems to be derived, the principle of analogy opens the eyes of men to discern the similarities and differences of things, and their relations to one another. At first these are such as lie on the surface only; after a time they are seen by men to reach farther down into the nature of things. Gradually in language they arrange themselves into a sort of imperfect system; groups of personal and case endings are placed side by side. The fertility of language produces many more than are wanted; and the superfluous ones are utilized by the assignment to them of new meanings. The vacuity and the superfluity are thus partially compensated by each other. It must be remembered that in all the languages which have a literature, certainly in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, we are not at the beginning but almost at the end of the linguistic process; we have reached a time when the verb and the noun are nearly perfected, though in no language did they completely perfect themselves, because for some unknown reason the motive powers of languages seem to have ceased when they were on the eve of completion: they became fixed or crystallized in an imperfect form either from the influence of writing and literature, or because no further differentiation of them was required for the intelligibility of language. So not without admixture and confusion and displacement and contamination of sounds and the meanings of words, a lower stage of language passes into a higher. Thus far we can see and no further. When we ask the reason why this principle of analogy prevails in all the vast domain of language, there is no answer to the question; or no other answer but this, that there are innumerable ways in which, like number, analogy permeates, not only language, but the whole world, both visible and intellectual. We know from experience that it does not (a) arise from any conscious act of reflection that the accusative of a Latin noun in \u201cus\u201d should end in \u201cum;\u201d nor (b) from any necessity of being understood,\u2014much less articulation would suffice for this; nor (c) from greater convenience or expressiveness of particular sounds. Such notions were certainly far enough away from the mind of primitive man. We may speak of a latent instinct, of a survival of the fittest, easiest, most euphonic, most economical of breath, in the case of one of two competing sounds; but these expressions do not add anything to our knowledge. We may try to grasp the infinity of language either under the figure of a limitless plain divided into countries and districts by natural boundaries, or of a vast river eternally flowing whose origin is concealed from us; we may apprehend partially the laws by which speech is regulated: but we do not know, and we seem as if we should never know, any more than in the parallel case of the origin of species, how vocal sounds received life and grew, and in the form of languages came to be distributed over the earth. iii. Next in order to analogy in the formation of language or even prior to it comes the principle of onomatopea, which is itself a kind of analogy or similarity of sound and meaning. In by far the greater number of words it has become disguised and has disappeared; but in no stage of language is it entirely lost. It belongs chiefly to early language, in which words were few; and its influence grew less and less as time went on. To the ear which had a sense of harmony it became a barbarism which disturbed the flow and equilibrium of discourse; it was an excrescence which had to be cut out, a survival which needed to be got rid of, because it was out of keeping with the rest. It remained for the most part only as a formative principle, which used words and letters not as crude imitations of other natural sounds, but as symbols of ideas which were naturally associated with them. It received in another way a new character; it affected not so much single words, as larger portions of human speech. It regulated the juxtaposition of sounds and the cadence of sentences. It was the music, not of song, but of speech, in prose as well as verse. The old onomatopea of primitive language was refined into an onomatopea of a higher kind, in which it is no longer true to say that a particular sound corresponds to a motion or action of man or beast or movement of nature, but that in all the higher uses of language the sound is the echo of the sense, especially in poetry, in which beauty and expressiveness are given to human thoughts by the harmonious composition of the words, syllables, letters, accents, quantities, rhythms, rhymes, varieties and contrasts of all sorts. The poet with his \u201cBreak, break, break\u201d or his e pasin nekuessi kataphthimenoisin anassein or his \u201clongius ex altoque sinum trahit,\u201d can produce a far finer music than any crude imitations of things or actions in sound, although a letter or two having this imitative power may be a lesser element of beauty in such passages. The same subtle sensibility, which adapts the word to the thing, adapts the sentence or cadence to the general meaning or spirit of the passage. This is the higher onomatopea which has banished the cruder sort as unworthy to have a place in great languages and literatures. We can see clearly enough that letters or collocations of letters do by various degrees of strength or weakness, length or shortness, emphasis or pitch, become the natural expressions of the finer parts of human feeling or thought. And not only so, but letters themselves have a significance; as Plato observes that the letter rho accent is expressive of motion, the letters delta and tau of binding and rest, the letter lambda of smoothness, nu of inwardness, the letter eta of length, the letter omicron of roundness. These were often combined so as to form composite notions, as for example in tromos (trembling), trachus (rugged), thrauein (crush), krouein (strike), thruptein (break), pumbein (whirl),\u2014in all which words we notice a parallel composition of sounds in their English equivalents. Plato also remarks, as we remark, that the onomatopoetic principle is far from prevailing uniformly, and further that no explanation of language consistently corresponds with any system of philosophy, however great may be the light which language throws upon the nature of the mind. Both in Greek and English we find groups of words such as string, swing, sling, spring, sting, which are parallel to one another and may be said to derive their vocal effect partly from contrast of letters, but in which it is impossible to assign a precise amount of meaning to each of the expressive and onomatopoetic letters. A few of them are directly imitative, as for example the omega in oon, which represents the round form of the egg by the figure of the mouth: or bronte (thunder), in which the fulness of the sound of the word corresponds to the thing signified by it; or bombos (buzzing), of which the first syllable, as in its English equivalent, has the meaning of a deep sound. We may observe also (as we see in the case of the poor stammerer) that speech has the co-operation of the whole body and may be often assisted or half expressed by gesticulation. A sound or word is not the work of the vocal organs only; nearly the whole of the upper part of the human frame, including head, chest, lungs, have a share in creating it; and it may be accompanied by a movement of the eyes, nose, fingers, hands, feet which contributes to the effect of it. The principle of onomatopea has fallen into discredit, partly because it has been supposed to imply an actual manufacture of words out of syllables and letters, like a piece of joiner\u2019s work,\u2014a theory of language which is more and more refuted by facts, and more and more going out of fashion with philologians; and partly also because the traces of onomatopea in separate words become almost obliterated in the course of ages. The poet of language cannot put in and pull out letters, as a painter might insert or blot out a shade of colour to give effect to his picture. It would be ridiculous for him to alter any received form of a word in order to render it more expressive of the sense. He can only select, perhaps out of some dialect, the form which is already best adapted to his purpose. The true onomatopea is not a creative, but a formative principle, which in the later stage of the history of language ceases to act upon individual words; but still works through the collocation of them in the sentence or paragraph, and the adaptation of every word, syllable, letter to one another and to the rhythm of the whole passage. iv. Next, under a distinct head, although not separable from the preceding, may be considered the differentiation of languages, i.e. the manner in which differences of meaning and form have arisen in them. Into their first creation we have ceased to enquire: it is their aftergrowth with which we are now concerned. How did the roots or substantial portions of words become modified or inflected? and how did they receive separate meanings? First we remark that words are attracted by the sounds and senses of other words, so that they form groups of nouns and verbs analogous in sound and sense to one another, each noun or verb putting forth inflexions, generally of two or three patterns, and with exceptions. We do not say that we know how sense became first allied to sound; but we have no difficulty in ascertaining how the sounds and meanings of words were in time parted off or differentiated. (1) The chief causes which regulate the variations of sound are (a) double or differing analogies, which lead sometimes to one form, sometimes to another (b) euphony, by which is meant chiefly the greater pleasure to the ear and the greater facility to the organs of speech which is given by a new formation or pronunciation of a word (c) the necessity of finding new expressions for new classes or processes of things. We are told that changes of sound take place by innumerable gradations until a whole tribe or community or society find themselves acquiescing in a new pronunciation or use of language. Yet no one observes the change, or is at all aware that in the course of a lifetime he and his contemporaries have appreciably varied their intonation or use of words. On the other hand, the necessities of language seem to require that the intermediate sounds or meanings of words should quickly become fixed or set and not continue in a state of transition. The process of settling down is aided by the organs of speech and by the use of writing and printing. (2) The meaning of words varies because ideas vary or the number of things which is included under them or with which they are associated is increased. A single word is thus made to do duty for many more things than were formerly expressed by it; and it parts into different senses when the classes of things or ideas which are represented by it are themselves different and distinct. A figurative use of a word may easily pass into a new sense: a new meaning caught up by association may become more important than all the rest. The good or neutral sense of a word, such as Jesuit, Puritan, Methodist, Heretic, has been often converted into a bad one by the malevolence of party spirit. Double forms suggest different meanings and are often used to express them; and the form or accent of a word has been not unfrequently altered when there is a difference of meaning. The difference of gender in nouns is utilized for the same reason. New meanings of words push themselves into the vacant spaces of language and retire when they are no longer needed. Language equally abhors vacancy and superfluity. But the remedial measures by which both are eliminated are not due to any conscious action of the human mind; nor is the force exerted by them constraining or necessary. (7) We have shown that language, although subject to laws, is far from being of an exact and uniform nature. We may now speak briefly of the faults of language. They may be compared to the faults of Geology, in which different strata cross one another or meet at an angle, or mix with one another either by slow transitions or by violent convulsions, leaving many lacunae which can be no longer filled up, and often becoming so complex that no true explanation of them can be given. So in language there are the cross influences of meaning and sound, of logic and grammar, of differing analogies, of words and the inflexions of words, which often come into conflict with each other. The grammarian, if he were to form new words, would make them all of the same pattern according to what he conceives to be the rule, that is, the more common usage of language. The subtlety of nature goes far beyond art, and it is complicated by irregularity, so that often we can hardly say that there is a right or wrong in the formation of words. For almost any formation which is not at variance with the first principles of language is possible and may be defended. The imperfection of language is really due to the formation and correlation of words by accident, that is to say, by principles which are unknown to us. Hence we see why Plato, like ourselves unable to comprehend the whole of language, was constrained to \u201csupplement the poor creature imitation by another poor creature convention.\u201d But the poor creature convention in the end proves too much for all the rest: for we do not ask what is the origin of words or whether they are formed according to a correct analogy, but what is the usage of them; and we are compelled to admit with Hermogenes in Plato and with Horace that usage is the ruling principle, \u201cquem penes arbitrium est, et jus et norma loquendi.\u201d (8) There are two ways in which a language may attain permanence or fixity. First, it may have been embodied in poems or hymns or laws, which may be repeated for hundreds, perhaps for thousands of years with a religious accuracy, so that to the priests or rhapsodists of a nation the whole or the greater part of a language is literally preserved; secondly, it may be written down and in a written form distributed more or less widely among the whole nation. In either case the language which is familiarly spoken may have grown up wholly or in a great measure independently of them. (1) The first of these processes has been sometimes attended by the result that the sound of the words has been carefully preserved and that the meaning of them has either perished wholly, or is only doubtfully recovered by the efforts of modern philology. The verses have been repeated as a chant or part of a ritual, but they have had no relation to ordinary life or speech. (2) The invention of writing again is commonly attributed to a particular epoch, and we are apt to think that such an inestimable gift would have immediately been diffused over a whole country. But it may have taken a long time to perfect the art of writing, and another long period may have elapsed before it came into common use. Its influence on language has been increased ten, twenty or one hundred fold by the invention of printing. Before the growth of poetry or the invention of writing, languages were only dialects. So they continued to be in parts of the country in which writing was not used or in which there was no diffusion of literature. In most of the counties of England there is still a provincial style, which has been sometimes made by a great poet the vehicle of his fancies. When a book sinks into the mind of a nation, such as Luther\u2019s Bible or the Authorized English Translation of the Bible, or again great classical works like Shakspere or Milton, not only have new powers of expression been diffused through a whole nation, but a great step towards uniformity has been made. The instinct of language demands regular grammar and correct spelling: these are imprinted deeply on the tablets of a nation\u2019s memory by a common use of classical and popular writers. In our own day we have attained to a point at which nearly every printed book is spelt correctly and written grammatically. (9) Proceeding further to trace the influence of literature on language we note some other causes which have affected the higher use of it: such as (1) the necessity of clearness and connexion; (2) the fear of tautology; (3) the influence of metre, rhythm, rhyme, and of the language of prose and verse upon one another; (4) the power of idiom and quotation; (5) the relativeness of words to one another. It has been usual to depreciate modern languages when compared with ancient. The latter are regarded as furnishing a type of excellence to which the former cannot attain. But the truth seems to be that modern languages, if through the loss of inflections and genders they lack some power or beauty or expressiveness or precision which is possessed by the ancient, are in many other respects superior to them: the thought is generally clearer, the connexion closer, the sentence and paragraph are better distributed. The best modern languages, for example English or French, possess as great a power of self-improvement as the Latin, if not as the Greek. Nor does there seem to be any reason why they should ever decline or decay. It is a popular remark that our great writers are beginning to disappear: it may also be remarked that whenever a great writer appears in the future he will find the English language as perfect and as ready for use as in the days of Shakspere or Milton. There is no reason to suppose that English or French will ever be reduced to the low level of Modern Greek or of Mediaeval Latin. The wide diffusion of great authors would make such a decline impossible. Nor will modern languages be easily broken up by amalgamation with each other. The distance between them is too wide to be spanned, the differences are too great to be overcome, and the use of printing makes it impossible that one of them should ever be lost in another. The structure of the English language differs greatly from that of either Latin or Greek. In the two latter, especially in Greek, sentences are joined together by connecting particles. They are distributed on the right hand and on the left by men, de, alla, kaitoi, kai de and the like, or deduced from one another by ara, de, oun, toinun and the like. In English the majority of sentences are independent and in apposition to one another; they are laid side by side or slightly connected by the copula. But within the sentence the expression of the logical relations of the clauses is closer and more exact: there is less of apposition and participial structure. The sentences thus laid side by side are also constructed into paragraphs; these again are less distinctly marked in Greek and Latin than in English. Generally French, German, and English have an advantage over the classical languages in point of accuracy. The three concords are more accurately observed in English than in either Greek or Latin. On the other hand, the extension of the familiar use of the masculine and feminine gender to objects of sense and abstract ideas as well as to men and animals no doubt lends a nameless grace to style which we have a difficulty in appreciating, and the possible variety in the order of words gives more flexibility and also a kind of dignity to the period. Of the comparative effect of accent and quantity and of the relation between them in ancient and modern languages we are not able to judge. Another quality in which modern are superior to ancient languages is freedom from tautology. No English style is thought tolerable in which, except for the sake of emphasis, the same words are repeated at short intervals. Of course the length of the interval must depend on the character of the word. Striking words and expressions cannot be allowed to reappear, if at all, except at the distance of a page or more. Pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions may or rather must recur in successive lines. It seems to be a kind of impertinence to the reader and strikes unpleasantly both on the mind and on the ear that the same sounds should be used twice over, when another word or turn of expression would have given a new shade of meaning to the thought and would have added a pleasing variety to the sound. And the mind equally rejects the repetition of the word and the use of a mere synonym for it,\u2014e.g. felicity and happiness. The cultivated mind desires something more, which a skilful writer is easily able to supply out of his treasure-house. The fear of tautology has doubtless led to the multiplications of words and the meanings of words, and generally to an enlargement of the vocabulary. It is a very early instinct of language; for ancient poetry is almost as free from tautology as the best modern writings. The speech of young children, except in so far as they are compelled to repeat themselves by the fewness of their words, also escapes from it. When they grow up and have ideas which are beyond their powers of expression, especially in writing, tautology begins to appear. In like manner when language is \u201ccontaminated\u201d by philosophy it is apt to become awkward, to stammer and repeat itself, to lose its flow and freedom. No philosophical writer with the exception of Plato, who is himself not free from tautology, and perhaps Bacon, has attained to any high degree of literary excellence. To poetry the form and polish of language is chiefly to be attributed; and the most critical period in the history of language is the transition from verse to prose. At first mankind were contented to express their thoughts in a set form of words having a kind of rhythm; to which regularity was given by accent and quantity. But after a time they demanded a greater degree of freedom, and to those who had all their life been hearing poetry the first introduction of prose had the charm of novelty. The prose romances into which the Homeric Poems were converted, for a while probably gave more delight to the hearers or readers of them than the Poems themselves, and in time the relation of the two was reversed: the poems which had once been a necessity of the human mind became a luxury: they were now superseded by prose, which in all succeeding ages became the natural vehicle of expression to all mankind. Henceforward prose and poetry formed each other. A comparatively slender link between them was also furnished by proverbs. We may trace in poetry how the simple succession of lines, not without monotony, has passed into a complicated period, and how in prose, rhythm and accent and the order of words and the balance of clauses, sometimes not without a slight admixture of rhyme, make up a new kind of harmony, swelling into strains not less majestic than those of Homer, Virgil, or Dante. One of the most curious and characteristic features of language, affecting both syntax and style, is idiom. The meaning of the word \u201cidiom\u201d is that which is peculiar, that which is familiar, the word or expression which strikes us or comes home to us, which is more readily understood or more easily remembered. It is a quality which really exists in infinite degrees, which we turn into differences of kind by applying the term only to conspicuous and striking examples of words or phrases which have this quality. It often supersedes the laws of language or the rules of grammar, or rather is to be regarded as another law of language which is natural and necessary. The word or phrase which has been repeated many times over is more intelligible and familiar to us than one which is rare, and our familiarity with it more than compensates for incorrectness or inaccuracy in the use of it. Striking expressions also which have moved the hearts of nations or are the precious stones and jewels of great authors partake of the nature of idioms: they are taken out of the sphere of grammar and are exempt from the proprieties of language. Every one knows that we often put words together in a manner which would be intolerable if it were not idiomatic. We cannot argue either about the meaning of words or the use of constructions that because they are used in one connexion they will be legitimate in another, unless we allow for this principle. We can bear to have words and sentences used in new senses or in a new order or even a little perverted in meaning when we are quite familiar with them. Quotations are as often applied in a sense which the author did not intend as in that which he did. The parody of the words of Shakspere or of the Bible, which has in it something of the nature of a lie, is far from unpleasing to us. The better known words, even if their meaning be perverted, are more agreeable to us and have a greater power over us. Most of us have experienced a sort of delight and feeling of curiosity when we first came across or when we first used for ourselves a new word or phrase or figure of speech. There are associations of sound and of sense by which every word is linked to every other. One letter harmonizes with another; every verb or noun derives its meaning, not only from itself, but from the words with which it is associated. Some reflection of them near or distant is embodied in it. In any new use of a word all the existing uses of it have to be considered. Upon these depends the question whether it will bear the proposed extension of meaning or not. According to the famous expression of Luther, \u201cWords are living creatures, having hands and feet.\u201d When they cease to retain this living power of adaptation, when they are only put together like the parts of a piece of furniture, language becomes unpoetical, inexpressive, dead. Grammars would lead us to suppose that words have a fixed form and sound. Lexicons assign to each word a definite meaning or meanings. They both tend to obscure the fact that the sentence precedes the word and that all language is relative. (1) It is relative to its own context. Its meaning is modified by what has been said before and after in the same or in some other passage: without comparing the context we are not sure whether it is used in the same sense even in two successive sentences. (2) It is relative to facts, to time, place, and occasion: when they are already known to the hearer or reader, they may be presupposed; there is no need to allude to them further. (3) It is relative to the knowledge of the writer and reader or of the speaker and hearer. Except for the sake of order and consecutiveness nothing ought to be expressed which is already commonly or universally known. A word or two may be sufficient to give an intimation to a friend; a long or elaborate speech or composition is required to explain some new idea to a popular audience or to the ordinary reader or to a young pupil. Grammars and dictionaries are not to be despised; for in teaching we need clearness rather than subtlety. But we must not therefore forget that there is also a higher ideal of language in which all is relative\u2014sounds to sounds, words to words, the parts to the whole\u2014in which besides the lesser context of the book or speech, there is also the larger context of history and circumstances. The study of Comparative Philology has introduced into the world a new science which more than any other binds up man with nature, and distant ages and countries with one another. It may be said to have thrown a light upon all other sciences and upon the nature of the human mind itself. The true conception of it dispels many errors, not only of metaphysics and theology, but also of natural knowledge. Yet it is far from certain that this newly-found science will continue to progress in the same surprising manner as heretofore; or that even if our materials are largely increased, we shall arrive at much more definite conclusions than at present. Like some other branches of knowledge, it may be approaching a point at which it can no longer be profitably studied. But at any rate it has brought back the philosophy of language from theory to fact; it has passed out of the region of guesses and hypotheses, and has attained the dignity of an Inductive Science. And it is not without practical and political importance. It gives a new interest to distant and subject countries; it brings back the dawning light from one end of the earth to the other. Nations, like individuals, are better understood by us when we know something of their early life; and when they are better understood by us, we feel more kindly towards them. Lastly, we may remember that all knowledge is valuable for its own sake; and we may also hope that a deeper insight into the nature of human speech will give us a greater command of it and enable us to make a nobler use of it.[2] [2] Compare again W. Humboldt, _Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues_; M. M\u00fcller, _Lectures on the Science of Language_; Steinthal, _Einleitung in die Psychologie und Sprachwissenschaft_: and for the latter part of the Essay, Delbruck, _Study of Language_; Paul\u2019s _Principles of the History of Language_: to the latter work the author of this Essay is largely indebted. CRATYLUS By Plato Translated by Benjamin Jowett PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Hermogenes, Cratylus."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Suppose that we make Socrates a party to the argument?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"If you please."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I should explain to you, Socrates, that our friend Cratylus has been arguing about names; he says that they are natural and not conventional; not a portion of the human voice which men agree to use; but that there is a truth or correctness in them, which is the same for Hellenes as for barbarians. Whereupon I ask him, whether his own name of Cratylus is a true name or not, and he answers \u201cYes.\u201d And Socrates? \u201cYes.\u201d Then every man\u2019s name, as I tell him, is that which he is called. To this he replies\u2014\u201cIf all the world were to call you Hermogenes, that would not be your name.\u201d And when I am anxious to have a further explanation he is ironical and mysterious, and seems to imply that he has a notion of his own about the matter, if he would only tell, and could entirely convince me, if he chose to be intelligible. Tell me, Socrates, what this oracle means; or rather tell me, if you will be so good, what is your own view of the truth or correctness of names, which I would far sooner hear."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Son of Hipponicus, there is an ancient saying, that \u201chard is the knowledge of the good.\u201d And the knowledge of names is a great part of knowledge. If I had not been poor, I might have heard the fifty-drachma course of the great Prodicus, which is a complete education in grammar and language\u2014these are his own words\u2014and then I should have been at once able to answer your question about the correctness of names. But, indeed, I have only heard the single-drachma course, and therefore, I do not know the truth about such matters; I will, however, gladly assist you and Cratylus in the investigation of them. When he declares that your name is not really Hermogenes, I suspect that he is only making fun of you;\u2014he means to say that you are no true son of Hermes, because you are always looking after a fortune and never in luck. But, as I was saying, there is a good deal of difficulty in this sort of knowledge, and therefore we had better leave the question open until we have heard both sides."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I have often talked over this matter, both with Cratylus and others, and cannot convince myself that there is any principle of correctness in names other than convention and agreement; any name which you give, in my opinion, is the right one, and if you change that and give another, the new name is as correct as the old\u2014we frequently change the names of our slaves, and the newly-imposed name is as good as the old: for there is no name given to anything by nature; all is convention and habit of the users;\u2014such is my view. But if I am mistaken I shall be happy to hear and learn of Cratylus, or of any one else."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I dare say that you may be right, Hermogenes: let us see;\u2014Your meaning is, that the name of each thing is only that which anybody agrees to call it?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is my notion."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Whether the giver of the name be an individual or a city?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, now, let me take an instance;\u2014suppose that I call a man a horse or a horse a man, you mean to say that a man will be rightly called a horse by me individually, and rightly called a man by the rest of the world; and a horse again would be rightly called a man by me and a horse by the world:\u2014that is your meaning?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"He would, according to my view."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But how about truth, then? you would acknowledge that there is in words a true and a false?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there are true and false propositions?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And a true proposition says that which is, and a false proposition says that which is not?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes; what other answer is possible?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then in a proposition there is a true and false?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But is a proposition true as a whole only, and are the parts untrue?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"No; the parts are true as well as the whole."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Would you say the large parts and not the smaller ones, or every part?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I should say that every part is true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is a proposition resolvable into any part smaller than a name?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"No; that is the smallest."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the name is a part of the true proposition?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, and a true part, as you say."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not the part of a falsehood also a falsehood?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, if propositions may be true and false, names may be true and false?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"So we must infer."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the name of anything is that which any one affirms to be the name?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will there be so many names of each thing as everybody says that there are? and will they be true names at the time of uttering them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, I can conceive no correctness of names other than this; you give one name, and I another; and in different cities and countries there are different names for the same things; Hellenes differ from barbarians in their use of names, and the several Hellenic tribes from one another."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But would you say, Hermogenes, that the things differ as the names differ? and are they relative to individuals, as Protagoras tells us? For he says that man is the measure of all things, and that things are to me as they appear to me, and that they are to you as they appear to you. Do you agree with him, or would you say that things have a permanent essence of their own?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"There have been times, Socrates, when I have been driven in my perplexity to take refuge with Protagoras; not that I agree with him at all."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What! have you ever been driven to admit that there was no such thing as a bad man?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"No, indeed; but I have often had reason to think that there are very bad men, and a good many of them."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and have you ever found any very good ones?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Not many."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Still you have found them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you hold that the very good were the very wise, and the very evil very foolish? Would that be your view?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"It would."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if Protagoras is right, and the truth is that things are as they appear to any one, how can some of us be wise and some of us foolish?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if, on the other hand, wisdom and folly are really distinguishable, you will allow, I think, that the assertion of Protagoras can hardly be correct. For if what appears to each man is true to him, one man cannot in reality be wiser than another."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"He cannot."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor will you be disposed to say with Euthydemus, that all things equally belong to all men at the same moment and always; for neither on his view can there be some good and others bad, if virtue and vice are always equally to be attributed to all."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"There cannot."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if neither is right, and things are not relative to individuals, and all things do not equally belong to all at the same moment and always, they must be supposed to have their own proper and permanent essence: they are not in relation to us, or influenced by us, fluctuating according to our fancy, but they are independent, and maintain to their own essence the relation prescribed by nature."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I think, Socrates, that you have said the truth."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Does what I am saying apply only to the things themselves, or equally to the actions which proceed from them? Are not actions also a class of being?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes, the actions are real as well as the things."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the actions also are done according to their proper nature, and not according to our opinion of them? In cutting, for example, we do not cut as we please, and with any chance instrument; but we cut with the proper instrument only, and according to the natural process of cutting; and the natural process is right and will succeed, but any other will fail and be of no use at all."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I should say that the natural way is the right way."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Again, in burning, not every way is the right way; but the right way is the natural way, and the right instrument the natural instrument."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this holds good of all actions?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And speech is a kind of action?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will a man speak correctly who speaks as he pleases? Will not the successful speaker rather be he who speaks in the natural way of speaking, and as things ought to be spoken, and with the natural instrument? Any other mode of speaking will result in error and failure."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I quite agree with you."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not naming a part of speaking? for in giving names men speak."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if speaking is a sort of action and has a relation to acts, is not naming also a sort of action?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And we saw that actions were not relative to ourselves, but had a special nature of their own?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Precisely."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the argument would lead us to infer that names ought to be given according to a natural process, and with a proper instrument, and not at our pleasure: in this and no other way shall we name with success."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But again, that which has to be cut has to be cut with something?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that which has to be woven or pierced has to be woven or pierced with something?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that which has to be named has to be named with something?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What is that with which we pierce?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"An awl."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And with which we weave?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"A shuttle."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And with which we name?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"A name."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good: then a name is an instrument?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Suppose that I ask, \u201cWhat sort of instrument is a shuttle?\u201d And you answer, \u201cA weaving instrument.\u201d"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Well."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I ask again, \u201cWhat do we do when we weave?\u201d\u2014The answer is, that we separate or disengage the warp from the woof."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And may not a similar description be given of an awl, and of instruments in general?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now suppose that I ask a similar question about names: will you answer me? Regarding the name as an instrument, what do we do when we name?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I cannot say."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do we not give information to one another, and distinguish things according to their natures?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly we do."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then a name is an instrument of teaching and of distinguishing natures, as the shuttle is of distinguishing the threads of the web."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the shuttle is the instrument of the weaver?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Assuredly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the weaver will use the shuttle well\u2014and well means like a weaver? and the teacher will use the name well\u2014and well means like a teacher?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when the weaver uses the shuttle, whose work will he be using well?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That of the carpenter."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is every man a carpenter, or the skilled only?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Only the skilled."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when the piercer uses the awl, whose work will he be using well?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That of the smith."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is every man a smith, or only the skilled?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"The skilled only."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when the teacher uses the name, whose work will he be using?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"There again I am puzzled."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Cannot you at least say who gives us the names which we use?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Indeed I cannot."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Does not the law seem to you to give us them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes, I suppose so."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the teacher, when he gives us a name, uses the work of the legislator?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is every man a legislator, or the skilled only?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"The skilled only."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, Hermogenes, not every man is able to give a name, but only a maker of names; and this is the legislator, who of all skilled artisans in the world is the rarest."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how does the legislator make names? and to what does he look? Consider this in the light of the previous instances: to what does the carpenter look in making the shuttle? Does he not look to that which is naturally fitted to act as a shuttle?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And suppose the shuttle to be broken in making, will he make another, looking to the broken one? or will he look to the form according to which he made the other?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"To the latter, I should imagine."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Might not that be justly called the true or ideal shuttle?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I think so."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And whatever shuttles are wanted, for the manufacture of garments, thin or thick, of flaxen, woollen, or other material, ought all of them to have the true form of the shuttle; and whatever is the shuttle best adapted to each kind of work, that ought to be the form which the maker produces in each case."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same holds of other instruments: when a man has discovered the instrument which is naturally adapted to each work, he must express this natural form, and not others which he fancies, in the material, whatever it may be, which he employs; for example, he ought to know how to put into iron the forms of awls adapted by nature to their several uses?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how to put into wood forms of shuttles adapted by nature to their uses?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"For the several forms of shuttles naturally answer to the several kinds of webs; and this is true of instruments in general."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, as to names: ought not our legislator also to know how to put the true natural name of each thing into sounds and syllables, and to make and give all names with a view to the ideal name, if he is to be a namer in any true sense? And we must remember that different legislators will not use the same syllables. For neither does every smith, although he may be making the same instrument for the same purpose, make them all of the same iron. The form must be the same, but the material may vary, and still the instrument may be equally good of whatever iron made, whether in Hellas or in a foreign country;\u2014there is no difference."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the legislator, whether he be Hellene or barbarian, is not therefore to be deemed by you a worse legislator, provided he gives the true and proper form of the name in whatever syllables; this or that country makes no matter."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But who then is to determine whether the proper form is given to the shuttle, whatever sort of wood may be used? the carpenter who makes, or the weaver who is to use them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I should say, he who is to use them, Socrates."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And who uses the work of the lyre-maker? Will not he be the man who knows how to direct what is being done, and who will know also whether the work is being well done or not?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And who is he?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"The player of the lyre."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And who will direct the shipwright?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"The pilot."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And who will be best able to direct the legislator in his work, and will know whether the work is well done, in this or any other country? Will not the user be the man?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this is he who knows how to ask questions?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how to answer them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And him who knows how to ask and answer you would call a dialectician?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes; that would be his name."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the work of the carpenter is to make a rudder, and the pilot has to direct him, if the rudder is to be well made."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the work of the legislator is to give names, and the dialectician must be his director if the names are to be rightly given?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, Hermogenes, I should say that this giving of names can be no such light matter as you fancy, or the work of light or chance persons; and Cratylus is right in saying that things have names by nature, and that not every man is an artificer of names, but he only who looks to the name which each thing by nature has, and is able to express the true forms of things in letters and syllables."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I cannot answer you, Socrates; but I find a difficulty in changing my opinion all in a moment, and I think that I should be more readily persuaded, if you would show me what this is which you term the natural fitness of names."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"My good Hermogenes, I have none to show. Was I not telling you just now (but you have forgotten), that I knew nothing, and proposing to share the enquiry with you? But now that you and I have talked over the matter, a step has been gained; for we have discovered that names have by nature a truth, and that not every man knows how to give a thing a name."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what is the nature of this truth or correctness of names? That, if you care to know, is the next question."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly, I care to know."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then reflect."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"How shall I reflect?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The true way is to have the assistance of those who know, and you must pay them well both in money and in thanks; these are the Sophists, of whom your brother, Callias, has\u2014rather dearly\u2014bought the reputation of wisdom. But you have not yet come into your inheritance, and therefore you had better go to him, and beg and entreat him to tell you what he has learnt from Protagoras about the fitness of names."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"But how inconsistent should I be, if, whilst repudiating Protagoras and his truth (\u201cTruth\u201d was the title of the book of Protagoras; compare Theaet.), I were to attach any value to what he and his book affirm!"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then if you despise him, you must learn of Homer and the poets."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"And where does Homer say anything about names, and what does he say?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He often speaks of them; notably and nobly in the places where he distinguishes the different names which Gods and men give to the same things. Does he not in these passages make a remarkable statement about the correctness of names? For the Gods must clearly be supposed to call things by their right and natural names; do you not think so?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Why, of course they call them rightly, if they call them at all. But to what are you referring?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you not know what he says about the river in Troy who had a single combat with Hephaestus? \u201cWhom,\u201d as he says, \u201cthe Gods call Xanthus, and men call Scamander.\u201d"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I remember."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and about this river\u2014to know that he ought to be called Xanthus and not Scamander\u2014is not that a solemn lesson? Or about the bird which, as he says, \u201cThe Gods call Chalcis, and men Cymindis:\u201d to be taught how much more correct the name Chalcis is than the name Cymindis\u2014do you deem that a light matter? Or about Batieia and Myrina? (Compare Il. \u201cThe hill which men call Batieia and the immortals the tomb of the sportive Myrina.\u201d) And there are many other observations of the same kind in Homer and other poets. Now, I think that this is beyond the understanding of you and me; but the names of Scamandrius and Astyanax, which he affirms to have been the names of Hector\u2019s son, are more within the range of human faculties, as I am disposed to think; and what the poet means by correctness may be more readily apprehended in that instance: you will remember I dare say the lines to which I refer? (Il.)"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me ask you, then, which did Homer think the more correct of the names given to Hector\u2019s son\u2014Astyanax or Scamandrius?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I do not know."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How would you answer, if you were asked whether the wise or the unwise are more likely to give correct names?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I should say the wise, of course."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are the men or the women of a city, taken as a class, the wiser?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I should say, the men."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And Homer, as you know, says that the Trojan men called him Astyanax (king of the city); but if the men called him Astyanax, the other name of Scamandrius could only have been given to him by the women."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That may be inferred."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And must not Homer have imagined the Trojans to be wiser than their wives?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he must have thought Astyanax to be a more correct name for the boy than Scamandrius?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what is the reason of this? Let us consider:\u2014does he not himself suggest a very good reason, when he says, \u201cFor he alone defended their city and long walls\u201d? This appears to be a good reason for calling the son of the saviour king of the city which his father was saving, as Homer observes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I see."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, Hermogenes, I do not as yet see myself; and do you?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"No, indeed; not I."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But tell me, friend, did not Homer himself also give Hector his name?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What of that?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The name appears to me to be very nearly the same as the name of Astyanax\u2014both are Hellenic; and a king (anax) and a holder (ektor) have nearly the same meaning, and are both descriptive of a king; for a man is clearly the holder of that of which he is king; he rules, and owns, and holds it. But, perhaps, you may think that I am talking nonsense; and indeed I believe that I myself did not know what I meant when I imagined that I had found some indication of the opinion of Homer about the correctness of names."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I assure you that I think otherwise, and I believe you to be on the right track."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is reason, I think, in calling the lion\u2019s whelp a lion, and the foal of a horse a horse; I am speaking only of the ordinary course of nature, when an animal produces after his kind, and not of extraordinary births;\u2014if contrary to nature a horse have a calf, then I should not call that a foal but a calf; nor do I call any inhuman birth a man, but only a natural birth. And the same may be said of trees and other things. Do you agree with me?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes, I agree."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good. But you had better watch me and see that I do not play tricks with you. For on the same principle the son of a king is to be called a king. And whether the syllables of the name are the same or not the same, makes no difference, provided the meaning is retained; nor does the addition or subtraction of a letter make any difference so long as the essence of the thing remains in possession of the name and appears in it."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A very simple matter. I may illustrate my meaning by the names of letters, which you know are not the same as the letters themselves with the exception of the four epsilon, upsilon, omicron, omega; the names of the rest, whether vowels or consonants, are made up of other letters which we add to them; but so long as we introduce the meaning, and there can be no mistake, the name of the letter is quite correct. Take, for example, the letter beta\u2014the addition of eta, tau, alpha, gives no offence, and does not prevent the whole name from having the value which the legislator intended\u2014so well did he know how to give the letters names."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I believe you are right."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And may not the same be said of a king? a king will often be the son of a king, the good son or the noble son of a good or noble sire; and similarly the offspring of every kind, in the regular course of nature, is like the parent, and therefore has the same name. Yet the syllables may be disguised until they appear different to the ignorant person, and he may not recognize them, although they are the same, just as any one of us would not recognize the same drugs under different disguises of colour and smell, although to the physician, who regards the power of them, they are the same, and he is not put out by the addition; and in like manner the etymologist is not put out by the addition or transposition or subtraction of a letter or two, or indeed by the change of all the letters, for this need not interfere with the meaning. As was just now said, the names of Hector and Astyanax have only one letter alike, which is tau, and yet they have the same meaning. And how little in common with the letters of their names has Archepolis (ruler of the city)\u2014and yet the meaning is the same. And there are many other names which just mean \u201cking.\u201d Again, there are several names for a general, as, for example, Agis (leader) and Polemarchus (chief in war) and Eupolemus (good warrior); and others which denote a physician, as Iatrocles (famous healer) and Acesimbrotus (curer of mortals); and there are many others which might be cited, differing in their syllables and letters, but having the same meaning. Would you not say so?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The same names, then, ought to be assigned to those who follow in the course of nature?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what of those who follow out of the course of nature, and are prodigies? for example, when a good and religious man has an irreligious son, he ought to bear the name not of his father, but of the class to which he belongs, just as in the case which was before supposed of a horse foaling a calf."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the irreligious son of a religious father should be called irreligious?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He should not be called Theophilus (beloved of God) or Mnesitheus (mindful of God), or any of these names: if names are correctly given, his should have an opposite meaning."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly, Socrates."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Again, Hermogenes, there is Orestes (the man of the mountains) who appears to be rightly called; whether chance gave the name, or perhaps some poet who meant to express the brutality and fierceness and mountain wildness of his hero\u2019s nature."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is very likely, Socrates."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And his father\u2019s name is also according to nature."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, for as his name, so also is his nature; Agamemnon (admirable for remaining) is one who is patient and persevering in the accomplishment of his resolves, and by his virtue crowns them; and his continuance at Troy with all the vast army is a proof of that admirable endurance in him which is signified by the name Agamemnon. I also think that Atreus is rightly called; for his murder of Chrysippus and his exceeding cruelty to Thyestes are damaging and destructive to his reputation\u2014the name is a little altered and disguised so as not to be intelligible to every one, but to the etymologist there is no difficulty in seeing the meaning, for whether you think of him as ateires the stubborn, or as atrestos the fearless, or as ateros the destructive one, the name is perfectly correct in every point of view. And I think that Pelops is also named appropriately; for, as the name implies, he is rightly called Pelops who sees what is near only (o ta pelas oron)."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because, according to the tradition, he had no forethought or foresight of all the evil which the murder of Myrtilus would entail upon his whole race in remote ages; he saw only what was at hand and immediate,\u2014or in other words, pelas (near), in his eagerness to win Hippodamia by all means for his bride. Every one would agree that the name of Tantalus is rightly given and in accordance with nature, if the traditions about him are true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"And what are the traditions?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Many terrible misfortunes are said to have happened to him in his life\u2014last of all, came the utter ruin of his country; and after his death he had the stone suspended (talanteia) over his head in the world below\u2014all this agrees wonderfully well with his name. You might imagine that some person who wanted to call him Talantatos (the most weighted down by misfortune), disguised the name by altering it into Tantalus; and into this form, by some accident of tradition, it has actually been transmuted. The name of Zeus, who is his alleged father, has also an excellent meaning, although hard to be understood, because really like a sentence, which is divided into two parts, for some call him Zena, and use the one half, and others who use the other half call him Dia; the two together signify the nature of the God, and the business of a name, as we were saying, is to express the nature. For there is none who is more the author of life to us and to all, than the lord and king of all. Wherefore we are right in calling him Zena and Dia, which are one name, although divided, meaning the God through whom all creatures always have life (di on zen aei pasi tois zosin uparchei). There is an irreverence, at first sight, in calling him son of Cronos (who is a proverb for stupidity), and we might rather expect Zeus to be the child of a mighty intellect. Which is the fact; for this is the meaning of his father\u2019s name: Kronos quasi Koros (Choreo, to sweep), not in the sense of a youth, but signifying to chatharon chai acheraton tou nou, the pure and garnished mind (sc. apo tou chorein). He, as we are informed by tradition, was begotten of Uranus, rightly so called (apo tou oran ta ano) from looking upwards; which, as philosophers tell us, is the way to have a pure mind, and the name Uranus is therefore correct. If I could remember the genealogy of Hesiod, I would have gone on and tried more conclusions of the same sort on the remoter ancestors of the Gods,\u2014then I might have seen whether this wisdom, which has come to me all in an instant, I know not whence, will or will not hold good to the end."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"You seem to me, Socrates, to be quite like a prophet newly inspired, and to be uttering oracles."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Hermogenes, and I believe that I caught the inspiration from the great Euthyphro of the Prospaltian deme, who gave me a long lecture which commenced at dawn: he talked and I listened, and his wisdom and enchanting ravishment has not only filled my ears but taken possession of my soul, and to-day I shall let his superhuman power work and finish the investigation of names\u2014that will be the way; but to-morrow, if you are so disposed, we will conjure him away, and make a purgation of him, if we can only find some priest or sophist who is skilled in purifications of this sort."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"With all my heart; for am very curious to hear the rest of the enquiry about names."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let us proceed; and where would you have us begin, now that we have got a sort of outline of the enquiry? Are there any names which witness of themselves that they are not given arbitrarily, but have a natural fitness? The names of heroes and of men in general are apt to be deceptive because they are often called after ancestors with whose names, as we were saying, they may have no business; or they are the expression of a wish like Eutychides (the son of good fortune), or Sosias (the Saviour), or Theophilus (the beloved of God), and others. But I think that we had better leave these, for there will be more chance of finding correctness in the names of immutable essences;\u2014there ought to have been more care taken about them when they were named, and perhaps there may have been some more than human power at work occasionally in giving them names."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I think so, Socrates."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Ought we not to begin with the consideration of the Gods, and show that they are rightly named Gods?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes, that will be well."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"My notion would be something of this sort:\u2014I suspect that the sun, moon, earth, stars, and heaven, which are still the Gods of many barbarians, were the only Gods known to the aboriginal Hellenes. Seeing that they were always moving and running, from their running nature they were called Gods or runners (Theous, Theontas); and when men became acquainted with the other Gods, they proceeded to apply the same name to them all. Do you think that likely?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I think it very likely indeed."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What shall follow the Gods?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Must not demons and heroes and men come next?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Demons! And what do you consider to be the meaning of this word? Tell me if my view is right."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Let me hear."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You know how Hesiod uses the word?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I do not."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you not remember that he speaks of a golden race of men who came first?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes, I do."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He says of them\u2014 \u201cBut now that fate has closed over this race They are holy demons upon the earth, Beneficent, averters of ills, guardians of mortal men.\u201d (Hesiod, Works and Days.)"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What is the inference?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What is the inference! Why, I suppose that he means by the golden men, not men literally made of gold, but good and noble; and I am convinced of this, because he further says that we are the iron race."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you not suppose that good men of our own day would by him be said to be of golden race?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very likely."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are not the good wise?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes, they are wise."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And therefore I have the most entire conviction that he called them demons, because they were daemones (knowing or wise), and in our older Attic dialect the word itself occurs. Now he and other poets say truly, that when a good man dies he has honour and a mighty portion among the dead, and becomes a demon; which is a name given to him signifying wisdom. And I say too, that every wise man who happens to be a good man is more than human (daimonion) both in life and death, and is rightly called a demon."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Then I rather think that I am of one mind with you; but what is the meaning of the word \u201chero\u201d? (Eros with an eta, in the old writing eros with an epsilon.)"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think that there is no difficulty in explaining, for the name is not much altered, and signifies that they were born of love."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you not know that the heroes are demigods?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What then?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"All of them sprang either from the love of a God for a mortal woman, or of a mortal man for a Goddess; think of the word in the old Attic, and you will see better that the name heros is only a slight alteration of Eros, from whom the heroes sprang: either this is the meaning, or, if not this, then they must have been skilful as rhetoricians and dialecticians, and able to put the question (erotan), for eirein is equivalent to legein. And therefore, as I was saying, in the Attic dialect the heroes turn out to be rhetoricians and questioners. All this is easy enough; the noble breed of heroes are a tribe of sophists and rhetors. But can you tell me why men are called anthropoi?\u2014that is more difficult."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"No, I cannot; and I would not try even if I could, because I think that you are the more likely to succeed."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is to say, you trust to the inspiration of Euthyphro."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Your faith is not vain; for at this very moment a new and ingenious thought strikes me, and, if I am not careful, before to-morrow\u2019s dawn I shall be wiser than I ought to be. Now, attend to me; and first, remember that we often put in and pull out letters in words, and give names as we please and change the accents. Take, for example, the word Dii Philos; in order to convert this from a sentence into a noun, we omit one of the iotas and sound the middle syllable grave instead of acute; as, on the other hand, letters are sometimes inserted in words instead of being omitted, and the acute takes the place of the grave."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The name anthropos, which was once a sentence, and is now a noun, appears to be a case just of this sort, for one letter, which is the alpha, has been omitted, and the acute on the last syllable has been changed to a grave."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean to say that the word \u201cman\u201d implies that other animals never examine, or consider, or look up at what they see, but that man not only sees (opope) but considers and looks up at that which he sees, and hence he alone of all animals is rightly anthropos, meaning anathron a opopen."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"May I ask you to examine another word about which I am curious?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I will take that which appears to me to follow next in order. You know the distinction of soul and body?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Let us endeavour to analyze them like the previous words."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You want me first of all to examine the natural fitness of the word psuche (soul), and then of the word soma (body)?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If I am to say what occurs to me at the moment, I should imagine that those who first used the name psuche meant to express that the soul when in the body is the source of life, and gives the power of breath and revival (anapsuchon), and when this reviving power fails then the body perishes and dies, and this, if I am not mistaken, they called psyche. But please stay a moment; I fancy that I can discover something which will be more acceptable to the disciples of Euthyphro, for I am afraid that they will scorn this explanation. What do you say to another?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Let me hear."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What is that which holds and carries and gives life and motion to the entire nature of the body? What else but the soul?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Just that."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you not believe with Anaxagoras, that mind or soul is the ordering and containing principle of all things?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes; I do."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you may well call that power phuseche which carries and holds nature (e phusin okei, kai ekei), and this may be refined away into psuche."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly; and this derivation is, I think, more scientific than the other."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"It is so; but I cannot help laughing, if I am to suppose that this was the true meaning of the name."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"But what shall we say of the next word?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You mean soma (the body)."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That may be variously interpreted; and yet more variously if a little permutation is allowed. For some say that the body is the grave (sema) of the soul which may be thought to be buried in our present life; or again the index of the soul, because the soul gives indications to (semainei) the body; probably the Orphic poets were the inventors of the name, and they were under the impression that the soul is suffering the punishment of sin, and that the body is an enclosure or prison in which the soul is incarcerated, kept safe (soma, sozetai), as the name soma implies, until the penalty is paid; according to this view, not even a letter of the word need be changed."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I think, Socrates, that we have said enough of this class of words. But have we any more explanations of the names of the Gods, like that which you were giving of Zeus? I should like to know whether any similar principle of correctness is to be applied to them."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed, Hermogenes; and there is one excellent principle which, as men of sense, we must acknowledge,\u2014that of the Gods we know nothing, either of their natures or of the names which they give themselves; but we are sure that the names by which they call themselves, whatever they may be, are true. And this is the best of all principles; and the next best is to say, as in prayers, that we will call them by any sort or kind of names or patronymics which they like, because we do not know of any other. That also, I think, is a very good custom, and one which I should much wish to observe. Let us, then, if you please, in the first place announce to them that we are not enquiring about them; we do not presume that we are able to do so; but we are enquiring about the meaning of men in giving them these names,\u2014in this there can be small blame."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I think, Socrates, that you are quite right, and I would like to do as you say."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall we begin, then, with Hestia, according to custom?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes, that will be very proper."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What may we suppose him to have meant who gave the name Hestia?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is another and certainly a most difficult question."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"My dear Hermogenes, the first imposers of names must surely have been considerable persons; they were philosophers, and had a good deal to say."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Well, and what of them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"They are the men to whom I should attribute the imposition of names. Even in foreign names, if you analyze them, a meaning is still discernible. For example, that which we term ousia is by some called esia, and by others again osia. Now that the essence of things should be called estia, which is akin to the first of these (esia = estia), is rational enough. And there is reason in the Athenians calling that estia which participates in ousia. For in ancient times we too seem to have said esia for ousia, and this you may note to have been the idea of those who appointed that sacrifices should be first offered to estia, which was natural enough if they meant that estia was the essence of things. Those again who read osia seem to have inclined to the opinion of Heracleitus, that all things flow and nothing stands; with them the pushing principle (othoun) is the cause and ruling power of all things, and is therefore rightly called osia. Enough of this, which is all that we who know nothing can affirm. Next in order after Hestia we ought to consider Rhea and Cronos, although the name of Cronos has been already discussed. But I dare say that I am talking great nonsense."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Why, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"My good friend, I have discovered a hive of wisdom."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Of what nature?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, rather ridiculous, and yet plausible."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"How plausible?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I fancy to myself Heracleitus repeating wise traditions of antiquity as old as the days of Cronos and Rhea, and of which Homer also spoke."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Heracleitus is supposed to say that all things are in motion and nothing at rest; he compares them to the stream of a river, and says that you cannot go into the same water twice."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, how can we avoid inferring that he who gave the names of Cronos and Rhea to the ancestors of the Gods, agreed pretty much in the doctrine of Heracleitus? Is the giving of the names of streams to both of them purely accidental? Compare the line in which Homer, and, as I believe, Hesiod also, tells of \u201cOcean, the origin of Gods, and mother Tethys (Il.\u2014the line is not found in the extant works of Hesiod.).\u201d And again, Orpheus says, that \u201cThe fair river of Ocean was the first to marry, and he espoused his sister Tethys, who was his mother\u2019s daughter.\u201d You see that this is a remarkable coincidence, and all in the direction of Heracleitus."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I think that there is something in what you say, Socrates; but I do not understand the meaning of the name Tethys."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, that is almost self-explained, being only the name of a spring, a little disguised; for that which is strained and filtered (diattomenon, ethoumenon) may be likened to a spring, and the name Tethys is made up of these two words."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"The idea is ingenious, Socrates."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"To be sure. But what comes next?\u2014of Zeus we have spoken."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let us next take his two brothers, Poseidon and Pluto, whether the latter is called by that or by his other name."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Poseidon is Posidesmos, the chain of the feet; the original inventor of the name had been stopped by the watery element in his walks, and not allowed to go on, and therefore he called the ruler of this element Poseidon; the epsilon was probably inserted as an ornament. Yet, perhaps, not so; but the name may have been originally written with a double lamda and not with a sigma, meaning that the God knew many things (Polla eidos). And perhaps also he being the shaker of the earth, has been named from shaking (seiein), and then pi and delta have been added. Pluto gives wealth (Ploutos), and his name means the giver of wealth, which comes out of the earth beneath. People in general appear to imagine that the term Hades is connected with the invisible (aeides) and so they are led by their fears to call the God Pluto instead."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"And what is the true derivation?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In spite of the mistakes which are made about the power of this deity, and the foolish fears which people have of him, such as the fear of always being with him after death, and of the soul denuded of the body going to him (compare Rep.), my belief is that all is quite consistent, and that the office and name of the God really correspond."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Why, how is that?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will tell you my own opinion; but first, I should like to ask you which chain does any animal feel to be the stronger? and which confines him more to the same spot,\u2014desire or necessity?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Desire, Socrates, is stronger far."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you not think that many a one would escape from Hades, if he did not bind those who depart to him by the strongest of chains?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Assuredly they would."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if by the greatest of chains, then by some desire, as I should certainly infer, and not by necessity?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is clear."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there are many desires?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And therefore by the greatest desire, if the chain is to be the greatest?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is any desire stronger than the thought that you will be made better by associating with another?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not that the reason, Hermogenes, why no one, who has been to him, is willing to come back to us? Even the Sirens, like all the rest of the world, have been laid under his spells. Such a charm, as I imagine, is the God able to infuse into his words. And, according to this view, he is the perfect and accomplished Sophist, and the great benefactor of the inhabitants of the other world; and even to us who are upon earth he sends from below exceeding blessings. For he has much more than he wants down there; wherefore he is called Pluto (or the rich). Note also, that he will have nothing to do with men while they are in the body, but only when the soul is liberated from the desires and evils of the body. Now there is a great deal of philosophy and reflection in that; for in their liberated state he can bind them with the desire of virtue, but while they are flustered and maddened by the body, not even father Cronos himself would suffice to keep them with him in his own far-famed chains."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"There is a deal of truth in what you say."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Hermogenes, and the legislator called him Hades, not from the unseen (aeides)\u2014far otherwise, but from his knowledge (eidenai) of all noble things."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very good; and what do we say of Demeter, and Here, and Apollo, and Athene, and Hephaestus, and Ares, and the other deities?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Demeter is e didousa meter, who gives food like a mother; Here is the lovely one (erate)\u2014for Zeus, according to tradition, loved and married her; possibly also the name may have been given when the legislator was thinking of the heavens, and may be only a disguise of the air (aer), putting the end in the place of the beginning. You will recognize the truth of this if you repeat the letters of Here several times over. People dread the name of Pherephatta as they dread the name of Apollo,\u2014and with as little reason; the fear, if I am not mistaken, only arises from their ignorance of the nature of names. But they go changing the name into Phersephone, and they are terrified at this; whereas the new name means only that the Goddess is wise (sophe); for seeing that all things in the world are in motion (pheromenon), that principle which embraces and touches and is able to follow them, is wisdom. And therefore the Goddess may be truly called Pherepaphe (Pherepapha), or some name like it, because she touches that which is in motion (tou pheromenon ephaptomene), herein showing her wisdom. And Hades, who is wise, consorts with her, because she is wise. They alter her name into Pherephatta now-a-days, because the present generation care for euphony more than truth. There is the other name, Apollo, which, as I was saying, is generally supposed to have some terrible signification. Have you remarked this fact?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"To be sure I have, and what you say is true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But the name, in my opinion, is really most expressive of the power of the God."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will endeavour to explain, for I do not believe that any single name could have been better adapted to express the attributes of the God, embracing and in a manner signifying all four of them,\u2014music, and prophecy, and medicine, and archery."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That must be a strange name, and I should like to hear the explanation."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Say rather an harmonious name, as beseems the God of Harmony. In the first place, the purgations and purifications which doctors and diviners use, and their fumigations with drugs magical or medicinal, as well as their washings and lustral sprinklings, have all one and the same object, which is to make a man pure both in body and soul."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not Apollo the purifier, and the washer, and the absolver from all impurities?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then in reference to his ablutions and absolutions, as being the physician who orders them, he may be rightly called Apolouon (purifier); or in respect of his powers of divination, and his truth and sincerity, which is the same as truth, he may be most fitly called Aplos, from aplous (sincere), as in the Thessalian dialect, for all the Thessalians call him Aplos; also he is aei Ballon (always shooting), because he is a master archer who never misses; or again, the name may refer to his musical attributes, and then, as in akolouthos, and akoitis, and in many other words the alpha is supposed to mean \u201ctogether,\u201d so the meaning of the name Apollo will be \u201cmoving together,\u201d whether in the poles of heaven as they are called, or in the harmony of song, which is termed concord, because he moves all together by an harmonious power, as astronomers and musicians ingeniously declare. And he is the God who presides over harmony, and makes all things move together, both among Gods and among men. And as in the words akolouthos and akoitis the alpha is substituted for an omicron, so the name Apollon is equivalent to omopolon; only the second lambda is added in order to avoid the ill-omened sound of destruction (apolon). Now the suspicion of this destructive power still haunts the minds of some who do not consider the true value of the name, which, as I was saying just now, has reference to all the powers of the God, who is the single one, the everdarting, the purifier, the mover together (aplous, aei Ballon, apolouon, omopolon). The name of the Muses and of music would seem to be derived from their making philosophical enquiries (mosthai); and Leto is called by this name, because she is such a gentle Goddess, and so willing (ethelemon) to grant our requests; or her name may be Letho, as she is often called by strangers\u2014they seem to imply by it her amiability, and her smooth and easy-going way of behaving. Artemis is named from her healthy (artemes), well-ordered nature, and because of her love of virginity, perhaps because she is a proficient in virtue (arete), and perhaps also as hating intercourse of the sexes (ton aroton misesasa). He who gave the Goddess her name may have had any or all of these reasons."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What is the meaning of Dionysus and Aphrodite?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Son of Hipponicus, you ask a solemn question; there is a serious and also a facetious explanation of both these names; the serious explanation is not to be had from me, but there is no objection to your hearing the facetious one; for the Gods too love a joke. Dionusos is simply didous oinon (giver of wine), Didoinusos, as he might be called in fun,\u2014and oinos is properly oionous, because wine makes those who drink, think (oiesthai) that they have a mind (noun) when they have none. The derivation of Aphrodite, born of the foam (aphros), may be fairly accepted on the authority of Hesiod."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Still there remains Athene, whom you, Socrates, as an Athenian, will surely not forget; there are also Hephaestus and Ares."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am not likely to forget them."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"No, indeed."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is no difficulty in explaining the other appellation of Athene."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What other appellation?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We call her Pallas."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And we cannot be wrong in supposing that this is derived from armed dances. For the elevation of oneself or anything else above the earth, or by the use of the hands, we call shaking (pallein), or dancing."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is quite true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then that is the explanation of the name Pallas?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes; but what do you say of the other name?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Athene?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is a graver matter, and there, my friend, the modern interpreters of Homer may, I think, assist in explaining the view of the ancients. For most of these in their explanations of the poet, assert that he meant by Athene \u201cmind\u201d (nous) and \u201cintelligence\u201d (dianoia), and the maker of names appears to have had a singular notion about her; and indeed calls her by a still higher title, \u201cdivine intelligence\u201d (Thou noesis), as though he would say: This is she who has the mind of God (Theonoa);\u2014using alpha as a dialectical variety for eta, and taking away iota and sigma (There seems to be some error in the MSS. The meaning is that the word theonoa = theounoa is a curtailed form of theou noesis, but the omitted letters do not agree.). Perhaps, however, the name Theonoe may mean \u201cshe who knows divine things\u201d (Theia noousa) better than others. Nor shall we be far wrong in supposing that the author of it wished to identify this Goddess with moral intelligence (en ethei noesin), and therefore gave her the name ethonoe; which, however, either he or his successors have altered into what they thought a nicer form, and called her Athene."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"But what do you say of Hephaestus?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Speak you of the princely lord of light (Phaeos istora)?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Surely."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Ephaistos is Phaistos, and has added the eta by attraction; that is obvious to anybody."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is very probable, until some more probable notion gets into your head."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"To prevent that, you had better ask what is the derivation of Ares."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What is Ares?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Ares may be called, if you will, from his manhood (arren) and manliness, or if you please, from his hard and unchangeable nature, which is the meaning of arratos: the latter is a derivation in every way appropriate to the God of war."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, by the Gods, let us have no more of the Gods, for I am afraid of them; ask about anything but them, and thou shalt see how the steeds of Euthyphro can prance."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Only one more God! I should like to know about Hermes, of whom I am said not to be a true son. Let us make him out, and then I shall know whether there is any meaning in what Cratylus says."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should imagine that the name Hermes has to do with speech, and signifies that he is the interpreter (ermeneus), or messenger, or thief, or liar, or bargainer; all that sort of thing has a great deal to do with language; as I was telling you, the word eirein is expressive of the use of speech, and there is an often-recurring Homeric word emesato, which means \u201che contrived\u201d\u2014out of these two words, eirein and mesasthai, the legislator formed the name of the God who invented language and speech; and we may imagine him dictating to us the use of this name: \u201cO my friends,\u201d says he to us, \u201cseeing that he is the contriver of tales or speeches, you may rightly call him Eirhemes.\u201d And this has been improved by us, as we think, into Hermes. Iris also appears to have been called from the verb \u201cto tell\u201d (eirein), because she was a messenger."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Then I am very sure that Cratylus was quite right in saying that I was no true son of Hermes (Ermogenes), for I am not a good hand at speeches."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is also reason, my friend, in Pan being the double-formed son of Hermes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"How do you make that out?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You are aware that speech signifies all things (pan), and is always turning them round and round, and has two forms, true and false?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is not the truth that is in him the smooth or sacred form which dwells above among the Gods, whereas falsehood dwells among men below, and is rough like the goat of tragedy; for tales and falsehoods have generally to do with the tragic or goatish life, and tragedy is the place of them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then surely Pan, who is the declarer of all things (pan) and the perpetual mover (aei polon) of all things, is rightly called aipolos (goat-herd), he being the two-formed son of Hermes, smooth in his upper part, and rough and goatlike in his lower regions. And, as the son of Hermes, he is speech or the brother of speech, and that brother should be like brother is no marvel. But, as I was saying, my dear Hermogenes, let us get away from the Gods."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"From these sort of Gods, by all means, Socrates. But why should we not discuss another kind of Gods\u2014the sun, moon, stars, earth, aether, air, fire, water, the seasons, and the year?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You impose a great many tasks upon me. Still, if you wish, I will not refuse."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"You will oblige me."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How would you have me begin? Shall I take first of all him whom you mentioned first\u2014the sun?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The origin of the sun will probably be clearer in the Doric form, for the Dorians call him alios, and this name is given to him because when he rises he gathers (alizoi) men together or because he is always rolling in his course (aei eilein ion) about the earth; or from aiolein, of which the meaning is the same as poikillein (to variegate), because he variegates the productions of the earth."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"But what is selene (the moon)?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That name is rather unfortunate for Anaxagoras."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The word seems to forestall his recent discovery, that the moon receives her light from the sun."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Why do you say so?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The two words selas (brightness) and phos (light) have much the same meaning?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"This light about the moon is always new (neon) and always old (enon), if the disciples of Anaxagoras say truly. For the sun in his revolution always adds new light, and there is the old light of the previous month."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The moon is not unfrequently called selanaia."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And as she has a light which is always old and always new (enon neon aei) she may very properly have the name selaenoneoaeia; and this when hammered into shape becomes selanaia."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"A real dithyrambic sort of name that, Socrates. But what do you say of the month and the stars?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Meis (month) is called from meiousthai (to lessen), because suffering diminution; the name of astra (stars) seems to be derived from astrape, which is an improvement on anastrope, signifying the upsetting of the eyes (anastrephein opa)."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What do you say of pur (fire) and udor (water)?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am at a loss how to explain pur; either the muse of Euthyphro has deserted me, or there is some very great difficulty in the word. Please, however, to note the contrivance which I adopt whenever I am in a difficulty of this sort."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will tell you; but I should like to know first whether you can tell me what is the meaning of the pur?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Indeed I cannot."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall I tell you what I suspect to be the true explanation of this and several other words?\u2014My belief is that they are of foreign origin. For the Hellenes, especially those who were under the dominion of the barbarians, often borrowed from them."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What is the inference?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, you know that any one who seeks to demonstrate the fitness of these names according to the Hellenic language, and not according to the language from which the words are derived, is rather likely to be at fault."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well then, consider whether this pur is not foreign; for the word is not easily brought into relation with the Hellenic tongue, and the Phrygians may be observed to have the same word slightly changed, just as they have udor (water) and kunes (dogs), and many other words."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Any violent interpretations of the words should be avoided; for something to say about them may easily be found. And thus I get rid of pur and udor. Aer (air), Hermogenes, may be explained as the element which raises (airei) things from the earth, or as ever flowing (aei rei), or because the flux of the air is wind, and the poets call the winds \u201cair-blasts,\u201d (aetai); he who uses the term may mean, so to speak, air-flux (aetorroun), in the sense of wind-flux (pneumatorroun); and because this moving wind may be expressed by either term he employs the word air (aer = aetes rheo). Aither (aether) I should interpret as aeitheer; this may be correctly said, because this element is always running in a flux about the air (aei thei peri tou aera reon). The meaning of the word ge (earth) comes out better when in the form of gaia, for the earth may be truly called \u201cmother\u201d (gaia, genneteira), as in the language of Homer (Od.) gegaasi means gegennesthai."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Good."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What shall we take next?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"There are orai (the seasons), and the two names of the year, eniautos and etos."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The orai should be spelt in the old Attic way, if you desire to know the probable truth about them; they are rightly called the orai because they divide (orizousin) the summers and winters and winds and the fruits of the earth. The words eniautos and etos appear to be the same,\u2014\u201cthat which brings to light the plants and growths of the earth in their turn, and passes them in review within itself (en eauto exetazei)\u201d: this is broken up into two words, eniautos from en eauto, and etos from etazei, just as the original name of Zeus was divided into Zena and Dia; and the whole proposition means that his power of reviewing from within is one, but has two names, two words etos and eniautos being thus formed out of a single proposition."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Indeed, Socrates, you make surprising progress."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am run away with."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But am not yet at my utmost speed."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I should like very much to know, in the next place, how you would explain the virtues. What principle of correctness is there in those charming words\u2014wisdom, understanding, justice, and the rest of them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is a tremendous class of names which you are disinterring; still, as I have put on the lion\u2019s skin, I must not be faint of heart; and I suppose that I must consider the meaning of wisdom (phronesis) and understanding (sunesis), and judgment (gnome), and knowledge (episteme), and all those other charming words, as you call them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Surely, we must not leave off until we find out their meaning."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"By the dog of Egypt I have a not bad notion which came into my head only this moment: I believe that the primeval givers of names were undoubtedly like too many of our modern philosophers, who, in their search after the nature of things, are always getting dizzy from constantly going round and round, and then they imagine that the world is going round and round and moving in all directions; and this appearance, which arises out of their own internal condition, they suppose to be a reality of nature; they think that there is nothing stable or permanent, but only flux and motion, and that the world is always full of every sort of motion and change. The consideration of the names which I mentioned has led me into making this reflection."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"How is that, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Perhaps you did not observe that in the names which have been just cited, the motion or flux or generation of things is most surely indicated."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"No, indeed, I never thought of it."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Take the first of those which you mentioned; clearly that is a name indicative of motion."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What was the name?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Phronesis (wisdom), which may signify phoras kai rhou noesis (perception of motion and flux), or perhaps phoras onesis (the blessing of motion), but is at any rate connected with pheresthai (motion); gnome (judgment), again, certainly implies the ponderation or consideration (nomesis) of generation, for to ponder is the same as to consider; or, if you would rather, here is noesis, the very word just now mentioned, which is neou esis (the desire of the new); the word neos implies that the world is always in process of creation. The giver of the name wanted to express this longing of the soul, for the original name was neoesis, and not noesis; but eta took the place of a double epsilon. The word sophrosune is the salvation (soteria) of that wisdom (phronesis) which we were just now considering. Epioteme (knowledge) is akin to this, and indicates that the soul which is good for anything follows (epetai) the motion of things, neither anticipating them nor falling behind them; wherefore the word should rather be read as epistemene, inserting epsilon nu. Sunesis (understanding) may be regarded in like manner as a kind of conclusion; the word is derived from sunienai (to go along with), and, like epistasthai (to know), implies the progression of the soul in company with the nature of things. Sophia (wisdom) is very dark, and appears not to be of native growth; the meaning is, touching the motion or stream of things. You must remember that the poets, when they speak of the commencement of any rapid motion, often use the word esuthe (he rushed); and there was a famous Lacedaemonian who was named Sous (Rush), for by this word the Lacedaemonians signify rapid motion, and the touching (epaphe) of motion is expressed by sophia, for all things are supposed to be in motion. Good (agathon) is the name which is given to the admirable (agasto) in nature; for, although all things move, still there are degrees of motion; some are swifter, some slower; but there are some things which are admirable for their swiftness, and this admirable part of nature is called agathon. Dikaiosune (justice) is clearly dikaiou sunesis (understanding of the just); but the actual word dikaion is more difficult: men are only agreed to a certain extent about justice, and then they begin to disagree. For those who suppose all things to be in motion conceive the greater part of nature to be a mere receptacle; and they say that there is a penetrating power which passes through all this, and is the instrument of creation in all, and is the subtlest and swiftest element; for if it were not the subtlest, and a power which none can keep out, and also the swiftest, passing by other things as if they were standing still, it could not penetrate through the moving universe. And this element, which superintends all things and pierces (diaion) all, is rightly called dikaion; the letter k is only added for the sake of euphony. Thus far, as I was saying, there is a general agreement about the nature of justice; but I, Hermogenes, being an enthusiastic disciple, have been told in a mystery that the justice of which I am speaking is also the cause of the world: now a cause is that because of which anything is created; and some one comes and whispers in my ear that justice is rightly so called because partaking of the nature of the cause, and I begin, after hearing what he has said, to interrogate him gently: \u201cWell, my excellent friend,\u201d say I, \u201cbut if all this be true, I still want to know what is justice.\u201d Thereupon they think that I ask tiresome questions, and am leaping over the barriers, and have been already sufficiently answered, and they try to satisfy me with one derivation after another, and at length they quarrel. For one of them says that justice is the sun, and that he only is the piercing (diaionta) and burning (kaonta) element which is the guardian of nature. And when I joyfully repeat this beautiful notion, I am answered by the satirical remark, \u201cWhat, is there no justice in the world when the sun is down?\u201d And when I earnestly beg my questioner to tell me his own honest opinion, he says, \u201cFire in the abstract\u201d; but this is not very intelligible. Another says, \u201cNo, not fire in the abstract, but the abstraction of heat in the fire.\u201d Another man professes to laugh at all this, and says, as Anaxagoras says, that justice is mind, for mind, as they say, has absolute power, and mixes with nothing, and orders all things, and passes through all things. At last, my friend, I find myself in far greater perplexity about the nature of justice than I was before I began to learn. But still I am of opinion that the name, which has led me into this digression, was given to justice for the reasons which I have mentioned."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I think, Socrates, that you are not improvising now; you must have heard this from some one else."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And not the rest?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Hardly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, let me go on in the hope of making you believe in the originality of the rest. What remains after justice? I do not think that we have as yet discussed courage (andreia),\u2014injustice (adikia), which is obviously nothing more than a hindrance to the penetrating principle (diaiontos), need not be considered. Well, then, the name of andreia seems to imply a battle;\u2014this battle is in the world of existence, and according to the doctrine of flux is only the counterflux (enantia rhon): if you extract the delta from andreia, the name at once signifies the thing, and you may clearly understand that andreia is not the stream opposed to every stream, but only to that which is contrary to justice, for otherwise courage would not have been praised. The words arren (male) and aner (man) also contain a similar allusion to the same principle of the upward flux (te ano rhon). Gune (woman) I suspect to be the same word as goun (birth): thelu (female) appears to be partly derived from thele (the teat), because the teat is like rain, and makes things flourish (tethelenai)."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is surely probable."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes; and the very word thallein (to flourish) seems to figure the growth of youth, which is swift and sudden ever. And this is expressed by the legislator in the name, which is a compound of thein (running), and allesthai (leaping). Pray observe how I gallop away when I get on smooth ground. There are a good many names generally thought to be of importance, which have still to be explained."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is the meaning of the word techne (art), for example."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That may be identified with echonoe, and expresses the possession of mind: you have only to take away the tau and insert two omichrons, one between the chi and nu, and another between the nu and eta."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is a very shabby etymology."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my dear friend; but then you know that the original names have been long ago buried and disguised by people sticking on and stripping off letters for the sake of euphony, and twisting and bedizening them in all sorts of ways: and time too may have had a share in the change. Take, for example, the word katoptron; why is the letter rho inserted? This must surely be the addition of some one who cares nothing about the truth, but thinks only of putting the mouth into shape. And the additions are often such that at last no human being can possibly make out the original meaning of the word. Another example is the word sphigx, sphiggos, which ought properly to be phigx, phiggos, and there are other examples."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is quite true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet, if you are permitted to put in and pull out any letters which you please, names will be too easily made, and any name may be adapted to any object."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, that is true. And therefore a wise dictator, like yourself, should observe the laws of moderation and probability."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Such is my desire."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And mine, too, Hermogenes. But do not be too much of a precisian, or \u201cyou will unnerve me of my strength (Iliad.).\u201d When you have allowed me to add mechane (contrivance) to techne (art) I shall be at the top of my bent, for I conceive mechane to be a sign of great accomplishment\u2014anein; for mekos has the meaning of greatness, and these two, mekos and anein, make up the word mechane. But, as I was saying, being now at the top of my bent, I should like to consider the meaning of the two words arete (virtue) and kakia (vice); arete I do not as yet understand, but kakia is transparent, and agrees with the principles which preceded, for all things being in a flux (ionton), kakia is kakos ion (going badly); and this evil motion when existing in the soul has the general name of kakia, or vice, specially appropriated to it. The meaning of kakos ienai may be further illustrated by the use of deilia (cowardice), which ought to have come after andreia, but was forgotten, and, as I fear, is not the only word which has been passed over. Deilia signifies that the soul is bound with a strong chain (desmos), for lian means strength, and therefore deilia expresses the greatest and strongest bond of the soul; and aporia (difficulty) is an evil of the same nature (from a (alpha) not, and poreuesthai to go), like anything else which is an impediment to motion and movement. Then the word kakia appears to mean kakos ienai, or going badly, or limping and halting; of which the consequence is, that the soul becomes filled with vice. And if kakia is the name of this sort of thing, arete will be the opposite of it, signifying in the first place ease of motion, then that the stream of the good soul is unimpeded, and has therefore the attribute of ever flowing without let or hindrance, and is therefore called arete, or, more correctly, aeireite (ever-flowing), and may perhaps have had another form, airete (eligible), indicating that nothing is more eligible than virtue, and this has been hammered into arete. I daresay that you will deem this to be another invention of mine, but I think that if the previous word kakia was right, then arete is also right."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"But what is the meaning of kakon, which has played so great a part in your previous discourse?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is a very singular word about which I can hardly form an opinion, and therefore I must have recourse to my ingenious device."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What device?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The device of a foreign origin, which I shall give to this word also."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very likely you are right; but suppose that we leave these words and endeavour to see the rationale of kalon and aischron."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The meaning of aischron is evident, being only aei ischon roes (always preventing from flowing), and this is in accordance with our former derivations. For the name-giver was a great enemy to stagnation of all sorts, and hence he gave the name aeischoroun to that which hindered the flux (aei ischon roun), and that is now beaten together into aischron."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"But what do you say of kalon?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is more obscure; yet the form is only due to the quantity, and has been changed by altering omicron upsilon into omicron."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"This name appears to denote mind."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me ask you what is the cause why anything has a name; is not the principle which imposes the name the cause?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And must not this be the mind of Gods, or of men, or of both?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is not mind that which called (kalesan) things by their names, and is not mind the beautiful (kalon)?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is evident."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are not the works of intelligence and mind worthy of praise, and are not other works worthy of blame?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Physic does the work of a physician, and carpentering does the works of a carpenter?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the principle of beauty does the works of beauty?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that principle we affirm to be mind?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then mind is rightly called beauty because she does the works which we recognize and speak of as the beautiful?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is evident."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What more names remain to us?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"There are the words which are connected with agathon and kalon, such as sumpheron and lusiteloun, ophelimon, kerdaleon, and their opposites."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The meaning of sumpheron (expedient) I think that you may discover for yourself by the light of the previous examples,\u2014for it is a sister word to episteme, meaning just the motion (pora) of the soul accompanying the world, and things which are done upon this principle are called sumphora or sumpheronta, because they are carried round with the world."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is probable."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Again, cherdaleon (gainful) is called from cherdos (gain), but you must alter the delta into nu if you want to get at the meaning; for this word also signifies good, but in another way; he who gave the name intended to express the power of admixture (kerannumenon) and universal penetration in the good; in forming the word, however, he inserted a delta instead of a nu, and so made kerdos."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Well, but what is lusiteloun (profitable)?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I suppose, Hermogenes, that people do not mean by the profitable the gainful or that which pays (luei) the retailer, but they use the word in the sense of swift. You regard the profitable (lusiteloun), as that which being the swiftest thing in existence, allows of no stay in things and no pause or end of motion, but always, if there begins to be any end, lets things go again (luei), and makes motion immortal and unceasing: and in this point of view, as appears to me, the good is happily denominated lusiteloun\u2014being that which looses (luon) the end (telos) of motion. Ophelimon (the advantageous) is derived from ophellein, meaning that which creates and increases; this latter is a common Homeric word, and has a foreign character."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"And what do you say of their opposites?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Of such as are mere negatives I hardly think that I need speak."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Which are they?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The words axumphoron (inexpedient), anopheles (unprofitable), alusiteles (unadvantageous), akerdes (ungainful)."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I would rather take the words blaberon (harmful), zemiodes (hurtful)."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Good."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The word blaberon is that which is said to hinder or harm (blaptein) the stream (roun); blapton is boulomenon aptein (seeking to hold or bind); for aptein is the same as dein, and dein is always a term of censure; boulomenon aptein roun (wanting to bind the stream) would properly be boulapteroun, and this, as I imagine, is improved into blaberon."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"You bring out curious results, Socrates, in the use of names; and when I hear the word boulapteroun I cannot help imagining that you are making your mouth into a flute, and puffing away at some prelude to Athene."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is the fault of the makers of the name, Hermogenes; not mine."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very true; but what is the derivation of zemiodes?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What is the meaning of zemiodes?\u2014let me remark, Hermogenes, how right I was in saying that great changes are made in the meaning of words by putting in and pulling out letters; even a very slight permutation will sometimes give an entirely opposite sense; I may instance the word deon, which occurs to me at the moment, and reminds me of what I was going to say to you, that the fine fashionable language of modern times has twisted and disguised and entirely altered the original meaning both of deon, and also of zemiodes, which in the old language is clearly indicated."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will try to explain. You are aware that our forefathers loved the sounds iota and delta, especially the women, who are most conservative of the ancient language, but now they change iota into eta or epsilon, and delta into zeta; this is supposed to increase the grandeur of the sound."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"For example, in very ancient times they called the day either imera or emera (short e), which is called by us emera (long e)."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you observe that only the ancient form shows the intention of the giver of the name? of which the reason is, that men long for (imeirousi) and love the light which comes after the darkness, and is therefore called imera, from imeros, desire."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But now the name is so travestied that you cannot tell the meaning, although there are some who imagine the day to be called emera because it makes things gentle (emera different accents)."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Such is my view."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you know that the ancients said duogon and not zugon?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"They did so."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And zugon (yoke) has no meaning,\u2014it ought to be duogon, which word expresses the binding of two together (duein agoge) for the purpose of drawing;\u2014this has been changed into zugon, and there are many other examples of similar changes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"There are."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Proceeding in the same train of thought I may remark that the word deon (obligation) has a meaning which is the opposite of all the other appellations of good; for deon is here a species of good, and is, nevertheless, the chain (desmos) or hinderer of motion, and therefore own brother of blaberon."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; that is quite plain."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Not if you restore the ancient form, which is more likely to be the correct one, and read dion instead of deon; if you convert the epsilon into an iota after the old fashion, this word will then agree with other words meaning good; for dion, not deon, signifies the good, and is a term of praise; and the author of names has not contradicted himself, but in all these various appellations, deon (obligatory), ophelimon (advantageous), lusiteloun (profitable), kerdaleon (gainful), agathon (good), sumpheron (expedient), euporon (plenteous), the same conception is implied of the ordering or all-pervading principle which is praised, and the restraining and binding principle which is censured. And this is further illustrated by the word zemiodes (hurtful), which if the zeta is only changed into delta as in the ancient language, becomes demiodes; and this name, as you will perceive, is given to that which binds motion (dounti ion)."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What do you say of edone (pleasure), lupe (pain), epithumia (desire), and the like, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I do not think, Hermogenes, that there is any great difficulty about them\u2014edone is e (eta) onesis, the action which tends to advantage; and the original form may be supposed to have been eone, but this has been altered by the insertion of the delta. Lupe appears to be derived from the relaxation (luein) which the body feels when in sorrow; ania (trouble) is the hindrance of motion (alpha and ienai); algedon (distress), if I am not mistaken, is a foreign word, which is derived from aleinos (grievous); odune (grief) is called from the putting on (endusis) sorrow; in achthedon (vexation) \u201cthe word too labours,\u201d as any one may see; chara (joy) is the very expression of the fluency and diffusion of the soul (cheo); terpsis (delight) is so called from the pleasure creeping (erpon) through the soul, which may be likened to a breath (pnoe) and is properly erpnoun, but has been altered by time into terpnon; eupherosune (cheerfulness) and epithumia explain themselves; the former, which ought to be eupherosune and has been changed euphrosune, is named, as every one may see, from the soul moving (pheresthai) in harmony with nature; epithumia is really e epi ton thumon iousa dunamis, the power which enters into the soul; thumos (passion) is called from the rushing (thuseos) and boiling of the soul; imeros (desire) denotes the stream (rous) which most draws the soul dia ten esin tes roes\u2014because flowing with desire (iemenos), and expresses a longing after things and violent attraction of the soul to them, and is termed imeros from possessing this power; pothos (longing) is expressive of the desire of that which is not present but absent, and in another place (pou); this is the reason why the name pothos is applied to things absent, as imeros is to things present; eros (love) is so called because flowing in (esron) from without; the stream is not inherent, but is an influence introduced through the eyes, and from flowing in was called esros (influx) in the old time when they used omicron for omega, and is called eros, now that omega is substituted for omicron. But why do you not give me another word?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What do you think of doxa (opinion), and that class of words?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Doxa is either derived from dioxis (pursuit), and expresses the march of the soul in the pursuit of knowledge, or from the shooting of a bow (toxon); the latter is more likely, and is confirmed by oiesis (thinking), which is only oisis (moving), and implies the movement of the soul to the essential nature of each thing\u2014just as boule (counsel) has to do with shooting (bole); and boulesthai (to wish) combines the notion of aiming and deliberating\u2014all these words seem to follow doxa, and all involve the idea of shooting, just as aboulia, absence of counsel, on the other hand, is a mishap, or missing, or mistaking of the mark, or aim, or proposal, or object."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"You are quickening your pace now, Socrates."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why yes, the end I now dedicate to God, not, however, until I have explained anagke (necessity), which ought to come next, and ekousion (the voluntary). Ekousion is certainly the yielding (eikon) and unresisting\u2014the notion implied is yielding and not opposing, yielding, as I was just now saying, to that motion which is in accordance with our will; but the necessary and resistant being contrary to our will, implies error and ignorance; the idea is taken from walking through a ravine which is impassable, and rugged, and overgrown, and impedes motion\u2014and this is the derivation of the word anagkaion (necessary) an agke ion, going through a ravine. But while my strength lasts let us persevere, and I hope that you will persevere with your questions."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Well, then, let me ask about the greatest and noblest, such as aletheia (truth) and pseudos (falsehood) and on (being), not forgetting to enquire why the word onoma (name), which is the theme of our discussion, has this name of onoma."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You know the word maiesthai (to seek)?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes;\u2014meaning the same as zetein (to enquire)."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The word onoma seems to be a compressed sentence, signifying on ou zetema (being for which there is a search); as is still more obvious in onomaston (notable), which states in so many words that real existence is that for which there is a seeking (on ou masma); aletheia is also an agglomeration of theia ale (divine wandering), implying the divine motion of existence; pseudos (falsehood) is the opposite of motion; here is another ill name given by the legislator to stagnation and forced inaction, which he compares to sleep (eudein); but the original meaning of the word is disguised by the addition of psi; on and ousia are ion with an iota broken off; this agrees with the true principle, for being (on) is also moving (ion), and the same may be said of not being, which is likewise called not going (oukion or ouki on = ouk ion)."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"You have hammered away at them manfully; but suppose that some one were to say to you, what is the word ion, and what are reon and doun?\u2014show me their fitness."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You mean to say, how should I answer him?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"One way of giving the appearance of an answer has been already suggested."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"What way?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"To say that names which we do not understand are of foreign origin; and this is very likely the right answer, and something of this kind may be true of them; but also the original forms of words may have been lost in the lapse of ages; names have been so twisted in all manner of ways, that I should not be surprised if the old language when compared with that now in use would appear to us to be a barbarous tongue."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very likely."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, very likely. But still the enquiry demands our earnest attention and we must not flinch. For we should remember, that if a person go on analysing names into words, and enquiring also into the elements out of which the words are formed, and keeps on always repeating this process, he who has to answer him must at last give up the enquiry in despair."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And at what point ought he to lose heart and give up the enquiry? Must he not stop when he comes to the names which are the elements of all other names and sentences; for these cannot be supposed to be made up of other names? The word agathon (good), for example, is, as we were saying, a compound of agastos (admirable) and thoos (swift). And probably thoos is made up of other elements, and these again of others. But if we take a word which is incapable of further resolution, then we shall be right in saying that we have at last reached a primary element, which need not be resolved any further."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I believe you to be in the right."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And suppose the names about which you are now asking should turn out to be primary elements, must not their truth or law be examined according to some new method?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very likely."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Quite so, Hermogenes; all that has preceded would lead to this conclusion. And if, as I think, the conclusion is true, then I shall again say to you, come and help me, that I may not fall into some absurdity in stating the principle of primary names."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Let me hear, and I will do my best to assist you."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think that you will acknowledge with me, that one principle is applicable to all names, primary as well as secondary\u2014when they are regarded simply as names, there is no difference in them."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"All the names that we have been explaining were intended to indicate the nature of things."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that this is true of the primary quite as much as of the secondary names, is implied in their being names."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Surely."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But the secondary, as I conceive, derive their significance from the primary."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That is evident."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good; but then how do the primary names which precede analysis show the natures of things, as far as they can be shown; which they must do, if they are to be real names? And here I will ask you a question: Suppose that we had no voice or tongue, and wanted to communicate with one another, should we not, like the deaf and dumb, make signs with the hands and head and the rest of the body?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"There would be no choice, Socrates."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We should imitate the nature of the thing; the elevation of our hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness; heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop to the ground; if we were describing the running of a horse, or any other animal, we should make our bodies and their gestures as like as we could to them."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I do not see that we could do anything else."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We could not; for by bodily imitation only can the body ever express anything."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when we want to express ourselves, either with the voice, or tongue, or mouth, the expression is simply their imitation of that which we want to express."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"It must be so, I think."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then a name is a vocal imitation of that which the vocal imitator names or imitates?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I think so."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nay, my friend, I am disposed to think that we have not reached the truth as yet."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Why not?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because if we have we shall be obliged to admit that the people who imitate sheep, or cocks, or other animals, name that which they imitate."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then could I have been right in what I was saying?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"In my opinion, no. But I wish that you would tell me, Socrates, what sort of an imitation is a name?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the first place, I should reply, not a musical imitation, although that is also vocal; nor, again, an imitation of what music imitates; these, in my judgment, would not be naming. Let me put the matter as follows: All objects have sound and figure, and many have colour?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But the art of naming appears not to be concerned with imitations of this kind; the arts which have to do with them are music and drawing?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Again, is there not an essence of each thing, just as there is a colour, or sound? And is there not an essence of colour and sound as well as of anything else which may be said to have an essence?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I should think so."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and if any one could express the essence of each thing in letters and syllables, would he not express the nature of each thing?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Quite so."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The musician and the painter were the two names which you gave to the two other imitators. What will this imitator be called?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I imagine, Socrates, that he must be the namer, or name-giver, of whom we are in search."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If this is true, then I think that we are in a condition to consider the names ron (stream), ienai (to go), schesis (retention), about which you were asking; and we may see whether the namer has grasped the nature of them in letters and syllables in such a manner as to imitate the essence or not."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But are these the only primary names, or are there others?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"There must be others."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"So I should expect. But how shall we further analyse them, and where does the imitator begin? Imitation of the essence is made by syllables and letters; ought we not, therefore, first to separate the letters, just as those who are beginning rhythm first distinguish the powers of elementary, and then of compound sounds, and when they have done so, but not before, they proceed to the consideration of rhythms?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Must we not begin in the same way with letters; first separating the vowels, and then the consonants and mutes (letters which are neither vowels nor semivowels), into classes, according to the received distinctions of the learned; also the semivowels, which are neither vowels, nor yet mutes; and distinguishing into classes the vowels themselves? And when we have perfected the classification of things, we shall give them names, and see whether, as in the case of letters, there are any classes to which they may be all referred (cf. Phaedrus); and hence we shall see their natures, and see, too, whether they have in them classes as there are in the letters; and when we have well considered all this, we shall know how to apply them to what they resemble\u2014whether one letter is used to denote one thing, or whether there is to be an admixture of several of them; just, as in painting, the painter who wants to depict anything sometimes uses purple only, or any other colour, and sometimes mixes up several colours, as his method is when he has to paint flesh colour or anything of that kind\u2014he uses his colours as his figures appear to require them; and so, too, we shall apply letters to the expression of objects, either single letters when required, or several letters; and so we shall form syllables, as they are called, and from syllables make nouns and verbs; and thus, at last, from the combinations of nouns and verbs arrive at language, large and fair and whole; and as the painter made a figure, even so shall we make speech by the art of the namer or the rhetorician, or by some other art. Not that I am literally speaking of ourselves, but I was carried away\u2014meaning to say that this was the way in which (not we but) the ancients formed language, and what they put together we must take to pieces in like manner, if we are to attain a scientific view of the whole subject, and we must see whether the primary, and also whether the secondary elements are rightly given or not, for if they are not, the composition of them, my dear Hermogenes, will be a sorry piece of work, and in the wrong direction."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"That, Socrates, I can quite believe."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but do you suppose that you will be able to analyse them in this way? for I am certain that I should not."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Much less am I likely to be able."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall we leave them, then? or shall we seek to discover, if we can, something about them, according to the measure of our ability, saying by way of preface, as I said before of the Gods, that of the truth about them we know nothing, and do but entertain human notions of them. And in this present enquiry, let us say to ourselves, before we proceed, that the higher method is the one which we or others who would analyse language to any good purpose must follow; but under the circumstances, as men say, we must do as well as we can. What do you think?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"I very much approve."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That objects should be imitated in letters and syllables, and so find expression, may appear ridiculous, Hermogenes, but it cannot be avoided\u2014there is no better principle to which we can look for the truth of first names. Deprived of this, we must have recourse to divine help, like the tragic poets, who in any perplexity have their gods waiting in the air; and must get out of our difficulty in like fashion, by saying that \u201cthe Gods gave the first names, and therefore they are right.\u201d This will be the best contrivance, or perhaps that other notion may be even better still, of deriving them from some barbarous people, for the barbarians are older than we are; or we may say that antiquity has cast a veil over them, which is the same sort of excuse as the last; for all these are not reasons but only ingenious excuses for having no reasons concerning the truth of words. And yet any sort of ignorance of first or primitive names involves an ignorance of secondary words; for they can only be explained by the primary. Clearly then the professor of languages should be able to give a very lucid explanation of first names, or let him be assured he will only talk nonsense about the rest. Do you not suppose this to be true?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Certainly, Socrates."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"My first notions of original names are truly wild and ridiculous, though I have no objection to impart them to you if you desire, and I hope that you will communicate to me in return anything better which you may have."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"Fear not; I will do my best."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the first place, the letter rho appears to me to be the general instrument expressing all motion (kinesis). But I have not yet explained the meaning of this latter word, which is just iesis (going); for the letter eta was not in use among the ancients, who only employed epsilon; and the root is kiein, which is a foreign form, the same as ienai. And the old word kinesis will be correctly given as iesis in corresponding modern letters. Assuming this foreign root kiein, and allowing for the change of the eta and the insertion of the nu, we have kinesis, which should have been kieinsis or eisis; and stasis is the negative of ienai (or eisis), and has been improved into stasis. Now the letter rho, as I was saying, appeared to the imposer of names an excellent instrument for the expression of motion; and he frequently uses the letter for this purpose: for example, in the actual words rein and roe he represents motion by rho; also in the words tromos (trembling), trachus (rugged); and again, in words such as krouein (strike), thrauein (crush), ereikein (bruise), thruptein (break), kermatixein (crumble), rumbein (whirl): of all these sorts of movements he generally finds an expression in the letter R, because, as I imagine, he had observed that the tongue was most agitated and least at rest in the pronunciation of this letter, which he therefore used in order to express motion, just as by the letter iota he expresses the subtle elements which pass through all things. This is why he uses the letter iota as imitative of motion, ienai, iesthai. And there is another class of letters, phi, psi, sigma, and xi, of which the pronunciation is accompanied by great expenditure of breath; these are used in the imitation of such notions as psuchron (shivering), xeon (seething), seiesthai, (to be shaken), seismos (shock), and are always introduced by the giver of names when he wants to imitate what is phusodes (windy). He seems to have thought that the closing and pressure of the tongue in the utterance of delta and tau was expressive of binding and rest in a place: he further observed the liquid movement of lambda, in the pronunciation of which the tongue slips, and in this he found the expression of smoothness, as in leios (level), and in the word oliothanein (to slip) itself, liparon (sleek), in the word kollodes (gluey), and the like: the heavier sound of gamma detained the slipping tongue, and the union of the two gave the notion of a glutinous clammy nature, as in glischros, glukus, gloiodes. The nu he observed to be sounded from within, and therefore to have a notion of inwardness; hence he introduced the sound in endos and entos: alpha he assigned to the expression of size, and nu of length, because they are great letters: omicron was the sign of roundness, and therefore there is plenty of omicron mixed up in the word goggulon (round). Thus did the legislator, reducing all things into letters and syllables, and impressing on them names and signs, and out of them by imitation compounding other signs. That is my view, Hermogenes, of the truth of names; but I should like to hear what Cratylus has more to say."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"But, Socrates, as I was telling you before, Cratylus mystifies me; he says that there is a fitness of names, but he never explains what is this fitness, so that I cannot tell whether his obscurity is intended or not. Tell me now, Cratylus, here in the presence of Socrates, do you agree in what Socrates has been saying about names, or have you something better of your own? and if you have, tell me what your view is, and then you will either learn of Socrates, or Socrates and I will learn of you."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Well, but surely, Hermogenes, you do not suppose that you can learn, or I explain, any subject of importance all in a moment; at any rate, not such a subject as language, which is, perhaps, the very greatest of all."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"HERMOGENES","Dialogue":"No, indeed; but, as Hesiod says, and I agree with him, \u201cto add little to little\u201d is worth while. And, therefore, if you think that you can add anything at all, however small, to our knowledge, take a little trouble and oblige Socrates, and me too, who certainly have a claim upon you."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am by no means positive, Cratylus, in the view which Hermogenes and myself have worked out; and therefore do not hesitate to say what you think, which if it be better than my own view I shall gladly accept. And I should not be at all surprized to find that you have found some better notion. For you have evidently reflected on these matters and have had teachers, and if you have really a better theory of the truth of names, you may count me in the number of your disciples."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"You are right, Socrates, in saying that I have made a study of these matters, and I might possibly convert you into a disciple. But I fear that the opposite is more probable, and I already find myself moved to say to you what Achilles in the \u201cPrayers\u201d says to Ajax,\u2014 \u201cIllustrious Ajax, son of Telamon, lord of the people, You appear to have spoken in all things much to my mind.\u201d And you, Socrates, appear to me to be an oracle, and to give answers much to my mind, whether you are inspired by Euthyphro, or whether some Muse may have long been an inhabitant of your breast, unconsciously to yourself."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Excellent Cratylus, I have long been wondering at my own wisdom; I cannot trust myself. And I think that I ought to stop and ask myself What am I saying? for there is nothing worse than self-deception\u2014when the deceiver is always at home and always with you\u2014it is quite terrible, and therefore I ought often to retrace my steps and endeavour to \u201clook fore and aft,\u201d in the words of the aforesaid Homer. And now let me see; where are we? Have we not been saying that the correct name indicates the nature of the thing:\u2014has this proposition been sufficiently proven?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, what you say, as I am disposed to think, is quite true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Names, then, are given in order to instruct?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And naming is an art, and has artificers?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And who are they?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"The legislators, of whom you spoke at first."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does this art grow up among men like other arts? Let me explain what I mean: of painters, some are better and some worse?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The better painters execute their works, I mean their figures, better, and the worse execute them worse; and of builders also, the better sort build fairer houses, and the worse build them worse."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And among legislators, there are some who do their work better and some worse?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"No; there I do not agree with you."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you do not think that some laws are better and others worse?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"No, indeed."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or that one name is better than another?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then all names are rightly imposed?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, if they are names at all."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, what do you say to the name of our friend Hermogenes, which was mentioned before:\u2014assuming that he has nothing of the nature of Hermes in him, shall we say that this is a wrong name, or not his name at all?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I should reply that Hermogenes is not his name at all, but only appears to be his, and is really the name of somebody else, who has the nature which corresponds to it."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if a man were to call him Hermogenes, would he not be even speaking falsely? For there may be a doubt whether you can call him Hermogenes, if he is not."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are you maintaining that falsehood is impossible? For if this is your meaning I should answer, that there have been plenty of liars in all ages."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Why, Socrates, how can a man say that which is not?\u2014say something and yet say nothing? For is not falsehood saying the thing which is not?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Your argument, friend, is too subtle for a man of my age. But I should like to know whether you are one of those philosophers who think that falsehood may be spoken but not said?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Neither spoken nor said."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor uttered nor addressed? For example: If a person, saluting you in a foreign country, were to take your hand and say: \u201cHail, Athenian stranger, Hermogenes, son of Smicrion\u201d\u2014these words, whether spoken, said, uttered, or addressed, would have no application to you but only to our friend Hermogenes, or perhaps to nobody at all?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"In my opinion, Socrates, the speaker would only be talking nonsense."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but that will be quite enough for me, if you will tell me whether the nonsense would be true or false, or partly true and partly false:\u2014which is all that I want to know."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I should say that he would be putting himself in motion to no purpose; and that his words would be an unmeaning sound like the noise of hammering at a brazen pot."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But let us see, Cratylus, whether we cannot find a meeting-point, for you would admit that the name is not the same with the thing named?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you further acknowledge that the name is an imitation of the thing?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you would say that pictures are also imitations of things, but in another way?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I believe you may be right, but I do not rightly understand you. Please to say, then, whether both sorts of imitation (I mean both pictures or words) are not equally attributable and applicable to the things of which they are the imitation."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"They are."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"First look at the matter thus: you may attribute the likeness of the man to the man, and of the woman to the woman; and so on?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And conversely you may attribute the likeness of the man to the woman, and of the woman to the man?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are both modes of assigning them right, or only the first?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Only the first."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is to say, the mode of assignment which attributes to each that which belongs to them and is like them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"That is my view."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now then, as I am desirous that we being friends should have a good understanding about the argument, let me state my view to you: the first mode of assignment, whether applied to figures or to names, I call right, and when applied to names only, true as well as right; and the other mode of giving and assigning the name which is unlike, I call wrong, and in the case of names, false as well as wrong."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"That may be true, Socrates, in the case of pictures; they may be wrongly assigned; but not in the case of names\u2014they must be always right."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, what is the difference? May I not go to a man and say to him, \u201cThis is your picture,\u201d showing him his own likeness, or perhaps the likeness of a woman; and when I say \u201cshow,\u201d I mean bring before the sense of sight."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And may I not go to him again, and say, \u201cThis is your name\u201d?\u2014for the name, like the picture, is an imitation. May I not say to him\u2014\u201cThis is your name\u201d? and may I not then bring to his sense of hearing the imitation of himself, when I say, \u201cThis is a man\u201d; or of a female of the human species, when I say, \u201cThis is a woman,\u201d as the case may be? Is not all that quite possible?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I would fain agree with you, Socrates; and therefore I say, Granted."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is very good of you, if I am right, which need hardly be disputed at present. But if I can assign names as well as pictures to objects, the right assignment of them we may call truth, and the wrong assignment of them falsehood. Now if there be such a wrong assignment of names, there may also be a wrong or inappropriate assignment of verbs; and if of names and verbs then of the sentences, which are made up of them. What do you say, Cratylus?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I agree; and think that what you say is very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And further, primitive nouns may be compared to pictures, and in pictures you may either give all the appropriate colours and figures, or you may not give them all\u2014some may be wanting; or there may be too many or too much of them\u2014may there not?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who gives all gives a perfect picture or figure; and he who takes away or adds also gives a picture or figure, but not a good one."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In like manner, he who by syllables and letters imitates the nature of things, if he gives all that is appropriate will produce a good image, or in other words a name; but if he subtracts or perhaps adds a little, he will make an image but not a good one; whence I infer that some names are well and others ill made."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the artist of names may be sometimes good, or he may be bad?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this artist of names is called the legislator?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then like other artists the legislator may be good or he may be bad; it must surely be so if our former admissions hold good?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Very true, Socrates; but the case of language, you see, is different; for when by the help of grammar we assign the letters alpha or beta, or any other letters to a certain name, then, if we add, or subtract, or misplace a letter, the name which is written is not only written wrongly, but not written at all; and in any of these cases becomes other than a name."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But I doubt whether your view is altogether correct, Cratylus."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I believe that what you say may be true about numbers, which must be just what they are, or not be at all; for example, the number ten at once becomes other than ten if a unit be added or subtracted, and so of any other number: but this does not apply to that which is qualitative or to anything which is represented under an image. I should say rather that the image, if expressing in every point the entire reality, would no longer be an image. Let us suppose the existence of two objects: one of them shall be Cratylus, and the other the image of Cratylus; and we will suppose, further, that some God makes not only a representation such as a painter would make of your outward form and colour, but also creates an inward organization like yours, having the same warmth and softness; and into this infuses motion, and soul, and mind, such as you have, and in a word copies all your qualities, and places them by you in another form; would you say that this was Cratylus and the image of Cratylus, or that there were two Cratyluses?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I should say that there were two Cratyluses."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you see, my friend, that we must find some other principle of truth in images, and also in names; and not insist that an image is no longer an image when something is added or subtracted. Do you not perceive that images are very far from having qualities which are the exact counterpart of the realities which they represent?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I see."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But then how ridiculous would be the effect of names on things, if they were exactly the same with them! For they would be the doubles of them, and no one would be able to determine which were the names and which were the realities."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then fear not, but have the courage to admit that one name may be correctly and another incorrectly given; and do not insist that the name shall be exactly the same with the thing; but allow the occasional substitution of a wrong letter, and if of a letter also of a noun in a sentence, and if of a noun in a sentence also of a sentence which is not appropriate to the matter, and acknowledge that the thing may be named, and described, so long as the general character of the thing which you are describing is retained; and this, as you will remember, was remarked by Hermogenes and myself in the particular instance of the names of the letters."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I remember."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Good; and when the general character is preserved, even if some of the proper letters are wanting, still the thing is signified;\u2014well, if all the letters are given; not well, when only a few of them are given. I think that we had better admit this, lest we be punished like travellers in Aegina who wander about the street late at night: and be likewise told by truth herself that we have arrived too late; or if not, you must find out some new notion of correctness of names, and no longer maintain that a name is the expression of a thing in letters or syllables; for if you say both, you will be inconsistent with yourself."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I quite acknowledge, Socrates, what you say to be very reasonable."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then as we are agreed thus far, let us ask ourselves whether a name rightly imposed ought not to have the proper letters."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the proper letters are those which are like the things?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Enough then of names which are rightly given. And in names which are incorrectly given, the greater part may be supposed to be made up of proper and similar letters, or there would be no likeness; but there will be likewise a part which is improper and spoils the beauty and formation of the word: you would admit that?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"There would be no use, Socrates, in my quarrelling with you, since I cannot be satisfied that a name which is incorrectly given is a name at all."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you admit a name to be the representation of a thing?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I do."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But do you not allow that some nouns are primitive, and some derived?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I do."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then if you admit that primitive or first nouns are representations of things, is there any better way of framing representations than by assimilating them to the objects as much as you can; or do you prefer the notion of Hermogenes and of many others, who say that names are conventional, and have a meaning to those who have agreed about them, and who have previous knowledge of the things intended by them, and that convention is the only principle; and whether you abide by our present convention, or make a new and opposite one, according to which you call small great and great small\u2014that, they would say, makes no difference, if you are only agreed. Which of these two notions do you prefer?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Representation by likeness, Socrates, is infinitely better than representation by any chance sign."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good: but if the name is to be like the thing, the letters out of which the first names are composed must also be like things. Returning to the image of the picture, I would ask, How could any one ever compose a picture which would be like anything at all, if there were not pigments in nature which resembled the things imitated, and out of which the picture is composed?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No more could names ever resemble any actually existing thing, unless the original elements of which they are compounded bore some degree of resemblance to the objects of which the names are the imitation: And the original elements are letters?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me now invite you to consider what Hermogenes and I were saying about sounds. Do you agree with me that the letter rho is expressive of rapidity, motion, and hardness? Were we right or wrong in saying so?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I should say that you were right."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that lamda was expressive of smoothness, and softness, and the like?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"There again you were right."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet, as you are aware, that which is called by us sklerotes, is by the Eretrians called skleroter."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But are the letters rho and sigma equivalents; and is there the same significance to them in the termination rho, which there is to us in sigma, or is there no significance to one of us?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Nay, surely there is a significance to both of us."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In as far as they are like, or in as far as they are unlike?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"In as far as they are like."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are they altogether alike?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes; for the purpose of expressing motion."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what do you say of the insertion of the lamda? for that is expressive not of hardness but of softness."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Why, perhaps the letter lamda is wrongly inserted, Socrates, and should be altered into rho, as you were saying to Hermogenes and in my opinion rightly, when you spoke of adding and subtracting letters upon occasion."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Good. But still the word is intelligible to both of us; when I say skleros (hard), you know what I mean."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, my dear friend, and the explanation of that is custom."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what is custom but convention? I utter a sound which I understand, and you know that I understand the meaning of the sound: this is what you are saying?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if when I speak you know my meaning, there is an indication given by me to you?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"This indication of my meaning may proceed from unlike as well as from like, for example in the lamda of sklerotes. But if this is true, then you have made a convention with yourself, and the correctness of a name turns out to be convention, since letters which are unlike are indicative equally with those which are like, if they are sanctioned by custom and convention. And even supposing that you distinguish custom from convention ever so much, still you must say that the signification of words is given by custom and not by likeness, for custom may indicate by the unlike as well as by the like. But as we are agreed thus far, Cratylus (for I shall assume that your silence gives consent), then custom and convention must be supposed to contribute to the indication of our thoughts; for suppose we take the instance of number, how can you ever imagine, my good friend, that you will find names resembling every individual number, unless you allow that which you term convention and agreement to have authority in determining the correctness of names? I quite agree with you that words should as far as possible resemble things; but I fear that this dragging in of resemblance, as Hermogenes says, is a shabby thing, which has to be supplemented by the mechanical aid of convention with a view to correctness; for I believe that if we could always, or almost always, use likenesses, which are perfectly appropriate, this would be the most perfect state of language; as the opposite is the most imperfect. But let me ask you, what is the force of names, and what is the use of them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"The use of names, Socrates, as I should imagine, is to inform: the simple truth is, that he who knows names knows also the things which are expressed by them."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I suppose you mean to say, Cratylus, that as the name is, so also is the thing; and that he who knows the one will also know the other, because they are similars, and all similars fall under the same art or science; and therefore you would say that he who knows names will also know things."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"That is precisely what I mean."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But let us consider what is the nature of this information about things which, according to you, is given us by names. Is it the best sort of information? or is there any other? What do you say?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I believe that to be both the only and the best sort of information about them; there can be no other."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But do you believe that in the discovery of them, he who discovers the names discovers also the things; or is this only the method of instruction, and is there some other method of enquiry and discovery."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I certainly believe that the methods of enquiry and discovery are of the same nature as instruction."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but do you not see, Cratylus, that he who follows names in the search after things, and analyses their meaning, is in great danger of being deceived?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why clearly he who first gave names gave them according to his conception of the things which they signified\u2014did he not?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if his conception was erroneous, and he gave names according to his conception, in what position shall we who are his followers find ourselves? Shall we not be deceived by him?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"But, Socrates, am I not right in thinking that he must surely have known; or else, as I was saying, his names would not be names at all? And you have a clear proof that he has not missed the truth, and the proof is\u2014that he is perfectly consistent. Did you ever observe in speaking that all the words which you utter have a common character and purpose?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But that, friend Cratylus, is no answer. For if he did begin in error, he may have forced the remainder into agreement with the original error and with himself; there would be nothing strange in this, any more than in geometrical diagrams, which have often a slight and invisible flaw in the first part of the process, and are consistently mistaken in the long deductions which follow. And this is the reason why every man should expend his chief thought and attention on the consideration of his first principles:\u2014are they or are they not rightly laid down? and when he has duly sifted them, all the rest will follow. Now I should be astonished to find that names are really consistent. And here let us revert to our former discussion: Were we not saying that all things are in motion and progress and flux, and that this idea of motion is expressed by names? Do you not conceive that to be the meaning of them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes; that is assuredly their meaning, and the true meaning."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us revert to episteme (knowledge) and observe how ambiguous this word is, seeming rather to signify stopping the soul at things than going round with them; and therefore we should leave the beginning as at present, and not reject the epsilon, but make an insertion of an iota instead of an epsilon (not pioteme, but epiisteme). Take another example: bebaion (sure) is clearly the expression of station and position, and not of motion. Again, the word istoria (enquiry) bears upon the face of it the stopping (istanai) of the stream; and the word piston (faithful) certainly indicates cessation of motion; then, again, mneme (memory), as any one may see, expresses rest in the soul, and not motion. Moreover, words such as amartia and sumphora, which have a bad sense, viewed in the light of their etymologies will be the same as sunesis and episteme and other words which have a good sense (compare omartein, sunienai, epesthai, sumpheresthai); and much the same may be said of amathia and akolasia, for amathia may be explained as e ama theo iontos poreia, and akolasia as e akolouthia tois pragmasin. Thus the names which in these instances we find to have the worst sense, will turn out to be framed on the same principle as those which have the best. And any one I believe who would take the trouble might find many other examples in which the giver of names indicates, not that things are in motion or progress, but that they are at rest; which is the opposite of motion."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, but observe; the greater number express motion."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What of that, Cratylus? Are we to count them like votes? and is correctness of names the voice of the majority? Are we to say of whichever sort there are most, those are the true ones?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"No; that is not reasonable."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Certainly not. But let us have done with this question and proceed to another, about which I should like to know whether you think with me. Were we not lately acknowledging that the first givers of names in states, both Hellenic and barbarous, were the legislators, and that the art which gave names was the art of the legislator?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Tell me, then, did the first legislators, who were the givers of the first names, know or not know the things which they named?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"They must have known, Socrates."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, yes, friend Cratylus, they could hardly have been ignorant."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I should say not."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us return to the point from which we digressed. You were saying, if you remember, that he who gave names must have known the things which he named; are you still of that opinion?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I am."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you say that the giver of the first names had also a knowledge of the things which he named?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But how could he have learned or discovered things from names if the primitive names were not yet given? For, if we are correct in our view, the only way of learning and discovering things, is either to discover names for ourselves or to learn them from others."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I think that there is a good deal in what you say, Socrates."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if things are only to be known through names, how can we suppose that the givers of names had knowledge, or were legislators before there were names at all, and therefore before they could have known them?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I believe, Socrates, the true account of the matter to be, that a power more than human gave things their first names, and that the names which are thus given are necessarily their true names."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then how came the giver of the names, if he was an inspired being or God, to contradict himself? For were we not saying just now that he made some names expressive of rest and others of motion? Were we mistaken?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"But I suppose one of the two not to be names at all."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And which, then, did he make, my good friend; those which are expressive of rest, or those which are expressive of motion? This is a point which, as I said before, cannot be determined by counting them."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"No; not in that way, Socrates."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if this is a battle of names, some of them asserting that they are like the truth, others contending that THEY are, how or by what criterion are we to decide between them? For there are no other names to which appeal can be made, but obviously recourse must be had to another standard which, without employing names, will make clear which of the two are right; and this must be a standard which shows the truth of things."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if that is true, Cratylus, then I suppose that things may be known without names?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But how would you expect to know them? What other way can there be of knowing them, except the true and natural way, through their affinities, when they are akin to each other, and through themselves? For that which is other and different from them must signify something other and different from them."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"What you are saying is, I think, true."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but reflect; have we not several times acknowledged that names rightly given are the likenesses and images of the things which they name?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us suppose that to any extent you please you can learn things through the medium of names, and suppose also that you can learn them from the things themselves\u2014which is likely to be the nobler and clearer way; to learn of the image, whether the image and the truth of which the image is the expression have been rightly conceived, or to learn of the truth whether the truth and the image of it have been duly executed?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I should say that we must learn of the truth."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How real existence is to be studied or discovered is, I suspect, beyond you and me. But we may admit so much, that the knowledge of things is not to be derived from names. No; they must be studied and investigated in themselves."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Clearly, Socrates."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is another point. I should not like us to be imposed upon by the appearance of such a multitude of names, all tending in the same direction. I myself do not deny that the givers of names did really give them under the idea that all things were in motion and flux; which was their sincere but, I think, mistaken opinion. And having fallen into a kind of whirlpool themselves, they are carried round, and want to drag us in after them. There is a matter, master Cratylus, about which I often dream, and should like to ask your opinion: Tell me, whether there is or is not any absolute beauty or good, or any other absolute existence?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly, Socrates, I think so."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let us seek the true beauty: not asking whether a face is fair, or anything of that sort, for all such things appear to be in a flux; but let us ask whether the true beauty is not always beautiful."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can we rightly speak of a beauty which is always passing away, and is first this and then that; must not the same thing be born and retire and vanish while the word is in our mouths?"}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Undoubtedly."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then how can that be a real thing which is never in the same state? for obviously things which are the same cannot change while they remain the same; and if they are always the same and in the same state, and never depart from their original form, they can never change or be moved."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly they cannot."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor yet can they be known by any one; for at the moment that the observer approaches, then they become other and of another nature, so that you cannot get any further in knowing their nature or state, for you cannot know that which has no state."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor can we reasonably say, Cratylus, that there is knowledge at all, if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing abiding; for knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always to abide and exist. But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no knowledge; and if the transition is always going on, there will always be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to know and nothing to be known: but if that which knows and that which is known exists ever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process or flux, as we were just now supposing. Whether there is this eternal nature in things, or whether the truth is what Heracleitus and his followers and many others say, is a question hard to determine; and no man of sense will like to put himself or the education of his mind in the power of names: neither will he so far trust names or the givers of names as to be confident in any knowledge which condemns himself and other existences to an unhealthy state of unreality; he will not believe that all things leak like a pot, or imagine that the world is a man who has a running at the nose. This may be true, Cratylus, but is also very likely to be untrue; and therefore I would not have you be too easily persuaded of it. Reflect well and like a man, and do not easily accept such a doctrine; for you are young and of an age to learn. And when you have found the truth, come and tell me."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"I will do as you say, though I can assure you, Socrates, that I have been considering the matter already, and the result of a great deal of trouble and consideration is that I incline to Heracleitus."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, another day, my friend, when you come back, you shall give me a lesson; but at present, go into the country, as you are intending, and Hermogenes shall set you on your way."}
{"Book":"cratylus","Speaker":"CRATYLUS","Dialogue":"Very good, Socrates; I hope, however, that you will continue to think about these things yourself. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRATYLUS *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor by practice, then whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"O Meno, there was a time when the Thessalians were famous among the other Hellenes only for their riches and their riding; but now, if I am not mistaken, they are equally famous for their wisdom, especially at Larisa, which is the native city of your friend Aristippus. And this is Gorgias' doing; for when he came there, the flower of the Aleuadae, among them your admirer Aristippus, and the other chiefs of the Thessalians, fell in love with his wisdom. And he has taught you the habit of answering questions in a grand and bold style, which becomes those who know, and is the style in which he himself answers all comers; and any Hellene who likes may ask him anything. How different is our lot! my dear Meno. Here at Athens there is a dearth of the commodity, and all wisdom seems to have emigrated from us to you. I am certain that if you were to ask any Athenian whether virtue was natural or acquired, he would laugh in your face, and say: 'Stranger, you have far too good an opinion of me, if you think that I can answer your question. For I literally do not know what virtue is, and much less whether it is acquired by teaching or not.' And I myself, Meno, living as I do in this region of poverty, am as poor as the rest of the world; and I confess with shame that I know literally nothing about virtue; and when I do not know the 'quid' of anything how can I know the 'quale'? How, if I knew nothing at all of Meno, could I tell if he was fair, or the opposite of fair; rich and noble, or the reverse of rich and noble? Do you think that I could?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"No, indeed. But are you in earnest, Socrates, in saying that you do not know what virtue is? And am I to carry back this report of you to Thessaly?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Not only that, my dear boy, but you may say further that I have never known of any one else who did, in my judgment."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Then you have never met Gorgias when he was at Athens?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, I have."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"And did you not think that he knew?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I have not a good memory, Meno, and therefore I cannot now tell what I thought of him at the time. And I dare say that he did know, and that you know what he said: please, therefore, to remind me of what he said; or, if you would rather, tell me your own view; for I suspect that you and he think much alike."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then as he is not here, never mind him, and do you tell me: By the gods, Meno, be generous, and tell me what you say that virtue is; for I shall be truly delighted to find that I have been mistaken, and that you and Gorgias do really have this knowledge; although I have been just saying that I have never found anybody who had."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"There will be no difficulty, Socrates, in answering your question. Let us take first the virtue of a man--he should know how to administer the state, and in the administration of it to benefit his friends and harm his enemies; and he must also be careful not to suffer harm himself. A woman's virtue, if you wish to know about that, may also be easily described: her duty is to order her house, and keep what is indoors, and obey her husband. Every age, every condition of life, young or old, male or female, bond or free, has a different virtue: there are virtues numberless, and no lack of definitions of them; for virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do. And the same may be said of vice, Socrates (Compare Arist. Pol.)."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How fortunate I am, Meno! When I ask you for one virtue, you present me with a swarm of them (Compare Theaet.), which are in your keeping. Suppose that I carry on the figure of the swarm, and ask of you, What is the nature of the bee? and you answer that there are many kinds of bees, and I reply: But do bees differ as bees, because there are many and different kinds of them; or are they not rather to be distinguished by some other quality, as for example beauty, size, or shape? How would you answer me?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I should answer that bees do not differ from one another, as bees."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if I went on to say: That is what I desire to know, Meno; tell me what is the quality in which they do not differ, but are all alike;--would you be able to answer?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And so of the virtues, however many and different they may be, they have all a common nature which makes them virtues; and on this he who would answer the question, 'What is virtue?' would do well to have his eye fixed: Do you understand?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I am beginning to understand; but I do not as yet take hold of the question as I could wish."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When you say, Meno, that there is one virtue of a man, another of a woman, another of a child, and so on, does this apply only to virtue, or would you say the same of health, and size, and strength? Or is the nature of health always the same, whether in man or woman?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I should say that health is the same, both in man and woman."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not this true of size and strength? If a woman is strong, she will be strong by reason of the same form and of the same strength subsisting in her which there is in the man. I mean to say that strength, as strength, whether of man or woman, is the same. Is there any difference?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I think not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will not virtue, as virtue, be the same, whether in a child or in a grown-up person, in a woman or in a man?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I cannot help feeling, Socrates, that this case is different from the others."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But why? Were you not saying that the virtue of a man was to order a state, and the virtue of a woman was to order a house?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I did say so."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can either house or state or anything be well ordered without temperance and without justice?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then they who order a state or a house temperately or justly order them with temperance and justice?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then both men and women, if they are to be good men and women, must have the same virtues of temperance and justice?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can either a young man or an elder one be good, if they are intemperate and unjust?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"They cannot."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"They must be temperate and just?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then all men are good in the same way, and by participation in the same virtues?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Such is the inference."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And they surely would not have been good in the same way, unless their virtue had been the same?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"They would not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now that the sameness of all virtue has been proven, try and remember what you and Gorgias say that virtue is."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Will you have one definition of them all?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is what I am seeking."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"If you want to have one definition of them all, I know not what to say, but that virtue is the power of governing mankind."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does this definition of virtue include all virtue? Is virtue the same in a child and in a slave, Meno? Can the child govern his father, or the slave his master; and would he who governed be any longer a slave?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I think not, Socrates."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No, indeed; there would be small reason in that. Yet once more, fair friend; according to you, virtue is 'the power of governing;' but do you not add 'justly and not unjustly'?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; I agree there; for justice is virtue."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Would you say 'virtue,' Meno, or 'a virtue'?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean as I might say about anything; that a round, for example, is 'a figure' and not simply 'figure,' and I should adopt this mode of speaking, because there are other figures."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Quite right; and that is just what I am saying about virtue--that there are other virtues as well as justice."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What are they? tell me the names of them, as I would tell you the names of the other figures if you asked me."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Courage and temperance and wisdom and magnanimity are virtues; and there are many others."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Meno; and again we are in the same case: in searching after one virtue we have found many, though not in the same way as before; but we have been unable to find the common virtue which runs through them all."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Why, Socrates, even now I am not able to follow you in the attempt to get at one common notion of virtue as of other things."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No wonder; but I will try to get nearer if I can, for you know that all things have a common notion. Suppose now that some one asked you the question which I asked before: Meno, he would say, what is figure? And if you answered 'roundness,' he would reply to you, in my way of speaking, by asking whether you would say that roundness is 'figure' or 'a figure;' and you would answer 'a figure.'"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And for this reason--that there are other figures?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he proceeded to ask, What other figures are there? you would have told him."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he similarly asked what colour is, and you answered whiteness, and the questioner rejoined, Would you say that whiteness is colour or a colour? you would reply, A colour, because there are other colours as well."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he had said, Tell me what they are?--you would have told him of other colours which are colours just as much as whiteness."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And suppose that he were to pursue the matter in my way, he would say: Ever and anon we are landed in particulars, but this is not what I want; tell me then, since you call them by a common name, and say that they are all figures, even when opposed to one another, what is that common nature which you designate as figure--which contains straight as well as round, and is no more one than the other--that would be your mode of speaking?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in speaking thus, you do not mean to say that the round is round any more than straight, or the straight any more straight than round?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You only assert that the round figure is not more a figure than the straight, or the straight than the round?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"To what then do we give the name of figure? Try and answer. Suppose that when a person asked you this question either about figure or colour, you were to reply, Man, I do not understand what you want, or know what you are saying; he would look rather astonished and say: Do you not understand that I am looking for the 'simile in multis'? And then he might put the question in another form: Meno, he might say, what is that 'simile in multis' which you call figure, and which includes not only round and straight figures, but all? Could you not answer that question, Meno? I wish that you would try; the attempt will be good practice with a view to the answer about virtue."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I would rather that you should answer, Socrates."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall I indulge you?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And then you will tell me about virtue?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I will."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I must do my best, for there is a prize to be won."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, I will try and explain to you what figure is. What do you say to this answer?--Figure is the only thing which always follows colour. Will you be satisfied with it, as I am sure that I should be, if you would let me have a similar definition of virtue?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"But, Socrates, it is such a simple answer."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why simple?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Because, according to you, figure is that which always follows colour. (SOCRATES: Granted.)"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"But if a person were to say that he does not know what colour is, any more than what figure is--what sort of answer would you have given him?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should have told him the truth. And if he were a philosopher of the eristic and antagonistic sort, I should say to him: You have my answer, and if I am wrong, your business is to take up the argument and refute me. But if we were friends, and were talking as you and I are now, I should reply in a milder strain and more in the dialectician's vein; that is to say, I should not only speak the truth, but I should make use of premises which the person interrogated would be willing to admit. And this is the way in which I shall endeavour to approach you. You will acknowledge, will you not, that there is such a thing as an end, or termination, or extremity?--all which words I use in the same sense, although I am aware that Prodicus might draw distinctions about them: but still you, I am sure, would speak of a thing as ended or terminated--that is all which I am saying--not anything very difficult."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, I should; and I believe that I understand your meaning."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you would speak of a surface and also of a solid, as for example in geometry."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well then, you are now in a condition to understand my definition of figure. I define figure to be that in which the solid ends; or, more concisely, the limit of solid."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"And now, Socrates, what is colour?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You are outrageous, Meno, in thus plaguing a poor old man to give you an answer, when you will not take the trouble of remembering what is Gorgias' definition of virtue."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"When you have told me what I ask, I will tell you, Socrates."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A man who was blindfolded has only to hear you talking, and he would know that you are a fair creature and have still many lovers."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Why do you think so?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, because you always speak in imperatives: like all beauties when they are in their prime, you are tyrannical; and also, as I suspect, you have found out that I have weakness for the fair, and therefore to humour you I must answer."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Please do."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Would you like me to answer you after the manner of Gorgias, which is familiar to you?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I should like nothing better."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do not he and you and Empedocles say that there are certain effluences of existence?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And passages into which and through which the effluences pass?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And some of the effluences fit into the passages, and some of them are too small or too large?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there is such a thing as sight?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, as Pindar says, 'read my meaning:'--colour is an effluence of form, commensurate with sight, and palpable to sense."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"That, Socrates, appears to me to be an admirable answer."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, yes, because it happens to be one which you have been in the habit of hearing: and your wit will have discovered, I suspect, that you may explain in the same way the nature of sound and smell, and of many other similar phenomena."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The answer, Meno, was in the orthodox solemn vein, and therefore was more acceptable to you than the other answer about figure."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet, O son of Alexidemus, I cannot help thinking that the other was the better; and I am sure that you would be of the same opinion, if you would only stay and be initiated, and were not compelled, as you said yesterday, to go away before the mysteries."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"But I will stay, Socrates, if you will give me many such answers."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well then, for my own sake as well as for yours, I will do my very best; but I am afraid that I shall not be able to give you very many as good: and now, in your turn, you are to fulfil your promise, and tell me what virtue is in the universal; and do not make a singular into a plural, as the facetious say of those who break a thing, but deliver virtue to me whole and sound, and not broken into a number of pieces: I have given you the pattern."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Well then, Socrates, virtue, as I take it, is when he, who desires the honourable, is able to provide it for himself; so the poet says, and I say too-- 'Virtue is the desire of things honourable and the power of attaining them.'"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does he who desires the honourable also desire the good?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then are there some who desire the evil and others who desire the good? Do not all men, my dear sir, desire good?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I think not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There are some who desire evil?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you mean that they think the evils which they desire, to be good; or do they know that they are evil and yet desire them?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Both, I think."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you really imagine, Meno, that a man knows evils to be evils and desires them notwithstanding?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly I do."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And desire is of possession?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, of possession."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does he think that the evils will do good to him who possesses them, or does he know that they will do him harm?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"There are some who think that the evils will do them good, and others who know that they will do them harm."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And, in your opinion, do those who think that they will do them good know that they are evils?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is it not obvious that those who are ignorant of their nature do not desire them; but they desire what they suppose to be goods although they are really evils; and if they are mistaken and suppose the evils to be goods they really desire goods?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, in that case."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and do those who, as you say, desire evils, and think that evils are hurtful to the possessor of them, know that they will be hurt by them?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"They must know it."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And must they not suppose that those who are hurt are miserable in proportion to the hurt which is inflicted upon them?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"How can it be otherwise?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But are not the miserable ill-fated?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does any one desire to be miserable and ill-fated?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I should say not, Socrates."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if there is no one who desires to be miserable, there is no one, Meno, who desires evil; for what is misery but the desire and possession of evil?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"That appears to be the truth, Socrates, and I admit that nobody desires evil."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet, were you not saying just now that virtue is the desire and power of attaining good?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, I did say so."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if this be affirmed, then the desire of good is common to all, and one man is no better than another in that respect?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if one man is not better than another in desiring good, he must be better in the power of attaining it?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, according to your definition, virtue would appear to be the power of attaining good?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I entirely approve, Socrates, of the manner in which you now view this matter."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let us see whether what you say is true from another point of view; for very likely you may be right:--You affirm virtue to be the power of attaining goods?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the goods which you mean are such as health and wealth and the possession of gold and silver, and having office and honour in the state--those are what you would call goods?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, I should include all those."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, according to Meno, who is the hereditary friend of the great king, virtue is the power of getting silver and gold; and would you add that they must be gained piously, justly, or do you deem this to be of no consequence? And is any mode of acquisition, even if unjust and dishonest, equally to be deemed virtue?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Not virtue, Socrates, but vice."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then justice or temperance or holiness, or some other part of virtue, as would appear, must accompany the acquisition, and without them the mere acquisition of good will not be virtue."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Why, how can there be virtue without these?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the non-acquisition of gold and silver in a dishonest manner for oneself or another, or in other words the want of them, may be equally virtue?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the acquisition of such goods is no more virtue than the non-acquisition and want of them, but whatever is accompanied by justice or honesty is virtue, and whatever is devoid of justice is vice."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"It cannot be otherwise, in my judgment."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And were we not saying just now that justice, temperance, and the like, were each of them a part of virtue?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And so, Meno, this is the way in which you mock me."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Why do you say that, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, because I asked you to deliver virtue into my hands whole and unbroken, and I gave you a pattern according to which you were to frame your answer; and you have forgotten already, and tell me that virtue is the power of attaining good justly, or with justice; and justice you acknowledge to be a part of virtue."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then it follows from your own admissions, that virtue is doing what you do with a part of virtue; for justice and the like are said by you to be parts of virtue."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"What of that?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What of that! Why, did not I ask you to tell me the nature of virtue as a whole? And you are very far from telling me this; but declare every action to be virtue which is done with a part of virtue; as though you had told me and I must already know the whole of virtue, and this too when frittered away into little pieces. And, therefore, my dear Meno, I fear that I must begin again and repeat the same question: What is virtue? for otherwise, I can only say, that every action done with a part of virtue is virtue; what else is the meaning of saying that every action done with justice is virtue? Ought I not to ask the question over again; for can any one who does not know virtue know a part of virtue?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"No; I do not say that he can."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you remember how, in the example of figure, we rejected any answer given in terms which were as yet unexplained or unadmitted?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; and we were quite right in doing so."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But then, my friend, do not suppose that we can explain to any one the nature of virtue as a whole through some unexplained portion of virtue, or anything at all in that fashion; we should only have to ask over again the old question, What is virtue? Am I not right?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I believe that you are."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then begin again, and answer me, What, according to you and your friend Gorgias, is the definition of virtue?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"O Socrates, I used to be told, before I knew you, that you were always doubting yourself and making others doubt; and now you are casting your spells over me, and I am simply getting bewitched and enchanted, and am at my wits' end. And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in your appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me, I think. For my soul and my tongue are really torpid, and I do not know how to answer you; and though I have been delivered of an infinite variety of speeches about virtue before now, and to many persons--and very good ones they were, as I thought--at this moment I cannot even say what virtue is. And I think that you are very wise in not voyaging and going away from home, for if you did in other places as you do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You are a rogue, Meno, and had all but caught me."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I can tell why you made a simile about me."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Why?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In order that I might make another simile about you. For I know that all pretty young gentlemen like to have pretty similes made about them--as well they may--but I shall not return the compliment. As to my being a torpedo, if the torpedo is torpid as well as the cause of torpidity in others, then indeed I am a torpedo, but not otherwise; for I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself. And now I know not what virtue is, and you seem to be in the same case, although you did once perhaps know before you touched me. However, I have no objection to join with you in the enquiry."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that a man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire (Compare Aristot. Post. Anal.)."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Well, Socrates, and is not the argument sound?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Why not?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will tell you why: I have heard from certain wise men and women who spoke of things divine that--"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"What did they say?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"They spoke of a glorious truth, as I conceive."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"What was it? and who were they?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Some of them were priests and priestesses, who had studied how they might be able to give a reason of their profession: there have been poets also, who spoke of these things by inspiration, like Pindar, and many others who were inspired. And they say--mark, now, and see whether their words are true--they say that the soul of man is immortal, and at one time has an end, which is termed dying, and at another time is born again, but is never destroyed. And the moral is, that a man ought to live always in perfect holiness. 'For in the ninth year Persephone sends the souls of those from whom she has received the penalty of ancient crime back again from beneath into the light of the sun above, and these are they who become noble kings and mighty men and great in wisdom and are called saintly heroes in after ages.' The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew about virtue, and about everything; for as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things; there is no difficulty in her eliciting or as men say learning, out of a single recollection all the rest, if a man is strenuous and does not faint; for all enquiry and all learning is but recollection. And therefore we ought not to listen to this sophistical argument about the impossibility of enquiry: for it will make us idle; and is sweet only to the sluggard; but the other saying will make us active and inquisitive. In that confiding, I will gladly enquire with you into the nature of virtue."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; but what do you mean by saying that we do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection? Can you teach me how this is?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I told you, Meno, just now that you were a rogue, and now you ask whether I can teach you, when I am saying that there is no teaching, but only recollection; and thus you imagine that you will involve me in a contradiction."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Indeed, Socrates, I protest that I had no such intention. I only asked the question from habit; but if you can prove to me that what you say is true, I wish that you would."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"It will be no easy matter, but I will try to please you to the utmost of my power. Suppose that you call one of your numerous attendants, that I may demonstrate on him."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly. Come hither, boy."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He is Greek, and speaks Greek, does he not?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed; he was born in the house."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Attend now to the questions which I ask him, and observe whether he learns of me or only remembers."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I will."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Tell me, boy, do you know that a figure like this is a square?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you know that a square figure has these four lines equal?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And these lines which I have drawn through the middle of the square are also equal?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A square may be of any size?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if one side of the figure be of two feet, and the other side be of two feet, how much will the whole be? Let me explain: if in one direction the space was of two feet, and in the other direction of one foot, the whole would be of two feet taken once?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But since this side is also of two feet, there are twice two feet?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"There are."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the square is of twice two feet?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how many are twice two feet? count and tell me."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Four, Socrates."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And might there not be another square twice as large as this, and having like this the lines equal?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And of how many feet will that be?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Of eight feet."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now try and tell me the length of the line which forms the side of that double square: this is two feet--what will that be?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Clearly, Socrates, it will be double."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you observe, Meno, that I am not teaching the boy anything, but only asking him questions; and now he fancies that he knows how long a line is necessary in order to produce a figure of eight square feet; does he not?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does he really know?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He only guesses that because the square is double, the line is double."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Observe him while he recalls the steps in regular order. (To the Boy:) Tell me, boy, do you assert that a double space comes from a double line? Remember that I am not speaking of an oblong, but of a figure equal every way, and twice the size of this--that is to say of eight feet; and I want to know whether you still say that a double square comes from double line?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But does not this line become doubled if we add another such line here?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And four such lines will make a space containing eight feet?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us describe such a figure: Would you not say that this is the figure of eight feet?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are there not these four divisions in the figure, each of which is equal to the figure of four feet?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not that four times four?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And four times is not double?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"No, indeed."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But how much?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Four times as much."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Therefore the double line, boy, has given a space, not twice, but four times as much."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Four times four are sixteen--are they not?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What line would give you a space of eight feet, as this gives one of sixteen feet;--do you see?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the space of four feet is made from this half line?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Good; and is not a space of eight feet twice the size of this, and half the size of the other?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Such a space, then, will be made out of a line greater than this one, and less than that one?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes; I think so."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good; I like to hear you say what you think. And now tell me, is not this a line of two feet and that of four?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the line which forms the side of eight feet ought to be more than this line of two feet, and less than the other of four feet?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"It ought."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Try and see if you can tell me how much it will be."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Three feet."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then if we add a half to this line of two, that will be the line of three. Here are two and there is one; and on the other side, here are two also and there is one: and that makes the figure of which you speak?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if there are three feet this way and three feet that way, the whole space will be three times three feet?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"That is evident."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how much are three times three feet?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Nine."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how much is the double of four?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Eight."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the figure of eight is not made out of a line of three?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But from what line?--tell me exactly; and if you would rather not reckon, try and show me the line."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Indeed, Socrates, I do not know."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you see, Meno, what advances he has made in his power of recollection? He did not know at first, and he does not know now, what is the side of a figure of eight feet: but then he thought that he knew, and answered confidently as if he knew, and had no difficulty; now he has a difficulty, and neither knows nor fancies that he knows."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is he not better off in knowing his ignorance?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I think that he is."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If we have made him doubt, and given him the 'torpedo's shock,' have we done him any harm?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I think not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We have certainly, as would seem, assisted him in some degree to the discovery of the truth; and now he will wish to remedy his ignorance, but then he would have been ready to tell all the world again and again that the double space should have a double side."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But do you suppose that he would ever have enquired into or learned what he fancied that he knew, though he was really ignorant of it, until he had fallen into perplexity under the idea that he did not know, and had desired to know?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I think not, Socrates."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he was the better for the torpedo's touch?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I think so."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Mark now the farther development. I shall only ask him, and not teach him, and he shall share the enquiry with me: and do you watch and see if you find me telling or explaining anything to him, instead of eliciting his opinion. Tell me, boy, is not this a square of four feet which I have drawn?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now I add another square equal to the former one?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And a third, which is equal to either of them?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Suppose that we fill up the vacant corner?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Here, then, there are four equal spaces?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how many times larger is this space than this other?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Four times."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But it ought to have been twice only, as you will remember."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does not this line, reaching from corner to corner, bisect each of these spaces?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are there not here four equal lines which contain this space?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"There are."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Look and see how much this space is."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"I do not understand."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Has not each interior line cut off half of the four spaces?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how many spaces are there in this section?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Four."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how many in this?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Two."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And four is how many times two?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Twice."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this space is of how many feet?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Of eight feet."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And from what line do you get this figure?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"From this."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is, from the line which extends from corner to corner of the figure of four feet?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that is the line which the learned call the diagonal. And if this is the proper name, then you, Meno's slave, are prepared to affirm that the double space is the square of the diagonal?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"BOY","Dialogue":"Certainly, Socrates."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What do you say of him, Meno? Were not all these answers given out of his own head?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, they were all his own."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet, as we were just now saying, he did not know?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But still he had in him those notions of his--had he not?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who does not know may still have true notions of that which he does not know?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"He has."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And at present these notions have just been stirred up in him, as in a dream; but if he were frequently asked the same questions, in different forms, he would know as well as any one at last?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I dare say."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Without any one teaching him he will recover his knowledge for himself, if he is only asked questions?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this spontaneous recovery of knowledge in him is recollection?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this knowledge which he now has must he not either have acquired or always possessed?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if he always possessed this knowledge he would always have known; or if he has acquired the knowledge he could not have acquired it in this life, unless he has been taught geometry; for he may be made to do the same with all geometry and every other branch of knowledge. Now, has any one ever taught him all this? You must know about him, if, as you say, he was born and bred in your house."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"And I am certain that no one ever did teach him."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet he has the knowledge?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"The fact, Socrates, is undeniable."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if he did not acquire the knowledge in this life, then he must have had and learned it at some other time?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Clearly he must."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Which must have been the time when he was not a man?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if there have been always true thoughts in him, both at the time when he was and was not a man, which only need to be awakened into knowledge by putting questions to him, his soul must have always possessed this knowledge, for he always either was or was not a man?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Obviously."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if the truth of all things always existed in the soul, then the soul is immortal. Wherefore be of good cheer, and try to recollect what you do not know, or rather what you do not remember."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I feel, somehow, that I like what you are saying."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I, Meno, like what I am saying. Some things I have said of which I am not altogether confident. But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know;--that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"There again, Socrates, your words seem to me excellent."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, as we are agreed that a man should enquire about that which he does not know, shall you and I make an effort to enquire together into the nature of virtue?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"By all means, Socrates. And yet I would much rather return to my original question, Whether in seeking to acquire virtue we should regard it as a thing to be taught, or as a gift of nature, or as coming to men in some other way?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Had I the command of you as well as of myself, Meno, I would not have enquired whether virtue is given by instruction or not, until we had first ascertained 'what it is.' But as you think only of controlling me who am your slave, and never of controlling yourself,--such being your notion of freedom, I must yield to you, for you are irresistible. And therefore I have now to enquire into the qualities of a thing of which I do not as yet know the nature. At any rate, will you condescend a little, and allow the question 'Whether virtue is given by instruction, or in any other way,' to be argued upon hypothesis? As the geometrician, when he is asked whether a certain triangle is capable being inscribed in a certain circle (Or, whether a certain area is capable of being inscribed as a triangle in a certain circle.), will reply: 'I cannot tell you as yet; but I will offer a hypothesis which may assist us in forming a conclusion: If the figure be such that when you have produced a given side of it (Or, when you apply it to the given line, i.e. the diameter of the circle (autou).), the given area of the triangle falls short by an area corresponding to the part produced (Or, similar to the area so applied.), then one consequence follows, and if this is impossible then some other; and therefore I wish to assume a hypothesis before I tell you whether this triangle is capable of being inscribed in the circle':--that is a geometrical hypothesis. And we too, as we know not the nature and qualities of virtue, must ask, whether virtue is or is not taught, under a hypothesis: as thus, if virtue is of such a class of mental goods, will it be taught or not? Let the first hypothesis be that virtue is or is not knowledge,--in that case will it be taught or not? or, as we were just now saying, 'remembered'? For there is no use in disputing about the name. But is virtue taught or not? or rather, does not every one see that knowledge alone is taught?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then if virtue is knowledge, virtue will be taught?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now we have made a quick end of this question: if virtue is of such a nature, it will be taught; and if not, not?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The next question is, whether virtue is knowledge or of another species?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, that appears to be the question which comes next in order."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do we not say that virtue is a good?--This is a hypothesis which is not set aside."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now, if there be any sort of good which is distinct from knowledge, virtue may be that good; but if knowledge embraces all good, then we shall be right in thinking that virtue is knowledge?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And virtue makes us good?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if we are good, then we are profitable; for all good things are profitable?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then virtue is profitable?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"That is the only inference."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now let us see what are the things which severally profit us. Health and strength, and beauty and wealth--these, and the like of these, we call profitable?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet these things may also sometimes do us harm: would you not think so?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what is the guiding principle which makes them profitable or the reverse? Are they not profitable when they are rightly used, and hurtful when they are not rightly used?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Next, let us consider the goods of the soul: they are temperance, justice, courage, quickness of apprehension, memory, magnanimity, and the like?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Surely."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And such of these as are not knowledge, but of another sort, are sometimes profitable and sometimes hurtful; as, for example, courage wanting prudence, which is only a sort of confidence? When a man has no sense he is harmed by courage, but when he has sense he is profited?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same may be said of temperance and quickness of apprehension; whatever things are learned or done with sense are profitable, but when done without sense they are hurtful?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in general, all that the soul attempts or endures, when under the guidance of wisdom, ends in happiness; but when she is under the guidance of folly, in the opposite?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"That appears to be true."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If then virtue is a quality of the soul, and is admitted to be profitable, it must be wisdom or prudence, since none of the things of the soul are either profitable or hurtful in themselves, but they are all made profitable or hurtful by the addition of wisdom or of folly; and therefore if virtue is profitable, virtue must be a sort of wisdom or prudence?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I quite agree."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the other goods, such as wealth and the like, of which we were just now saying that they are sometimes good and sometimes evil, do not they also become profitable or hurtful, accordingly as the soul guides and uses them rightly or wrongly; just as the things of the soul herself are benefited when under the guidance of wisdom and harmed by folly?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the wise soul guides them rightly, and the foolish soul wrongly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not this universally true of human nature? All other things hang upon the soul, and the things of the soul herself hang upon wisdom, if they are to be good; and so wisdom is inferred to be that which profits--and virtue, as we say, is profitable?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And thus we arrive at the conclusion that virtue is either wholly or partly wisdom?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I think that what you are saying, Socrates, is very true."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if this is true, then the good are not by nature good?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I think not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If they had been, there would assuredly have been discerners of characters among us who would have known our future great men; and on their showing we should have adopted them, and when we had got them, we should have kept them in the citadel out of the way of harm, and set a stamp upon them far rather than upon a piece of gold, in order that no one might tamper with them; and when they grew up they would have been useful to the state?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, that would have been the right way."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if the good are not by nature good, are they made good by instruction?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"There appears to be no other alternative, Socrates. On the supposition that virtue is knowledge, there can be no doubt that virtue is taught."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed; but what if the supposition is erroneous?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I certainly thought just now that we were right."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Meno; but a principle which has any soundness should stand firm not only just now, but always."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Well; and why are you so slow of heart to believe that knowledge is virtue?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will try and tell you why, Meno. I do not retract the assertion that if virtue is knowledge it may be taught; but I fear that I have some reason in doubting whether virtue is knowledge: for consider now and say whether virtue, and not only virtue but anything that is taught, must not have teachers and disciples?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Surely."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And conversely, may not the art of which neither teachers nor disciples exist be assumed to be incapable of being taught?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True; but do you think that there are no teachers of virtue?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I have certainly often enquired whether there were any, and taken great pains to find them, and have never succeeded; and many have assisted me in the search, and they were the persons whom I thought the most likely to know. Here at the moment when he is wanted we fortunately have sitting by us Anytus, the very person of whom we should make enquiry; to him then let us repair. In the first place, he is the son of a wealthy and wise father, Anthemion, who acquired his wealth, not by accident or gift, like Ismenias the Theban (who has recently made himself as rich as Polycrates), but by his own skill and industry, and who is a well-conditioned, modest man, not insolent, or overbearing, or annoying; moreover, this son of his has received a good education, as the Athenian people certainly appear to think, for they choose him to fill the highest offices. And these are the sort of men from whom you are likely to learn whether there are any teachers of virtue, and who they are. Please, Anytus, to help me and your friend Meno in answering our question, Who are the teachers? Consider the matter thus: If we wanted Meno to be a good physician, to whom should we send him? Should we not send him to the physicians?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or if we wanted him to be a good cobbler, should we not send him to the cobblers?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And so forth?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me trouble you with one more question. When we say that we should be right in sending him to the physicians if we wanted him to be a physician, do we mean that we should be right in sending him to those who profess the art, rather than to those who do not, and to those who demand payment for teaching the art, and profess to teach it to any one who will come and learn? And if these were our reasons, should we not be right in sending him?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And might not the same be said of flute-playing, and of the other arts? Would a man who wanted to make another a flute-player refuse to send him to those who profess to teach the art for money, and be plaguing other persons to give him instruction, who are not professed teachers and who never had a single disciple in that branch of knowledge which he wishes him to acquire--would not such conduct be the height of folly?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Yes, by Zeus, and of ignorance too."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good. And now you are in a position to advise with me about my friend Meno. He has been telling me, Anytus, that he desires to attain that kind of wisdom and virtue by which men order the state or the house, and honour their parents, and know when to receive and when to send away citizens and strangers, as a good man should. Now, to whom should he go in order that he may learn this virtue? Does not the previous argument imply clearly that we should send him to those who profess and avouch that they are the common teachers of all Hellas, and are ready to impart instruction to any one who likes, at a fixed price?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Whom do you mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You surely know, do you not, Anytus, that these are the people whom mankind call Sophists?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"By Heracles, Socrates, forbear! I only hope that no friend or kinsman or acquaintance of mine, whether citizen or stranger, will ever be so mad as to allow himself to be corrupted by them; for they are a manifest pest and corrupting influence to those who have to do with them."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What, Anytus? Of all the people who profess that they know how to do men good, do you mean to say that these are the only ones who not only do them no good, but positively corrupt those who are entrusted to them, and in return for this disservice have the face to demand money? Indeed, I cannot believe you; for I know of a single man, Protagoras, who made more out of his craft than the illustrious Pheidias, who created such noble works, or any ten other statuaries. How could that be? A mender of old shoes, or patcher up of clothes, who made the shoes or clothes worse than he received them, could not have remained thirty days undetected, and would very soon have starved; whereas during more than forty years, Protagoras was corrupting all Hellas, and sending his disciples from him worse than he received them, and he was never found out. For, if I am not mistaken, he was about seventy years old at his death, forty of which were spent in the practice of his profession; and during all that time he had a good reputation, which to this day he retains: and not only Protagoras, but many others are well spoken of; some who lived before him, and others who are still living. Now, when you say that they deceived and corrupted the youth, are they to be supposed to have corrupted them consciously or unconsciously? Can those who were deemed by many to be the wisest men of Hellas have been out of their minds?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Out of their minds! No, Socrates; the young men who gave their money to them were out of their minds, and their relations and guardians who entrusted their youth to the care of these men were still more out of their minds, and most of all, the cities who allowed them to come in, and did not drive them out, citizen and stranger alike."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Has any of the Sophists wronged you, Anytus? What makes you so angry with them?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"No, indeed, neither I nor any of my belongings has ever had, nor would I suffer them to have, anything to do with them."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you are entirely unacquainted with them?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"And I have no wish to be acquainted."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, my dear friend, how can you know whether a thing is good or bad of which you are wholly ignorant?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Quite well; I am sure that I know what manner of men these are, whether I am acquainted with them or not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You must be a diviner, Anytus, for I really cannot make out, judging from your own words, how, if you are not acquainted with them, you know about them. But I am not enquiring of you who are the teachers who will corrupt Meno (let them be, if you please, the Sophists); I only ask you to tell him who there is in this great city who will teach him how to become eminent in the virtues which I was just now describing. He is the friend of your family, and you will oblige him."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Why do you not tell him yourself?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I have told him whom I supposed to be the teachers of these things; but I learn from you that I am utterly at fault, and I dare say that you are right. And now I wish that you, on your part, would tell me to whom among the Athenians he should go. Whom would you name?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Why single out individuals? Any Athenian gentleman, taken at random, if he will mind him, will do far more good to him than the Sophists."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And did those gentlemen grow of themselves; and without having been taught by any one, were they nevertheless able to teach others that which they had never learned themselves?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"I imagine that they learned of the previous generation of gentlemen. Have there not been many good men in this city?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly, Anytus; and many good statesmen also there always have been and there are still, in the city of Athens. But the question is whether they were also good teachers of their own virtue;--not whether there are, or have been, good men in this part of the world, but whether virtue can be taught, is the question which we have been discussing. Now, do we mean to say that the good men of our own and of other times knew how to impart to others that virtue which they had themselves; or is virtue a thing incapable of being communicated or imparted by one man to another? That is the question which I and Meno have been arguing. Look at the matter in your own way: Would you not admit that Themistocles was a good man?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Certainly; no man better."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And must not he then have been a good teacher, if any man ever was a good teacher, of his own virtue?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Yes certainly,--if he wanted to be so."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But would he not have wanted? He would, at any rate, have desired to make his own son a good man and a gentleman; he could not have been jealous of him, or have intentionally abstained from imparting to him his own virtue. Did you never hear that he made his son Cleophantus a famous horseman; and had him taught to stand upright on horseback and hurl a javelin, and to do many other marvellous things; and in anything which could be learned from a master he was well trained? Have you not heard from our elders of him?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"I have."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then no one could say that his son showed any want of capacity?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Very likely not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But did any one, old or young, ever say in your hearing that Cleophantus, son of Themistocles, was a wise or good man, as his father was?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"I have certainly never heard any one say so."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if virtue could have been taught, would his father Themistocles have sought to train him in these minor accomplishments, and allowed him who, as you must remember, was his own son, to be no better than his neighbours in those qualities in which he himself excelled?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Indeed, indeed, I think not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Here was a teacher of virtue whom you admit to be among the best men of the past. Let us take another,--Aristides, the son of Lysimachus: would you not acknowledge that he was a good man?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"To be sure I should."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And did not he train his son Lysimachus better than any other Athenian in all that could be done for him by the help of masters? But what has been the result? Is he a bit better than any other mortal? He is an acquaintance of yours, and you see what he is like. There is Pericles, again, magnificent in his wisdom; and he, as you are aware, had two sons, Paralus and Xanthippus."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"I know."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you know, also, that he taught them to be unrivalled horsemen, and had them trained in music and gymnastics and all sorts of arts--in these respects they were on a level with the best--and had he no wish to make good men of them? Nay, he must have wished it. But virtue, as I suspect, could not be taught. And that you may not suppose the incompetent teachers to be only the meaner sort of Athenians and few in number, remember again that Thucydides had two sons, Melesias and Stephanus, whom, besides giving them a good education in other things, he trained in wrestling, and they were the best wrestlers in Athens: one of them he committed to the care of Xanthias, and the other of Eudorus, who had the reputation of being the most celebrated wrestlers of that day. Do you remember them?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"I have heard of them."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now, can there be a doubt that Thucydides, whose children were taught things for which he had to spend money, would have taught them to be good men, which would have cost him nothing, if virtue could have been taught? Will you reply that he was a mean man, and had not many friends among the Athenians and allies? Nay, but he was of a great family, and a man of influence at Athens and in all Hellas, and, if virtue could have been taught, he would have found out some Athenian or foreigner who would have made good men of his sons, if he could not himself spare the time from cares of state. Once more, I suspect, friend Anytus, that virtue is not a thing which can be taught?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"ANYTUS","Dialogue":"Socrates, I think that you are too ready to speak evil of men: and, if you will take my advice, I would recommend you to be careful. Perhaps there is no city in which it is not easier to do men harm than to do them good, and this is certainly the case at Athens, as I believe that you know."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"O Meno, think that Anytus is in a rage. And he may well be in a rage, for he thinks, in the first place, that I am defaming these gentlemen; and in the second place, he is of opinion that he is one of them himself. But some day he will know what is the meaning of defamation, and if he ever does, he will forgive me. Meanwhile I will return to you, Meno; for I suppose that there are gentlemen in your region too?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly there are."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are they willing to teach the young? and do they profess to be teachers? and do they agree that virtue is taught?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"No indeed, Socrates, they are anything but agreed; you may hear them saying at one time that virtue can be taught, and then again the reverse."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Can we call those teachers who do not acknowledge the possibility of their own vocation?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I think not, Socrates."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what do you think of these Sophists, who are the only professors? Do they seem to you to be teachers of virtue?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I often wonder, Socrates, that Gorgias is never heard promising to teach virtue: and when he hears others promising he only laughs at them; but he thinks that men should be taught to speak."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then do you not think that the Sophists are teachers?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I cannot tell you, Socrates; like the rest of the world, I am in doubt, and sometimes I think that they are teachers and sometimes not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are you aware that not you only and other politicians have doubts whether virtue can be taught or not, but that Theognis the poet says the very same thing?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Where does he say so?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In these elegiac verses (Theog.): 'Eat and drink and sit with the mighty, and make yourself agreeable to them; for from the good you will learn what is good, but if you mix with the bad you will lose the intelligence which you already have.' Do you observe that here he seems to imply that virtue can be taught?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But in some other verses he shifts about and says (Theog.): 'If understanding could be created and put into a man, then they' (who were able to perform this feat) 'would have obtained great rewards.' And again:-- 'Never would a bad son have sprung from a good sire, for he would have heard the voice of instruction; but not by teaching will you ever make a bad man into a good one.' And this, as you may remark, is a contradiction of the other."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is there anything else of which the professors are affirmed not only not to be teachers of others, but to be ignorant themselves, and bad at the knowledge of that which they are professing to teach? or is there anything about which even the acknowledged 'gentlemen' are sometimes saying that 'this thing can be taught,' and sometimes the opposite? Can you say that they are teachers in any true sense whose ideas are in such confusion?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I should say, certainly not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if neither the Sophists nor the gentlemen are teachers, clearly there can be no other teachers?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if there are no teachers, neither are there disciples?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Agreed."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And we have admitted that a thing cannot be taught of which there are neither teachers nor disciples?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"We have."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there are no teachers of virtue to be found anywhere?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"There are not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if there are no teachers, neither are there scholars?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"That, I think, is true."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then virtue cannot be taught?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Not if we are right in our view. But I cannot believe, Socrates, that there are no good men: And if there are, how did they come into existence?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am afraid, Meno, that you and I are not good for much, and that Gorgias has been as poor an educator of you as Prodicus has been of me. Certainly we shall have to look to ourselves, and try to find some one who will help in some way or other to improve us. This I say, because I observe that in the previous discussion none of us remarked that right and good action is possible to man under other guidance than that of knowledge (episteme);--and indeed if this be denied, there is no seeing how there can be any good men at all."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"How do you mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean that good men are necessarily useful or profitable. Were we not right in admitting this? It must be so."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in supposing that they will be useful only if they are true guides to us of action--there we were also right?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But when we said that a man cannot be a good guide unless he have knowledge (phrhonesis), this we were wrong."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"What do you mean by the word 'right'?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will explain. If a man knew the way to Larisa, or anywhere else, and went to the place and led others thither, would he not be a right and good guide?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And a person who had a right opinion about the way, but had never been and did not know, might be a good guide also, might he not?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And while he has true opinion about that which the other knows, he will be just as good a guide if he thinks the truth, as he who knows the truth?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then true opinion is as good a guide to correct action as knowledge; and that was the point which we omitted in our speculation about the nature of virtue, when we said that knowledge only is the guide of right action; whereas there is also right opinion."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then right opinion is not less useful than knowledge?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"The difference, Socrates, is only that he who has knowledge will always be right; but he who has right opinion will sometimes be right, and sometimes not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What do you mean? Can he be wrong who has right opinion, so long as he has right opinion?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I admit the cogency of your argument, and therefore, Socrates, I wonder that knowledge should be preferred to right opinion--or why they should ever differ."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And shall I explain this wonder to you?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Do tell me."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You would not wonder if you had ever observed the images of Daedalus (Compare Euthyphro); but perhaps you have not got them in your country?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"What have they to do with the question?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because they require to be fastened in order to keep them, and if they are not fastened they will play truant and run away."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Well, what of that?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean to say that they are not very valuable possessions if they are at liberty, for they will walk off like runaway slaves; but when fastened, they are of great value, for they are really beautiful works of art. Now this is an illustration of the nature of true opinions: while they abide with us they are beautiful and fruitful, but they run away out of the human soul, and do not remain long, and therefore they are not of much value until they are fastened by the tie of the cause; and this fastening of them, friend Meno, is recollection, as you and I have agreed to call it. But when they are bound, in the first place, they have the nature of knowledge; and, in the second place, they are abiding. And this is why knowledge is more honourable and excellent than true opinion, because fastened by a chain."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"What you are saying, Socrates, seems to be very like the truth."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I too speak rather in ignorance; I only conjecture. And yet that knowledge differs from true opinion is no matter of conjecture with me. There are not many things which I profess to know, but this is most certainly one of them."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; and you are quite right in saying so."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And am I not also right in saying that true opinion leading the way perfects action quite as well as knowledge?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"There again, Socrates, I think you are right."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then right opinion is not a whit inferior to knowledge, or less useful in action; nor is the man who has right opinion inferior to him who has knowledge?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And surely the good man has been acknowledged by us to be useful?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Seeing then that men become good and useful to states, not only because they have knowledge, but because they have right opinion, and that neither knowledge nor right opinion is given to man by nature or acquired by him--(do you imagine either of them to be given by nature?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Not I.)"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then if they are not given by nature, neither are the good by nature good?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And nature being excluded, then came the question whether virtue is acquired by teaching?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If virtue was wisdom (or knowledge), then, as we thought, it was taught?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if it was taught it was wisdom?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if there were teachers, it might be taught; and if there were no teachers, not?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But surely we acknowledged that there were no teachers of virtue?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we acknowledged that it was not taught, and was not wisdom?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet we admitted that it was a good?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the right guide is useful and good?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the only right guides are knowledge and true opinion--these are the guides of man; for things which happen by chance are not under the guidance of man: but the guides of man are true opinion and knowledge."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I think so too."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if virtue is not taught, neither is virtue knowledge."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Clearly not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then of two good and useful things, one, which is knowledge, has been set aside, and cannot be supposed to be our guide in political life."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"I think not."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And therefore not by any wisdom, and not because they were wise, did Themistocles and those others of whom Anytus spoke govern states. This was the reason why they were unable to make others like themselves--because their virtue was not grounded on knowledge."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"That is probably true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if not by knowledge, the only alternative which remains is that statesmen must have guided states by right opinion, which is in politics what divination is in religion; for diviners and also prophets say many things truly, but they know not what they say."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"So I believe."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And may we not, Meno, truly call those men 'divine' who, having no understanding, yet succeed in many a grand deed and word?"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we shall also be right in calling divine those whom we were just now speaking of as diviners and prophets, including the whole tribe of poets. Yes, and statesmen above all may be said to be divine and illumined, being inspired and possessed of God, in which condition they say many grand things, not knowing what they say."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the women too, Meno, call good men divine--do they not? and the Spartans, when they praise a good man, say 'that he is a divine man.'"}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"And I think, Socrates, that they are right; although very likely our friend Anytus may take offence at the word."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I do not care; as for Anytus, there will be another opportunity of talking with him. To sum up our enquiry--the result seems to be, if we are at all right in our view, that virtue is neither natural nor acquired, but an instinct given by God to the virtuous. Nor is the instinct accompanied by reason, unless there may be supposed to be among statesmen some one who is capable of educating statesmen. And if there be such an one, he may be said to be among the living what Homer says that Tiresias was among the dead, 'he alone has understanding; but the rest are flitting shades'; and he and his virtue in like manner will be a reality among shadows."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"MENO","Dialogue":"That is excellent, Socrates."}
{"Book":"meno","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, Meno, the conclusion is that virtue comes to the virtuous by the gift of God. But we shall never know the certain truth until, before asking how virtue is given, we enquire into the actual nature of virtue. I fear that I must go away, but do you, now that you are persuaded yourself, persuade our friend Anytus. And do not let him be so exasperated; if you can conciliate him, you will have done good service to the Athenian people. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MENO *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I dare say that you may be surprised to find, O son of Cleinias, that I, who am your first lover, not having spoken to you for many years, when the rest of the world were wearying you with their attentions, am the last of your lovers who still speaks to you. The cause of my silence has been that I was hindered by a power more than human, of which I will some day explain to you the nature; this impediment has now been removed; I therefore here present myself before you, and I greatly hope that no similar hindrance will again occur. Meanwhile, I have observed that your pride has been too much for the pride of your admirers; they were numerous and high-spirited, but they have all run away, overpowered by your superior force of character; not one of them remains. And I want you to understand the reason why you have been too much for them. You think that you have no need of them or of any other man, for you have great possessions and lack nothing, beginning with the body, and ending with the soul. In the first place, you say to yourself that you are the fairest and tallest of the citizens, and this every one who has eyes may see to be true; in the second place, that you are among the noblest of them, highly connected both on the father's and the mother's side, and sprung from one of the most distinguished families in your own state, which is the greatest in Hellas, and having many friends and kinsmen of the best sort, who can assist you when in need; and there is one potent relative, who is more to you than all the rest, Pericles the son of Xanthippus, whom your father left guardian of you, and of your brother, and who can do as he pleases not only in this city, but in all Hellas, and among many and mighty barbarous nations. Moreover, you are rich; but I must say that you value yourself least of all upon your possessions. And all these things have lifted you up; you have overcome your lovers, and they have acknowledged that you were too much for them. Have you not remarked their absence? And now I know that you wonder why I, unlike the rest of them, have not gone away, and what can be my motive in remaining."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Perhaps, Socrates, you are not aware that I was just going to ask you the very same question--What do you want? And what is your motive in annoying me, and always, wherever I am, making a point of coming? (Compare Symp.) I do really wonder what you mean, and should greatly like to know."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then if, as you say, you desire to know, I suppose that you will be willing to hear, and I may consider myself to be speaking to an auditor who will remain, and will not run away?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly, let me hear."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You had better be careful, for I may very likely be as unwilling to end as I have hitherto been to begin."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Proceed, my good man, and I will listen."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will proceed; and, although no lover likes to speak with one who has no feeling of love in him (compare Symp.), I will make an effort, and tell you what I meant: My love, Alcibiades, which I hardly like to confess, would long ago have passed away, as I flatter myself, if I saw you loving your good things, or thinking that you ought to pass life in the enjoyment of them. But I shall reveal other thoughts of yours, which you keep to yourself; whereby you will know that I have always had my eye on you. Suppose that at this moment some God came to you and said: Alcibiades, will you live as you are, or die in an instant if you are forbidden to make any further acquisition?--I verily believe that you would choose death. And I will tell you the hope in which you are at present living: Before many days have elapsed, you think that you will come before the Athenian assembly, and will prove to them that you are more worthy of honour than Pericles, or any other man that ever lived, and having proved this, you will have the greatest power in the state. When you have gained the greatest power among us, you will go on to other Hellenic states, and not only to Hellenes, but to all the barbarians who inhabit the same continent with us. And if the God were then to say to you again: Here in Europe is to be your seat of empire, and you must not cross over into Asia or meddle with Asiatic affairs, I do not believe that you would choose to live upon these terms; but the world, as I may say, must be filled with your power and name--no man less than Cyrus and Xerxes is of any account with you. Such I know to be your hopes--I am not guessing only--and very likely you, who know that I am speaking the truth, will reply, Well, Socrates, but what have my hopes to do with the explanation which you promised of your unwillingness to leave me? And that is what I am now going to tell you, sweet son of Cleinias and Dinomache. The explanation is, that all these designs of yours cannot be accomplished by you without my help; so great is the power which I believe myself to have over you and your concerns; and this I conceive to be the reason why the God has hitherto forbidden me to converse with you, and I have been long expecting his permission. For, as you hope to prove your own great value to the state, and having proved it, to attain at once to absolute power, so do I indulge a hope that I shall be the supreme power over you, if I am able to prove my own great value to you, and to show you that neither guardian, nor kinsman, nor any one is able to deliver into your hands the power which you desire, but I only, God being my helper. When you were young (compare Symp.) and your hopes were not yet matured, I should have wasted my time, and therefore, as I conceive, the God forbade me to converse with you; but now, having his permission, I will speak, for now you will listen to me."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Your silence, Socrates, was always a surprise to me. I never could understand why you followed me about, and now that you have begun to speak again, I am still more amazed. Whether I think all this or not, is a matter about which you seem to have already made up your mind, and therefore my denial will have no effect upon you. But granting, if I must, that you have perfectly divined my purposes, why is your assistance necessary to the attainment of them? Can you tell me why?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You want to know whether I can make a long speech, such as you are in the habit of hearing; but that is not my way. I think, however, that I can prove to you the truth of what I am saying, if you will grant me one little favour."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, if the favour which you mean be not a troublesome one."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Will you be troubled at having questions to answer?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Not at all."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then please to answer."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Ask me."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Have you not the intention which I attribute to you?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I will grant anything you like, in the hope of hearing what more you have to say."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You do, then, mean, as I was saying, to come forward in a little while in the character of an adviser of the Athenians? And suppose that when you are ascending the bema, I pull you by the sleeve and say, Alcibiades, you are getting up to advise the Athenians--do you know the matter about which they are going to deliberate, better than they?--How would you answer?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I should reply, that I was going to advise them about a matter which I do know better than they."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you are a good adviser about the things which you know?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you know anything but what you have learned of others, or found out yourself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is all."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you have ever learned or discovered anything, if you had not been willing either to learn of others or to examine yourself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I should not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you have been willing to learn or to examine what you supposed that you knew?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then there was a time when you thought that you did not know what you are now supposed to know?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think that I know tolerably well the extent of your acquirements; and you must tell me if I forget any of them: according to my recollection, you learned the arts of writing, of playing on the lyre, and of wrestling; the flute you never would learn; this is the sum of your accomplishments, unless there were some which you acquired in secret; and I think that secrecy was hardly possible, as you could not have come out of your door, either by day or night, without my seeing you."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, that was the whole of my schooling."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are you going to get up in the Athenian assembly, and give them advice about writing?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No, indeed."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or about the touch of the lyre?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And they are not in the habit of deliberating about wrestling, in the assembly?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Hardly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then what are the deliberations in which you propose to advise them? Surely not about building?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"For the builder will advise better than you will about that?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"He will."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor about divination?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"About that again the diviner will advise better than you will?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Whether he be little or great, good or ill-looking, noble or ignoble--makes no difference."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A man is a good adviser about anything, not because he has riches, but because he has knowledge?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Assuredly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Whether their counsellor is rich or poor, is not a matter which will make any difference to the Athenians when they are deliberating about the health of the citizens; they only require that he should be a physician."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then what will be the subject of deliberation about which you will be justified in getting up and advising them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"About their own concerns, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You mean about shipbuilding, for example, when the question is what sort of ships they ought to build?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No, I should not advise them about that."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I suppose, because you do not understand shipbuilding:--is that the reason?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"It is."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then about what concerns of theirs will you advise them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"About war, Socrates, or about peace, or about any other concerns of the state."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You mean, when they deliberate with whom they ought to make peace, and with whom they ought to go to war, and in what manner?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And they ought to go to war with those against whom it is better to go to war?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when it is better?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And for as long a time as is better?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But suppose the Athenians to deliberate with whom they ought to close in wrestling, and whom they should grasp by the hand, would you, or the master of gymnastics, be a better adviser of them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly, the master of gymnastics."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can you tell me on what grounds the master of gymnastics would decide, with whom they ought or ought not to close, and when and how? To take an instance: Would he not say that they should wrestle with those against whom it is best to wrestle?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And as much as is best?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And at such times as are best?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Again; you sometimes accompany the lyre with the song and dance?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When it is well to do so?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And as much as is well?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Just so."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And as you speak of an excellence or art of the best in wrestling, and of an excellence in playing the lyre, I wish you would tell me what this latter is;--the excellence of wrestling I call gymnastic, and I want to know what you call the other."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I do not understand you."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then try to do as I do; for the answer which I gave is universally right, and when I say right, I mean according to rule."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And was not the art of which I spoke gymnastic?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I called the excellence in wrestling gymnastic?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"You did."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I was right?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I think that you were."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, now,--for you should learn to argue prettily--let me ask you in return to tell me, first, what is that art of which playing and singing, and stepping properly in the dance, are parts,--what is the name of the whole? I think that by this time you must be able to tell."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Indeed I cannot."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let me put the matter in another way: what do you call the Goddesses who are the patronesses of art?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"The Muses do you mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, I do; and what is the name of the art which is called after them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I suppose that you mean music."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, that is my meaning; and what is the excellence of the art of music, as I told you truly that the excellence of wrestling was gymnastic--what is the excellence of music--to be what?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"To be musical, I suppose."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good; and now please to tell me what is the excellence of war and peace; as the more musical was the more excellent, or the more gymnastical was the more excellent, tell me, what name do you give to the more excellent in war and peace?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"But I really cannot tell you."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if you were offering advice to another and said to him--This food is better than that, at this time and in this quantity, and he said to you--What do you mean, Alcibiades, by the word 'better'? you would have no difficulty in replying that you meant 'more wholesome,' although you do not profess to be a physician: and when the subject is one of which you profess to have knowledge, and about which you are ready to get up and advise as if you knew, are you not ashamed, when you are asked, not to be able to answer the question? Is it not disgraceful?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, consider and try to explain what is the meaning of 'better,' in the matter of making peace and going to war with those against whom you ought to go to war? To what does the word refer?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I am thinking, and I cannot tell."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But you surely know what are the charges which we bring against one another, when we arrive at the point of making war, and what name we give them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly; we say that deceit or violence has been employed, or that we have been defrauded."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how does this happen? Will you tell me how? For there may be a difference in the manner."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Do you mean by 'how,' Socrates, whether we suffered these things justly or unjustly?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"There can be no greater difference than between just and unjust."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you advise the Athenians to go to war with the just or with the unjust?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is an awkward question; for certainly, even if a person did intend to go to war with the just, he would not admit that they were just."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He would not go to war, because it would be unlawful?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Neither lawful nor honourable."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you, too, would address them on principles of justice?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What, then, is justice but that better, of which I spoke, in going to war or not going to war with those against whom we ought or ought not, and when we ought or ought not to go to war?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But how is this, friend Alcibiades? Have you forgotten that you do not know this, or have you been to the schoolmaster without my knowledge, and has he taught you to discern the just from the unjust? Who is he? I wish you would tell me, that I may go and learn of him--you shall introduce me."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"You are mocking, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No, indeed; I most solemnly declare to you by Zeus, who is the God of our common friendship, and whom I never will forswear, that I am not; tell me, then, who this instructor is, if he exists."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"But, perhaps, he does not exist; may I not have acquired the knowledge of just and unjust in some other way?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes; if you have discovered them."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"But do you not think that I could discover them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am sure that you might, if you enquired about them."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"And do you not think that I would enquire?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes; if you thought that you did not know them."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"And was there not a time when I did so think?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good; and can you tell me how long it is since you thought that you did not know the nature of the just and the unjust? What do you say to a year ago? Were you then in a state of conscious ignorance and enquiry? Or did you think that you knew? And please to answer truly, that our discussion may not be in vain."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Well, I thought that I knew."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And two years ago, and three years ago, and four years ago, you knew all the same?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I did."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And more than four years ago you were a child--were you not?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And then I am quite sure that you thought you knew."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Why are you so sure?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because I often heard you when a child, in your teacher's house, or elsewhere, playing at dice or some other game with the boys, not hesitating at all about the nature of the just and unjust; but very confident--crying and shouting that one of the boys was a rogue and a cheat, and had been cheating. Is it not true?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"But what was I to do, Socrates, when anybody cheated me?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how can you say, 'What was I to do'? if at the time you did not know whether you were wronged or not?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"To be sure I knew; I was quite aware that I was being cheated."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you suppose yourself even when a child to have known the nature of just and unjust?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly; and I did know then."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when did you discover them--not, surely, at the time when you thought that you knew them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when did you think that you were ignorant--if you consider, you will find that there never was such a time?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Really, Socrates, I cannot say."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you did not learn them by discovering them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But just before you said that you did not know them by learning; now, if you have neither discovered nor learned them, how and whence do you come to know them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I suppose that I was mistaken in saying that I knew them through my own discovery of them; whereas, in truth, I learned them in the same way that other people learn."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"So you said before, and I must again ask, of whom? Do tell me."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Of the many."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you take refuge in them? I cannot say much for your teachers."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Why, are they not able to teach?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"They could not teach you how to play at draughts, which you would acknowledge (would you not) to be a much smaller matter than justice?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can they teach the better who are unable to teach the worse?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I think that they can; at any rate, they can teach many far better things than to play at draughts."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What things?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Why, for example, I learned to speak Greek of them, and I cannot say who was my teacher, or to whom I am to attribute my knowledge of Greek, if not to those good-for-nothing teachers, as you call them."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, yes, my friend; and the many are good enough teachers of Greek, and some of their instructions in that line may be justly praised."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Why is that?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, because they have the qualities which good teachers ought to have."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What qualities?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, you know that knowledge is the first qualification of any teacher?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if they know, they must agree together and not differ?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you say that they knew the things about which they differ?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then how can they teach them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"They cannot."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but do you imagine that the many would differ about the nature of wood and stone? are they not agreed if you ask them what they are? and do they not run to fetch the same thing, when they want a piece of wood or a stone? And so in similar cases, which I suspect to be pretty nearly all that you mean by speaking Greek."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"These, as we were saying, are matters about which they are agreed with one another and with themselves; both individuals and states use the same words about them; they do not use some one word and some another."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"They do not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then they may be expected to be good teachers of these things?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if we want to instruct any one in them, we shall be right in sending him to be taught by our friends the many?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if we wanted further to know not only which are men and which are horses, but which men or horses have powers of running, would the many still be able to inform us?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you have a sufficient proof that they do not know these things and are not the best teachers of them, inasmuch as they are never agreed about them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And suppose that we wanted to know not only what men are like, but what healthy or diseased men are like--would the many be able to teach us?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"They would not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you would have a proof that they were bad teachers of these matters, if you saw them at variance?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but are the many agreed with themselves, or with one another, about the justice or injustice of men and things?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Assuredly not, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is no subject about which they are more at variance?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"None."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I do not suppose that you ever saw or heard of men quarrelling over the principles of health and disease to such an extent as to go to war and kill one another for the sake of them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No indeed."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But of the quarrels about justice and injustice, even if you have never seen them, you have certainly heard from many people, including Homer; for you have heard of the Iliad and Odyssey?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"To be sure, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A difference of just and unjust is the argument of those poems?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Which difference caused all the wars and deaths of Trojans and Achaeans, and the deaths of the suitors of Penelope in their quarrel with Odysseus."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when the Athenians and Lacedaemonians and Boeotians fell at Tanagra, and afterwards in the battle of Coronea, at which your father Cleinias met his end, the question was one of justice--this was the sole cause of the battles, and of their deaths."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But can they be said to understand that about which they are quarrelling to the death?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet those whom you thus allow to be ignorant are the teachers to whom you are appealing."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But how are you ever likely to know the nature of justice and injustice, about which you are so perplexed, if you have neither learned them of others nor discovered them yourself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"From what you say, I suppose not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"See, again, how inaccurately you speak, Alcibiades!"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"In what respect?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In saying that I say so."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Why, did you not say that I know nothing of the just and unjust?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No; I did not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Did I, then?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"How was that?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me explain. Suppose I were to ask you which is the greater number, two or one; you would reply 'two'?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And by how much greater?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"By one."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Which of us now says that two is more than one?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Did not I ask, and you answer the question?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then who is speaking? I who put the question, or you who answer me?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I am."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or suppose that I ask and you tell me the letters which make up the name Socrates, which of us is the speaker?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I am."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now let us put the case generally: whenever there is a question and answer, who is the speaker,--the questioner or the answerer?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I should say, Socrates, that the answerer was the speaker."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And have I not been the questioner all through?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you the answerer?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Just so."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Which of us, then, was the speaker?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"The inference is, Socrates, that I was the speaker."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Did not some one say that Alcibiades, the fair son of Cleinias, not understanding about just and unjust, but thinking that he did understand, was going to the assembly to advise the Athenians about what he did not know? Was not that said?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, Alcibiades, the result may be expressed in the language of Euripides. I think that you have heard all this 'from yourself, and not from me'; nor did I say this, which you erroneously attribute to me, but you yourself, and what you said was very true. For indeed, my dear fellow, the design which you meditate of teaching what you do not know, and have not taken any pains to learn, is downright insanity."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"But, Socrates, I think that the Athenians and the rest of the Hellenes do not often advise as to the more just or unjust; for they see no difficulty in them, and therefore they leave them, and consider which course of action will be most expedient; for there is a difference between justice and expediency. Many persons have done great wrong and profited by their injustice; others have done rightly and come to no good."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but granting that the just and the expedient are ever so much opposed, you surely do not imagine that you know what is expedient for mankind, or why a thing is expedient?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Why not, Socrates?--But I am not going to be asked again from whom I learned, or when I made the discovery."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What a way you have! When you make a mistake which might be refuted by a previous argument, you insist on having a new and different refutation; the old argument is a worn-our garment which you will no longer put on, but some one must produce another which is clean and new. Now I shall disregard this move of yours, and shall ask over again,--Where did you learn and how do you know the nature of the expedient, and who is your teacher? All this I comprehend in a single question, and now you will manifestly be in the old difficulty, and will not be able to show that you know the expedient, either because you learned or because you discovered it yourself. But, as I perceive that you are dainty, and dislike the taste of a stale argument, I will enquire no further into your knowledge of what is expedient or what is not expedient for the Athenian people, and simply request you to say why you do not explain whether justice and expediency are the same or different? And if you like you may examine me as I have examined you, or, if you would rather, you may carry on the discussion by yourself."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"But I am not certain, Socrates, whether I shall be able to discuss the matter with you."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then imagine, my dear fellow, that I am the demus and the ecclesia; for in the ecclesia, too, you will have to persuade men individually."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not the same person able to persuade one individual singly and many individuals of the things which he knows? The grammarian, for example, can persuade one and he can persuade many about letters."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And about number, will not the same person persuade one and persuade many?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this will be he who knows number, or the arithmetician?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And cannot you persuade one man about that of which you can persuade many?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I suppose so."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that of which you can persuade either is clearly what you know?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the only difference between one who argues as we are doing, and the orator who is addressing an assembly, is that the one seeks to persuade a number, and the other an individual, of the same things."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I suppose so."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, since the same person who can persuade a multitude can persuade individuals, try conclusions upon me, and prove to me that the just is not always expedient."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"You take liberties, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I shall take the liberty of proving to you the opposite of that which you will not prove to me."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Answer my questions--that is all."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Nay, I should like you to be the speaker."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What, do you not wish to be persuaded?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly I do."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can you be persuaded better than out of your own mouth?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I think not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you shall answer; and if you do not hear the words, that the just is the expedient, coming from your own lips, never believe another man again."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I won't; but answer I will, for I do not see how I can come to any harm."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A true prophecy! Let me begin then by enquiring of you whether you allow that the just is sometimes expedient and sometimes not?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And sometimes honourable and sometimes not?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am asking if you ever knew any one who did what was dishonourable and yet just?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Never."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"All just things are honourable?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are honourable things sometimes good and sometimes not good, or are they always good?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I rather think, Socrates, that some honourable things are evil."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are some dishonourable things good?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You mean in such a case as the following:--In time of war, men have been wounded or have died in rescuing a companion or kinsman, when others who have neglected the duty of rescuing them have escaped in safety?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And to rescue another under such circumstances is honourable, in respect of the attempt to save those whom we ought to save; and this is courage?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But evil in respect of death and wounds?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the courage which is shown in the rescue is one thing, and the death another?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the rescue of one's friends is honourable in one point of view, but evil in another?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if honourable, then also good: Will you consider now whether I may not be right, for you were acknowledging that the courage which is shown in the rescue is honourable? Now is this courage good or evil? Look at the matter thus: which would you rather choose, good or evil?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Good."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the greatest goods you would be most ready to choose, and would least like to be deprived of them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What would you say of courage? At what price would you be willing to be deprived of courage?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I would rather die than be a coward."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you think that cowardice is the worst of evils?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"As bad as death, I suppose?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And life and courage are the extreme opposites of death and cowardice?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And they are what you would most desire to have, and their opposites you would least desire?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is this because you think life and courage the best, and death and cowardice the worst?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you would term the rescue of a friend in battle honourable, in as much as courage does a good work?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But evil because of the death which ensues?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Might we not describe their different effects as follows:--You may call either of them evil in respect of the evil which is the result, and good in respect of the good which is the result of either of them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And they are honourable in so far as they are good, and dishonourable in so far as they are evil?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then when you say that the rescue of a friend in battle is honourable and yet evil, that is equivalent to saying that the rescue is good and yet evil?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I believe that you are right, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nothing honourable, regarded as honourable, is evil; nor anything base, regarded as base, good."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Look at the matter yet once more in a further light: he who acts honourably acts well?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who acts well is happy?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the happy are those who obtain good?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And they obtain good by acting well and honourably?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then acting well is a good?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And happiness is a good?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the good and the honourable are again identified."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Manifestly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, if the argument holds, what we find to be honourable we shall also find to be good?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is the good expedient or not?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Expedient."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you remember our admissions about the just?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes; if I am not mistaken, we said that those who acted justly must also act honourably."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the honourable is the good?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the good is expedient?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, Alcibiades, the just is expedient?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I should infer so."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And all this I prove out of your own mouth, for I ask and you answer?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I must acknowledge it to be true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And having acknowledged that the just is the same as the expedient, are you not (let me ask) prepared to ridicule any one who, pretending to understand the principles of justice and injustice, gets up to advise the noble Athenians or the ignoble Peparethians, that the just may be the evil?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I solemnly declare, Socrates, that I do not know what I am saying. Verily, I am in a strange state, for when you put questions to me I am of different minds in successive instants."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are you not aware of the nature of this perplexity, my friend?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Indeed I am not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you suppose that if some one were to ask you whether you have two eyes or three, or two hands or four, or anything of that sort, you would then be of different minds in successive instants?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I begin to distrust myself, but still I do not suppose that I should."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You would feel no doubt; and for this reason--because you would know?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I suppose so."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the reason why you involuntarily contradict yourself is clearly that you are ignorant?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very likely."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if you are perplexed in answering about just and unjust, honourable and dishonourable, good and evil, expedient and inexpedient, the reason is that you are ignorant of them, and therefore in perplexity. Is not that clear?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But is this always the case, and is a man necessarily perplexed about that of which he has no knowledge?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly he is."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you know how to ascend into heaven?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in this case, too, is your judgment perplexed?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you see the reason why, or shall I tell you?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Tell me."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The reason is, that you not only do not know, my friend, but you do not think that you know."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"There again; what do you mean?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Ask yourself; are you in any perplexity about things of which you are ignorant? You know, for example, that you know nothing about the preparation of food."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you think and perplex yourself about the preparation of food: or do you leave that to some one who understands the art?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"The latter."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or if you were on a voyage, would you bewilder yourself by considering whether the rudder is to be drawn inwards or outwards, or do you leave that to the pilot, and do nothing?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"It would be the concern of the pilot."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you are not perplexed about what you do not know, if you know that you do not know it?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I imagine not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you not see, then, that mistakes in life and practice are likewise to be attributed to the ignorance which has conceit of knowledge?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Once more, what do you mean?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I suppose that we begin to act when we think that we know what we are doing?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But when people think that they do not know, they entrust their business to others?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And so there is a class of ignorant persons who do not make mistakes in life, because they trust others about things of which they are ignorant?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Who, then, are the persons who make mistakes? They cannot, of course, be those who know?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if neither those who know, nor those who know that they do not know, make mistakes, there remain those only who do not know and think that they know."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, only those."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then this is ignorance of the disgraceful sort which is mischievous?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And most mischievous and most disgraceful when having to do with the greatest matters?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"By far."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can there be any matters greater than the just, the honourable, the good, and the expedient?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"There cannot be."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And these, as you were saying, are what perplex you?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if you are perplexed, then, as the previous argument has shown, you are not only ignorant of the greatest matters, but being ignorant you fancy that you know them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I fear that you are right."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now see what has happened to you, Alcibiades! I hardly like to speak of your evil case, but as we are alone I will: My good friend, you are wedded to ignorance of the most disgraceful kind, and of this you are convicted, not by me, but out of your own mouth and by your own argument; wherefore also you rush into politics before you are educated. Neither is your case to be deemed singular. For I might say the same of almost all our statesmen, with the exception, perhaps of your guardian, Pericles."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; and Pericles is said not to have got his wisdom by the light of nature, but to have associated with several of the philosophers; with Pythocleides, for example, and with Anaxagoras, and now in advanced life with Damon, in the hope of gaining wisdom."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good; but did you ever know a man wise in anything who was unable to impart his particular wisdom? For example, he who taught you letters was not only wise, but he made you and any others whom he liked wise."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you, whom he taught, can do the same?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in like manner the harper and gymnastic-master?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When a person is enabled to impart knowledge to another, he thereby gives an excellent proof of his own understanding of any matter."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and did Pericles make any one wise; did he begin by making his sons wise?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"But, Socrates, if the two sons of Pericles were simpletons, what has that to do with the matter?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but did he make your brother, Cleinias, wise?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Cleinias is a madman; there is no use in talking of him."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if Cleinias is a madman and the two sons of Pericles were simpletons, what reason can be given why he neglects you, and lets you be as you are?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I believe that I am to blame for not listening to him."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But did you ever hear of any other Athenian or foreigner, bond or free, who was deemed to have grown wiser in the society of Pericles,--as I might cite Pythodorus, the son of Isolochus, and Callias, the son of Calliades, who have grown wiser in the society of Zeno, for which privilege they have each of them paid him the sum of a hundred minae (about 406 pounds sterling) to the increase of their wisdom and fame."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I certainly never did hear of any one."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and in reference to your own case, do you mean to remain as you are, or will you take some pains about yourself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"With your aid, Socrates, I will. And indeed, when I hear you speak, the truth of what you are saying strikes home to me, and I agree with you, for our statesmen, all but a few, do appear to be quite uneducated."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What is the inference?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Why, that if they were educated they would be trained athletes, and he who means to rival them ought to have knowledge and experience when he attacks them; but now, as they have become politicians without any special training, why should I have the trouble of learning and practising? For I know well that by the light of nature I shall get the better of them."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"My dear friend, what a sentiment! And how unworthy of your noble form and your high estate!"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Socrates; why do you say so?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am grieved when I think of our mutual love."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"At what?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"At your fancying that the contest on which you are entering is with people here."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Why, what others are there?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is that a question which a magnanimous soul should ask?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Do you mean to say that the contest is not with these?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And suppose that you were going to steer a ship into action, would you only aim at being the best pilot on board? Would you not, while acknowledging that you must possess this degree of excellence, rather look to your antagonists, and not, as you are now doing, to your fellow combatants? You ought to be so far above these latter, that they will not even dare to be your rivals; and, being regarded by you as inferiors, will do battle for you against the enemy; this is the kind of superiority which you must establish over them, if you mean to accomplish any noble action really worthy of yourself and of the state."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That would certainly be my aim."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Verily, then, you have good reason to be satisfied, if you are better than the soldiers; and you need not, when you are their superior and have your thoughts and actions fixed upon them, look away to the generals of the enemy."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Of whom are you speaking, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, you surely know that our city goes to war now and then with the Lacedaemonians and with the great king?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True enough."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if you meant to be the ruler of this city, would you not be right in considering that the Lacedaemonian and Persian king were your true rivals?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I believe that you are right."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Oh no, my friend, I am quite wrong, and I think that you ought rather to turn your attention to Midias the quail-breeder and others like him, who manage our politics; in whom, as the women would remark, you may still see the slaves' cut of hair, cropping out in their minds as well as on their pates; and they come with their barbarous lingo to flatter us and not to rule us. To these, I say, you should look, and then you need not trouble yourself about your own fitness to contend in such a noble arena: there is no reason why you should either learn what has to be learned, or practise what has to be practised, and only when thoroughly prepared enter on a political career."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"There, I think, Socrates, that you are right; I do not suppose, however, that the Spartan generals or the great king are really different from anybody else."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But, my dear friend, do consider what you are saying."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What am I to consider?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the first place, will you be more likely to take care of yourself, if you are in a wholesome fear and dread of them, or if you are not?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly, if I have such a fear of them."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you think that you will sustain any injury if you take care of yourself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No, I shall be greatly benefited."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this is one very important respect in which that notion of yours is bad."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the next place, consider that what you say is probably false."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me ask you whether better natures are likely to be found in noble races or not in noble races?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly in noble races."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are not those who are well born and well bred most likely to be perfect in virtue?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let us compare our antecedents with those of the Lacedaemonian and Persian kings; are they inferior to us in descent? Have we not heard that the former are sprung from Heracles, and the latter from Achaemenes, and that the race of Heracles and the race of Achaemenes go back to Perseus, son of Zeus?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Why, so does mine go back to Eurysaces, and he to Zeus!"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And mine, noble Alcibiades, to Daedalus, and he to Hephaestus, son of Zeus. But, for all that, we are far inferior to them. For they are descended 'from Zeus,' through a line of kings--either kings of Argos and Lacedaemon, or kings of Persia, a country which the descendants of Achaemenes have always possessed, besides being at various times sovereigns of Asia, as they now are; whereas, we and our fathers were but private persons. How ridiculous would you be thought if you were to make a display of your ancestors and of Salamis the island of Eurysaces, or of Aegina, the habitation of the still more ancient Aeacus, before Artaxerxes, son of Xerxes. You should consider how inferior we are to them both in the derivation of our birth and in other particulars. Did you never observe how great is the property of the Spartan kings? And their wives are under the guardianship of the Ephori, who are public officers and watch over them, in order to preserve as far as possible the purity of the Heracleid blood. Still greater is the difference among the Persians; for no one entertains a suspicion that the father of a prince of Persia can be any one but the king. Such is the awe which invests the person of the queen, that any other guard is needless. And when the heir of the kingdom is born, all the subjects of the king feast; and the day of his birth is for ever afterwards kept as a holiday and time of sacrifice by all Asia; whereas, when you and I were born, Alcibiades, as the comic poet says, the neighbours hardly knew of the important event. After the birth of the royal child, he is tended, not by a good-for-nothing woman-nurse, but by the best of the royal eunuchs, who are charged with the care of him, and especially with the fashioning and right formation of his limbs, in order that he may be as shapely as possible; which being their calling, they are held in great honour. And when the young prince is seven years old he is put upon a horse and taken to the riding-masters, and begins to go out hunting. And at fourteen years of age he is handed over to the royal schoolmasters, as they are termed: these are four chosen men, reputed to be the best among the Persians of a certain age; and one of them is the wisest, another the justest, a third the most temperate, and a fourth the most valiant. The first instructs him in the magianism of Zoroaster, the son of Oromasus, which is the worship of the Gods, and teaches him also the duties of his royal office; the second, who is the justest, teaches him always to speak the truth; the third, or most temperate, forbids him to allow any pleasure to be lord over him, that he may be accustomed to be a freeman and king indeed,--lord of himself first, and not a slave; the most valiant trains him to be bold and fearless, telling him that if he fears he is to deem himself a slave; whereas Pericles gave you, Alcibiades, for a tutor Zopyrus the Thracian, a slave of his who was past all other work. I might enlarge on the nurture and education of your rivals, but that would be tedious; and what I have said is a sufficient sample of what remains to be said. I have only to remark, by way of contrast, that no one cares about your birth or nurture or education, or, I may say, about that of any other Athenian, unless he has a lover who looks after him. And if you cast an eye on the wealth, the luxury, the garments with their flowing trains, the anointings with myrrh, the multitudes of attendants, and all the other bravery of the Persians, you will be ashamed when you discern your own inferiority; or if you look at the temperance and orderliness and ease and grace and magnanimity and courage and endurance and love of toil and desire of glory and ambition of the Lacedaemonians--in all these respects you will see that you are but a child in comparison of them. Even in the matter of wealth, if you value yourself upon that, I must reveal to you how you stand; for if you form an estimate of the wealth of the Lacedaemonians, you will see that our possessions fall far short of theirs. For no one here can compete with them either in the extent and fertility of their own and the Messenian territory, or in the number of their slaves, and especially of the Helots, or of their horses, or of the animals which feed on the Messenian pastures. But I have said enough of this: and as to gold and silver, there is more of them in Lacedaemon than in all the rest of Hellas, for during many generations gold has been always flowing in to them from the whole Hellenic world, and often from the barbarian also, and never going out, as in the fable of Aesop the fox said to the lion, 'The prints of the feet of those going in are distinct enough;' but who ever saw the trace of money going out of Lacedaemon? And therefore you may safely infer that the inhabitants are the richest of the Hellenes in gold and silver, and that their kings are the richest of them, for they have a larger share of these things, and they have also a tribute paid to them which is very considerable. Yet the Spartan wealth, though great in comparison of the wealth of the other Hellenes, is as nothing in comparison of that of the Persians and their kings. Why, I have been informed by a credible person who went up to the king (at Susa), that he passed through a large tract of excellent land, extending for nearly a day's journey, which the people of the country called the queen's girdle, and another, which they called her veil; and several other fair and fertile districts, which were reserved for the adornment of the queen, and are named after her several habiliments. Now, I cannot help thinking to myself, What if some one were to go to Amestris, the wife of Xerxes and mother of Artaxerxes, and say to her, There is a certain Dinomache, whose whole wardrobe is not worth fifty minae--and that will be more than the value--and she has a son who is possessed of a three-hundred acre patch at Erchiae, and he has a mind to go to war with your son--would she not wonder to what this Alcibiades trusts for success in the conflict? 'He must rely,' she would say to herself, 'upon his training and wisdom--these are the things which Hellenes value.' And if she heard that this Alcibiades who is making the attempt is not as yet twenty years old, and is wholly uneducated, and when his lover tells him that he ought to get education and training first, and then go and fight the king, he refuses, and says that he is well enough as he is, would she not be amazed, and ask 'On what, then, does the youth rely?' And if we replied: He relies on his beauty, and stature, and birth, and mental endowments, she would think that we were mad, Alcibiades, when she compared the advantages which you possess with those of her own people. And I believe that even Lampido, the daughter of Leotychides, the wife of Archidamus and mother of Agis, all of whom were kings, would have the same feeling; if, in your present uneducated state, you were to turn your thoughts against her son, she too would be equally astonished. But how disgraceful, that we should not have as high a notion of what is required in us as our enemies' wives and mothers have of the qualities which are required in their assailants! O my friend, be persuaded by me, and hear the Delphian inscription, 'Know thyself'--not the men whom you think, but these kings are our rivals, and we can only overcome them by pains and skill. And if you fail in the required qualities, you will fail also in becoming renowned among Hellenes and Barbarians, which you seem to desire more than any other man ever desired anything."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I entirely believe you; but what are the sort of pains which are required, Socrates,--can you tell me?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, I can; but we must take counsel together concerning the manner in which both of us may be most improved. For what I am telling you of the necessity of education applies to myself as well as to you; and there is only one point in which I have an advantage over you."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What is that?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I have a guardian who is better and wiser than your guardian, Pericles."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Who is he, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"God, Alcibiades, who up to this day has not allowed me to converse with you; and he inspires in me the faith that I am especially designed to bring you to honour."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"You are jesting, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Perhaps, at any rate, I am right in saying that all men greatly need pains and care, and you and I above all men."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"You are not far wrong about me."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And certainly not about myself."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"But what can we do?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There must be no hesitation or cowardice, my friend."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That would not become us, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No, indeed, and we ought to take counsel together: for do we not wish to be as good as possible?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"We do."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In what sort of virtue?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Plainly, in the virtue of good men."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Who are good in what?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Those, clearly, who are good in the management of affairs."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What sort of affairs? Equestrian affairs?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You mean that about them we should have recourse to horsemen?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, naval affairs?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You mean that we should have recourse to sailors about them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then what affairs? And who do them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"The affairs which occupy Athenian gentlemen."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when you speak of gentlemen, do you mean the wise or the unwise?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"The wise."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And a man is good in respect of that in which he is wise?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And evil in respect of that in which he is unwise?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The shoemaker, for example, is wise in respect of the making of shoes?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he is good in that?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"He is."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But in respect of the making of garments he is unwise?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then in that he is bad?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then upon this view of the matter the same man is good and also bad?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But would you say that the good are the same as the bad?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then whom do you call the good?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I mean by the good those who are able to rule in the city."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Not, surely, over horses?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But over men?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When they are sick?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or on a voyage?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or reaping the harvest?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When they are doing something or nothing?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"When they are doing something, I should say."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I wish that you would explain to me what this something is."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"When they are having dealings with one another, and using one another's services, as we citizens do in our daily life."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Those of whom you speak are ruling over men who are using the services of other men?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are they ruling over the signal-men who give the time to the rowers?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No; they are not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That would be the office of the pilot?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But, perhaps you mean that they rule over flute-players, who lead the singers and use the services of the dancers?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That would be the business of the teacher of the chorus?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then what is the meaning of being able to rule over men who use other men?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I mean that they rule over men who have common rights of citizenship, and dealings with one another."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what sort of an art is this? Suppose that I ask you again, as I did just now, What art makes men know how to rule over their fellow-sailors,--how would you answer?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"The art of the pilot."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And, if I may recur to another old instance, what art enables them to rule over their fellow-singers?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"The art of the teacher of the chorus, which you were just now mentioning."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what do you call the art of fellow-citizens?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I should say, good counsel, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is the art of the pilot evil counsel?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But good counsel?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, that is what I should say,--good counsel, of which the aim is the preservation of the voyagers."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"True. And what is the aim of that other good counsel of which you speak?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"The aim is the better order and preservation of the city."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what is that of which the absence or presence improves and preserves the order of the city? Suppose you were to ask me, what is that of which the presence or absence improves or preserves the order of the body? I should reply, the presence of health and the absence of disease. You would say the same?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if you were to ask me the same question about the eyes, I should reply in the same way, 'the presence of sight and the absence of blindness;' or about the ears, I should reply, that they were improved and were in better case, when deafness was absent, and hearing was present in them."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what would you say of a state? What is that by the presence or absence of which the state is improved and better managed and ordered?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I should say, Socrates:--the presence of friendship and the absence of hatred and division."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you mean by friendship agreement or disagreement?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Agreement."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What art makes cities agree about numbers?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Arithmetic."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And private individuals?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"The same."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what art makes each individual agree with himself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"The same."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what art makes each of us agree with himself about the comparative length of the span and of the cubit? Does not the art of measure?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Individuals are agreed with one another about this; and states, equally?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same holds of the balance?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But what is the other agreement of which you speak, and about what? what art can give that agreement? And does that which gives it to the state give it also to the individual, so as to make him consistent with himself and with another?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I should suppose so."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But what is the nature of the agreement?--answer, and faint not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I mean to say that there should be such friendship and agreement as exists between an affectionate father and mother and their son, or between brothers, or between husband and wife."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But can a man, Alcibiades, agree with a woman about the spinning of wool, which she understands and he does not?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No, truly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor has he any need, for spinning is a female accomplishment."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would a woman agree with a man about the science of arms, which she has never learned?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I suppose that the use of arms would be regarded by you as a male accomplishment?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"It would."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, upon your view, women and men have two sorts of knowledge?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then in their knowledge there is no agreement of women and men?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"There is not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor can there be friendship, if friendship is agreement?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Plainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then women are not loved by men when they do their own work?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I suppose not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor men by women when they do their own work?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor are states well administered, when individuals do their own work?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I should rather think, Socrates, that the reverse is the truth. (Compare Republic.)"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What! do you mean to say that states are well administered when friendship is absent, the presence of which, as we were saying, alone secures their good order?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"But I should say that there is friendship among them, for this very reason, that the two parties respectively do their own work."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That was not what you were saying before; and what do you mean now by affirming that friendship exists when there is no agreement? How can there be agreement about matters which the one party knows, and of which the other is in ignorance?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when individuals are doing their own work, are they doing what is just or unjust?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What is just, certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when individuals do what is just in the state, is there no friendship among them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I suppose that there must be, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then what do you mean by this friendship or agreement about which we must be wise and discreet in order that we may be good men? I cannot make out where it exists or among whom; according to you, the same persons may sometimes have it, and sometimes not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"But, indeed, Socrates, I do not know what I am saying; and I have long been, unconsciously to myself, in a most disgraceful state."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nevertheless, cheer up; at fifty, if you had discovered your deficiency, you would have been too old, and the time for taking care of yourself would have passed away, but yours is just the age at which the discovery should be made."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"And what should he do, Socrates, who would make the discovery?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Answer questions, Alcibiades; and that is a process which, by the grace of God, if I may put any faith in my oracle, will be very improving to both of us."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"If I can be improved by answering, I will answer."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And first of all, that we may not peradventure be deceived by appearances, fancying, perhaps, that we are taking care of ourselves when we are not, what is the meaning of a man taking care of himself? and when does he take care? Does he take care of himself when he takes care of what belongs to him?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I should think so."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When does a man take care of his feet? Does he not take care of them when he takes care of that which belongs to his feet?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I do not understand."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me take the hand as an illustration; does not a ring belong to the finger, and to the finger only?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the shoe in like manner to the foot?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when we take care of our shoes, do we not take care of our feet?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I do not comprehend, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But you would admit, Alcibiades, that to take proper care of a thing is a correct expression?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And taking proper care means improving?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what is the art which improves our shoes?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Shoemaking."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then by shoemaking we take care of our shoes?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do we by shoemaking take care of our feet, or by some other art which improves the feet?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"By some other art."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same art improves the feet which improves the rest of the body?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Which is gymnastic?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then by gymnastic we take care of our feet, and by shoemaking of that which belongs to our feet?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And by gymnastic we take care of our hands, and by the art of graving rings of that which belongs to our hands?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And by gymnastic we take care of the body, and by the art of weaving and the other arts we take care of the things of the body?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the art which takes care of each thing is different from that which takes care of the belongings of each thing?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then in taking care of what belongs to you, you do not take care of yourself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"For the art which takes care of our belongings appears not to be the same as that which takes care of ourselves?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now let me ask you what is the art with which we take care of ourselves?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I cannot say."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"At any rate, thus much has been admitted, that the art is not one which makes any of our possessions, but which makes ourselves better?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But should we ever have known what art makes a shoe better, if we did not know a shoe?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor should we know what art makes a ring better, if we did not know a ring?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can we ever know what art makes a man better, if we do not know what we are ourselves?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is self-knowledge such an easy thing, and was he to be lightly esteemed who inscribed the text on the temple at Delphi? Or is self-knowledge a difficult thing, which few are able to attain?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"At times I fancy, Socrates, that anybody can know himself; at other times the task appears to be very difficult."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But whether easy or difficult, Alcibiades, still there is no other way; knowing what we are, we shall know how to take care of ourselves, and if we are ignorant we shall not know."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, let us see in what way the self-existent can be discovered by us; that will give us a chance of discovering our own existence, which otherwise we can never know."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"You say truly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Come, now, I beseech you, tell me with whom you are conversing?--with whom but with me?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"As I am, with you?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is to say, I, Socrates, am talking?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And Alcibiades is my hearer?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I in talking use words?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And talking and using words have, I suppose, the same meaning?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the user is not the same as the thing which he uses?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will explain; the shoemaker, for example, uses a square tool, and a circular tool, and other tools for cutting?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But the tool is not the same as the cutter and user of the tool?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Of course not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in the same way the instrument of the harper is to be distinguished from the harper himself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"It is."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now the question which I asked was whether you conceive the user to be always different from that which he uses?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then what shall we say of the shoemaker? Does he cut with his tools only or with his hands?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"With his hands as well."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He uses his hands too?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does he use his eyes in cutting leather?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"He does."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And we admit that the user is not the same with the things which he uses?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the shoemaker and the harper are to be distinguished from the hands and feet which they use?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does not a man use the whole body?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that which uses is different from that which is used?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then a man is not the same as his own body?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is the inference."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What is he, then?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I cannot say."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nay, you can say that he is the user of the body."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the user of the body is the soul?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, the soul."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the soul rules?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me make an assertion which will, I think, be universally admitted."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That man is one of three things."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Soul, body, or both together forming a whole."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But did we not say that the actual ruling principle of the body is man?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, we did."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does the body rule over itself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"It is subject, as we were saying?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then that is not the principle which we are seeking?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"It would seem not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But may we say that the union of the two rules over the body, and consequently that this is man?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very likely."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The most unlikely of all things; for if one of the members is subject, the two united cannot possibly rule."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But since neither the body, nor the union of the two, is man, either man has no real existence, or the soul is man?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Just so."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is anything more required to prove that the soul is man?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not; the proof is, I think, quite sufficient."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if the proof, although not perfect, be sufficient, we shall be satisfied;--more precise proof will be supplied when we have discovered that which we were led to omit, from a fear that the enquiry would be too much protracted."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What was that?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What I meant, when I said that absolute existence must be first considered; but now, instead of absolute existence, we have been considering the nature of individual existence, and this may, perhaps, be sufficient; for surely there is nothing which may be called more properly ourselves than the soul?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"There is nothing."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we may truly conceive that you and I are conversing with one another, soul to soul?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that is just what I was saying before--that I, Socrates, am not arguing or talking with the face of Alcibiades, but with the real Alcibiades; or in other words, with his soul."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who bids a man know himself, would have him know his soul?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That appears to be true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He whose knowledge only extends to the body, knows the things of a man, and not the man himself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then neither the physician regarded as a physician, nor the trainer regarded as a trainer, knows himself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"He does not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The husbandmen and the other craftsmen are very far from knowing themselves, for they would seem not even to know their own belongings? When regarded in relation to the arts which they practise they are even further removed from self-knowledge, for they only know the belongings of the body, which minister to the body."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then if temperance is the knowledge of self, in respect of his art none of them is temperate?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this is the reason why their arts are accounted vulgar, and are not such as a good man would practise?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Again, he who cherishes his body cherishes not himself, but what belongs to him?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But he who cherishes his money, cherishes neither himself nor his belongings, but is in a stage yet further removed from himself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the money-maker has really ceased to be occupied with his own concerns?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if any one has fallen in love with the person of Alcibiades, he loves not Alcibiades, but the belongings of Alcibiades?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But he who loves your soul is the true lover?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is the necessary inference."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The lover of the body goes away when the flower of youth fades?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But he who loves the soul goes not away, as long as the soul follows after virtue?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I am the lover who goes not away, but remains with you, when you are no longer young and the rest are gone?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; and therein you do well, and I hope that you will remain."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you must try to look your best."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I will."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The fact is, that there is only one lover of Alcibiades the son of Cleinias; there neither is nor ever has been seemingly any other; and he is his darling,--Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus and Phaenarete."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And did you not say, that if I had not spoken first, you were on the point of coming to me, and enquiring why I only remained?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The reason was that I loved you for your own sake, whereas other men love what belongs to you; and your beauty, which is not you, is fading away, just as your true self is beginning to bloom. And I will never desert you, if you are not spoiled and deformed by the Athenian people; for the danger which I most fear is that you will become a lover of the people and will be spoiled by them. Many a noble Athenian has been ruined in this way. For the demus of the great-hearted Erechteus is of a fair countenance, but you should see him naked; wherefore observe the caution which I give you."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What caution?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Practise yourself, sweet friend, in learning what you ought to know, before you enter on politics; and then you will have an antidote which will keep you out of harm's way."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Good advice, Socrates, but I wish that you would explain to me in what way I am to take care of myself."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Have we not made an advance? for we are at any rate tolerably well agreed as to what we are, and there is no longer any danger, as we once feared, that we might be taking care not of ourselves, but of something which is not ourselves."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the next step will be to take care of the soul, and look to that?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Leaving the care of our bodies and of our properties to others?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But how can we have a perfect knowledge of the things of the soul?--For if we know them, then I suppose we shall know ourselves. Can we really be ignorant of the excellent meaning of the Delphian inscription, of which we were just now speaking?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What have you in your thoughts, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will tell you what I suspect to be the meaning and lesson of that inscription. Let me take an illustration from sight, which I imagine to be the only one suitable to my purpose."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Consider; if some one were to say to the eye, 'See thyself,' as you might say to a man, 'Know thyself,' what is the nature and meaning of this precept? Would not his meaning be:--That the eye should look at that in which it would see itself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what are the objects in looking at which we see ourselves?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly, Socrates, in looking at mirrors and the like."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very true; and is there not something of the nature of a mirror in our own eyes?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Did you ever observe that the face of the person looking into the eye of another is reflected as in a mirror; and in the visual organ which is over against him, and which is called the pupil, there is a sort of image of the person looking?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is quite true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the eye, looking at another eye, and at that in the eye which is most perfect, and which is the instrument of vision, will there see itself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is evident."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But looking at anything else either in man or in the world, and not to what resembles this, it will not see itself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then if the eye is to see itself, it must look at the eye, and at that part of the eye where sight which is the virtue of the eye resides?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if the soul, my dear Alcibiades, is ever to know herself, must she not look at the soul; and especially at that part of the soul in which her virtue resides, and to any other which is like this?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I agree, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do we know of any part of our souls more divine than that which has to do with wisdom and knowledge?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"There is none."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then this is that part of the soul which resembles the divine; and he who looks at this and at the whole class of things divine, will be most likely to know himself?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And self-knowledge we agree to be wisdom?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if we have no self-knowledge and no wisdom, can we ever know our own good and evil?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"How can we, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You mean, that if you did not know Alcibiades, there would be no possibility of your knowing that what belonged to Alcibiades was really his?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"It would be quite impossible."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor should we know that we were the persons to whom anything belonged, if we did not know ourselves?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"How could we?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if we did not know our own belongings, neither should we know the belongings of our belongings?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we were not altogether right in acknowledging just now that a man may know what belongs to him and yet not know himself; nay, rather he cannot even know the belongings of his belongings; for the discernment of the things of self, and of the things which belong to the things of self, appear all to be the business of the same man, and of the same art."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"So much may be supposed."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who knows not the things which belong to himself, will in like manner be ignorant of the things which belong to others?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he knows not the affairs of others, he will not know the affairs of states?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then such a man can never be a statesman?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"He cannot."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor an economist?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"He cannot."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He will not know what he is doing?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"He will not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will not he who is ignorant fall into error?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Assuredly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he falls into error will he not fail both in his public and private capacity?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And failing, will he not be miserable?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what will become of those for whom he is acting?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"They will be miserable also."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who is not wise and good cannot be happy?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"He cannot."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The bad, then, are miserable?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, very."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if so, not he who has riches, but he who has wisdom, is delivered from his misery?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Cities, then, if they are to be happy, do not want walls, or triremes, or docks, or numbers, or size, Alcibiades, without virtue? (Compare Arist. Pol.)"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Indeed they do not."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you must give the citizens virtue, if you mean to administer their affairs rightly or nobly?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But can a man give that which he has not?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you or any one who means to govern and superintend, not only himself and the things of himself, but the state and the things of the state, must in the first place acquire virtue."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You have not therefore to obtain power or authority, in order to enable you to do what you wish for yourself and the state, but justice and wisdom."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You and the state, if you act wisely and justly, will act according to the will of God?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"As I was saying before, you will look only at what is bright and divine, and act with a view to them?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In that mirror you will see and know yourselves and your own good?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And so you will act rightly and well?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In which case, I will be security for your happiness."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I accept the security."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if you act unrighteously, your eye will turn to the dark and godless, and being in darkness and ignorance of yourselves, you will probably do deeds of darkness."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Very possibly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"For if a man, my dear Alcibiades, has the power to do what he likes, but has no understanding, what is likely to be the result, either to him as an individual or to the state--for example, if he be sick and is able to do what he likes, not having the mind of a physician--having moreover tyrannical power, and no one daring to reprove him, what will happen to him? Will he not be likely to have his constitution ruined?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or again, in a ship, if a man having the power to do what he likes, has no intelligence or skill in navigation, do you see what will happen to him and to his fellow-sailors?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes; I see that they will all perish."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in like manner, in a state, and where there is any power and authority which is wanting in virtue, will not misfortune, in like manner, ensue?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Not tyrannical power, then, my good Alcibiades, should be the aim either of individuals or states, if they would be happy, but virtue."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And before they have virtue, to be commanded by a superior is better for men as well as for children? (Compare Arist. Pol.)"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is evident."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that which is better is also nobler?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what is nobler is more becoming?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then to the bad man slavery is more becoming, because better?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then vice is only suited to a slave?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And virtue to a freeman?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And, O my friend, is not the condition of a slave to be avoided?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are you now conscious of your own state? And do you know whether you are a freeman or not?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I think that I am very conscious indeed of my own state."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you know how to escape out of a state which I do not even like to name to my beauty?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, I do."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"By your help, Socrates."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is not well said, Alcibiades."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What ought I to have said?"}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"By the help of God."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I agree; and I further say, that our relations are likely to be reversed. From this day forward, I must and will follow you as you have followed me; I will be the disciple, and you shall be my master."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"O that is rare! My love breeds another love: and so like the stork I shall be cherished by the bird whom I have hatched."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Strange, but true; and henceforward I shall begin to think about justice."}
{"Book":"first_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I hope that you will persist; although I have fears, not because I doubt you; but I see the power of the state, which may be too much for both of us. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALCIBIADES I *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Tell me, Strangers, is a God or some man supposed to be the author of your laws?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"A God, Stranger; in very truth a God: among us Cretans he is said to have been Zeus, but in Lacedaemon, whence our friend here comes, I believe they would say that Apollo is their lawgiver: would they not, Megillus?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And do you, Cleinias, believe, as Homer tells, that every ninth year Minos went to converse with his Olympian sire, and was inspired by him to make laws for your cities?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is our tradition; and there was Rhadamanthus, a brother of his, with whose name you are familiar; he is reputed to have been the justest of men, and we Cretans are of opinion that he earned this reputation from his righteous administration of justice when he was alive."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes, and a noble reputation it was, worthy of a son of Zeus. As you and Megillus have been trained in these institutions, I dare say that you will not be unwilling to give an account of your government and laws; on our way we can pass the time pleasantly in talking about them, for I am told that the distance from Cnosus to the cave and temple of Zeus is considerable; and doubtless there are shady places under the lofty trees, which will protect us from this scorching sun. Being no longer young, we may often stop to rest beneath them, and get over the whole journey without difficulty, beguiling the time by conversation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, Stranger, and if we proceed onward we shall come to groves of cypresses, which are of rare height and beauty, and there are green meadows, in which we may repose and converse."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good, indeed; and still better when we see them; let us move on cheerily."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I am willing--And first, I want to know why the law has ordained that you shall have common meals and gymnastic exercises, and wear arms."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I think, Stranger, that the aim of our institutions is easily intelligible to any one. Look at the character of our country: Crete is not like Thessaly, a large plain; and for this reason they have horsemen in Thessaly, and we have runners--the inequality of the ground in our country is more adapted to locomotion on foot; but then, if you have runners you must have light arms--no one can carry a heavy weight when running, and bows and arrows are convenient because they are light. Now all these regulations have been made with a view to war, and the legislator appears to me to have looked to this in all his arrangements:--the common meals, if I am not mistaken, were instituted by him for a similar reason, because he saw that while they are in the field the citizens are by the nature of the case compelled to take their meals together for the sake of mutual protection. He seems to me to have thought the world foolish in not understanding that all men are always at war with one another; and if in war there ought to be common meals and certain persons regularly appointed under others to protect an army, they should be continued in peace. For what men in general term peace would be said by him to be only a name; in reality every city is in a natural state of war with every other, not indeed proclaimed by heralds, but everlasting. And if you look closely, you will find that this was the intention of the Cretan legislator; all institutions, private as well as public, were arranged by him with a view to war; in giving them he was under the impression that no possessions or institutions are of any value to him who is defeated in battle; for all the good things of the conquered pass into the hands of the conquerors."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"You appear to me, Stranger, to have been thoroughly trained in the Cretan institutions, and to be well informed about them; will you tell me a little more explicitly what is the principle of government which you would lay down? You seem to imagine that a well-governed state ought to be so ordered as to conquer all other states in war: am I right in supposing this to be your meaning?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly; and our Lacedaemonian friend, if I am not mistaken, will agree with me."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Why, my good friend, how could any Lacedaemonian say anything else?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And is what you say applicable only to states, or also to villages?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To both alike."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The case is the same?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And in the village will there be the same war of family against family, and of individual against individual?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"The same."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And should each man conceive himself to be his own enemy:--what shall we say?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"O Athenian Stranger--inhabitant of Attica I will not call you, for you seem to deserve rather to be named after the goddess herself, because you go back to first principles,--you have thrown a light upon the argument, and will now be better able to understand what I was just saying,--that all men are publicly one another's enemies, and each man privately his own. (ATHENIAN: My good sir, what do you mean?)--"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"...Moreover, there is a victory and defeat--the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats--which each man gains or sustains at the hands, not of another, but of himself; this shows that there is a war against ourselves going on within every one of us."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us now reverse the order of the argument: Seeing that every individual is either his own superior or his own inferior, may we say that there is the same principle in the house, the village, and the state?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You mean that in each of them there is a principle of superiority or inferiority to self?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You are quite right in asking the question, for there certainly is such a principle, and above all in states; and the state in which the better citizens win a victory over the mob and over the inferior classes may be truly said to be better than itself, and may be justly praised, where such a victory is gained, or censured in the opposite case."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Whether the better is ever really conquered by the worse, is a question which requires more discussion, and may be therefore left for the present. But I now quite understand your meaning when you say that citizens who are of the same race and live in the same cities may unjustly conspire, and having the superiority in numbers may overcome and enslave the few just; and when they prevail, the state may be truly called its own inferior and therefore bad; and when they are defeated, its own superior and therefore good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Your remark, Stranger, is a paradox, and yet we cannot possibly deny it."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Here is another case for consideration;--in a family there may be several brothers, who are the offspring of a single pair; very possibly the majority of them may be unjust, and the just may be in a minority."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very possibly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And you and I ought not to raise a question of words as to whether this family and household are rightly said to be superior when they conquer, and inferior when they are conquered; for we are not now considering what may or may not be the proper or customary way of speaking, but we are considering the natural principles of right and wrong in laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What you say, Stranger, is most true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Quite excellent, in my opinion, as far as we have gone."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Again; might there not be a judge over these brethren, of whom we were speaking?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Now, which would be the better judge--one who destroyed the bad and appointed the good to govern themselves; or one who, while allowing the good to govern, let the bad live, and made them voluntarily submit? Or third, I suppose, in the scale of excellence might be placed a judge, who, finding the family distracted, not only did not destroy any one, but reconciled them to one another for ever after, and gave them laws which they mutually observed, and was able to keep them friends."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"The last would be by far the best sort of judge and legislator."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And yet the aim of all the laws which he gave would be the reverse of war."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And will he who constitutes the state and orders the life of man have in view external war, or that kind of intestine war called civil, which no one, if he could prevent, would like to have occurring in his own state; and when occurring, every one would wish to be quit of as soon as possible?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"He would have the latter chiefly in view."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And would he prefer that this civil war should be terminated by the destruction of one of the parties, and by the victory of the other, or that peace and friendship should be re-established, and that, being reconciled, they should give their attention to foreign enemies?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Every one would desire the latter in the case of his own state."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And would not that also be the desire of the legislator?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And would not every one always make laws for the sake of the best?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But war, whether external or civil, is not the best, and the need of either is to be deprecated; but peace with one another, and good will, are best. Nor is the victory of the state over itself to be regarded as a really good thing, but as a necessity; a man might as well say that the body was in the best state when sick and purged by medicine, forgetting that there is also a state of the body which needs no purge. And in like manner no one can be a true statesman, whether he aims at the happiness of the individual or state, who looks only, or first of all, to external warfare; nor will he ever be a sound legislator who orders peace for the sake of war, and not war for the sake of peace."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I suppose that there is truth, Stranger, in that remark of yours; and yet I am greatly mistaken if war is not the entire aim and object of our own institutions, and also of the Lacedaemonian."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I dare say; but there is no reason why we should rudely quarrel with one another about your legislators, instead of gently questioning them, seeing that both we and they are equally in earnest. Please follow me and the argument closely:--And first I will put forward Tyrtaeus, an Athenian by birth, but also a Spartan citizen, who of all men was most eager about war: Well, he says, 'I sing not, I care not, about any man, even if he were the richest of men, and possessed every good (and then he gives a whole list of them), if he be not at all times a brave warrior.' I imagine that you, too, must have heard his poems; our Lacedaemonian friend has probably heard more than enough of them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And they have found their way from Lacedaemon to Crete."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Come now and let us all join in asking this question of Tyrtaeus: O most divine poet, we will say to him, the excellent praise which you have bestowed on those who excel in war sufficiently proves that you are wise and good, and I and Megillus and Cleinias of Cnosus do, as I believe, entirely agree with you. But we should like to be quite sure that we are speaking of the same men; tell us, then, do you agree with us in thinking that there are two kinds of war; or what would you say? A far inferior man to Tyrtaeus would have no difficulty in replying quite truly, that war is of two kinds,--one which is universally called civil war, and is, as we were just now saying, of all wars the worst; the other, as we should all admit, in which we fall out with other nations who are of a different race, is a far milder form of warfare."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly, far milder."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, now, when you praise and blame war in this high-flown strain, whom are you praising or blaming, and to which kind of war are you referring? I suppose that you must mean foreign war, if I am to judge from expressions of yours in which you say that you abominate those 'Who refuse to look upon fields of blood, and will not draw near and strike at their enemies.' And we shall naturally go on to say to him,--You, Tyrtaeus, as it seems, praise those who distinguish themselves in external and foreign war; and he must admit this."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Evidently."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"They are good; but we say that there are still better men whose virtue is displayed in the greatest of all battles. And we too have a poet whom we summon as a witness, Theognis, citizen of Megara in Sicily: 'Cyrnus,' he says, 'he who is faithful in a civil broil is worth his weight in gold and silver.' And such an one is far better, as we affirm, than the other in a more difficult kind of war, much in the same degree as justice and temperance and wisdom, when united with courage, are better than courage only; for a man cannot be faithful and good in civil strife without having all virtue. But in the war of which Tyrtaeus speaks, many a mercenary soldier will take his stand and be ready to die at his post, and yet they are generally and almost without exception insolent, unjust, violent men, and the most senseless of human beings. You will ask what the conclusion is, and what I am seeking to prove: I maintain that the divine legislator of Crete, like any other who is worthy of consideration, will always and above all things in making laws have regard to the greatest virtue; which, according to Theognis, is loyalty in the hour of danger, and may be truly called perfect justice. Whereas, that virtue which Tyrtaeus highly praises is well enough, and was praised by the poet at the right time, yet in place and dignity may be said to be only fourth rate (i.e., it ranks after justice, temperance, and wisdom.)."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Stranger, we are degrading our inspired lawgiver to a rank which is far beneath him."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Nay, I think that we degrade not him but ourselves, if we imagine that Lycurgus and Minos laid down laws both in Lacedaemon and Crete mainly with a view to war."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What ought we to say then?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"What truth and what justice require of us, if I am not mistaken, when speaking in behalf of divine excellence;--that the legislator when making his laws had in view not a part only, and this the lowest part of virtue, but all virtue, and that he devised classes of laws answering to the kinds of virtue; not in the way in which modern inventors of laws make the classes, for they only investigate and offer laws whenever a want is felt, and one man has a class of laws about allotments and heiresses, another about assaults; others about ten thousand other such matters. But we maintain that the right way of examining into laws is to proceed as we have now done, and I admired the spirit of your exposition; for you were quite right in beginning with virtue, and saying that this was the aim of the giver of the law, but I thought that you went wrong when you added that all his legislation had a view only to a part, and the least part of virtue, and this called forth my subsequent remarks. Will you allow me then to explain how I should have liked to have heard you expound the matter?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"You ought to have said, Stranger--The Cretan laws are with reason famous among the Hellenes; for they fulfil the object of laws, which is to make those who use them happy; and they confer every sort of good. Now goods are of two kinds: there are human and there are divine goods, and the human hang upon the divine; and the state which attains the greater, at the same time acquires the less, or, not having the greater, has neither. Of the lesser goods the first is health, the second beauty, the third strength, including swiftness in running and bodily agility generally, and the fourth is wealth, not the blind god (Pluto), but one who is keen of sight, if only he has wisdom for his companion. For wisdom is chief and leader of the divine class of goods, and next follows temperance; and from the union of these two with courage springs justice, and fourth in the scale of virtue is courage. All these naturally take precedence of the other goods, and this is the order in which the legislator must place them, and after them he will enjoin the rest of his ordinances on the citizens with a view to these, the human looking to the divine, and the divine looking to their leader mind. Some of his ordinances will relate to contracts of marriage which they make one with another, and then to the procreation and education of children, both male and female; the duty of the lawgiver will be to take charge of his citizens, in youth and age, and at every time of life, and to give them punishments and rewards; and in reference to all their intercourse with one another, he ought to consider their pains and pleasures and desires, and the vehemence of all their passions; he should keep a watch over them, and blame and praise them rightly by the mouth of the laws themselves. Also with regard to anger and terror, and the other perturbations of the soul, which arise out of misfortune, and the deliverances from them which prosperity brings, and the experiences which come to men in diseases, or in war, or poverty, or the opposite of these; in all these states he should determine and teach what is the good and evil of the condition of each. In the next place, the legislator has to be careful how the citizens make their money and in what way they spend it, and to have an eye to their mutual contracts and dissolutions of contracts, whether voluntary or involuntary: he should see how they order all this, and consider where justice as well as injustice is found or is wanting in their several dealings with one another; and honour those who obey the law, and impose fixed penalties on those who disobey, until the round of civil life is ended, and the time has come for the consideration of the proper funeral rites and honours of the dead. And the lawgiver reviewing his work, will appoint guardians to preside over these things,--some who walk by intelligence, others by true opinion only, and then mind will bind together all his ordinances and show them to be in harmony with temperance and justice, and not with wealth or ambition. This is the spirit, Stranger, in which I was and am desirous that you should pursue the subject. And I want to know the nature of all these things, and how they are arranged in the laws of Zeus, as they are termed, and in those of the Pythian Apollo, which Minos and Lycurgus gave; and how the order of them is discovered to his eyes, who has experience in laws gained either by study or habit, although they are far from being self-evident to the rest of mankind like ourselves."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How shall we proceed, Stranger?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I think that we must begin again as before, and first consider the habit of courage; and then we will go on and discuss another and then another form of virtue, if you please. In this way we shall have a model of the whole; and with these and similar discourses we will beguile the way. And when we have gone through all the virtues, we will show, by the grace of God, that the institutions of which I was speaking look to virtue."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very good; and suppose that you first criticize this praiser of Zeus and the laws of Crete."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will try to criticize you and myself, as well as him, for the argument is a common concern. Tell me,--were not first the syssitia, and secondly the gymnasia, invented by your legislator with a view to war?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what comes third, and what fourth? For that, I think, is the sort of enumeration which ought to be made of the remaining parts of virtue, no matter whether you call them parts or what their name is, provided the meaning is clear."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Then I, or any other Lacedaemonian, would reply that hunting is third in order."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us see if we can discover what comes fourth and fifth."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I think that I can get as far as the fourth head, which is the frequent endurance of pain, exhibited among us Spartans in certain hand-to-hand fights; also in stealing with the prospect of getting a good beating; there is, too, the so-called Crypteia, or secret service, in which wonderful endurance is shown,--our people wander over the whole country by day and by night, and even in winter have not a shoe to their foot, and are without beds to lie upon, and have to attend upon themselves. Marvellous, too, is the endurance which our citizens show in their naked exercises, contending against the violent summer heat; and there are many similar practices, to speak of which in detail would be endless."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Excellent, O Lacedaemonian Stranger. But how ought we to define courage? Is it to be regarded only as a combat against fears and pains, or also against desires and pleasures, and against flatteries; which exercise such a tremendous power, that they make the hearts even of respectable citizens to melt like wax?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I should say the latter."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In what preceded, as you will remember, our Cnosian friend was speaking of a man or a city being inferior to themselves:--Were you not, Cleinias?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I was."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Now, which is in the truest sense inferior, the man who is overcome by pleasure or by pain?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I should say the man who is overcome by pleasure; for all men deem him to be inferior in a more disgraceful sense, than the other who is overcome by pain."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But surely the lawgivers of Crete and Lacedaemon have not legislated for a courage which is lame of one leg, able only to meet attacks which come from the left, but impotent against the insidious flatteries which come from the right?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Able to meet both, I should say."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then let me once more ask, what institutions have you in either of your states which give a taste of pleasures, and do not avoid them any more than they avoid pains; but which set a person in the midst of them, and compel or induce him by the prospect of reward to get the better of them? Where is an ordinance about pleasure similar to that about pain to be found in your laws? Tell me what there is of this nature among you:--What is there which makes your citizen equally brave against pleasure and pain, conquering what they ought to conquer, and superior to the enemies who are most dangerous and nearest home?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I was able to tell you, Stranger, many laws which were directed against pain; but I do not know that I can point out any great or obvious examples of similar institutions which are concerned with pleasure; there are some lesser provisions, however, which I might mention."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Neither can I show anything of that sort which is at all equally prominent in the Cretan laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"No wonder, my dear friends; and if, as is very likely, in our search after the true and good, one of us may have to censure the laws of the others, we must not be offended, but take kindly what another says."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You are quite right, Athenian Stranger, and we will do as you say."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"At our time of life, Cleinias, there should be no feeling of irritation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will not at present determine whether he who censures the Cretan or Lacedaemonian polities is right or wrong. But I believe that I can tell better than either of you what the many say about them. For assuming that you have reasonably good laws, one of the best of them will be the law forbidding any young men to enquire which of them are right or wrong; but with one mouth and one voice they must all agree that the laws are all good, for they came from God; and any one who says the contrary is not to be listened to. But an old man who remarks any defect in your laws may communicate his observation to a ruler or to an equal in years when no young man is present."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Exactly so, Stranger; and like a diviner, although not there at the time, you seem to me quite to have hit the meaning of the legislator, and to say what is most true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"As there are no young men present, and the legislator has given old men free licence, there will be no impropriety in our discussing these very matters now that we are alone."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True. And therefore you may be as free as you like in your censure of our laws, for there is no discredit in knowing what is wrong; he who receives what is said in a generous and friendly spirit will be all the better for it."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Very good; however, I am not going to say anything against your laws until to the best of my ability I have examined them, but I am going to raise doubts about them. For you are the only people known to us, whether Greek or barbarian, whom the legislator commanded to eschew all great pleasures and amusements and never to touch them; whereas in the matter of pains or fears which we have just been discussing, he thought that they who from infancy had always avoided pains and fears and sorrows, when they were compelled to face them would run away from those who were hardened in them, and would become their subjects. Now the legislator ought to have considered that this was equally true of pleasure; he should have said to himself, that if our citizens are from their youth upward unacquainted with the greatest pleasures, and unused to endure amid the temptations of pleasure, and are not disciplined to refrain from all things evil, the sweet feeling of pleasure will overcome them just as fear would overcome the former class; and in another, and even a worse manner, they will be the slaves of those who are able to endure amid pleasures, and have had the opportunity of enjoying them, they being often the worst of mankind. One half of their souls will be a slave, the other half free; and they will not be worthy to be called in the true sense men and freemen. Tell me whether you assent to my words?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"On first hearing, what you say appears to be the truth; but to be hasty in coming to a conclusion about such important matters would be very childish and simple."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Suppose, Cleinias and Megillus, that we consider the virtue which follows next of those which we intended to discuss (for after courage comes temperance), what institutions shall we find relating to temperance, either in Crete or Lacedaemon, which, like your military institutions, differ from those of any ordinary state."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"That is not an easy question to answer; still I should say that the common meals and gymnastic exercises have been excellently devised for the promotion both of temperance and courage."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There seems to be a difficulty, Stranger, with regard to states, in making words and facts coincide so that there can be no dispute about them. As in the human body, the regimen which does good in one way does harm in another; and we can hardly say that any one course of treatment is adapted to a particular constitution. Now the gymnasia and common meals do a great deal of good, and yet they are a source of evil in civil troubles; as is shown in the case of the Milesian, and Boeotian, and Thurian youth, among whom these institutions seem always to have had a tendency to degrade the ancient and natural custom of love below the level, not only of man, but of the beasts. The charge may be fairly brought against your cities above all others, and is true also of most other states which especially cultivate gymnastics. Whether such matters are to be regarded jestingly or seriously, I think that the pleasure is to be deemed natural which arises out of the intercourse between men and women; but that the intercourse of men with men, or of women with women, is contrary to nature, and that the bold attempt was originally due to unbridled lust. The Cretans are always accused of having invented the story of Ganymede and Zeus because they wanted to justify themselves in the enjoyment of unnatural pleasures by the practice of the god whom they believe to have been their lawgiver. Leaving the story, we may observe that any speculation about laws turns almost entirely on pleasure and pain, both in states and in individuals: these are two fountains which nature lets flow, and he who draws from them where and when, and as much as he ought, is happy; and this holds of men and animals--of individuals as well as states; and he who indulges in them ignorantly and at the wrong time, is the reverse of happy."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I admit, Stranger, that your words are well spoken, and I hardly know what to say in answer to you; but still I think that the Spartan lawgiver was quite right in forbidding pleasure. Of the Cretan laws, I shall leave the defence to my Cnosian friend. But the laws of Sparta, in as far as they relate to pleasure, appear to me to be the best in the world; for that which leads mankind in general into the wildest pleasure and licence, and every other folly, the law has clean driven out; and neither in the country nor in towns which are under the control of Sparta, will you find revelries and the many incitements of every kind of pleasure which accompany them; and any one who meets a drunken and disorderly person, will immediately have him most severely punished, and will not let him off on any pretence, not even at the time of a Dionysiac festival; although I have remarked that this may happen at your performances 'on the cart,' as they are called; and among our Tarentine colonists I have seen the whole city drunk at a Dionysiac festival; but nothing of the sort happens among us."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"O Lacedaemonian Stranger, these festivities are praiseworthy where there is a spirit of endurance, but are very senseless when they are under no regulations. In order to retaliate, an Athenian has only to point out the licence which exists among your women. To all such accusations, whether they are brought against the Tarentines, or us, or you, there is one answer which exonerates the practice in question from impropriety. When a stranger expresses wonder at the singularity of what he sees, any inhabitant will naturally answer him:--Wonder not, O stranger; this is our custom, and you may very likely have some other custom about the same things. Now we are speaking, my friends, not about men in general, but about the merits and defects of the lawgivers themselves. Let us then discourse a little more at length about intoxication, which is a very important subject, and will seriously task the discrimination of the legislator. I am not speaking of drinking, or not drinking, wine at all, but of intoxication. Are we to follow the custom of the Scythians, and Persians, and Carthaginians, and Celts, and Iberians, and Thracians, who are all warlike nations, or that of your countrymen, for they, as you say, altogether abstain? But the Scythians and Thracians, both men and women, drink unmixed wine, which they pour on their garments, and this they think a happy and glorious institution. The Persians, again, are much given to other practices of luxury which you reject, but they have more moderation in them than the Thracians and Scythians."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"O best of men, we have only to take arms into our hands, and we send all these nations flying before us."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Nay, my good friend, do not say that; there have been, as there always will be, flights and pursuits of which no account can be given, and therefore we cannot say that victory or defeat in battle affords more than a doubtful proof of the goodness or badness of institutions. For when the greater states conquer and enslave the lesser, as the Syracusans have done the Locrians, who appear to be the best-governed people in their part of the world, or as the Athenians have done the Ceans (and there are ten thousand other instances of the same sort of thing), all this is not to the point; let us endeavour rather to form a conclusion about each institution in itself and say nothing, at present, of victories and defeats. Let us only say that such and such a custom is honourable, and another not. And first permit me to tell you how good and bad are to be estimated in reference to these very matters."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"All those who are ready at a moment's notice to praise or censure any practice which is matter of discussion, seem to me to proceed in a wrong way. Let me give you an illustration of what I mean:--You may suppose a person to be praising wheat as a good kind of food, whereupon another person instantly blames wheat, without ever enquiring into its effect or use, or in what way, or to whom, or with what, or in what state and how, wheat is to be given. And that is just what we are doing in this discussion. At the very mention of the word intoxication, one side is ready with their praises and the other with their censures; which is absurd. For either side adduce their witnesses and approvers, and some of us think that we speak with authority because we have many witnesses; and others because they see those who abstain conquering in battle, and this again is disputed by us. Now I cannot say that I shall be satisfied, if we go on discussing each of the remaining laws in the same way. And about this very point of intoxication I should like to speak in another way, which I hold to be the right one; for if number is to be the criterion, are there not myriads upon myriads of nations ready to dispute the point with you, who are only two cities?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I shall gladly welcome any method of enquiry which is right."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let me put the matter thus:--Suppose a person to praise the keeping of goats, and the creatures themselves as capital things to have, and then some one who had seen goats feeding without a goatherd in cultivated spots, and doing mischief, were to censure a goat or any other animal who has no keeper, or a bad keeper, would there be any sense or justice in such censure?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Does a captain require only to have nautical knowledge in order to be a good captain, whether he is sea-sick or not? What do you say?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I say that he is not a good captain if, although he have nautical skill, he is liable to sea-sickness."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what would you say of the commander of an army? Will he be able to command merely because he has military skill if he be a coward, who, when danger comes, is sick and drunk with fear?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what if besides being a coward he has no skill?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"He is a miserable fellow, not fit to be a commander of men, but only of old women."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what would you say of some one who blames or praises any sort of meeting which is intended by nature to have a ruler, and is well enough when under his presidency? The critic, however, has never seen the society meeting together at an orderly feast under the control of a president, but always without a ruler or with a bad one:--when observers of this class praise or blame such meetings, are we to suppose that what they say is of any value?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not, if they have never seen or been present at such a meeting when rightly ordered."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Reflect; may not banqueters and banquets be said to constitute a kind of meeting?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And did any one ever see this sort of convivial meeting rightly ordered? Of course you two will answer that you have never seen them at all, because they are not customary or lawful in your country; but I have come across many of them in many different places, and moreover I have made enquiries about them wherever I went, as I may say, and never did I see or hear of anything of the kind which was carried on altogether rightly; in some few particulars they might be right, but in general they were utterly wrong."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Stranger, by this remark? Explain. For we, as you say, from our inexperience in such matters, might very likely not know, even if they came in our way, what was right or wrong in such societies."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Likely enough; then let me try to be your instructor: You would acknowledge, would you not, that in all gatherings of mankind, of whatever sort, there ought to be a leader?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly I should."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And we were saying just now, that when men are at war the leader ought to be a brave man?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"We were."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The brave man is less likely than the coward to be disturbed by fears?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That again is true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And if there were a possibility of having a general of an army who was absolutely fearless and imperturbable, should we not by all means appoint him?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Assuredly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Now, however, we are speaking not of a general who is to command an army, when foe meets foe in time of war, but of one who is to regulate meetings of another sort, when friend meets friend in time of peace."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And that sort of meeting, if attended with drunkenness, is apt to be unquiet."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly; the reverse of quiet."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In the first place, then, the revellers as well as the soldiers will require a ruler?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure; no men more so."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And we ought, if possible, to provide them with a quiet ruler?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And he should be a man who understands society; for his duty is to preserve the friendly feelings which exist among the company at the time, and to increase them for the future by his use of the occasion."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Must we not appoint a sober man and a wise to be our master of the revels? For if the ruler of drinkers be himself young and drunken, and not over-wise, only by some special good fortune will he be saved from doing some great evil."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"It will be by a singular good fortune that he is saved."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Now suppose such associations to be framed in the best way possible in states, and that some one blames the very fact of their existence--he may very likely be right. But if he blames a practice which he only sees very much mismanaged, he shows in the first place that he is not aware of the mismanagement, and also not aware that everything done in this way will turn out to be wrong, because done without the superintendence of a sober ruler. Do you not see that a drunken pilot or a drunken ruler of any sort will ruin ship, chariot, army--anything, in short, of which he has the direction?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"The last remark is very true, Stranger; and I see quite clearly the advantage of an army having a good leader--he will give victory in war to his followers, which is a very great advantage; and so of other things. But I do not see any similar advantage which either individuals or states gain from the good management of a feast; and I want you to tell me what great good will be effected, supposing that this drinking ordinance is duly established."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"If you mean to ask what great good accrues to the state from the right training of a single youth, or of a single chorus--when the question is put in that form, we cannot deny that the good is not very great in any particular instance. But if you ask what is the good of education in general, the answer is easy--that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly, and conquer their enemies in battle, because they are good. Education certainly gives victory, although victory sometimes produces forgetfulness of education; for many have grown insolent from victory in war, and this insolence has engendered in them innumerable evils; and many a victory has been and will be suicidal to the victors; but education is never suicidal."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You seem to imply, my friend, that convivial meetings, when rightly ordered, are an important element of education."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Certainly I do."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And can you show that what you have been saying is true?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"To be absolutely sure of the truth of matters concerning which there are many opinions, is an attribute of the Gods not given to man, Stranger; but I shall be very happy to tell you what I think, especially as we are now proposing to enter on a discussion concerning laws and constitutions."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Your opinion, Stranger, about the questions which are now being raised, is precisely what we want to hear."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Very good; I will try to find a way of explaining my meaning, and you shall try to have the gift of understanding me. But first let me make an apology. The Athenian citizen is reputed among all the Hellenes to be a great talker, whereas Sparta is renowned for brevity, and the Cretans have more wit than words. Now I am afraid of appearing to elicit a very long discourse out of very small materials. For drinking indeed may appear to be a slight matter, and yet is one which cannot be rightly ordered according to nature, without correct principles of music; these are necessary to any clear or satisfactory treatment of the subject, and music again runs up into education generally, and there is much to be said about all this. What would you say then to leaving these matters for the present, and passing on to some other question of law?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"O Athenian Stranger, let me tell you what perhaps you do not know, that our family is the proxenus of your state. I imagine that from their earliest youth all boys, when they are told that they are the proxeni of a particular state, feel kindly towards their second country; and this has certainly been my own feeling. I can well remember from the days of my boyhood, how, when any Lacedaemonians praised or blamed the Athenians, they used to say to me,--'See, Megillus, how ill or how well,' as the case might be, 'has your state treated us'; and having always had to fight your battles against detractors when I heard you assailed, I became warmly attached to you. And I always like to hear the Athenian tongue spoken; the common saying is quite true, that a good Athenian is more than ordinarily good, for he is the only man who is freely and genuinely good by the divine inspiration of his own nature, and is not manufactured. Therefore be assured that I shall like to hear you say whatever you have to say."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, Stranger; and when you have heard me speak, say boldly what is in your thoughts. Let me remind you of a tie which unites you to Crete. You must have heard here the story of the prophet Epimenides, who was of my family, and came to Athens ten years before the Persian war, in accordance with the response of the Oracle, and offered certain sacrifices which the God commanded. The Athenians were at that time in dread of the Persian invasion; and he said that for ten years they would not come, and that when they came, they would go away again without accomplishing any of their objects, and would suffer more evil than they inflicted. At that time my forefathers formed ties of hospitality with you; thus ancient is the friendship which I and my parents have had for you."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"You seem to be quite ready to listen; and I am also ready to perform as much as I can of an almost impossible task, which I will nevertheless attempt. At the outset of the discussion, let me define the nature and power of education; for this is the way by which our argument must travel onwards to the God Dionysus."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Let us proceed, if you please."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, then, if I tell you what are my notions of education, will you consider whether they satisfy you?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Let us hear."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"According to my view, any one who would be good at anything must practise that thing from his youth upwards, both in sport and earnest, in its several branches: for example, he who is to be a good builder, should play at building children's houses; he who is to be a good husbandman, at tilling the ground; and those who have the care of their education should provide them when young with mimic tools. They should learn beforehand the knowledge which they will afterwards require for their art. For example, the future carpenter should learn to measure or apply the line in play; and the future warrior should learn riding, or some other exercise, for amusement, and the teacher should endeavour to direct the children's inclinations and pleasures, by the help of amusements, to their final aim in life. The most important part of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be guided to the love of that sort of excellence in which when he grows up to manhood he will have to be perfected. Do you agree with me thus far?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then let us not leave the meaning of education ambiguous or ill-defined. At present, when we speak in terms of praise or blame about the bringing-up of each person, we call one man educated and another uneducated, although the uneducated man may be sometimes very well educated for the calling of a retail trader, or of a captain of a ship, and the like. For we are not speaking of education in this narrower sense, but of that other education in virtue from youth upwards, which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship, and teaches him how rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only education which, upon our view, deserves the name; that other sort of training, which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice, is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all. But let us not quarrel with one another about a word, provided that the proposition which has just been granted hold good: to wit, that those who are rightly educated generally become good men. Neither must we cast a slight upon education, which is the first and fairest thing that the best of men can ever have, and which, though liable to take a wrong direction, is capable of reformation. And this work of reformation is the great business of every man while he lives."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true; and we entirely agree with you."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And we agreed before that they are good men who are able to rule themselves, and bad men who are not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You are quite right."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let me now proceed, if I can, to clear up the subject a little further by an illustration which I will offer you."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Do we not consider each of ourselves to be one?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"We do."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And each one of us has in his bosom two counsellors, both foolish and also antagonistic; of which we call the one pleasure, and the other pain."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Also there are opinions about the future, which have the general name of expectations; and the specific name of fear, when the expectation is of pain; and of hope, when of pleasure; and further, there is reflection about the good or evil of them, and this, when embodied in a decree by the State, is called Law."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I am hardly able to follow you; proceed, however, as if I were."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I am in the like case."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us look at the matter thus: May we not conceive each of us living beings to be a puppet of the Gods, either their plaything only, or created with a purpose--which of the two we cannot certainly know? But we do know, that these affections in us are like cords and strings, which pull us different and opposite ways, and to opposite actions; and herein lies the difference between virtue and vice. According to the argument there is one among these cords which every man ought to grasp and never let go, but to pull with it against all the rest; and this is the sacred and golden cord of reason, called by us the common law of the State; there are others which are hard and of iron, but this one is soft because golden; and there are several other kinds. Now we ought always to cooperate with the lead of the best, which is law. For inasmuch as reason is beautiful and gentle, and not violent, her rule must needs have ministers in order to help the golden principle in vanquishing the other principles. And thus the moral of the tale about our being puppets will not have been lost, and the meaning of the expression 'superior or inferior to a man's self' will become clearer; and the individual, attaining to right reason in this matter of pulling the strings of the puppet, should live according to its rule; while the city, receiving the same from some god or from one who has knowledge of these things, should embody it in a law, to be her guide in her dealings with herself and with other states. In this way virtue and vice will be more clearly distinguished by us. And when they have become clearer, education and other institutions will in like manner become clearer; and in particular that question of convivial entertainment, which may seem, perhaps, to have been a very trifling matter, and to have taken a great many more words than were necessary."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Perhaps, however, the theme may turn out not to be unworthy of the length of discourse."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Very good; let us proceed with any enquiry which really bears on our present object."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Suppose that we give this puppet of ours drink,--what will be the effect on him?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Having what in view do you ask that question?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Nothing as yet; but I ask generally, when the puppet is brought to the drink, what sort of result is likely to follow. I will endeavour to explain my meaning more clearly: what I am now asking is this--Does the drinking of wine heighten and increase pleasures and pains, and passions and loves?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very greatly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And are perception and memory, and opinion and prudence, heightened and increased? Do not these qualities entirely desert a man if he becomes saturated with drink?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, they entirely desert him."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Does he not return to the state of soul in which he was when a young child?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"He does."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then at that time he will have the least control over himself?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"The least."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And will he not be in a most wretched plight?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Most wretched."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then not only an old man but also a drunkard becomes a second time a child?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Well said, Stranger."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Is there any argument which will prove to us that we ought to encourage the taste for drinking instead of doing all we can to avoid it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I suppose that there is; you at any rate, were just now saying that you were ready to maintain such a doctrine."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"True, I was; and I am ready still, seeing that you have both declared that you are anxious to hear me."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure we are, if only for the strangeness of the paradox, which asserts that a man ought of his own accord to plunge into utter degradation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Are you speaking of the soul?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what would you say about the body, my friend? Are you not surprised at any one of his own accord bringing upon himself deformity, leanness, ugliness, decrepitude?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yet when a man goes of his own accord to a doctor's shop, and takes medicine, is he not aware that soon, and for many days afterwards, he will be in a state of body which he would die rather than accept as the permanent condition of his life? Are not those who train in gymnasia, at first beginning reduced to a state of weakness?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, all that is well known."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Also that they go of their own accord for the sake of the subsequent benefit?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And we may conceive this to be true in the same way of other practices?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And the same view may be taken of the pastime of drinking wine, if we are right in supposing that the same good effect follows?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"If such convivialities should turn out to have any advantage equal in importance to that of gymnastic, they are in their very nature to be preferred to mere bodily exercise, inasmuch as they have no accompaniment of pain."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True; but I hardly think that we shall be able to discover any such benefits to be derived from them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That is just what we must endeavour to show. And let me ask you a question:--Do we not distinguish two kinds of fear, which are very different?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There is the fear of expected evil."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And there is the fear of an evil reputation; we are afraid of being thought evil, because we do or say some dishonourable thing, which fear we and all men term shame."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"These are the two fears, as I called them; one of which is the opposite of pain and other fears, and the opposite also of the greatest and most numerous sort of pleasures."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And does not the legislator and every one who is good for anything, hold this fear in the greatest honour? This is what he terms reverence, and the confidence which is the reverse of this he terms insolence; and the latter he always deems to be a very great evil both to individuals and to states."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Does not this kind of fear preserve us in many important ways? What is there which so surely gives victory and safety in war? For there are two things which give victory--confidence before enemies, and fear of disgrace before friends."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"There are."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then each of us should be fearless and also fearful; and why we should be either has now been determined."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And when we want to make any one fearless, we and the law bring him face to face with many fears."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And when we want to make him rightly fearful, must we not introduce him to shameless pleasures, and train him to take up arms against them, and to overcome them? Or does this principle apply to courage only, and must he who would be perfect in valour fight against and overcome his own natural character,--since if he be unpractised and inexperienced in such conflicts, he will not be half the man which he might have been,--and are we to suppose, that with temperance it is otherwise, and that he who has never fought with the shameless and unrighteous temptations of his pleasures and lusts, and conquered them, in earnest and in play, by word, deed, and act, will still be perfectly temperate?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"A most unlikely supposition."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Suppose that some God had given a fear-potion to men, and that the more a man drank of this the more he regarded himself at every draught as a child of misfortune, and that he feared everything happening or about to happen to him; and that at last the most courageous of men utterly lost his presence of mind for a time, and only came to himself again when he had slept off the influence of the draught."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"But has such a draught, Stranger, ever really been known among men?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"No; but, if there had been, might not such a draught have been of use to the legislator as a test of courage? Might we not go and say to him, 'O legislator, whether you are legislating for the Cretan, or for any other state, would you not like to have a touchstone of the courage and cowardice of your citizens?'"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"'I should,' will be the answer of every one."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"'And you would rather have a touchstone in which there is no risk and no great danger than the reverse?'"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"In that proposition every one may safely agree."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"'And in order to make use of the draught, you would lead them amid these imaginary terrors, and prove them, when the affection of fear was working upon them, and compel them to be fearless, exhorting and admonishing them; and also honouring them, but dishonouring any one who will not be persuaded by you to be in all respects such as you command him; and if he underwent the trial well and manfully, you would let him go unscathed; but if ill, you would inflict a punishment upon him? Or would you abstain from using the potion altogether, although you have no reason for abstaining?'"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"He would be certain, Stranger, to use the potion."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"This would be a mode of testing and training which would be wonderfully easy in comparison with those now in use, and might be applied to a single person, or to a few, or indeed to any number; and he would do well who provided himself with the potion only, rather than with any number of other things, whether he preferred to be by himself in solitude, and there contend with his fears, because he was ashamed to be seen by the eye of man until he was perfect; or trusting to the force of his own nature and habits, and believing that he had been already disciplined sufficiently, he did not hesitate to train himself in company with any number of others, and display his power in conquering the irresistible change effected by the draught--his virtue being such, that he never in any instance fell into any great unseemliness, but was always himself, and left off before he arrived at the last cup, fearing that he, like all other men, might be overcome by the potion."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, Stranger, in that last case, too, he might equally show his self-control."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us return to the lawgiver, and say to him:--'Well, lawgiver, there is certainly no such fear-potion which man has either received from the Gods or himself discovered; for witchcraft has no place at our board. But is there any potion which might serve as a test of overboldness and excessive and indiscreet boasting?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I suppose that he will say, Yes,--meaning that wine is such a potion."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Is not the effect of this quite the opposite of the effect of the other? When a man drinks wine he begins to be better pleased with himself, and the more he drinks the more he is filled full of brave hopes, and conceit of his power, and at last the string of his tongue is loosened, and fancying himself wise, he is brimming over with lawlessness, and has no more fear or respect, and is ready to do or say anything."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I think that every one will admit the truth of your description."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Now, let us remember, as we were saying, that there are two things which should be cultivated in the soul: first, the greatest courage; secondly, the greatest fear--"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Which you said to be characteristic of reverence, if I am not mistaken."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Thank you for reminding me. But now, as the habit of courage and fearlessness is to be trained amid fears, let us consider whether the opposite quality is not also to be trained among opposites."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is probably the case."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There are times and seasons at which we are by nature more than commonly valiant and bold; now we ought to train ourselves on these occasions to be as free from impudence and shamelessness as possible, and to be afraid to say or suffer or do anything that is base."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Are not the moments in which we are apt to be bold and shameless such as these?--when we are under the influence of anger, love, pride, ignorance, avarice, cowardice? or when wealth, beauty, strength, and all the intoxicating workings of pleasure madden us? What is better adapted than the festive use of wine, in the first place to test, and in the second place to train the character of a man, if care be taken in the use of it? What is there cheaper, or more innocent? For do but consider which is the greater risk:--Would you rather test a man of a morose and savage nature, which is the source of ten thousand acts of injustice, by making bargains with him at a risk to yourself, or by having him as a companion at the festival of Dionysus? Or would you, if you wanted to apply a touchstone to a man who is prone to love, entrust your wife, or your sons, or daughters to him, perilling your dearest interests in order to have a view of the condition of his soul? I might mention numberless cases, in which the advantage would be manifest of getting to know a character in sport, and without paying dearly for experience. And I do not believe that either a Cretan, or any other man, will doubt that such a test is a fair test, and safer, cheaper, and speedier than any other."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is certainly true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And this knowledge of the natures and habits of men's souls will be of the greatest use in that art which has the management of them; and that art, if I am not mistaken, is politics."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Exactly so. BOOK II."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And now we have to consider whether the insight into human nature is the only benefit derived from well-ordered potations, or whether there are not other advantages great and much to be desired. The argument seems to imply that there are. But how and in what way these are to be attained, will have to be considered attentively, or we may be entangled in error."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let me once more recall our doctrine of right education; which, if I am not mistaken, depends on the due regulation of convivial intercourse."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You talk rather grandly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Pleasure and pain I maintain to be the first perceptions of children, and I say that they are the forms under which virtue and vice are originally present to them. As to wisdom and true and fixed opinions, happy is the man who acquires them, even when declining in years; and we may say that he who possesses them, and the blessings which are contained in them, is a perfect man. Now I mean by education that training which is given by suitable habits to the first instincts of virtue in children;--when pleasure, and friendship, and pain, and hatred, are rightly implanted in souls not yet capable of understanding the nature of them, and who find them, after they have attained reason, to be in harmony with her. This harmony of the soul, taken as a whole, is virtue; but the particular training in respect of pleasure and pain, which leads you always to hate what you ought to hate, and love what you ought to love from the beginning of life to the end, may be separated off; and, in my view, will be rightly called education."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I think, Stranger, that you are quite right in all that you have said and are saying about education."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I am glad to hear that you agree with me; for, indeed, the discipline of pleasure and pain which, when rightly ordered, is a principle of education, has been often relaxed and corrupted in human life. And the Gods, pitying the toils which our race is born to undergo, have appointed holy festivals, wherein men alternate rest with labour; and have given them the Muses and Apollo, the leader of the Muses, and Dionysus, to be companions in their revels, that they may improve their education by taking part in the festivals of the Gods, and with their help. I should like to know whether a common saying is in our opinion true to nature or not. For men say that the young of all creatures cannot be quiet in their bodies or in their voices; they are always wanting to move and cry out; some leaping and skipping, and overflowing with sportiveness and delight at something, others uttering all sorts of cries. But, whereas the animals have no perception of order or disorder in their movements, that is, of rhythm or harmony, as they are called, to us, the Gods, who, as we say, have been appointed to be our companions in the dance, have given the pleasurable sense of harmony and rhythm; and so they stir us into life, and we follow them, joining hands together in dances and songs; and these they call choruses, which is a term naturally expressive of cheerfulness. Shall we begin, then, with the acknowledgment that education is first given through Apollo and the Muses? What do you say?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I assent."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And the uneducated is he who has not been trained in the chorus, and the educated is he who has been well trained?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And the chorus is made up of two parts, dance and song?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then he who is well educated will be able to sing and dance well?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I suppose that he will."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us see; what are we saying?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"He sings well and dances well; now must we add that he sings what is good and dances what is good?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Let us make the addition."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"We will suppose that he knows the good to be good, and the bad to be bad, and makes use of them accordingly: which now is the better trained in dancing and music--he who is able to move his body and to use his voice in what is understood to be the right manner, but has no delight in good or hatred of evil; or he who is incorrect in gesture and voice, but is right in his sense of pleasure and pain, and welcomes what is good, and is offended at what is evil?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"There is a great difference, Stranger, in the two kinds of education."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"If we three know what is good in song and dance, then we truly know also who is educated and who is uneducated; but if not, then we certainly shall not know wherein lies the safeguard of education, and whether there is any or not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us follow the scent like hounds, and go in pursuit of beauty of figure, and melody, and song, and dance; if these escape us, there will be no use in talking about true education, whether Hellenic or barbarian."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what is beauty of figure, or beautiful melody? When a manly soul is in trouble, and when a cowardly soul is in similar case, are they likely to use the same figures and gestures, or to give utterance to the same sounds?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How can they, when the very colours of their faces differ?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Good, my friend; I may observe, however, in passing, that in music there certainly are figures and there are melodies: and music is concerned with harmony and rhythm, so that you may speak of a melody or figure having good rhythm or good harmony--the term is correct enough; but to speak metaphorically of a melody or figure having a 'good colour,' as the masters of choruses do, is not allowable, although you can speak of the melodies or figures of the brave and the coward, praising the one and censuring the other. And not to be tedious, let us say that the figures and melodies which are expressive of virtue of soul or body, or of images of virtue, are without exception good, and those which are expressive of vice are the reverse of good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Your suggestion is excellent; and let us answer that these things are so."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Once more, are all of us equally delighted with every sort of dance?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Far otherwise."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"What, then, leads us astray? Are beautiful things not the same to us all, or are they the same in themselves, but not in our opinion of them? For no one will admit that forms of vice in the dance are more beautiful than forms of virtue, or that he himself delights in the forms of vice, and others in a muse of another character. And yet most persons say, that the excellence of music is to give pleasure to our souls. But this is intolerable and blasphemous; there is, however, a much more plausible account of the delusion."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The adaptation of art to the characters of men. Choric movements are imitations of manners occurring in various actions, fortunes, dispositions,--each particular is imitated, and those to whom the words, or songs, or dances are suited, either by nature or habit or both, cannot help feeling pleasure in them and applauding them, and calling them beautiful. But those whose natures, or ways, or habits are unsuited to them, cannot delight in them or applaud them, and they call them base. There are others, again, whose natures are right and their habits wrong, or whose habits are right and their natures wrong, and they praise one thing, but are pleased at another. For they say that all these imitations are pleasant, but not good. And in the presence of those whom they think wise, they are ashamed of dancing and singing in the baser manner, or of deliberately lending any countenance to such proceedings; and yet, they have a secret pleasure in them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And is any harm done to the lover of vicious dances or songs, or any good done to the approver of the opposite sort of pleasure?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I think that there is."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"'I think' is not the word, but I would say, rather, 'I am certain.' For must they not have the same effect as when a man associates with bad characters, whom he likes and approves rather than dislikes, and only censures playfully because he has a suspicion of his own badness? In that case, he who takes pleasure in them will surely become like those in whom he takes pleasure, even though he be ashamed to praise them. And what greater good or evil can any destiny ever make us undergo?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I know of none."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then in a city which has good laws, or in future ages is to have them, bearing in mind the instruction and amusement which are given by music, can we suppose that the poets are to be allowed to teach in the dance anything which they themselves like, in the way of rhythm, or melody, or words, to the young children of any well-conditioned parents? Is the poet to train his choruses as he pleases, without reference to virtue or vice?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is surely quite unreasonable, and is not to be thought of."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And yet he may do this in almost any state with the exception of Egypt."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And what are the laws about music and dancing in Egypt?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"You will wonder when I tell you: Long ago they appear to have recognized the very principle of which we are now speaking--that their young citizens must be habituated to forms and strains of virtue. These they fixed, and exhibited the patterns of them in their temples; and no painter or artist is allowed to innovate upon them, or to leave the traditional forms and invent new ones. To this day, no alteration is allowed either in these arts, or in music at all. And you will find that their works of art are painted or moulded in the same forms which they had ten thousand years ago;--this is literally true and no exaggeration,--their ancient paintings and sculptures are not a whit better or worse than the work of to-day, but are made with just the same skill."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How extraordinary!"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I should rather say, How statesmanlike, how worthy of a legislator! I know that other things in Egypt are not so well. But what I am telling you about music is true and deserving of consideration, because showing that a lawgiver may institute melodies which have a natural truth and correctness without any fear of failure. To do this, however, must be the work of God, or of a divine person; in Egypt they have a tradition that their ancient chants which have been preserved for so many ages are the composition of the Goddess Isis. And therefore, as I was saying, if a person can only find in any way the natural melodies, he may confidently embody them in a fixed and legal form. For the love of novelty which arises out of pleasure in the new and weariness of the old, has not strength enough to corrupt the consecrated song and dance, under the plea that they have become antiquated. At any rate, they are far from being corrupted in Egypt."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Your arguments seem to prove your point."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"May we not confidently say that the true use of music and of choral festivities is as follows: We rejoice when we think that we prosper, and again we think that we prosper when we rejoice?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And when rejoicing in our good fortune, we are unable to be still?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Our young men break forth into dancing and singing, and we who are their elders deem that we are fulfilling our part in life when we look on at them. Having lost our agility, we delight in their sports and merry-making, because we love to think of our former selves; and gladly institute contests for those who are able to awaken in us the memory of our youth."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Is it altogether unmeaning to say, as the common people do about festivals, that he should be adjudged the wisest of men, and the winner of the palm, who gives us the greatest amount of pleasure and mirth? For on such occasions, and when mirth is the order of the day, ought not he to be honoured most, and, as I was saying, bear the palm, who gives most mirth to the greatest number? Now is this a true way of speaking or of acting?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Possibly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But, my dear friend, let us distinguish between different cases, and not be hasty in forming a judgment: One way of considering the question will be to imagine a festival at which there are entertainments of all sorts, including gymnastic, musical, and equestrian contests: the citizens are assembled; prizes are offered, and proclamation is made that any one who likes may enter the lists, and that he is to bear the palm who gives the most pleasure to the spectators--there is to be no regulation about the manner how; but he who is most successful in giving pleasure is to be crowned victor, and deemed to be the pleasantest of the candidates: What is likely to be the result of such a proclamation?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"In what respect?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There would be various exhibitions: one man, like Homer, will exhibit a rhapsody, another a performance on the lute; one will have a tragedy, and another a comedy. Nor would there be anything astonishing in some one imagining that he could gain the prize by exhibiting a puppet-show. Suppose these competitors to meet, and not these only, but innumerable others as well--can you tell me who ought to be the victor?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I do not see how any one can answer you, or pretend to know, unless he has heard with his own ears the several competitors; the question is absurd."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, then, if neither of you can answer, shall I answer this question which you deem so absurd?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"If very small children are to determine the question, they will decide for the puppet show."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The older children will be advocates of comedy; educated women, and young men, and people in general, will favour tragedy."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very likely."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And I believe that we old men would have the greatest pleasure in hearing a rhapsodist recite well the Iliad and Odyssey, or one of the Hesiodic poems, and would award the victory to him. But, who would really be the victor?--that is the question."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Clearly you and I will have to declare that those whom we old men adjudge victors ought to win; for our ways are far and away better than any which at present exist anywhere in the world."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Thus far I too should agree with the many, that the excellence of music is to be measured by pleasure. But the pleasure must not be that of chance persons; the fairest music is that which delights the best and best educated, and especially that which delights the one man who is pre-eminent in virtue and education. And therefore the judges must be men of character, for they will require both wisdom and courage; the true judge must not draw his inspiration from the theatre, nor ought he to be unnerved by the clamour of the many and his own incapacity; nor again, knowing the truth, ought he through cowardice and unmanliness carelessly to deliver a lying judgment, with the very same lips which have just appealed to the Gods before he judged. He is sitting not as the disciple of the theatre, but, in his proper place, as their instructor, and he ought to be the enemy of all pandering to the pleasure of the spectators. The ancient and common custom of Hellas, which still prevails in Italy and Sicily, did certainly leave the judgment to the body of spectators, who determined the victor by show of hands. But this custom has been the destruction of the poets; for they are now in the habit of composing with a view to please the bad taste of their judges, and the result is that the spectators instruct themselves;--and also it has been the ruin of the theatre; they ought to be having characters put before them better than their own, and so receiving a higher pleasure, but now by their own act the opposite result follows. What inference is to be drawn from all this? Shall I tell you?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The inference at which we arrive for the third or fourth time is, that education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason, which the law affirms, and which the experience of the eldest and best has agreed to be truly right. In order, then, that the soul of the child may not be habituated to feel joy and sorrow in a manner at variance with the law, and those who obey the law, but may rather follow the law and rejoice and sorrow at the same things as the aged--in order, I say, to produce this effect, chants appear to have been invented, which really enchant, and are designed to implant that harmony of which we speak. And, because the mind of the child is incapable of enduring serious training, they are called plays and songs, and are performed in play; just as when men are sick and ailing in their bodies, their attendants give them wholesome diet in pleasant meats and drinks, but unwholesome diet in disagreeable things, in order that they may learn, as they ought, to like the one, and to dislike the other. And similarly the true legislator will persuade, and, if he cannot persuade, will compel the poet to express, as he ought, by fair and noble words, in his rhythms, the figures, and in his melodies, the music of temperate and brave and in every way good men."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"But do you really imagine, Stranger, that this is the way in which poets generally compose in States at the present day? As far as I can observe, except among us and among the Lacedaemonians, there are no regulations like those of which you speak; in other places novelties are always being introduced in dancing and in music, generally not under the authority of any law, but at the instigation of lawless pleasures; and these pleasures are so far from being the same, as you describe the Egyptian to be, or having the same principles, that they are never the same."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Most true, Cleinias; and I daresay that I may have expressed myself obscurely, and so led you to imagine that I was speaking of some really existing state of things, whereas I was only saying what regulations I would like to have about music; and hence there occurred a misapprehension on your part. For when evils are far gone and irremediable, the task of censuring them is never pleasant, although at times necessary. But as we do not really differ, will you let me ask you whether you consider such institutions to be more prevalent among the Cretans and Lacedaemonians than among the other Hellenes?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly they are."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And if they were extended to the other Hellenes, would it be an improvement on the present state of things?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"A very great improvement, if the customs which prevail among them were such as prevail among us and the Lacedaemonians, and such as you were just now saying ought to prevail."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us see whether we understand one another:--Are not the principles of education and music which prevail among you as follows: you compel your poets to say that the good man, if he be temperate and just, is fortunate and happy; and this whether he be great and strong or small and weak, and whether he be rich or poor; and, on the other hand, if he have a wealth passing that of Cinyras or Midas, and be unjust, he is wretched and lives in misery? As the poet says, and with truth: I sing not, I care not about him who accomplishes all noble things, not having justice; let him who 'draws near and stretches out his hand against his enemies be a just man.' But if he be unjust, I would not have him 'look calmly upon bloody death,' nor 'surpass in swiftness the Thracian Boreas;' and let no other thing that is called good ever be his. For the goods of which the many speak are not really good: first in the catalogue is placed health, beauty next, wealth third; and then innumerable others, as for example to have a keen eye or a quick ear, and in general to have all the senses perfect; or, again, to be a tyrant and do as you like; and the final consummation of happiness is to have acquired all these things, and when you have acquired them to become at once immortal. But you and I say, that while to the just and holy all these things are the best of possessions, to the unjust they are all, including even health, the greatest of evils. For in truth, to have sight, and hearing, and the use of the senses, or to live at all without justice and virtue, even though a man be rich in all the so-called goods of fortune, is the greatest of evils, if life be immortal; but not so great, if the bad man lives only a very short time. These are the truths which, if I am not mistaken, you will persuade or compel your poets to utter with suitable accompaniments of harmony and rhythm, and in these they must train up your youth. Am I not right? For I plainly declare that evils as they are termed are goods to the unjust, and only evils to the just, and that goods are truly good to the good, but evil to the evil. Let me ask again, Are you and I agreed about this?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I think that we partly agree and partly do not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"When a man has health and wealth and a tyranny which lasts, and when he is pre-eminent in strength and courage, and has the gift of immortality, and none of the so-called evils which counter-balance these goods, but only the injustice and insolence of his own nature--of such an one you are, I suspect, unwilling to believe that he is miserable rather than happy."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Once more: Suppose that he be valiant and strong, and handsome and rich, and does throughout his whole life whatever he likes, still, if he be unrighteous and insolent, would not both of you agree that he will of necessity live basely? You will surely grant so much?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And an evil life too?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I am not equally disposed to grant that."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Will he not live painfully and to his own disadvantage?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How can I possibly say so?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"How! Then may Heaven make us to be of one mind, for now we are of two. To me, dear Cleinias, the truth of what I am saying is as plain as the fact that Crete is an island. And, if I were a lawgiver, I would try to make the poets and all the citizens speak in this strain, and I would inflict the heaviest penalties on any one in all the land who should dare to say that there are bad men who lead pleasant lives, or that the profitable and gainful is one thing, and the just another; and there are many other matters about which I should make my citizens speak in a manner different from the Cretans and Lacedaemonians of this age, and I may say, indeed, from the world in general. For tell me, my good friends, by Zeus and Apollo tell me, if I were to ask these same Gods who were your legislators,--Is not the most just life also the pleasantest? or are there two lives, one of which is the justest and the other the pleasantest?--and they were to reply that there are two; and thereupon I proceeded to ask, (that would be the right way of pursuing the enquiry), Which are the happier--those who lead the justest, or those who lead the pleasantest life? and they replied, Those who lead the pleasantest--that would be a very strange answer, which I should not like to put into the mouth of the Gods. The words will come with more propriety from the lips of fathers and legislators, and therefore I will repeat my former questions to one of them, and suppose him to say again that he who leads the pleasantest life is the happiest. And to that I rejoin:--O my father, did you not wish me to live as happily as possible? And yet you also never ceased telling me that I should live as justly as possible. Now, here the giver of the rule, whether he be legislator or father, will be in a dilemma, and will in vain endeavour to be consistent with himself. But if he were to declare that the justest life is also the happiest, every one hearing him would enquire, if I am not mistaken, what is that good and noble principle in life which the law approves, and which is superior to pleasure. For what good can the just man have which is separated from pleasure? Shall we say that glory and fame, coming from Gods and men, though good and noble, are nevertheless unpleasant, and infamy pleasant? Certainly not, sweet legislator. Or shall we say that the not-doing of wrong and there being no wrong done is good and honourable, although there is no pleasure in it, and that the doing wrong is pleasant, but evil and base?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The view which identifies the pleasant and the pleasant and the just and the good and the noble has an excellent moral and religious tendency. And the opposite view is most at variance with the designs of the legislator, and is, in his opinion, infamous; for no one, if he can help, will be persuaded to do that which gives him more pain than pleasure. But as distant prospects are apt to make us dizzy, especially in childhood, the legislator will try to purge away the darkness and exhibit the truth; he will persuade the citizens, in some way or other, by customs and praises and words, that just and unjust are shadows only, and that injustice, which seems opposed to justice, when contemplated by the unjust and evil man appears pleasant and the just most unpleasant; but that from the just man's point of view, the very opposite is the appearance of both of them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And which may be supposed to be the truer judgment--that of the inferior or of the better soul?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Surely, that of the better soul."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then the unjust life must not only be more base and depraved, but also more unpleasant than the just and holy life?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That seems to be implied in the present argument."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And even supposing this were otherwise, and not as the argument has proven, still the lawgiver, who is worth anything, if he ever ventures to tell a lie to the young for their good, could not invent a more useful lie than this, or one which will have a better effect in making them do what is right, not on compulsion but voluntarily."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Truth, Stranger, is a noble thing and a lasting, but a thing of which men are hard to be persuaded."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And yet the story of the Sidonian Cadmus, which is so improbable, has been readily believed, and also innumerable other tales."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is that story?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The story of armed men springing up after the sowing of teeth, which the legislator may take as a proof that he can persuade the minds of the young of anything; so that he has only to reflect and find out what belief will be of the greatest public advantage, and then use all his efforts to make the whole community utter one and the same word in their songs and tales and discourses all their life long. But if you do not agree with me, there is no reason why you should not argue on the other side."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I do not see that any argument can fairly be raised by either of us against what you are now saying."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The next suggestion which I have to offer is, that all our three choruses shall sing to the young and tender souls of children, reciting in their strains all the noble thoughts of which we have already spoken, or are about to speak; and the sum of them shall be, that the life which is by the Gods deemed to be the happiest is also the best;--we shall affirm this to be a most certain truth; and the minds of our young disciples will be more likely to receive these words of ours than any others which we might address to them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I assent to what you say."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"First will enter in their natural order the sacred choir composed of children, which is to sing lustily the heaven-taught lay to the whole city. Next will follow the choir of young men under the age of thirty, who will call upon the God Paean to testify to the truth of their words, and will pray him to be gracious to the youth and to turn their hearts. Thirdly, the choir of elder men, who are from thirty to sixty years of age, will also sing. There remain those who are too old to sing, and they will tell stories, illustrating the same virtues, as with the voice of an oracle."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Who are those who compose the third choir, Stranger? for I do not clearly understand what you mean to say about them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And yet almost all that I have been saying has been said with a view to them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Will you try to be a little plainer?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I was speaking at the commencement of our discourse, as you will remember, of the fiery nature of young creatures: I said that they were unable to keep quiet either in limb or voice, and that they called out and jumped about in a disorderly manner; and that no other animal attained to any perception of order, but man only. Now the order of motion is called rhythm, and the order of the voice, in which high and low are duly mingled, is called harmony; and both together are termed choric song. And I said that the Gods had pity on us, and gave us Apollo and the Muses to be our playfellows and leaders in the dance; and Dionysus, as I dare say that you will remember, was the third."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I quite remember."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Thus far I have spoken of the chorus of Apollo and the Muses, and I have still to speak of the remaining chorus, which is that of Dionysus."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How is that arranged? There is something strange, at any rate on first hearing, in a Dionysiac chorus of old men, if you really mean that those who are above thirty, and may be fifty, or from fifty to sixty years of age, are to dance in his honour."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Very true; and therefore it must be shown that there is good reason for the proposal."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Are we agreed thus far?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"About what?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That every man and boy, slave and free, both sexes, and the whole city, should never cease charming themselves with the strains of which we have spoken; and that there should be every sort of change and variation of them in order to take away the effect of sameness, so that the singers may always receive pleasure from their hymns, and may never weary of them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Every one will agree."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Where, then, will that best part of our city which, by reason of age and intelligence, has the greatest influence, sing these fairest of strains, which are to do so much good? Shall we be so foolish as to let them off who would give us the most beautiful and also the most useful of songs?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"But, says the argument, we cannot let them off."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then how can we carry out our purpose with decorum? Will this be the way?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"When a man is advancing in years, he is afraid and reluctant to sing;--he has no pleasure in his own performances; and if compulsion is used, he will be more and more ashamed, the older and more discreet he grows;--is not this true?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, and will he not be yet more ashamed if he has to stand up and sing in the theatre to a mixed audience?--and if moreover when he is required to do so, like the other choirs who contend for prizes, and have been trained under a singing master, he is pinched and hungry, he will certainly have a feeling of shame and discomfort which will make him very unwilling to exhibit."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"No doubt."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"How, then, shall we reassure him, and get him to sing? Shall we begin by enacting that boys shall not taste wine at all until they are eighteen years of age; we will tell them that fire must not be poured upon fire, whether in the body or in the soul, until they begin to go to work--this is a precaution which has to be taken against the excitableness of youth;--afterwards they may taste wine in moderation up to the age of thirty, but while a man is young he should abstain altogether from intoxication and from excess of wine; when, at length, he has reached forty years, after dinner at a public mess, he may invite not only the other Gods, but Dionysus above all, to the mystery and festivity of the elder men, making use of the wine which he has given men to lighten the sourness of old age; that in age we may renew our youth, and forget our sorrows; and also in order that the nature of the soul, like iron melted in the fire, may become softer and so more impressible. In the first place, will not any one who is thus mellowed be more ready and less ashamed to sing--I do not say before a large audience, but before a moderate company; nor yet among strangers, but among his familiars, and, as we have often said, to chant, and to enchant?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"He will be far more ready."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There will be no impropriety in our using such a method of persuading them to join with us in song."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"None at all."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what strain will they sing, and what muse will they hymn? The strain should clearly be one suitable to them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what strain is suitable for heroes? Shall they sing a choric strain?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Truly, Stranger, we of Crete and Lacedaemon know no strain other than that which we have learnt and been accustomed to sing in our chorus."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I dare say; for you have never acquired the knowledge of the most beautiful kind of song, in your military way of life, which is modelled after the camp, and is not like that of dwellers in cities; and you have your young men herding and feeding together like young colts. No one takes his own individual colt and drags him away from his fellows against his will, raging and foaming, and gives him a groom to attend to him alone, and trains and rubs him down privately, and gives him the qualities in education which will make him not only a good soldier, but also a governor of a state and of cities. Such an one, as we said at first, would be a greater warrior than he of whom Tyrtaeus sings; and he would honour courage everywhere, but always as the fourth, and not as the first part of virtue, either in individuals or states."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Once more, Stranger, I must complain that you depreciate our lawgivers."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Not intentionally, if at all, my good friend; but whither the argument leads, thither let us follow; for if there be indeed some strain of song more beautiful than that of the choruses or the public theatres, I should like to impart it to those who, as we say, are ashamed of these, and want to have the best."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"When things have an accompanying charm, either the best thing in them is this very charm, or there is some rightness or utility possessed by them;--for example, I should say that eating and drinking, and the use of food in general, have an accompanying charm which we call pleasure; but that this rightness and utility is just the healthfulness of the things served up to us, which is their true rightness."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Just so."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Thus, too, I should say that learning has a certain accompanying charm which is the pleasure; but that the right and the profitable, the good and the noble, are qualities which the truth gives to it."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And so in the imitative arts--if they succeed in making likenesses, and are accompanied by pleasure, may not their works be said to have a charm?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But equal proportions, whether of quality or quantity, and not pleasure, speaking generally, would give them truth or rightness."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then that only can be rightly judged by the standard of pleasure, which makes or furnishes no utility or truth or likeness, nor on the other hand is productive of any hurtful quality, but exists solely for the sake of the accompanying charm; and the term 'pleasure' is most appropriately applied to it when these other qualities are absent."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You are speaking of harmless pleasure, are you not?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes; and this I term amusement, when doing neither harm nor good in any degree worth speaking of."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then, if such be our principles, we must assert that imitation is not to be judged of by pleasure and false opinion; and this is true of all equality, for the equal is not equal or the symmetrical symmetrical, because somebody thinks or likes something, but they are to be judged of by the standard of truth, and by no other whatever."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Do we not regard all music as representative and imitative?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then, when any one says that music is to be judged of by pleasure, his doctrine cannot be admitted; and if there be any music of which pleasure is the criterion, such music is not to be sought out or deemed to have any real excellence, but only that other kind of music which is an imitation of the good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And those who seek for the best kind of song and music ought not to seek for that which is pleasant, but for that which is true; and the truth of imitation consists, as we were saying, in rendering the thing imitated according to quantity and quality."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And every one will admit that musical compositions are all imitative and representative. Will not poets and spectators and actors all agree in this?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"They will."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Surely then he who would judge correctly must know what each composition is; for if he does not know what is the character and meaning of the piece, and what it represents, he will never discern whether the intention is true or false."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And will he who does not know what is true be able to distinguish what is good and bad? My statement is not very clear; but perhaps you will understand me better if I put the matter in another way."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There are ten thousand likenesses of objects of sight?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And can he who does not know what the exact object is which is imitated, ever know whether the resemblance is truthfully executed? I mean, for example, whether a statue has the proportions of a body, and the true situation of the parts; what those proportions are, and how the parts fit into one another in due order; also their colours and conformations, or whether this is all confused in the execution: do you think that any one can know about this, who does not know what the animal is which has been imitated?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But even if we know that the thing pictured or sculptured is a man, who has received at the hand of the artist all his proper parts and colours and shapes, must we not also know whether the work is beautiful or in any respect deficient in beauty?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"If this were not required, Stranger, we should all of us be judges of beauty."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Very true; and may we not say that in everything imitated, whether in drawing, music, or any other art, he who is to be a competent judge must possess three things;--he must know, in the first place, of what the imitation is; secondly, he must know that it is true; and thirdly, that it has been well executed in words and melodies and rhythms?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then let us not faint in discussing the peculiar difficulty of music. Music is more celebrated than any other kind of imitation, and therefore requires the greatest care of them all. For if a man makes a mistake here, he may do himself the greatest injury by welcoming evil dispositions, and the mistake may be very difficult to discern, because the poets are artists very inferior in character to the Muses themselves, who would never fall into the monstrous error of assigning to the words of men the gestures and songs of women; nor after combining the melodies with the gestures of freemen would they add on the rhythms of slaves and men of the baser sort; nor, beginning with the rhythms and gestures of freemen, would they assign to them a melody or words which are of an opposite character; nor would they mix up the voices and sounds of animals and of men and instruments, and every other sort of noise, as if they were all one. But human poets are fond of introducing this sort of inconsistent mixture, and so make themselves ridiculous in the eyes of those who, as Orpheus says, 'are ripe for true pleasure.' The experienced see all this confusion, and yet the poets go on and make still further havoc by separating the rhythm and the figure of the dance from the melody, setting bare words to metre, and also separating the melody and the rhythm from the words, using the lyre or the flute alone. For when there are no words, it is very difficult to recognize the meaning of the harmony and rhythm, or to see that any worthy object is imitated by them. And we must acknowledge that all this sort of thing, which aims only at swiftness and smoothness and a brutish noise, and uses the flute and the lyre not as the mere accompaniments of the dance and song, is exceedingly coarse and tasteless. The use of either instrument, when unaccompanied, leads to every sort of irregularity and trickery. This is all rational enough. But we are considering not how our choristers, who are from thirty to fifty years of age, and may be over fifty, are not to use the Muses, but how they are to use them. And the considerations which we have urged seem to show in what way these fifty years' old choristers who are to sing, may be expected to be better trained. For they need to have a quick perception and knowledge of harmonies and rhythms; otherwise, how can they ever know whether a melody would be rightly sung to the Dorian mode, or to the rhythm which the poet has assigned to it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly they cannot."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The many are ridiculous in imagining that they know what is in proper harmony and rhythm, and what is not, when they can only be made to sing and step in rhythm by force; it never occurs to them that they are ignorant of what they are doing. Now every melody is right when it has suitable harmony and rhythm, and wrong when unsuitable."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is most certain."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But can a man who does not know a thing, as we were saying, know that the thing is right?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then now, as would appear, we are making the discovery that our newly-appointed choristers, whom we hereby invite and, although they are their own masters, compel to sing, must be educated to such an extent as to be able to follow the steps of the rhythm and the notes of the song, that they may know the harmonies and rhythms, and be able to select what are suitable for men of their age and character to sing; and may sing them, and have innocent pleasure from their own performance, and also lead younger men to welcome with dutiful delight good dispositions. Having such training, they will attain a more accurate knowledge than falls to the lot of the common people, or even of the poets themselves. For the poet need not know the third point, viz., whether the imitation is good or not, though he can hardly help knowing the laws of melody and rhythm. But the aged chorus must know all the three, that they may choose the best, and that which is nearest to the best; for otherwise they will never be able to charm the souls of young men in the way of virtue. And now the original design of the argument which was intended to bring eloquent aid to the Chorus of Dionysus, has been accomplished to the best of our ability, and let us see whether we were right:--I should imagine that a drinking assembly is likely to become more and more tumultuous as the drinking goes on: this, as we were saying at first, will certainly be the case."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Every man has a more than natural elevation; his heart is glad within him, and he will say anything and will be restrained by nobody at such a time; he fancies that he is able to rule over himself and all mankind."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Were we not saying that on such occasions the souls of the drinkers become like iron heated in the fire, and grow softer and younger, and are easily moulded by him who knows how to educate and fashion them, just as when they were young, and that this fashioner of them is the same who prescribed for them in the days of their youth, viz., the good legislator; and that he ought to enact laws of the banquet, which, when a man is confident, bold, and impudent, and unwilling to wait his turn and have his share of silence and speech, and drinking and music, will change his character into the opposite--such laws as will infuse into him a just and noble fear, which will take up arms at the approach of insolence, being that divine fear which we have called reverence and shame?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And the guardians of these laws and fellow-workers with them are the calm and sober generals of the drinkers; and without their help there is greater difficulty in fighting against drink than in fighting against enemies when the commander of an army is not himself calm; and he who is unwilling to obey them and the commanders of Dionysiac feasts who are more than sixty years of age, shall suffer a disgrace as great as he who disobeys military leaders, or even greater."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Right."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"If, then, drinking and amusement were regulated in this way, would not the companions of our revels be improved? they would part better friends than they were, and not, as now, enemies. Their whole intercourse would be regulated by law and observant of it, and the sober would be the leaders of the drunken."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I think so too, if drinking were regulated as you propose."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us not then simply censure the gift of Dionysus as bad and unfit to be received into the State. For wine has many excellences, and one pre-eminent one, about which there is a difficulty in speaking to the many, from a fear of their misconceiving and misunderstanding what is said."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To what do you refer?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There is a tradition or story, which has somehow crept about the world, that Dionysus was robbed of his wits by his stepmother Here, and that out of revenge he inspires Bacchic furies and dancing madnesses in others; for which reason he gave men wine. Such traditions concerning the Gods I leave to those who think that they may be safely uttered (compare Euthyph.; Republic); I only know that no animal at birth is mature or perfect in intelligence; and in the intermediate period, in which he has not yet acquired his own proper sense, he rages and roars without rhyme or reason; and when he has once got on his legs he jumps about without rhyme or reason; and this, as you will remember, has been already said by us to be the origin of music and gymnastic."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure, I remember."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And did we not say that the sense of harmony and rhythm sprang from this beginning among men, and that Apollo and the Muses and Dionysus were the Gods whom we had to thank for them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The other story implied that wine was given man out of revenge, and in order to make him mad; but our present doctrine, on the contrary, is, that wine was given him as a balm, and in order to implant modesty in the soul, and health and strength in the body."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That, Stranger, is precisely what was said."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then half the subject may now be considered to have been discussed; shall we proceed to the consideration of the other half?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is the other half, and how do you divide the subject?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The whole choral art is also in our view the whole of education; and of this art, rhythms and harmonies form the part which has to do with the voice."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The movement of the body has rhythm in common with the movement of the voice, but gesture is peculiar to it, whereas song is simply the movement of the voice."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And the sound of the voice which reaches and educates the soul, we have ventured to term music."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"We were right."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And the movement of the body, when regarded as an amusement, we termed dancing; but when extended and pursued with a view to the excellence of the body, this scientific training may be called gymnastic."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Music, which was one half of the choral art, may be said to have been completely discussed. Shall we proceed to the other half or not? What would you like?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"My good friend, when you are talking with a Cretan and Lacedaemonian, and we have discussed music and not gymnastic, what answer are either of us likely to make to such an enquiry?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"An answer is contained in your question; and I understand and accept what you say not only as an answer, but also as a command to proceed with gymnastic."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You quite understand me; do as you say."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will; and there will not be any difficulty in speaking intelligibly to you about a subject with which both of you are far more familiar than with music."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"There will not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Is not the origin of gymnastics, too, to be sought in the tendency to rapid motion which exists in all animals; man, as we were saying, having attained the sense of rhythm, created and invented dancing; and melody arousing and awakening rhythm, both united formed the choral art?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And one part of this subject has been already discussed by us, and there still remains another to be discussed?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I have first a final word to add to my discourse about drink, if you will allow me to do so."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What more have you to say?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I should say that if a city seriously means to adopt the practice of drinking under due regulation and with a view to the enforcement of temperance, and in like manner, and on the same principle, will allow of other pleasures, designing to gain the victory over them--in this way all of them may be used. But if the State makes drinking an amusement only, and whoever likes may drink whenever he likes, and with whom he likes, and add to this any other indulgences, I shall never agree or allow that this city or this man should practise drinking. I would go further than the Cretans and Lacedaemonians, and am disposed rather to the law of the Carthaginians, that no one while he is on a campaign should be allowed to taste wine at all, but that he should drink water during all that time, and that in the city no slave, male or female, should ever drink wine; and that no magistrates should drink during their year of office, nor should pilots of vessels or judges while on duty taste wine at all, nor any one who is going to hold a consultation about any matter of importance; nor in the day-time at all, unless in consequence of exercise or as medicine; nor again at night, when any one, either man or woman, is minded to get children. There are numberless other cases also in which those who have good sense and good laws ought not to drink wine, so that if what I say is true, no city will need many vineyards. Their husbandry and their way of life in general will follow an appointed order, and their cultivation of the vine will be the most limited and the least common of their employments. And this, Stranger, shall be the crown of my discourse about wine, if you agree."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Excellent: we agree. BOOK III."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Enough of this. And what, then, is to be regarded as the origin of government? Will not a man be able to judge of it best from a point of view in which he may behold the progress of states and their transitions to good or evil?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I mean that he might watch them from the point of view of time, and observe the changes which take place in them during infinite ages."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Why, do you think that you can reckon the time which has elapsed since cities first existed and men were citizens of them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Hardly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But are sure that it must be vast and incalculable?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And have not thousands and thousands of cities come into being during this period and as many perished? And has not each of them had every form of government many times over, now growing larger, now smaller, and again improving or declining?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us endeavour to ascertain the cause of these changes; for that will probably explain the first origin and development of forms of government."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good. You shall endeavour to impart your thoughts to us, and we will make an effort to understand you."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Do you believe that there is any truth in ancient traditions?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What traditions?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The traditions about the many destructions of mankind which have been occasioned by deluges and pestilences, and in many other ways, and of the survival of a remnant?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Every one is disposed to believe them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us consider one of them, that which was caused by the famous deluge."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What are we to observe about it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I mean to say that those who then escaped would only be hill shepherds,--small sparks of the human race preserved on the tops of mountains."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Such survivors would necessarily be unacquainted with the arts and the various devices which are suggested to the dwellers in cities by interest or ambition, and with all the wrongs which they contrive against one another."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us suppose, then, that the cities in the plain and on the sea-coast were utterly destroyed at that time."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Would not all implements have then perished and every other excellent invention of political or any other sort of wisdom have utterly disappeared?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Why, yes, my friend; and if things had always continued as they are at present ordered, how could any discovery have ever been made even in the least particular? For it is evident that the arts were unknown during ten thousand times ten thousand years. And no more than a thousand or two thousand years have elapsed since the discoveries of Daedalus, Orpheus and Palamedes,--since Marsyas and Olympus invented music, and Amphion the lyre--not to speak of numberless other inventions which are but of yesterday."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Have you forgotten, Cleinias, the name of a friend who is really of yesterday?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I suppose that you mean Epimenides."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The same, my friend; he does indeed far overleap the heads of all mankind by his invention; for he carried out in practice, as you declare, what of old Hesiod (Works and Days) only preached."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, according to our tradition."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"After the great destruction, may we not suppose that the state of man was something of this sort:--In the beginning of things there was a fearful illimitable desert and a vast expanse of land; a herd or two of oxen would be the only survivors of the animal world; and there might be a few goats, these too hardly enough to maintain the shepherds who tended them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And of cities or governments or legislation, about which we are now talking, do you suppose that they could have any recollection at all?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"None whatever."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And out of this state of things has there not sprung all that we now are and have: cities and governments, and arts and laws, and a great deal of vice and a great deal of virtue?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Why, my good friend, how can we possibly suppose that those who knew nothing of all the good and evil of cities could have attained their full development, whether of virtue or of vice?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I understand your meaning, and you are quite right."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But, as time advanced and the race multiplied, the world came to be what the world is."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Doubtless the change was not made all in a moment, but little by little, during a very long period of time."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"A highly probable supposition."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"At first, they would have a natural fear ringing in their ears which would prevent their descending from the heights into the plain."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The fewness of the survivors at that time would have made them all the more desirous of seeing one another; but then the means of travelling either by land or sea had been almost entirely lost, as I may say, with the loss of the arts, and there was great difficulty in getting at one another; for iron and brass and all metals were jumbled together and had disappeared in the chaos; nor was there any possibility of extracting ore from them; and they had scarcely any means of felling timber. Even if you suppose that some implements might have been preserved in the mountains, they must quickly have worn out and vanished, and there would be no more of them until the art of metallurgy had again revived."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"There could not have been."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In how many generations would this be attained?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly, not for many generations."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"During this period, and for some time afterwards, all the arts which require iron and brass and the like would disappear."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Faction and war would also have died out in those days, and for many reasons."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How would that be?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In the first place, the desolation of these primitive men would create in them a feeling of affection and goodwill towards one another; and, secondly, they would have no occasion to quarrel about their subsistence, for they would have pasture in abundance, except just at first, and in some particular cases; and from their pasture-land they would obtain the greater part of their food in a primitive age, having plenty of milk and flesh; moreover they would procure other food by the chase, not to be despised either in quantity or quality. They would also have abundance of clothing, and bedding, and dwellings, and utensils either capable of standing on the fire or not; for the plastic and weaving arts do not require any use of iron: and God has given these two arts to man in order to provide him with all such things, that, when reduced to the last extremity, the human race may still grow and increase. Hence in those days mankind were not very poor; nor was poverty a cause of difference among them; and rich they could not have been, having neither gold nor silver:--such at that time was their condition. And the community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles; in it there is no insolence or injustice, nor, again, are there any contentions or envyings. And therefore they were good, and also because they were what is called simple-minded; and when they were told about good and evil, they in their simplicity believed what they heard to be very truth and practised it. No one had the wit to suspect another of a falsehood, as men do now; but what they heard about Gods and men they believed to be true, and lived accordingly; and therefore they were in all respects such as we have described them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That quite accords with my views, and with those of my friend here."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Would not many generations living on in a simple manner, although ruder, perhaps, and more ignorant of the arts generally, and in particular of those of land or naval warfare, and likewise of other arts, termed in cities legal practices and party conflicts, and including all conceivable ways of hurting one another in word and deed;--although inferior to those who lived before the deluge, or to the men of our day in these respects, would they not, I say, be simpler and more manly, and also more temperate and altogether more just? The reason has been already explained."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I should wish you to understand that what has preceded and what is about to follow, has been, and will be said, with the intention of explaining what need the men of that time had of laws, and who was their lawgiver."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And thus far what you have said has been very well said."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"They could hardly have wanted lawgivers as yet; nothing of that sort was likely to have existed in their days, for they had no letters at this early period; they lived by habit and the customs of their ancestors, as they are called."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Probably."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But there was already existing a form of government which, if I am not mistaken, is generally termed a lordship, and this still remains in many places, both among Hellenes and barbarians (compare Arist. Pol.), and is the government which is declared by Homer to have prevailed among the Cyclopes:-- 'They have neither councils nor judgments, but they dwell in hollow caves on the tops of high mountains, and every one gives law to his wife and children, and they do not busy themselves about one another.' (Odyss.)"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That seems to be a charming poet of yours; I have read some other verses of his, which are very clever; but I do not know much of him, for foreign poets are very little read among the Cretans."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"But they are in Lacedaemon, and he appears to be the prince of them all; the manner of life, however, which he describes is not Spartan, but rather Ionian, and he seems quite to confirm what you are saying, when he traces up the ancient state of mankind by the help of tradition to barbarism."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes, he does confirm it; and we may accept his witness to the fact that such forms of government sometimes arise."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"We may."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And were not such states composed of men who had been dispersed in single habitations and families by the poverty which attended the devastations; and did not the eldest then rule among them, because with them government originated in the authority of a father and a mother, whom, like a flock of birds, they followed, forming one troop under the patriarchal rule and sovereignty of their parents, which of all sovereignties is the most just?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"After this they came together in greater numbers, and increased the size of their cities, and betook themselves to husbandry, first of all at the foot of the mountains, and made enclosures of loose walls and works of defence, in order to keep off wild beasts; thus creating a single large and common habitation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes; at least we may suppose so."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There is another thing which would probably happen."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"When these larger habitations grew up out of the lesser original ones, each of the lesser ones would survive in the larger; every family would be under the rule of the eldest, and, owing to their separation from one another, would have peculiar customs in things divine and human, which they would have received from their several parents who had educated them; and these customs would incline them to order, when the parents had the element of order in their nature, and to courage, when they had the element of courage. And they would naturally stamp upon their children, and upon their children's children, their own likings; and, as we are saying, they would find their way into the larger society, having already their own peculiar laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And every man surely likes his own laws best, and the laws of others not so well."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then now we seem to have stumbled upon the beginnings of legislation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The next step will be that these persons who have met together, will select some arbiters, who will review the laws of all of them, and will publicly present such as they approve to the chiefs who lead the tribes, and who are in a manner their kings, allowing them to choose those which they think best. These persons will themselves be called legislators, and will appoint the magistrates, framing some sort of aristocracy, or perhaps monarchy, out of the dynasties or lordships, and in this altered state of the government they will live."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, that would be the natural order of things."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then, now let us speak of a third form of government, in which all other forms and conditions of polities and cities concur."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is that?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The form which in fact Homer indicates as following the second. This third form arose when, as he says, Dardanus founded Dardania:-- 'For not as yet had the holy Ilium been built on the plain to be a city of speaking men; but they were still dwelling at the foot of many-fountained Ida.' For indeed, in these verses, and in what he said of the Cyclopes, he speaks the words of God and nature; for poets are a divine race, and often in their strains, by the aid of the Muses and the Graces, they attain truth."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then now let us proceed with the rest of our tale, which will probably be found to illustrate in some degree our proposed design:--Shall we do so?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Ilium was built, when they descended from the mountain, in a large and fair plain, on a sort of low hill, watered by many rivers descending from Ida."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Such is the tradition."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And we must suppose this event to have taken place many ages after the deluge?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"A marvellous forgetfulness of the former destruction would appear to have come over them, when they placed their town right under numerous streams flowing from the heights, trusting for their security to not very high hills, either."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"There must have been a long interval, clearly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And, as population increased, many other cities would begin to be inhabited."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Doubtless."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Those cities made war against Troy--by sea as well as land--for at that time men were ceasing to be afraid of the sea."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The Achaeans remained ten years, and overthrew Troy."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And during the ten years in which the Achaeans were besieging Ilium, the homes of the besiegers were falling into an evil plight. Their youth revolted; and when the soldiers returned to their own cities and families, they did not receive them properly, and as they ought to have done, and numerous deaths, murders, exiles, were the consequence. The exiles came again, under a new name, no longer Achaeans, but Dorians,--a name which they derived from Dorieus; for it was he who gathered them together. The rest of the story is told by you Lacedaemonians as part of the history of Sparta."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Thus, after digressing from the original subject of laws into music and drinking-bouts, the argument has, providentially, come back to the same point, and presents to us another handle. For we have reached the settlement of Lacedaemon; which, as you truly say, is in laws and in institutions the sister of Crete. And we are all the better for the digression, because we have gone through various governments and settlements, and have been present at the foundation of a first, second, and third state, succeeding one another in infinite time. And now there appears on the horizon a fourth state or nation which was once in process of settlement and has continued settled to this day. If, out of all this, we are able to discern what is well or ill settled, and what laws are the salvation and what are the destruction of cities, and what changes would make a state happy, O Megillus and Cleinias, we may now begin again, unless we have some fault to find with the previous discussion."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"If some God, Stranger, would promise us that our new enquiry about legislation would be as good and full as the present, I would go a great way to hear such another, and would think that a day as long as this--and we are now approaching the longest day of the year--was too short for the discussion."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then I suppose that we must consider this subject?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us place ourselves in thought at the moment when Lacedaemon and Argos and Messene and the rest of the Peloponnesus were all in complete subjection, Megillus, to your ancestors; for afterwards, as the legend informs us, they divided their army into three portions, and settled three cities, Argos, Messene, Lacedaemon."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Temenus was the king of Argos, Cresphontes of Messene, Procles and Eurysthenes of Lacedaemon."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"To these kings all the men of that day made oath that they would assist them, if any one subverted their kingdom."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But can a kingship be destroyed, or was any other form of government ever destroyed, by any but the rulers themselves? No indeed, by Zeus. Have we already forgotten what was said a little while ago?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And may we not now further confirm what was then mentioned? For we have come upon facts which have brought us back again to the same principle; so that, in resuming the discussion, we shall not be enquiring about an empty theory, but about events which actually happened. The case was as follows:--Three royal heroes made oath to three cities which were under a kingly government, and the cities to the kings, that both rulers and subjects should govern and be governed according to the laws which were common to all of them: the rulers promised that as time and the race went forward they would not make their rule more arbitrary; and the subjects said that, if the rulers observed these conditions, they would never subvert or permit others to subvert those kingdoms; the kings were to assist kings and peoples when injured, and the peoples were to assist peoples and kings in like manner. Is not this the fact?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And the three states to whom these laws were given, whether their kings or any others were the authors of them, had therefore the greatest security for the maintenance of their constitutions?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"What security?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That the other two states were always to come to the rescue against a rebellious third."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Many persons say that legislators ought to impose such laws as the mass of the people will be ready to receive; but this is just as if one were to command gymnastic masters or physicians to treat or cure their pupils or patients in an agreeable manner."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Whereas the physician may often be too happy if he can restore health, and make the body whole, without any very great infliction of pain."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There was also another advantage possessed by the men of that day, which greatly lightened the task of passing laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"What advantage?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The legislators of that day, when they equalized property, escaped the great accusation which generally arises in legislation, if a person attempts to disturb the possession of land, or to abolish debts, because he sees that without this reform there can never be any real equality. Now, in general, when the legislator attempts to make a new settlement of such matters, every one meets him with the cry, that 'he is not to disturb vested interests,'--declaring with imprecations that he is introducing agrarian laws and cancelling of debts, until a man is at his wits' end; whereas no one could quarrel with the Dorians for distributing the land,--there was nothing to hinder them; and as for debts, they had none which were considerable or of old standing."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But then, my good friends, why did the settlement and legislation of their country turn out so badly?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"How do you mean; and why do you blame them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There were three kingdoms, and of these, two quickly corrupted their original constitution and laws, and the only one which remained was the Spartan."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"The question which you ask is not easily answered."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And yet must be answered when we are enquiring about laws, this being our old man's sober game of play, whereby we beguile the way, as I was saying when we first set out on our journey."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly; and we must find out why this was."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"What laws are more worthy of our attention than those which have regulated such cities? or what settlements of states are greater or more famous?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I know of none."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Can we doubt that your ancestors intended these institutions not only for the protection of Peloponnesus, but of all the Hellenes, in case they were attacked by the barbarian? For the inhabitants of the region about Ilium, when they provoked by their insolence the Trojan war, relied upon the power of the Assyrians and the Empire of Ninus, which still existed and had a great prestige; the people of those days fearing the united Assyrian Empire just as we now fear the Great King. And the second capture of Troy was a serious offence against them, because Troy was a portion of the Assyrian Empire. To meet the danger the single army was distributed between three cities by the royal brothers, sons of Heracles,--a fair device, as it seemed, and a far better arrangement than the expedition against Troy. For, firstly, the people of that day had, as they thought, in the Heraclidae better leaders than the Pelopidae; in the next place, they considered that their army was superior in valour to that which went against Troy; for, although the latter conquered the Trojans, they were themselves conquered by the Heraclidae--Achaeans by Dorians. May we not suppose that this was the intention with which the men of those days framed the constitutions of their states?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And would not men who had shared with one another many dangers, and were governed by a single race of royal brothers, and had taken the advice of oracles, and in particular of the Delphian Apollo, be likely to think that such states would be firmly and lastingly established?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Of course they would."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yet these institutions, of which such great expectations were entertained, seem to have all rapidly vanished away; with the exception, as I was saying, of that small part of them which existed in your land. And this third part has never to this day ceased warring against the two others; whereas, if the original idea had been carried out, and they had agreed to be one, their power would have been invincible in war."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"No doubt."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But what was the ruin of this glorious confederacy? Here is a subject well worthy of consideration."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly, no one will ever find more striking instances of laws or governments being the salvation or destruction of great and noble interests, than are here presented to his view."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then now we seem to have happily arrived at a real and important question."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Did you never remark, sage friend, that all men, and we ourselves at this moment, often fancy that they see some beautiful thing which might have effected wonders if any one had only known how to make a right use of it in some way; and yet this mode of looking at things may turn out after all to be a mistake, and not according to nature, either in our own case or in any other?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"To what are you referring, and what do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I was thinking of my own admiration of the aforesaid Heracleid expedition, which was so noble, and might have had such wonderful results for the Hellenes, if only rightly used; and I was just laughing at myself."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"But were you not right and wise in speaking as you did, and we in assenting to you?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Perhaps; and yet I cannot help observing that any one who sees anything great or powerful, immediately has the feeling that--'If the owner only knew how to use his great and noble possession, how happy would he be, and what great results would he achieve!'"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"And would he not be justified?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Reflect; in what point of view does this sort of praise appear just: First, in reference to the question in hand:--If the then commanders had known how to arrange their army properly, how would they have attained success? Would not this have been the way? They would have bound them all firmly together and preserved them for ever, giving them freedom and dominion at pleasure, combined with the power of doing in the whole world, Hellenic and barbarian, whatever they and their descendants desired. What other aim would they have had?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Suppose any one were in the same way to express his admiration at the sight of great wealth or family honour, or the like, he would praise them under the idea that through them he would attain either all or the greater and chief part of what he desires."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"He would."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, now, and does not the argument show that there is one common desire of all mankind?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The desire which a man has, that all things, if possible,--at any rate, things human,--may come to pass in accordance with his soul's desire."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And having this desire always, and at every time of life, in youth, in manhood, in age, he cannot help always praying for the fulfilment of it."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"No doubt."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And we join in the prayers of our friends, and ask for them what they ask for themselves."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"We do."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Dear is the son to the father--the younger to the elder."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And yet the son often prays to obtain things which the father prays that he may not obtain."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"When the son is young and foolish, you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes; or when the father, in the dotage of age or the heat of youth, having no sense of right and justice, prays with fervour, under the influence of feelings akin to those of Theseus when he cursed the unfortunate Hippolytus, do you imagine that the son, having a sense of right and justice, will join in his father's prayers?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I understand you to mean that a man should not desire or be in a hurry to have all things according to his wish, for his wish may be at variance with his reason. But every state and every individual ought to pray and strive for wisdom."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes; and I remember, and you will remember, what I said at first, that a statesman and legislator ought to ordain laws with a view to wisdom; while you were arguing that the good lawgiver ought to order all with a view to war. And to this I replied that there were four virtues, but that upon your view one of them only was the aim of legislation; whereas you ought to regard all virtue, and especially that which comes first, and is the leader of all the rest--I mean wisdom and mind and opinion, having affection and desire in their train. And now the argument returns to the same point, and I say once more, in jest if you like, or in earnest if you like, that the prayer of a fool is full of danger, being likely to end in the opposite of what he desires. And if you would rather receive my words in earnest, I am willing that you should; and you will find, I suspect, as I have said already, that not cowardice was the cause of the ruin of the Dorian kings and of their whole design, nor ignorance of military matters, either on the part of the rulers or of their subjects; but their misfortunes were due to their general degeneracy, and especially to their ignorance of the most important human affairs. That was then, and is still, and always will be the case, as I will endeavour, if you will allow me, to make out and demonstrate as well as I am able to you who are my friends, in the course of the argument."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Pray go on, Stranger;--compliments are troublesome, but we will show, not in word but in deed, how greatly we prize your words, for we will give them our best attention; and that is the way in which a freeman best shows his approval or disapproval."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Excellent, Cleinias; let us do as you say."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means, if Heaven wills. Go on."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, then, proceeding in the same train of thought, I say that the greatest ignorance was the ruin of the Dorian power, and that now, as then, ignorance is ruin. And if this be true, the legislator must endeavour to implant wisdom in states, and banish ignorance to the utmost of his power."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is evident."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then now consider what is really the greatest ignorance. I should like to know whether you and Megillus would agree with me in what I am about to say; for my opinion is--"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That the greatest ignorance is when a man hates that which he nevertheless thinks to be good and noble, and loves and embraces that which he knows to be unrighteous and evil. This disagreement between the sense of pleasure and the judgment of reason in the soul is, in my opinion, the worst ignorance; and also the greatest, because affecting the great mass of the human soul; for the principle which feels pleasure and pain in the individual is like the mass or populace in a state. And when the soul is opposed to knowledge, or opinion, or reason, which are her natural lords, that I call folly, just as in the state, when the multitude refuses to obey their rulers and the laws; or, again, in the individual, when fair reasonings have their habitation in the soul and yet do no good, but rather the reverse of good. All these cases I term the worst ignorance, whether in individuals or in states. You will understand, Stranger, that I am speaking of something which is very different from the ignorance of handicraftsmen."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, my friend, we understand and agree."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us, then, in the first place declare and affirm that the citizen who does not know these things ought never to have any kind of authority entrusted to him: he must be stigmatized as ignorant, even though he be versed in calculation and skilled in all sorts of accomplishments, and feats of mental dexterity; and the opposite are to be called wise, even although, in the words of the proverb, they know neither how to read nor how to swim; and to them, as to men of sense, authority is to be committed. For, O my friends, how can there be the least shadow of wisdom when there is no harmony? There is none; but the noblest and greatest of harmonies may be truly said to be the greatest wisdom; and of this he is a partaker who lives according to reason; whereas he who is devoid of reason is the destroyer of his house and the very opposite of a saviour of the state: he is utterly ignorant of political wisdom. Let this, then, as I was saying, be laid down by us."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Let it be so laid down."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I suppose that there must be rulers and subjects in states?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what are the principles on which men rule and obey in cities, whether great or small; and similarly in families? What are they, and how many in number? Is there not one claim of authority which is always just,--that of fathers and mothers and in general of progenitors to rule over their offspring?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"There is."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Next follows the principle that the noble should rule over the ignoble; and, thirdly, that the elder should rule and the younger obey?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And, fourthly, that slaves should be ruled, and their masters rule?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Fifthly, if I am not mistaken, comes the principle that the stronger shall rule, and the weaker be ruled?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is a rule not to be disobeyed."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes, and a rule which prevails very widely among all creatures, and is according to nature, as the Theban poet Pindar once said; and the sixth principle, and the greatest of all, is, that the wise should lead and command, and the ignorant follow and obey; and yet, O thou most wise Pindar, as I should reply him, this surely is not contrary to nature, but according to nature, being the rule of law over willing subjects, and not a rule of compulsion."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There is a seventh kind of rule which is awarded by lot, and is dear to the Gods and a token of good fortune: he on whom the lot falls is a ruler, and he who fails in obtaining the lot goes away and is the subject; and this we affirm to be quite just."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"'Then now,' as we say playfully to any of those who lightly undertake the making of laws, 'you see, legislator, the principles of government, how many they are, and that they are naturally opposed to each other. There we have discovered a fountain-head of seditions, to which you must attend. And, first, we will ask you to consider with us, how and in what respect the kings of Argos and Messene violated these our maxims, and ruined themselves and the great and famous Hellenic power of the olden time. Was it because they did not know how wisely Hesiod spoke when he said that the half is often more than the whole? His meaning was, that when to take the whole would be dangerous, and to take the half would be the safe and moderate course, then the moderate or better was more than the immoderate or worse.'"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And may we suppose this immoderate spirit to be more fatal when found among kings than when among peoples?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"The probability is that ignorance will be a disorder especially prevalent among kings, because they lead a proud and luxurious life."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Is it not palpable that the chief aim of the kings of that time was to get the better of the established laws, and that they were not in harmony with the principles which they had agreed to observe by word and oath? This want of harmony may have had the appearance of wisdom, but was really, as we assert, the greatest ignorance, and utterly overthrew the whole empire by dissonance and harsh discord."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very likely."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Good; and what measures ought the legislator to have then taken in order to avert this calamity? Truly there is no great wisdom in knowing, and no great difficulty in telling, after the evil has happened; but to have foreseen the remedy at the time would have taken a much wiser head than ours."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Any one who looks at what has occurred with you Lacedaemonians, Megillus, may easily know and may easily say what ought to have been done at that time."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Speak a little more clearly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Nothing can be clearer than the observation which I am about to make."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That if any one gives too great a power to anything, too large a sail to a vessel, too much food to the body, too much authority to the mind, and does not observe the mean, everything is overthrown, and, in the wantonness of excess, runs in the one case to disorders, and in the other to injustice, which is the child of excess. I mean to say, my dear friends, that there is no soul of man, young and irresponsible, who will be able to sustain the temptation of arbitrary power--no one who will not, under such circumstances, become filled with folly, that worst of diseases, and be hated by his nearest and dearest friends: when this happens his kingdom is undermined, and all his power vanishes from him. And great legislators who know the mean should take heed of the danger. As far as we can guess at this distance of time, what happened was as follows:--"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"A God, who watched over Sparta, seeing into the future, gave you two families of kings instead of one; and thus brought you more within the limits of moderation. In the next place, some human wisdom mingled with divine power, observing that the constitution of your government was still feverish and excited, tempered your inborn strength and pride of birth with the moderation which comes of age, making the power of your twenty-eight elders equal with that of the kings in the most important matters. But your third saviour, perceiving that your government was still swelling and foaming, and desirous to impose a curb upon it, instituted the Ephors, whose power he made to resemble that of magistrates elected by lot; and by this arrangement the kingly office, being compounded of the right elements and duly moderated, was preserved, and was the means of preserving all the rest. Since, if there had been only the original legislators, Temenus, Cresphontes, and their contemporaries, as far as they were concerned not even the portion of Aristodemus would have been preserved; for they had no proper experience in legislation, or they would surely not have imagined that oaths would moderate a youthful spirit invested with a power which might be converted into a tyranny. Now that God has instructed us what sort of government would have been or will be lasting, there is no wisdom, as I have already said, in judging after the event; there is no difficulty in learning from an example which has already occurred. But if any one could have foreseen all this at the time, and had been able to moderate the government of the three kingdoms and unite them into one, he might have saved all the excellent institutions which were then conceived; and no Persian or any other armament would have dared to attack us, or would have regarded Hellas as a power to be despised."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There was small credit to us, Cleinias, in defeating them; and the discredit was, not that the conquerors did not win glorious victories both by land and sea, but what, in my opinion, brought discredit was, first of all, the circumstance that of the three cities one only fought on behalf of Hellas, and the two others were so utterly good for nothing that the one was waging a mighty war against Lacedaemon, and was thus preventing her from rendering assistance, while the city of Argos, which had the precedence at the time of the distribution, when asked to aid in repelling the barbarian, would not answer to the call, or give aid. Many things might be told about Hellas in connexion with that war which are far from honourable; nor, indeed, can we rightly say that Hellas repelled the invader; for the truth is, that unless the Athenians and Lacedaemonians, acting in concert, had warded off the impending yoke, all the tribes of Hellas would have been fused in a chaos of Hellenes mingling with one another, of barbarians mingling with Hellenes, and Hellenes with barbarians; just as nations who are now subject to the Persian power, owing to unnatural separations and combinations of them, are dispersed and scattered, and live miserably. These, Cleinias and Megillus, are the reproaches which we have to make against statesmen and legislators, as they are called, past and present, if we would analyse the causes of their failure, and find out what else might have been done. We said, for instance, just now, that there ought to be no great and unmixed powers; and this was under the idea that a state ought to be free and wise and harmonious, and that a legislator ought to legislate with a view to this end. Nor is there any reason to be surprised at our continually proposing aims for the legislator which appear not to be always the same; but we should consider when we say that temperance is to be the aim, or wisdom is to be the aim, or friendship is to be the aim, that all these aims are really the same; and if so, a variety in the modes of expression ought not to disturb us."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Let us resume the argument in that spirit. And now, speaking of friendship and wisdom and freedom, I wish that you would tell me at what, in your opinion, the legislator should aim."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Hear me, then: there are two mother forms of states from which the rest may be truly said to be derived; and one of them may be called monarchy and the other democracy: the Persians have the highest form of the one, and we of the other; almost all the rest, as I was saying, are variations of these. Now, if you are to have liberty and the combination of friendship with wisdom, you must have both these forms of government in a measure; the argument emphatically declares that no city can be well governed which is not made up of both."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Neither the one, if it be exclusively and excessively attached to monarchy, nor the other, if it be similarly attached to freedom, observes moderation; but your states, the Laconian and Cretan, have more of it; and the same was the case with the Athenians and Persians of old time, but now they have less. Shall I tell you why?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means, if it will tend to elucidate our subject."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Hear, then:--There was a time when the Persians had more of the state which is a mean between slavery and freedom. In the reign of Cyrus they were freemen and also lords of many others: the rulers gave a share of freedom to the subjects, and being treated as equals, the soldiers were on better terms with their generals, and showed themselves more ready in the hour of danger. And if there was any wise man among them, who was able to give good counsel, he imparted his wisdom to the public; for the king was not jealous, but allowed him full liberty of speech, and gave honour to those who could advise him in any matter. And the nation waxed in all respects, because there was freedom and friendship and communion of mind among them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That certainly appears to have been the case."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"How, then, was this advantage lost under Cambyses, and again recovered under Darius? Shall I try to divine?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"The enquiry, no doubt, has a bearing upon our subject."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I imagine that Cyrus, though a great and patriotic general, had never given his mind to education, and never attended to the order of his household."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What makes you say so?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I think that from his youth upwards he was a soldier, and entrusted the education of his children to the women; and they brought them up from their childhood as the favourites of fortune, who were blessed already, and needed no more blessings. They thought that they were happy enough, and that no one should be allowed to oppose them in any way, and they compelled every one to praise all that they said or did. This was how they brought them up."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"A splendid education truly!"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Such an one as women were likely to give them, and especially princesses who had recently grown rich, and in the absence of the men, too, who were occupied in wars and dangers, and had no time to look after them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What would you expect?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Their father had possessions of cattle and sheep, and many herds of men and other animals, but he did not consider that those to whom he was about to make them over were not trained in his own calling, which was Persian; for the Persians are shepherds--sons of a rugged land, which is a stern mother, and well fitted to produce a sturdy race able to live in the open air and go without sleep, and also to fight, if fighting is required (compare Arist. Pol.). He did not observe that his sons were trained differently; through the so-called blessing of being royal they were educated in the Median fashion by women and eunuchs, which led to their becoming such as people do become when they are brought up unreproved. And so, after the death of Cyrus, his sons, in the fulness of luxury and licence, took the kingdom, and first one slew the other because he could not endure a rival; and, afterwards, the slayer himself, mad with wine and brutality, lost his kingdom through the Medes and the Eunuch, as they called him, who despised the folly of Cambyses."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"So runs the tale, and such probably were the facts."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes; and the tradition says, that the empire came back to the Persians, through Darius and the seven chiefs."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us note the rest of the story. Observe, that Darius was not the son of a king, and had not received a luxurious education. When he came to the throne, being one of the seven, he divided the country into seven portions, and of this arrangement there are some shadowy traces still remaining; he made laws upon the principle of introducing universal equality in the order of the state, and he embodied in his laws the settlement of the tribute which Cyrus promised,--thus creating a feeling of friendship and community among all the Persians, and attaching the people to him with money and gifts. Hence his armies cheerfully acquired for him countries as large as those which Cyrus had left behind him. Darius was succeeded by his son Xerxes; and he again was brought up in the royal and luxurious fashion. Might we not most justly say: 'O Darius, how came you to bring up Xerxes in the same way in which Cyrus brought up Cambyses, and not to see his fatal mistake?' For Xerxes, being the creation of the same education, met with much the same fortune as Cambyses; and from that time until now there has never been a really great king among the Persians, although they are all called Great. And their degeneracy is not to be attributed to chance, as I maintain; the reason is rather the evil life which is generally led by the sons of very rich and royal persons; for never will boy or man, young or old, excel in virtue, who has been thus educated. And this, I say, is what the legislator has to consider, and what at the present moment has to be considered by us. Justly may you, O Lacedaemonians, be praised, in that you do not give special honour or a special education to wealth rather than to poverty, or to a royal rather than to a private station, where the divine and inspired lawgiver has not originally commanded them to be given. For no man ought to have pre-eminent honour in a state because he surpasses others in wealth, any more than because he is swift of foot or fair or strong, unless he have some virtue in him; nor even if he have virtue, unless he have this particular virtue of temperance."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Stranger?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I suppose that courage is a part of virtue?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then, now hear and judge for yourself:--Would you like to have for a fellow-lodger or neighbour a very courageous man, who had no control over himself?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Heaven forbid!"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Or an artist, who was clever in his profession, but a rogue?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And surely justice does not grow apart from temperance?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Any more than our pattern wise man, whom we exhibited as having his pleasures and pains in accordance with and corresponding to true reason, can be intemperate?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There is a further consideration relating to the due and undue award of honours in states."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I should like to know whether temperance without the other virtues, existing alone in the soul of man, is rightly to be praised or blamed?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I cannot tell."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And that is the best answer; for whichever alternative you had chosen, I think that you would have gone wrong."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I am fortunate."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Very good; a quality, which is a mere appendage of things which can be praised or blamed, does not deserve an expression of opinion, but is best passed over in silence."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"You are speaking of temperance?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes; but of the other virtues, that which having this appendage is also most beneficial, will be most deserving of honour, and next that which is beneficial in the next degree; and so each of them will be rightly honoured according to a regular order."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And ought not the legislator to determine these classes?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly he should."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Suppose that we leave to him the arrangement of details. But the general division of laws according to their importance into a first and second and third class, we who are lovers of law may make ourselves."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"We maintain, then, that a State which would be safe and happy, as far as the nature of man allows, must and ought to distribute honour and dishonour in the right way. And the right way is to place the goods of the soul first and highest in the scale, always assuming temperance to be the condition of them; and to assign the second place to the goods of the body; and the third place to money and property. And if any legislator or state departs from this rule by giving money the place of honour, or in any way preferring that which is really last, may we not say, that he or the state is doing an unholy and unpatriotic thing?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Yes; let that be plainly declared."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The consideration of the Persian governments led us thus far to enlarge. We remarked that the Persians grew worse and worse. And we affirm the reason of this to have been, that they too much diminished the freedom of the people, and introduced too much of despotism, and so destroyed friendship and community of feeling. And when there is an end of these, no longer do the governors govern on behalf of their subjects or of the people, but on behalf of themselves; and if they think that they can gain ever so small an advantage for themselves, they devastate cities, and send fire and desolation among friendly races. And as they hate ruthlessly and horribly, so are they hated; and when they want the people to fight for them, they find no community of feeling or willingness to risk their lives on their behalf; their untold myriads are useless to them on the field of battle, and they think that their salvation depends on the employment of mercenaries and strangers whom they hire, as if they were in want of more men. And they cannot help being stupid, since they proclaim by their actions that the ordinary distinctions of right and wrong which are made in a state are a trifle, when compared with gold and silver."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And now enough of the Persians, and their present mal-administration of their government, which is owing to the excess of slavery and despotism among them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Next, we must pass in review the government of Attica in like manner, and from this show that entire freedom and the absence of all superior authority is not by any means so good as government by others when properly limited, which was our ancient Athenian constitution at the time when the Persians made their attack on Hellas, or, speaking more correctly, on the whole continent of Europe. There were four classes, arranged according to a property census, and reverence was our queen and mistress, and made us willing to live in obedience to the laws which then prevailed. Also the vastness of the Persian armament, both by sea and on land, caused a helpless terror, which made us more and more the servants of our rulers and of the laws; and for all these reasons an exceeding harmony prevailed among us. About ten years before the naval engagement at Salamis, Datis came, leading a Persian host by command of Darius, which was expressly directed against the Athenians and Eretrians, having orders to carry them away captive; and these orders he was to execute under pain of death. Now Datis and his myriads soon became complete masters of Eretria, and he sent a fearful report to Athens that no Eretrian had escaped him; for the soldiers of Datis had joined hands and netted the whole of Eretria. And this report, whether well or ill founded, was terrible to all the Hellenes, and above all to the Athenians, and they dispatched embassies in all directions, but no one was willing to come to their relief, with the exception of the Lacedaemonians; and they, either because they were detained by the Messenian war, which was then going on, or for some other reason of which we are not told, came a day too late for the battle of Marathon. After a while, the news arrived of mighty preparations being made, and innumerable threats came from the king. Then, as time went on, a rumour reached us that Darius had died, and that his son, who was young and hot-headed, had come to the throne and was persisting in his design. The Athenians were under the impression that the whole expedition was directed against them, in consequence of the battle of Marathon; and hearing of the bridge over the Hellespont, and the canal of Athos, and the host of ships, considering that there was no salvation for them either by land or by sea, for there was no one to help them, and remembering that in the first expedition, when the Persians destroyed Eretria, no one came to their help, or would risk the danger of an alliance with them, they thought that this would happen again, at least on land; nor, when they looked to the sea, could they descry any hope of salvation; for they were attacked by a thousand vessels and more. One chance of safety remained, slight indeed and desperate, but their only one. They saw that on the former occasion they had gained a seemingly impossible victory, and borne up by this hope, they found that their only refuge was in themselves and in the Gods. All these things created in them the spirit of friendship; there was the fear of the moment, and there was that higher fear, which they had acquired by obedience to their ancient laws, and which I have several times in the preceding discourse called reverence, of which the good man ought to be a willing servant, and of which the coward is independent and fearless. If this fear had not possessed them, they would never have met the enemy, or defended their temples and sepulchres and their country, and everything that was near and dear to them, as they did; but little by little they would have been all scattered and dispersed."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Your words, Athenian, are quite true, and worthy of yourself and of your country."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"They are true, Megillus; and to you, who have inherited the virtues of your ancestors, I may properly speak of the actions of that day. And I would wish you and Cleinias to consider whether my words have not also a bearing on legislation; for I am not discoursing only for the pleasure of talking, but for the argument's sake. Please to remark that the experience both of ourselves and the Persians was, in a certain sense, the same; for as they led their people into utter servitude, so we too led ours into all freedom. And now, how shall we proceed? for I would like you to observe that our previous arguments have good deal to say for themselves."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"True; but I wish that you would give us a fuller explanation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will. Under the ancient laws, my friends, the people was not as now the master, but rather the willing servant of the laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"What laws do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In the first place, let us speak of the laws about music,--that is to say, such music as then existed--in order that we may trace the growth of the excess of freedom from the beginning. Now music was early divided among us into certain kinds and manners. One sort consisted of prayers to the Gods, which were called hymns; and there was another and opposite sort called lamentations, and another termed paeans, and another, celebrating the birth of Dionysus, called, I believe, 'dithyrambs.' And they used the actual word 'laws,' or nomoi, for another kind of song; and to this they added the term 'citharoedic.' All these and others were duly distinguished, nor were the performers allowed to confuse one style of music with another. And the authority which determined and gave judgment, and punished the disobedient, was not expressed in a hiss, nor in the most unmusical shouts of the multitude, as in our days, nor in applause and clapping of hands. But the directors of public instruction insisted that the spectators should listen in silence to the end; and boys and their tutors, and the multitude in general, were kept quiet by a hint from a stick. Such was the good order which the multitude were willing to observe; they would never have dared to give judgment by noisy cries. And then, as time went on, the poets themselves introduced the reign of vulgar and lawless innovation. They were men of genius, but they had no perception of what is just and lawful in music; raging like Bacchanals and possessed with inordinate delights--mingling lamentations with hymns, and paeans with dithyrambs; imitating the sounds of the flute on the lyre, and making one general confusion; ignorantly affirming that music has no truth, and, whether good or bad, can only be judged of rightly by the pleasure of the hearer (compare Republic). And by composing such licentious works, and adding to them words as licentious, they have inspired the multitude with lawlessness and boldness, and made them fancy that they can judge for themselves about melody and song. And in this way the theatres from being mute have become vocal, as though they had understanding of good and bad in music and poetry; and instead of an aristocracy, an evil sort of theatrocracy has grown up (compare Arist. Pol.). For if the democracy which judged had only consisted of educated persons, no fatal harm would have been done; but in music there first arose the universal conceit of omniscience and general lawlessness;--freedom came following afterwards, and men, fancying that they knew what they did not know, had no longer any fear, and the absence of fear begets shamelessness. For what is this shamelessness, which is so evil a thing, but the insolent refusal to regard the opinion of the better by reason of an over-daring sort of liberty?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Consequent upon this freedom comes the other freedom, of disobedience to rulers (compare Republic); and then the attempt to escape the control and exhortation of father, mother, elders, and when near the end, the control of the laws also; and at the very end there is the contempt of oaths and pledges, and no regard at all for the Gods,--herein they exhibit and imitate the old so-called Titanic nature, and come to the same point as the Titans when they rebelled against God, leading a life of endless evils. But why have I said all this? I ask, because the argument ought to be pulled up from time to time, and not be allowed to run away, but held with bit and bridle, and then we shall not, as the proverb says, fall off our ass. Let us then once more ask the question, To what end has all this been said?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"This, then, has been said for the sake--"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Of what?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"We were maintaining that the lawgiver ought to have three things in view: first, that the city for which he legislates should be free; and secondly, be at unity with herself; and thirdly, should have understanding;--these were our principles, were they not?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"With a view to this we selected two kinds of government, the one the most despotic, and the other the most free; and now we are considering which of them is the right form: we took a mean in both cases, of despotism in the one, and of liberty in the other, and we saw that in a mean they attained their perfection; but that when they were carried to the extreme of either, slavery or licence, neither party were the gainers."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And that was our reason for considering the settlement of the Dorian army, and of the city built by Dardanus at the foot of the mountains, and the removal of cities to the seashore, and of our mention of the first men, who were the survivors of the deluge. And all that was previously said about music and drinking, and what preceded, was said with the view of seeing how a state might be best administered, and how an individual might best order his own life. And now, Megillus and Cleinias, how can we put to the proof the value of our words?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Stranger, I think that I see how a proof of their value may be obtained. This discussion of ours appears to me to have been singularly fortunate, and just what I at this moment want; most auspiciously have you and my friend Megillus come in my way. For I will tell you what has happened to me; and I regard the coincidence as a sort of omen. The greater part of Crete is going to send out a colony, and they have entrusted the management of the affair to the Cnosians; and the Cnosian government to me and nine others. And they desire us to give them any laws which we please, whether taken from the Cretan model or from any other; and they do not mind about their being foreign if they are better. Grant me then this favour, which will also be a gain to yourselves:--Let us make a selection from what has been said, and then let us imagine a State of which we will suppose ourselves to be the original founders. Thus we shall proceed with our enquiry, and, at the same time, I may have the use of the framework which you are constructing, for the city which is in contemplation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Good news, Cleinias; if Megillus has no objection, you may be sure that I will do all in my power to please you."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Thank you."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"And so will I."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Excellent; and now let us begin to frame the State. BOOK IV."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And now, what will this city be? I do not mean to ask what is or will hereafter be the name of the place; that may be determined by the accident of locality or of the original settlement--a river or fountain, or some local deity may give the sanction of a name to the newly-founded city; but I do want to know what the situation is, whether maritime or inland."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I should imagine, Stranger, that the city of which we are speaking is about eighty stadia distant from the sea."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And are there harbours on the seaboard?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Excellent harbours, Stranger; there could not be better."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Alas! what a prospect! And is the surrounding country productive, or in need of importations?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Hardly in need of anything."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And is there any neighbouring State?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"None whatever, and that is the reason for selecting the place; in days of old, there was a migration of the inhabitants, and the region has been deserted from time immemorial."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And has the place a fair proportion of hill, and plain, and wood?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Like the rest of Crete in that."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"You mean to say that there is more rock than plain?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then there is some hope that your citizens may be virtuous: had you been on the sea, and well provided with harbours, and an importing rather than a producing country, some mighty saviour would have been needed, and lawgivers more than mortal, if you were ever to have a chance of preserving your state from degeneracy and discordance of manners (compare Ar. Pol.). But there is comfort in the eighty stadia; although the sea is too near, especially if, as you say, the harbours are so good. Still we may be content. The sea is pleasant enough as a daily companion, but has indeed also a bitter and brackish quality; filling the streets with merchants and shopkeepers, and begetting in the souls of men uncertain and unfaithful ways--making the state unfriendly and unfaithful both to her own citizens, and also to other nations. There is a consolation, therefore, in the country producing all things at home; and yet, owing to the ruggedness of the soil, not providing anything in great abundance. Had there been abundance, there might have been a great export trade, and a great return of gold and silver; which, as we may safely affirm, has the most fatal results on a State whose aim is the attainment of just and noble sentiments: this was said by us, if you remember, in the previous discussion."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I remember, and am of opinion that we both were and are in the right."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, but let me ask, how is the country supplied with timber for ship-building?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"There is no fir of any consequence, nor pine, and not much cypress; and you will find very little stone-pine or plane-wood, which shipwrights always require for the interior of ships."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"These are also natural advantages."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Why so?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Because no city ought to be easily able to imitate its enemies in what is mischievous."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How does that bear upon any of the matters of which we have been speaking?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Remember, my good friend, what I said at first about the Cretan laws, that they looked to one thing only, and this, as you both agreed, was war; and I replied that such laws, in so far as they tended to promote virtue, were good; but in that they regarded a part only, and not the whole of virtue, I disapproved of them. And now I hope that you in your turn will follow and watch me if I legislate with a view to anything but virtue, or with a view to a part of virtue only. For I consider that the true lawgiver, like an archer, aims only at that on which some eternal beauty is always attending, and dismisses everything else, whether wealth or any other benefit, when separated from virtue. I was saying that the imitation of enemies was a bad thing; and I was thinking of a case in which a maritime people are harassed by enemies, as the Athenians were by Minos (I do not speak from any desire to recall past grievances); but he, as we know, was a great naval potentate, who compelled the inhabitants of Attica to pay him a cruel tribute; and in those days they had no ships of war as they now have, nor was the country filled with ship-timber, and therefore they could not readily build them. Hence they could not learn how to imitate their enemy at sea, and in this way, becoming sailors themselves, directly repel their enemies. Better for them to have lost many times over the seven youths, than that heavy-armed and stationary troops should have been turned into sailors, and accustomed to be often leaping on shore, and again to come running back to their ships; or should have fancied that there was no disgrace in not awaiting the attack of an enemy and dying boldly; and that there were good reasons, and plenty of them, for a man throwing away his arms, and betaking himself to flight,--which is not dishonourable, as people say, at certain times. This is the language of naval warfare, and is anything but worthy of extraordinary praise. For we should not teach bad habits, least of all to the best part of the citizens. You may learn the evil of such a practice from Homer, by whom Odysseus is introduced, rebuking Agamemnon, because he desires to draw down the ships to the sea at a time when the Achaeans are hard pressed by the Trojans,--he gets angry with him, and says: 'Who, at a time when the battle is in full cry, biddest to drag the well-benched ships into the sea, that the prayers of the Trojans may be accomplished yet more, and high ruin fall upon us. For the Achaeans will not maintain the battle, when the ships are drawn into the sea, but they will look behind and will cease from strife; in that the counsel which you give will prove injurious.' You see that he quite knew triremes on the sea, in the neighbourhood of fighting men, to be an evil;--lions might be trained in that way to fly from a herd of deer. Moreover, naval powers which owe their safety to ships, do not give honour to that sort of warlike excellence which is most deserving of it. For he who owes his safety to the pilot and the captain, and the oarsman, and all sorts of rather inferior persons, cannot rightly give honour to whom honour is due. But how can a state be in a right condition which cannot justly award honour?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"It is hardly possible, I admit; and yet, Stranger, we Cretans are in the habit of saying that the battle of Salamis was the salvation of Hellas."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Why, yes; and that is an opinion which is widely spread both among Hellenes and barbarians. But Megillus and I say rather, that the battle of Marathon was the beginning, and the battle of Plataea the completion, of the great deliverance, and that these battles by land made the Hellenes better; whereas the sea-fights of Salamis and Artemisium--for I may as well put them both together--made them no better, if I may say so without offence about the battles which helped to save us. And in estimating the goodness of a state, we regard both the situation of the country and the order of the laws, considering that the mere preservation and continuance of life is not the most honourable thing for men, as the vulgar think, but the continuance of the best life, while we live; and that again, if I am not mistaken, is a remark which has been made already."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then we have only to ask, whether we are taking the course which we acknowledge to be the best for the settlement and legislation of states."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"The best by far."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And now let me proceed to another question: Who are to be the colonists? May any one come out of all Crete; and is the idea that the population in the several states is too numerous for the means of subsistence? For I suppose that you are not going to send out a general invitation to any Hellene who likes to come. And yet I observe that to your country settlers have come from Argos and Aegina and other parts of Hellas. Tell me, then, whence do you draw your recruits in the present enterprise?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"They will come from all Crete; and of other Hellenes, Peloponnesians will be most acceptable. For, as you truly observe, there are Cretans of Argive descent; and the race of Cretans which has the highest character at the present day is the Gortynian, and this has come from Gortys in the Peloponnesus."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Cities find colonization in some respects easier if the colonists are one race, which like a swarm of bees is sent out from a single country, either when friends leave friends, owing to some pressure of population or other similar necessity, or when a portion of a state is driven by factions to emigrate. And there have been whole cities which have taken flight when utterly conquered by a superior power in war. This, however, which is in one way an advantage to the colonist or legislator, in another point of view creates a difficulty. There is an element of friendship in the community of race, and language, and laws, and in common temples and rites of worship; but colonies which are of this homogeneous sort are apt to kick against any laws or any form of constitution differing from that which they had at home; and although the badness of their own laws may have been the cause of the factions which prevailed among them, yet from the force of habit they would fain preserve the very customs which were their ruin, and the leader of the colony, who is their legislator, finds them troublesome and rebellious. On the other hand, the conflux of several populations might be more disposed to listen to new laws; but then, to make them combine and pull together, as they say of horses, is a most difficult task, and the work of years. And yet there is nothing which tends more to the improvement of mankind than legislation and colonization."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"No doubt; but I should like to know why you say so."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"My good friend, I am afraid that the course of my speculations is leading me to say something depreciatory of legislators; but if the word be to the purpose, there can be no harm. And yet, why am I disquieted, for I believe that the same principle applies equally to all human things?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To what are you referring?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I was going to say that man never legislates, but accidents of all sorts, which legislate for us in all sorts of ways. The violence of war and the hard necessity of poverty are constantly overturning governments and changing laws. And the power of disease has often caused innovations in the state, when there have been pestilences, or when there has been a succession of bad seasons continuing during many years. Any one who sees all this, naturally rushes to the conclusion of which I was speaking, that no mortal legislates in anything, but that in human affairs chance is almost everything. And this may be said of the arts of the sailor, and the pilot, and the physician, and the general, and may seem to be well said; and yet there is another thing which may be said with equal truth of all of them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That God governs all things, and that chance and opportunity co-operate with Him in the government of human affairs. There is, however, a third and less extreme view, that art should be there also; for I should say that in a storm there must surely be a great advantage in having the aid of the pilot's art. You would agree?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And does not a like principle apply to legislation as well as to other things: even supposing all the conditions to be favourable which are needed for the happiness of the state, yet the true legislator must from time to time appear on the scene?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In each case the artist would be able to pray rightly for certain conditions, and if these were granted by fortune, he would then only require to exercise his art?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And all the other artists just now mentioned, if they were bidden to offer up each their special prayer, would do so?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And the legislator would do likewise?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I believe that he would."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"'Come, legislator,' we will say to him; 'what are the conditions which you require in a state before you can organize it?' How ought he to answer this question? Shall I give his answer?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"He will say--'Give me a state which is governed by a tyrant, and let the tyrant be young and have a good memory; let him be quick at learning, and of a courageous and noble nature; let him have that quality which, as I said before, is the inseparable companion of all the other parts of virtue, if there is to be any good in them.'"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I suppose, Megillus, that this companion virtue of which the Stranger speaks, must be temperance?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes, Cleinias, temperance in the vulgar sense; not that which in the forced and exaggerated language of some philosophers is called prudence, but that which is the natural gift of children and animals, of whom some live continently and others incontinently, but when isolated, was, as we said, hardly worth reckoning in the catalogue of goods. I think that you must understand my meaning."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then our tyrant must have this as well as the other qualities, if the state is to acquire in the best manner and in the shortest time the form of government which is most conducive to happiness; for there neither is nor ever will be a better or speedier way of establishing a polity than by a tyranny."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By what possible arguments, Stranger, can any man persuade himself of such a monstrous doctrine?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There is surely no difficulty in seeing, Cleinias, what is in accordance with the order of nature?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You would assume, as you say, a tyrant who was young, temperate, quick at learning, having a good memory, courageous, of a noble nature?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes; and you must add fortunate; and his good fortune must be that he is the contemporary of a great legislator, and that some happy chance brings them together. When this has been accomplished, God has done all that he ever does for a state which he desires to be eminently prosperous; He has done second best for a state in which there are two such rulers, and third best for a state in which there are three. The difficulty increases with the increase, and diminishes with the diminution of the number."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You mean to say, I suppose, that the best government is produced from a tyranny, and originates in a good lawgiver and an orderly tyrant, and that the change from such a tyranny into a perfect form of government takes place most easily; less easily when from an oligarchy; and, in the third degree, from a democracy: is not that your meaning?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Not so; I mean rather to say that the change is best made out of a tyranny; and secondly, out of a monarchy; and thirdly, out of some sort of democracy: fourth, in the capacity for improvement, comes oligarchy, which has the greatest difficulty in admitting of such a change, because the government is in the hands of a number of potentates. I am supposing that the legislator is by nature of the true sort, and that his strength is united with that of the chief men of the state; and when the ruling element is numerically small, and at the same time very strong, as in a tyranny, there the change is likely to be easiest and most rapid."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How? I do not understand."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And yet I have repeated what I am saying a good many times; but I suppose that you have never seen a city which is under a tyranny?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"No, and I cannot say that I have any great desire to see one."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And yet, where there is a tyranny, you might certainly see that of which I am now speaking."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I mean that you might see how, without trouble and in no very long period of time, the tyrant, if he wishes, can change the manners of a state: he has only to go in the direction of virtue or of vice, whichever he prefers, he himself indicating by his example the lines of conduct, praising and rewarding some actions and reproving others, and degrading those who disobey."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"But how can we imagine that the citizens in general will at once follow the example set to them; and how can he have this power both of persuading and of compelling them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let no one, my friends, persuade us that there is any quicker and easier way in which states change their laws than when the rulers lead: such changes never have, nor ever will, come to pass in any other way. The real impossibility or difficulty is of another sort, and is rarely surmounted in the course of ages; but when once it is surmounted, ten thousand or rather all blessings follow."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of what are you speaking?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The difficulty is to find the divine love of temperate and just institutions existing in any powerful forms of government, whether in a monarchy or oligarchy of wealth or of birth. You might as well hope to reproduce the character of Nestor, who is said to have excelled all men in the power of speech, and yet more in his temperance. This, however, according to the tradition, was in the times of Troy; in our own days there is nothing of the sort; but if such an one either has or ever shall come into being, or is now among us, blessed is he and blessed are they who hear the wise words that flow from his lips. And this may be said of power in general: When the supreme power in man coincides with the greatest wisdom and temperance, then the best laws and the best constitution come into being; but in no other way. And let what I have been saying be regarded as a kind of sacred legend or oracle, and let this be our proof that, in one point of view, there may be a difficulty for a city to have good laws, but that there is another point of view in which nothing can be easier or sooner effected, granting our supposition."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us try to amuse ourselves, old boys as we are, by moulding in words the laws which are suitable to your state."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Let us proceed without delay."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then let us invoke God at the settlement of our state; may He hear and be propitious to us, and come and set in order the State and the laws!"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"May He come!"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But what form of polity are we going to give the city?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Tell us what you mean a little more clearly. Do you mean some form of democracy, or oligarchy, or aristocracy, or monarchy? For we cannot suppose that you would include tyranny."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Which of you will first tell me to which of these classes his own government is to be referred?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Ought I to answer first, since I am the elder?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Perhaps you should."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"And yet, Stranger, I perceive that I cannot say, without more thought, what I should call the government of Lacedaemon, for it seems to me to be like a tyranny,--the power of our Ephors is marvellously tyrannical; and sometimes it appears to me to be of all cities the most democratical; and who can reasonably deny that it is an aristocracy (compare Ar. Pol.)? We have also a monarchy which is held for life, and is said by all mankind, and not by ourselves only, to be the most ancient of all monarchies; and, therefore, when asked on a sudden, I cannot precisely say which form of government the Spartan is."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I am in the same difficulty, Megillus; for I do not feel confident that the polity of Cnosus is any of these."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The reason is, my excellent friends, that you really have polities, but the states of which we were just now speaking are merely aggregations of men dwelling in cities who are the subjects and servants of a part of their own state, and each of them is named after the dominant power; they are not polities at all. But if states are to be named after their rulers, the true state ought to be called by the name of the God who rules over wise men."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And who is this God?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"May I still make use of fable to some extent, in the hope that I may be better able to answer your question: shall I?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In the primeval world, and a long while before the cities came into being whose settlements we have described, there is said to have been in the time of Cronos a blessed rule and life, of which the best-ordered of existing states is a copy (compare Statesman)."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"It will be very necessary to hear about that."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I quite agree with you; and therefore I have introduced the subject."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Most appropriately; and since the tale is to the point, you will do well in giving us the whole story."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will do as you suggest. There is a tradition of the happy life of mankind in days when all things were spontaneous and abundant. And of this the reason is said to have been as follows:--Cronos knew what we ourselves were declaring, that no human nature invested with supreme power is able to order human affairs and not overflow with insolence and wrong. Which reflection led him to appoint not men but demigods, who are of a higher and more divine race, to be the kings and rulers of our cities; he did as we do with flocks of sheep and other tame animals. For we do not appoint oxen to be the lords of oxen, or goats of goats; but we ourselves are a superior race, and rule over them. In like manner God, in His love of mankind, placed over us the demons, who are a superior race, and they with great ease and pleasure to themselves, and no less to us, taking care of us and giving us peace and reverence and order and justice never failing, made the tribes of men happy and united. And this tradition, which is true, declares that cities of which some mortal man and not God is the ruler, have no escape from evils and toils. Still we must do all that we can to imitate the life which is said to have existed in the days of Cronos, and, as far as the principle of immortality dwells in us, to that we must hearken, both in private and public life, and regulate our cities and houses according to law, meaning by the very term 'law,' the distribution of mind. But if either a single person or an oligarchy or a democracy has a soul eager after pleasures and desires--wanting to be filled with them, yet retaining none of them, and perpetually afflicted with an endless and insatiable disorder; and this evil spirit, having first trampled the laws under foot, becomes the master either of a state or of an individual,--then, as I was saying, salvation is hopeless. And now, Cleinias, we have to consider whether you will or will not accept this tale of mine."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly we will."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"You are aware,--are you not?--that there are often said to be as many forms of laws as there are of governments, and of the latter we have already mentioned all those which are commonly recognized. Now you must regard this as a matter of first-rate importance. For what is to be the standard of just and unjust, is once more the point at issue. Men say that the law ought not to regard either military virtue, or virtue in general, but only the interests and power and preservation of the established form of government; this is thought by them to be the best way of expressing the natural definition of justice."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Justice is said by them to be the interest of the stronger (Republic)."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Speak plainer."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will:--'Surely,' they say, 'the governing power makes whatever laws have authority in any state'?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"'Well,' they would add, 'and do you suppose that tyranny or democracy, or any other conquering power, does not make the continuance of the power which is possessed by them the first or principal object of their laws'?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How can they have any other?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"'And whoever transgresses these laws is punished as an evil-doer by the legislator, who calls the laws just'?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Naturally."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"'This, then, is always the mode and fashion in which justice exists.'"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly, if they are correct in their view."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Why, yes, this is one of those false principles of government to which we were referring."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Which do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Those which we were examining when we spoke of who ought to govern whom. Did we not arrive at the conclusion that parents ought to govern their children, and the elder the younger, and the noble the ignoble? And there were many other principles, if you remember, and they were not always consistent. One principle was this very principle of might, and we said that Pindar considered violence natural and justified it."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes; I remember."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Consider, then, to whom our state is to be entrusted. For there is a thing which has occurred times without number in states--"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What thing?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That when there has been a contest for power, those who gain the upper hand so entirely monopolize the government, as to refuse all share to the defeated party and their descendants--they live watching one another, the ruling class being in perpetual fear that some one who has a recollection of former wrongs will come into power and rise up against them. Now, according to our view, such governments are not polities at all, nor are laws right which are passed for the good of particular classes and not for the good of the whole state. States which have such laws are not polities but parties, and their notions of justice are simply unmeaning. I say this, because I am going to assert that we must not entrust the government in your state to any one because he is rich, or because he possesses any other advantage, such as strength, or stature, or again birth: but he who is most obedient to the laws of the state, he shall win the palm; and to him who is victorious in the first degree shall be given the highest office and chief ministry of the gods; and the second to him who bears the second palm; and on a similar principle shall all the other offices be assigned to those who come next in order. And when I call the rulers servants or ministers of the law, I give them this name not for the sake of novelty, but because I certainly believe that upon such service or ministry depends the well- or ill-being of the state. For that state in which the law is subject and has no authority, I perceive to be on the highway to ruin; but I see that the state in which the law is above the rulers, and the rulers are the inferiors of the law, has salvation, and every blessing which the Gods can confer."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Truly, Stranger, you see with the keen vision of age."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Why, yes; every man when he is young has that sort of vision dullest, and when he is old keenest."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And now, what is to be the next step? May we not suppose the colonists to have arrived, and proceed to make our speech to them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"'Friends,' we say to them,--'God, as the old tradition declares, holding in his hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is, travels according to His nature in a straight line towards the accomplishment of His end. Justice always accompanies Him, and is the punisher of those who fall short of the divine law. To justice, he who would be happy holds fast, and follows in her company with all humility and order; but he who is lifted up with pride, or elated by wealth or rank, or beauty, who is young and foolish, and has a soul hot with insolence, and thinks that he has no need of any guide or ruler, but is able himself to be the guide of others, he, I say, is left deserted of God; and being thus deserted, he takes to him others who are like himself, and dances about, throwing all things into confusion, and many think that he is a great man, but in a short time he pays a penalty which justice cannot but approve, and is utterly destroyed, and his family and city with him. Wherefore, seeing that human things are thus ordered, what should a wise man do or think, or not do or think'?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Every man ought to make up his mind that he will be one of the followers of God; there can be no doubt of that."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then what life is agreeable to God, and becoming in His followers? One only, expressed once for all in the old saying that 'like agrees with like, with measure measure,' but things which have no measure agree neither with themselves nor with the things which have. Now God ought to be to us the measure of all things, and not man (compare Crat.; Theaet.), as men commonly say (Protagoras): the words are far more true of Him. And he who would be dear to God must, as far as is possible, be like Him and such as He is. Wherefore the temperate man is the friend of God, for he is like Him; and the intemperate man is unlike Him, and different from Him, and unjust. And the same applies to other things; and this is the conclusion, which is also the noblest and truest of all sayings,--that for the good man to offer sacrifice to the Gods, and hold converse with them by means of prayers and offerings and every kind of service, is the noblest and best of all things, and also the most conducive to a happy life, and very fit and meet. But with the bad man, the opposite of this is true: for the bad man has an impure soul, whereas the good is pure; and from one who is polluted, neither a good man nor God can without impropriety receive gifts. Wherefore the unholy do only waste their much service upon the Gods, but when offered by any holy man, such service is most acceptable to them. This is the mark at which we ought to aim. But what weapons shall we use, and how shall we direct them? In the first place, we affirm that next after the Olympian Gods and the Gods of the State, honour should be given to the Gods below; they should receive everything in even numbers, and of the second choice, and ill omen, while the odd numbers, and the first choice, and the things of lucky omen, are given to the Gods above, by him who would rightly hit the mark of piety. Next to these Gods, a wise man will do service to the demons or spirits, and then to the heroes, and after them will follow the private and ancestral Gods, who are worshipped as the law prescribes in the places which are sacred to them. Next comes the honour of living parents, to whom, as is meet, we have to pay the first and greatest and oldest of all debts, considering that all which a man has belongs to those who gave him birth and brought him up, and that he must do all that he can to minister to them, first, in his property, secondly, in his person, and thirdly, in his soul, in return for the endless care and travail which they bestowed upon him of old, in the days of his infancy, and which he is now to pay back to them when they are old and in the extremity of their need. And all his life long he ought never to utter, or to have uttered, an unbecoming word to them; for of light and fleeting words the penalty is most severe; Nemesis, the messenger of justice, is appointed to watch over all such matters. When they are angry and want to satisfy their feelings in word or deed, he should give way to them; for a father who thinks that he has been wronged by his son may be reasonably expected to be very angry. At their death, the most moderate funeral is best, neither exceeding the customary expense, nor yet falling short of the honour which has been usually shown by the former generation to their parents. And let a man not forget to pay the yearly tribute of respect to the dead, honouring them chiefly by omitting nothing that conduces to a perpetual remembrance of them, and giving a reasonable portion of his fortune to the dead. Doing this, and living after this manner, we shall receive our reward from the Gods and those who are above us (i.e. the demons); and we shall spend our days for the most part in good hope. And how a man ought to order what relates to his descendants and his kindred and friends and fellow-citizens, and the rites of hospitality taught by Heaven, and the intercourse which arises out of all these duties, with a view to the embellishment and orderly regulation of his own life--these things, I say, the laws, as we proceed with them, will accomplish, partly persuading, and partly when natures do not yield to the persuasion of custom, chastising them by might and right, and will thus render our state, if the Gods co-operate with us, prosperous and happy. But of what has to be said, and must be said by the legislator who is of my way of thinking, and yet, if said in the form of law, would be out of place--of this I think that he may give a sample for the instruction of himself and of those for whom he is legislating; and then when, as far as he is able, he has gone through all the preliminaries, he may proceed to the work of legislation. Now, what will be the form of such prefaces? There may be a difficulty in including or describing them all under a single form, but I think that we may get some notion of them if we can guarantee one thing."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is that?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I should wish the citizens to be as readily persuaded to virtue as possible; this will surely be the aim of the legislator in all his laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The proposal appears to me to be of some value; and I think that a person will listen with more gentleness and good-will to the precepts addressed to him by the legislator, when his soul is not altogether unprepared to receive them. Even a little done in the way of conciliation gains his ear, and is always worth having. For there is no great inclination or readiness on the part of mankind to be made as good, or as quickly good, as possible. The case of the many proves the wisdom of Hesiod, who says that the road to wickedness is smooth and can be travelled without perspiring, because it is so very short: 'But before virtue the immortal Gods have placed the sweat of labour, and long and steep is the way thither, and rugged at first; but when you have reached the top, although difficult before, it is then easy.' (Works and Days.)"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes; and he certainly speaks well."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Very true: and now let me tell you the effect which the preceding discourse has had upon me."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Suppose that we have a little conversation with the legislator, and say to him--'O, legislator, speak; if you know what we ought to say and do, you can surely tell.'"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course he can."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"'Did we not hear you just now saying, that the legislator ought not to allow the poets to do what they liked? For that they would not know in which of their words they went against the laws, to the hurt of the state.'"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"May we not fairly make answer to him on behalf of the poets?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What answer shall we make to him?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That the poet, according to the tradition which has ever prevailed among us, and is accepted of all men, when he sits down on the tripod of the muse, is not in his right mind; like a fountain, he allows to flow out freely whatever comes in, and his art being imitative, he is often compelled to represent men of opposite dispositions, and thus to contradict himself; neither can he tell whether there is more truth in one thing that he has said than in another. This is not the case in a law; the legislator must give not two rules about the same thing, but one only. Take an example from what you have just been saying. Of three kinds of funerals, there is one which is too extravagant, another is too niggardly, the third in a mean; and you choose and approve and order the last without qualification. But if I had an extremely rich wife, and she bade me bury her and describe her burial in a poem, I should praise the extravagant sort; and a poor miserly man, who had not much money to spend, would approve of the niggardly; and the man of moderate means, who was himself moderate, would praise a moderate funeral. Now you in the capacity of legislator must not barely say 'a moderate funeral,' but you must define what moderation is, and how much; unless you are definite, you must not suppose that you are speaking a language that can become law."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And is our legislator to have no preface to his laws, but to say at once Do this, avoid that--and then holding the penalty in terrorem, to go on to another law; offering never a word of advice or exhortation to those for whom he is legislating, after the manner of some doctors? For of doctors, as I may remind you, some have a gentler, others a ruder method of cure; and as children ask the doctor to be gentle with them, so we will ask the legislator to cure our disorders with the gentlest remedies. What I mean to say is, that besides doctors there are doctors' servants, who are also styled doctors."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And whether they are slaves or freemen makes no difference; they acquire their knowledge of medicine by obeying and observing their masters; empirically and not according to the natural way of learning, as the manner of freemen is, who have learned scientifically themselves the art which they impart scientifically to their pupils. You are aware that there are these two classes of doctors?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And did you ever observe that there are two classes of patients in states, slaves and freemen; and the slave doctors run about and cure the slaves, or wait for them in the dispensaries--practitioners of this sort never talk to their patients individually, or let them talk about their own individual complaints? The slave doctor prescribes what mere experience suggests, as if he had exact knowledge; and when he has given his orders, like a tyrant, he rushes off with equal assurance to some other servant who is ill; and so he relieves the master of the house of the care of his invalid slaves. But the other doctor, who is a freeman, attends and practices upon freemen; and he carries his enquiries far back, and goes into the nature of the disorder; he enters into discourse with the patient and with his friends, and is at once getting information from the sick man, and also instructing him as far as he is able, and he will not prescribe for him until he has first convinced him; at last, when he has brought the patient more and more under his persuasive influences and set him on the road to health, he attempts to effect a cure. Now which is the better way of proceeding in a physician and in a trainer? Is he the better who accomplishes his ends in a double way, or he who works in one way, and that the ruder and inferior?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I should say, Stranger, that the double way is far better."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Should you like to see an example of the double and single method in legislation?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly I should."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"What will be our first law? Will not the legislator, observing the order of nature, begin by making regulations for states about births?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"He will."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In all states the birth of children goes back to the connexion of marriage?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And, according to the true order, the laws relating to marriage should be those which are first determined in every state?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite so."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then let me first give the law of marriage in a simple form; it may run as follows:--A man shall marry between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, or, if he does not, he shall pay such and such a fine, or shall suffer the loss of such and such privileges. This would be the simple law about marriage. The double law would run thus:--A man shall marry between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, considering that in a manner the human race naturally partakes of immortality, which every man is by nature inclined to desire to the utmost; for the desire of every man that he may become famous, and not lie in the grave without a name, is only the love of continuance. Now mankind are coeval with all time, and are ever following, and will ever follow, the course of time; and so they are immortal, because they leave children's children behind them, and partake of immortality in the unity of generation. And for a man voluntarily to deprive himself of this gift, as he deliberately does who will not have a wife or children, is impiety. He who obeys the law shall be free, and shall pay no fine; but he who is disobedient, and does not marry, when he has arrived at the age of thirty-five, shall pay a yearly fine of a certain amount, in order that he may not imagine his celibacy to bring ease and profit to him; and he shall not share in the honours which the young men in the state give to the aged. Comparing now the two forms of the law, you will be able to arrive at a judgment about any other laws--whether they should be double in length even when shortest, because they have to persuade as well as threaten, or whether they shall only threaten and be of half the length."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"The shorter form, Stranger, would be more in accordance with Lacedaemonian custom; although, for my own part, if any one were to ask me which I myself prefer in the state, I should certainly determine in favour of the longer; and I would have every law made after the same pattern, if I had to choose. But I think that Cleinias is the person to be consulted, for his is the state which is going to use these laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Thank you, Megillus."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Whether, in the abstract, words are to be many or few, is a very foolish question; the best form, and not the shortest, is to be approved; nor is length at all to be regarded. Of the two forms of law which have been recited, the one is not only twice as good in practical usefulness as the other, but the case is like that of the two kinds of doctors, which I was just now mentioning. And yet legislators never appear to have considered that they have two instruments which they might use in legislation--persuasion and force; for in dealing with the rude and uneducated multitude, they use the one only as far as they can; they do not mingle persuasion with coercion, but employ force pure and simple. Moreover, there is a third point, sweet friends, which ought to be, and never is, regarded in our existing laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"A point arising out of our previous discussion, which comes into my mind in some mysterious way. All this time, from early dawn until noon, have we been talking about laws in this charming retreat: now we are going to promulgate our laws, and what has preceded was only the prelude of them. Why do I mention this? For this reason:--Because all discourses and vocal exercises have preludes and overtures, which are a sort of artistic beginnings intended to help the strain which is to be performed; lyric measures and music of every other kind have preludes framed with wonderful care. But of the truer and higher strain of law and politics, no one has ever yet uttered any prelude, or composed or published any, as though there was no such thing in nature. Whereas our present discussion seems to me to imply that there is;--these double laws, of which we were speaking, are not exactly double, but they are in two parts, the law and the prelude of the law. The arbitrary command, which was compared to the commands of doctors, whom we described as of the meaner sort, was the law pure and simple; and that which preceded, and was described by our friend here as being hortatory only, was, although in fact, an exhortation, likewise analogous to the preamble of a discourse. For I imagine that all this language of conciliation, which the legislator has been uttering in the preface of the law, was intended to create good-will in the person whom he addressed, in order that, by reason of this good-will, he might more intelligently receive his command, that is to say, the law. And therefore, in my way of speaking, this is more rightly described as the preamble than as the matter of the law. And I must further proceed to observe, that to all his laws, and to each separately, the legislator should prefix a preamble; he should remember how great will be the difference between them, according as they have, or have not, such preambles, as in the case already given."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"The lawgiver, if he asks my opinion, will certainly legislate in the form which you advise."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I think that you are right, Cleinias, in affirming that all laws have preambles, and that throughout the whole of this work of legislation every single law should have a suitable preamble at the beginning; for that which is to follow is most important, and it makes all the difference whether we clearly remember the preambles or not. Yet we should be wrong in requiring that all laws, small and great alike, should have preambles of the same kind, any more than all songs or speeches; although they may be natural to all, they are not always necessary, and whether they are to be employed or not has in each case to be left to the judgment of the speaker or the musician, or, in the present instance, of the lawgiver."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That I think is most true. And now, Stranger, without delay let us return to the argument, and, as people say in play, make a second and better beginning, if you please, with the principles which we have been laying down, which we never thought of regarding as a preamble before, but of which we may now make a preamble, and not merely consider them to be chance topics of discourse. Let us acknowledge, then, that we have a preamble. About the honour of the Gods and the respect of parents, enough has been already said; and we may proceed to the topics which follow next in order, until the preamble is deemed by you to be complete; and after that you shall go through the laws themselves."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I understand you to mean that we have made a sufficient preamble about Gods and demigods, and about parents living or dead; and now you would have us bring the rest of the subject into the light of day?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"After this, as is meet and for the interest of us all, I the speaker, and you the listeners, will try to estimate all that relates to the souls and bodies and properties of the citizens, as regards both their occupations and amusements, and thus arrive, as far as in us lies, at the nature of education. These then are the topics which follow next in order."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good. BOOK V."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Listen, all ye who have just now heard the laws about Gods, and about our dear forefathers:--Of all the things which a man has, next to the Gods, his soul is the most divine and most truly his own. Now in every man there are two parts: the better and superior, which rules, and the worse and inferior, which serves; and the ruling part of him is always to be preferred to the subject. Wherefore I am right in bidding every one next to the Gods, who are our masters, and those who in order follow them (i.e. the demons), to honour his own soul, which every one seems to honour, but no one honours as he ought; for honour is a divine good, and no evil thing is honourable; and he who thinks that he can honour the soul by word or gift, or any sort of compliance, without making her in any way better, seems to honour her, but honours her not at all. For example, every man, from his very boyhood, fancies that he is able to know everything, and thinks that he honours his soul by praising her, and he is very ready to let her do whatever she may like. But I mean to say that in acting thus he injures his soul, and is far from honouring her; whereas, in our opinion, he ought to honour her as second only to the Gods. Again, when a man thinks that others are to be blamed, and not himself, for the errors which he has committed from time to time, and the many and great evils which befell him in consequence, and is always fancying himself to be exempt and innocent, he is under the idea that he is honouring his soul; whereas the very reverse is the fact, for he is really injuring her. And when, disregarding the word and approval of the legislator, he indulges in pleasure, then again he is far from honouring her; he only dishonours her, and fills her full of evil and remorse; or when he does not endure to the end the labours and fears and sorrows and pains which the legislator approves, but gives way before them, then, by yielding, he does not honour the soul, but by all such conduct he makes her to be dishonourable; nor when he thinks that life at any price is a good, does he honour her, but yet once more he dishonours her; for the soul having a notion that the world below is all evil, he yields to her, and does not resist and teach or convince her that, for aught she knows, the world of the Gods below, instead of being evil, may be the greatest of all goods. Again, when any one prefers beauty to virtue, what is this but the real and utter dishonour of the soul? For such a preference implies that the body is more honourable than the soul; and this is false, for there is nothing of earthly birth which is more honourable than the heavenly, and he who thinks otherwise of the soul has no idea how greatly he undervalues this wonderful possession; nor, again, when a person is willing, or not unwilling, to acquire dishonest gains, does he then honour his soul with gifts--far otherwise; he sells her glory and honour for a small piece of gold; but all the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue. In a word, I may say that he who does not estimate the base and evil, the good and noble, according to the standard of the legislator, and abstain in every possible way from the one and practise the other to the utmost of his power, does not know that in all these respects he is most foully and disgracefully abusing his soul, which is the divinest part of man; for no one, as I may say, ever considers that which is declared to be the greatest penalty of evil-doing--namely, to grow into the likeness of bad men, and growing like them to fly from the conversation of the good, and be cut off from them, and cleave to and follow after the company of the bad. And he who is joined to them must do and suffer what such men by nature do and say to one another,--a suffering which is not justice but retribution; for justice and the just are noble, whereas retribution is the suffering which waits upon injustice; and whether a man escape or endure this, he is miserable,--in the former case, because he is not cured; while in the latter, he perishes in order that the rest of mankind may be saved. Speaking generally, our glory is to follow the better and improve the inferior, which is susceptible of improvement, as far as this is possible. And of all human possessions, the soul is by nature most inclined to avoid the evil, and track out and find the chief good; which when a man has found, he should take up his abode with it during the remainder of his life. Wherefore the soul also is second (or next to God) in honour; and third, as every one will perceive, comes the honour of the body in natural order. Having determined this, we have next to consider that there is a natural honour of the body, and that of honours some are true and some are counterfeit. To decide which are which is the business of the legislator; and he, I suspect, would intimate that they are as follows:--Honour is not to be given to the fair body, or to the strong or the swift or the tall, or to the healthy body (although many may think otherwise), any more than to their opposites; but the mean states of all these habits are by far the safest and most moderate; for the one extreme makes the soul braggart and insolent, and the other, illiberal and base; and money, and property, and distinction all go to the same tune. The excess of any of these things is apt to be a source of hatreds and divisions among states and individuals; and the defect of them is commonly a cause of slavery. And, therefore, I would not have any one fond of heaping up riches for the sake of his children, in order that he may leave them as rich as possible. For the possession of great wealth is of no use, either to them or to the state. The condition of youth which is free from flattery, and at the same time not in need of the necessaries of life, is the best and most harmonious of all, being in accord and agreement with our nature, and making life to be most entirely free from sorrow. Let parents, then, bequeath to their children not a heap of riches, but the spirit of reverence. We, indeed, fancy that they will inherit reverence from us, if we rebuke them when they show a want of reverence. But this quality is not really imparted to them by the present style of admonition, which only tells them that the young ought always to be reverential. A sensible legislator will rather exhort the elders to reverence the younger, and above all to take heed that no young man sees or hears one of themselves doing or saying anything disgraceful; for where old men have no shame, there young men will most certainly be devoid of reverence. The best way of training the young is to train yourself at the same time; not to admonish them, but to be always carrying out your own admonitions in practice. He who honours his kindred, and reveres those who share in the same Gods and are of the same blood and family, may fairly expect that the Gods who preside over generation will be propitious to him, and will quicken his seed. And he who deems the services which his friends and acquaintances do for him, greater and more important than they themselves deem them, and his own favours to them less than theirs to him, will have their good-will in the intercourse of life. And surely in his relations to the state and his fellow citizens, he is by far the best, who rather than the Olympic or any other victory of peace or war, desires to win the palm of obedience to the laws of his country, and who, of all mankind, is the person reputed to have obeyed them best through life. In his relations to strangers, a man should consider that a contract is a most holy thing, and that all concerns and wrongs of strangers are more directly dependent on the protection of God, than wrongs done to citizens; for the stranger, having no kindred and friends, is more to be pitied by Gods and men. Wherefore, also, he who is most able to avenge him is most zealous in his cause; and he who is most able is the genius and the god of the stranger, who follow in the train of Zeus, the god of strangers. And for this reason, he who has a spark of caution in him, will do his best to pass through life without sinning against the stranger. And of offences committed, whether against strangers or fellow-countrymen, that against suppliants is the greatest. For the God who witnessed to the agreement made with the suppliant, becomes in a special manner the guardian of the sufferer; and he will certainly not suffer unavenged. Thus we have fairly described the manner in which a man is to act about his parents, and himself, and his own affairs; and in relation to the state, and his friends, and kindred, both in what concerns his own countrymen, and in what concerns the stranger. We will now consider what manner of man he must be who would best pass through life in respect of those other things which are not matters of law, but of praise and blame only; in which praise and blame educate a man, and make him more tractable and amenable to the laws which are about to be imposed. Truth is the beginning of every good thing, both to Gods and men; and he who would be blessed and happy, should be from the first a partaker of the truth, that he may live a true man as long as possible, for then he can be trusted; but he is not to be trusted who loves voluntary falsehood, and he who loves involuntary falsehood is a fool. Neither condition is enviable, for the untrustworthy and ignorant has no friend, and as time advances he becomes known, and lays up in store for himself isolation in crabbed age when life is on the wane: so that, whether his children or friends are alive or not, he is equally solitary.--Worthy of honour is he who does no injustice, and of more than twofold honour, if he not only does no injustice himself, but hinders others from doing any; the first may count as one man, the second is worth many men, because he informs the rulers of the injustice of others. And yet more highly to be esteemed is he who co-operates with the rulers in correcting the citizens as far as he can--he shall be proclaimed the great and perfect citizen, and bear away the palm of virtue. The same praise may be given about temperance and wisdom, and all other goods which may be imparted to others, as well as acquired by a man for himself; he who imparts them shall be honoured as the man of men, and he who is willing, yet is not able, may be allowed the second place; but he who is jealous and will not, if he can help, allow others to partake in a friendly way of any good, is deserving of blame: the good, however, which he has, is not to be undervalued by us because it is possessed by him, but must be acquired by us also to the utmost of our power. Let every man, then, freely strive for the prize of virtue, and let there be no envy. For the unenvious nature increases the greatness of states--he himself contends in the race, blasting the fair fame of no man; but the envious, who thinks that he ought to get the better by defaming others, is less energetic himself in the pursuit of true virtue, and reduces his rivals to despair by his unjust slanders of them. And so he makes the whole city to enter the arena untrained in the practice of virtue, and diminishes her glory as far as in him lies. Now every man should be valiant, but he should also be gentle. From the cruel, or hardly curable, or altogether incurable acts of injustice done to him by others, a man can only escape by fighting and defending himself and conquering, and by never ceasing to punish them; and no man who is not of a noble spirit is able to accomplish this. As to the actions of those who do evil, but whose evil is curable, in the first place, let us remember that the unjust man is not unjust of his own free will. For no man of his own free will would choose to possess the greatest of evils, and least of all in the most honourable part of himself. And the soul, as we said, is of a truth deemed by all men the most honourable. In the soul, then, which is the most honourable part of him, no one, if he could help, would admit, or allow to continue the greatest of evils (compare Republic). The unrighteous and vicious are always to be pitied in any case; and one can afford to forgive as well as pity him who is curable, and refrain and calm one's anger, not getting into a passion, like a woman, and nursing ill-feeling. But upon him who is incapable of reformation and wholly evil, the vials of our wrath should be poured out; wherefore I say that good men ought, when occasion demands, to be both gentle and passionate. Of all evils the greatest is one which in the souls of most men is innate, and which a man is always excusing in himself and never correcting; I mean, what is expressed in the saying that 'Every man by nature is and ought to be his own friend.' Whereas the excessive love of self is in reality the source to each man of all offences; for the lover is blinded about the beloved, so that he judges wrongly of the just, the good, and the honourable, and thinks that he ought always to prefer himself to the truth. But he who would be a great man ought to regard, not himself or his interests, but what is just, whether the just act be his own or that of another. Through a similar error men are induced to fancy that their own ignorance is wisdom, and thus we who may be truly said to know nothing, think that we know all things; and because we will not let others act for us in what we do not know, we are compelled to act amiss ourselves. Wherefore let every man avoid excess of self-love, and condescend to follow a better man than himself, not allowing any false shame to stand in the way. There are also minor precepts which are often repeated, and are quite as useful; a man should recollect them and remind himself of them. For when a stream is flowing out, there should be water flowing in too; and recollection flows in while wisdom is departing. Therefore I say that a man should refrain from excess either of laughter or tears, and should exhort his neighbour to do the same; he should veil his immoderate sorrow or joy, and seek to behave with propriety, whether the genius of his good fortune remains with him, or whether at the crisis of his fate, when he seems to be mounting high and steep places, the Gods oppose him in some of his enterprises. Still he may ever hope, in the case of good men, that whatever afflictions are to befall them in the future God will lessen, and that present evils He will change for the better; and as to the goods which are the opposite of these evils, he will not doubt that they will be added to them, and that they will be fortunate. Such should be men's hopes, and such should be the exhortations with which they admonish one another, never losing an opportunity, but on every occasion distinctly reminding themselves and others of all these things, both in jest and earnest. Enough has now been said of divine matters, both as touching the practices which men ought to follow, and as to the sort of persons who they ought severally to be. But of human things we have not as yet spoken, and we must; for to men we are discoursing and not to Gods. Pleasures and pains and desires are a part of human nature, and on them every mortal being must of necessity hang and depend with the most eager interest. And therefore we must praise the noblest life, not only as the fairest in appearance, but as being one which, if a man will only taste, and not, while still in his youth, desert for another, he will find to surpass also in the very thing which we all of us desire,--I mean in having a greater amount of pleasure and less of pain during the whole of life. And this will be plain, if a man has a true taste of them, as will be quickly and clearly seen. But what is a true taste? That we have to learn from the argument--the point being what is according to nature, and what is not according to nature. One life must be compared with another, the more pleasurable with the more painful, after this manner:--We desire to have pleasure, but we neither desire nor choose pain; and the neutral state we are ready to take in exchange, not for pleasure but for pain; and we also wish for less pain and greater pleasure, but less pleasure and greater pain we do not wish for; and an equal balance of either we cannot venture to assert that we should desire. And all these differ or do not differ severally in number and magnitude and intensity and equality, and in the opposites of these when regarded as objects of choice, in relation to desire. And such being the necessary order of things, we wish for that life in which there are many great and intense elements of pleasure and pain, and in which the pleasures are in excess, and do not wish for that in which the opposites exceed; nor, again, do we wish for that in which the elements of either are small and few and feeble, and the pains exceed. And when, as I said before, there is a balance of pleasure and pain in life, this is to be regarded by us as the balanced life; while other lives are preferred by us because they exceed in what we like, or are rejected by us because they exceed in what we dislike. All the lives of men may be regarded by us as bound up in these, and we must also consider what sort of lives we by nature desire. And if we wish for any others, I say that we desire them only through some ignorance and inexperience of the lives which actually exist. Now, what lives are they, and how many in which, having searched out and beheld the objects of will and desire and their opposites, and making of them a law, choosing, I say, the dear and the pleasant and the best and noblest, a man may live in the happiest way possible? Let us say that the temperate life is one kind of life, and the rational another, and the courageous another, and the healthful another; and to these four let us oppose four other lives--the foolish, the cowardly, the intemperate, the diseased. He who knows the temperate life will describe it as in all things gentle, having gentle pains and gentle pleasures, and placid desires and loves not insane; whereas the intemperate life is impetuous in all things, and has violent pains and pleasures, and vehement and stinging desires, and loves utterly insane; and in the temperate life the pleasures exceed the pains, but in the intemperate life the pains exceed the pleasures in greatness and number and frequency. Hence one of the two lives is naturally and necessarily more pleasant and the other more painful, and he who would live pleasantly cannot possibly choose to live intemperately. And if this is true, the inference clearly is that no man is voluntarily intemperate; but that the whole multitude of men lack temperance in their lives, either from ignorance, or from want of self-control, or both. And the same holds of the diseased and healthy life; they both have pleasures and pains, but in health the pleasure exceeds the pain, and in sickness the pain exceeds the pleasure. Now our intention in choosing the lives is not that the painful should exceed, but the life in which pain is exceeded by pleasure we have determined to be the more pleasant life. And we should say that the temperate life has the elements both of pleasure and pain fewer and smaller and less frequent than the intemperate, and the wise life than the foolish life, and the life of courage than the life of cowardice; one of each pair exceeding in pleasure and the other in pain, the courageous surpassing the cowardly, and the wise exceeding the foolish. And so the one class of lives exceeds the other class in pleasure; the temperate and courageous and wise and healthy exceed the cowardly and foolish and intemperate and diseased lives; and generally speaking, that which has any virtue, whether of body or soul, is pleasanter than the vicious life, and far superior in beauty and rectitude and excellence and reputation, and causes him who lives accordingly to be infinitely happier than the opposite. Enough of the preamble; and now the laws should follow; or, to speak more correctly, an outline of them. As, then, in the case of a web or any other tissue, the warp and the woof cannot be made of the same materials (compare Statesman), but the warp is necessarily superior as being stronger, and having a certain character of firmness, whereas the woof is softer and has a proper degree of elasticity;--in a similar manner those who are to hold great offices in states, should be distinguished truly in each case from those who have been but slenderly proven by education. Let us suppose that there are two parts in the constitution of a state--one the creation of offices, the other the laws which are assigned to them to administer. But, before all this, comes the following consideration:--The shepherd or herdsman, or breeder of horses or the like, when he has received his animals will not begin to train them until he has first purified them in a manner which befits a community of animals; he will divide the healthy and unhealthy, and the good breed and the bad breed, and will send away the unhealthy and badly bred to other herds, and tend the rest, reflecting that his labours will be vain and have no effect, either on the souls or bodies of those whom nature and ill nurture have corrupted, and that they will involve in destruction the pure and healthy nature and being of every other animal, if he should neglect to purify them. Now the case of other animals is not so important--they are only worth introducing for the sake of illustration; but what relates to man is of the highest importance; and the legislator should make enquiries, and indicate what is proper for each one in the way of purification and of any other procedure. Take, for example, the purification of a city--there are many kinds of purification, some easier and others more difficult; and some of them, and the best and most difficult of them, the legislator, if he be also a despot, may be able to effect; but the legislator, who, not being a despot, sets up a new government and laws, even if he attempt the mildest of purgations, may think himself happy if he can complete his work. The best kind of purification is painful, like similar cures in medicine, involving righteous punishment and inflicting death or exile in the last resort. For in this way we commonly dispose of great sinners who are incurable, and are the greatest injury of the whole state. But the milder form of purification is as follows:--when men who have nothing, and are in want of food, show a disposition to follow their leaders in an attack on the property of the rich--these, who are the natural plague of the state, are sent away by the legislator in a friendly spirit as far as he is able; and this dismissal of them is euphemistically termed a colony. And every legislator should contrive to do this at once. Our present case, however, is peculiar. For there is no need to devise any colony or purifying separation under the circumstances in which we are placed. But as, when many streams flow together from many sources, whether springs or mountain torrents, into a single lake, we ought to attend and take care that the confluent waters should be perfectly clear, and in order to effect this, should pump and draw off and divert impurities, so in every political arrangement there may be trouble and danger. But, seeing that we are now only discoursing and not acting, let our selection be supposed to be completed, and the desired purity attained. Touching evil men, who want to join and be citizens of our state, after we have tested them by every sort of persuasion and for a sufficient time, we will prevent them from coming; but the good we will to the utmost of our ability receive as friends with open arms. Another piece of good fortune must not be forgotten, which, as we were saying, the Heraclid colony had, and which is also ours,--that we have escaped division of land and the abolition of debts; for these are always a source of dangerous contention, and a city which is driven by necessity to legislate upon such matters can neither allow the old ways to continue, nor yet venture to alter them. We must have recourse to prayers, so to speak, and hope that a slight change may be cautiously effected in a length of time. And such a change can be accomplished by those who have abundance of land, and having also many debtors, are willing, in a kindly spirit, to share with those who are in want, sometimes remitting and sometimes giving, holding fast in a path of moderation, and deeming poverty to be the increase of a man's desires and not the diminution of his property. For this is the great beginning of salvation to a state, and upon this lasting basis may be erected afterwards whatever political order is suitable under the circumstances; but if the change be based upon an unsound principle, the future administration of the country will be full of difficulties. That is a danger which, as I am saying, is escaped by us, and yet we had better say how, if we had not escaped, we might have escaped; and we may venture now to assert that no other way of escape, whether narrow or broad, can be devised but freedom from avarice and a sense of justice--upon this rock our city shall be built; for there ought to be no disputes among citizens about property. If there are quarrels of long standing among them, no legislator of any degree of sense will proceed a step in the arrangement of the state until they are settled. But that they to whom God has given, as He has to us, to be the founders of a new state as yet free from enmity--that they should create themselves enmities by their mode of distributing lands and houses, would be superhuman folly and wickedness. How then can we rightly order the distribution of the land? In the first place, the number of the citizens has to be determined, and also the number and size of the divisions into which they will have to be formed; and the land and the houses will then have to be apportioned by us as fairly as we can. The number of citizens can only be estimated satisfactorily in relation to the territory and the neighbouring states. The territory must be sufficient to maintain a certain number of inhabitants in a moderate way of life--more than this is not required; and the number of citizens should be sufficient to defend themselves against the injustice of their neighbours, and also to give them the power of rendering efficient aid to their neighbours when they are wronged. After having taken a survey of their's and their neighbours' territory, we will determine the limits of them in fact as well as in theory. And now, let us proceed to legislate with a view to perfecting the form and outline of our state. The number of our citizens shall be 5040--this will be a convenient number; and these shall be owners of the land and protectors of the allotment. The houses and the land will be divided in the same way, so that every man may correspond to a lot. Let the whole number be first divided into two parts, and then into three; and the number is further capable of being divided into four or five parts, or any number of parts up to ten. Every legislator ought to know so much arithmetic as to be able to tell what number is most likely to be useful to all cities; and we are going to take that number which contains the greatest and most regular and unbroken series of divisions. The whole of number has every possible division, and the number 5040 can be divided by exactly fifty-nine divisors, and ten of these proceed without interval from one to ten: this will furnish numbers for war and peace, and for all contracts and dealings, including taxes and divisions of the land. These properties of number should be ascertained at leisure by those who are bound by law to know them; for they are true, and should be proclaimed at the foundation of the city, with a view to use. Whether the legislator is establishing a new state or restoring an old and decayed one, in respect of Gods and temples,--the temples which are to be built in each city, and the Gods or demi-gods after whom they are to be called,--if he be a man of sense, he will make no change in anything which the oracle of Delphi, or Dodona, or the God Ammon, or any ancient tradition has sanctioned in whatever manner, whether by apparitions or reputed inspiration of Heaven, in obedience to which mankind have established sacrifices in connexion with mystic rites, either originating on the spot, or derived from Tyrrhenia or Cyprus or some other place, and on the strength of which traditions they have consecrated oracles and images, and altars and temples, and portioned out a sacred domain for each of them. The least part of all these ought not to be disturbed by the legislator; but he should assign to the several districts some God, or demi-god, or hero, and, in the distribution of the soil, should give to these first their chosen domain and all things fitting, that the inhabitants of the several districts may meet at fixed times, and that they may readily supply their various wants, and entertain one another with sacrifices, and become friends and acquaintances; for there is no greater good in a state than that the citizens should be known to one another. When not light but darkness and ignorance of each other's characters prevails among them, no one will receive the honour of which he is deserving, or the power or the justice to which he is fairly entitled: wherefore, in every state, above all things, every man should take heed that he have no deceit in him, but that he be always true and simple; and that no deceitful person take any advantage of him. The next move in our pastime of legislation, like the withdrawal of the stone from the holy line in the game of draughts, being an unusual one, will probably excite wonder when mentioned for the first time. And yet, if a man will only reflect and weigh the matter with care, he will see that our city is ordered in a manner which, if not the best, is the second best. Perhaps also some one may not approve this form, because he thinks that such a constitution is ill adapted to a legislator who has not despotic power. The truth is, that there are three forms of government, the best, the second and the third best, which we may just mention, and then leave the selection to the ruler of the settlement. Following this method in the present instance, let us speak of the states which are respectively first, second, and third in excellence, and then we will leave the choice to Cleinias now, or to any one else who may hereafter have to make a similar choice among constitutions, and may desire to give to his state some feature which is congenial to him and which he approves in his own country. The first and highest form of the state and of the government and of the law is that in which there prevails most widely the ancient saying, that 'Friends have all things in common.' Whether there is anywhere now, or will ever be, this communion of women and children and of property, in which the private and individual is altogether banished from life, and things which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have become common, and in some way see and hear and act in common, and all men express praise and blame and feel joy and sorrow on the same occasions, and whatever laws there are unite the city to the utmost (compare Republic),--whether all this is possible or not, I say that no man, acting upon any other principle, will ever constitute a state which will be truer or better or more exalted in virtue. Whether such a state is governed by Gods or sons of Gods, one, or more than one, happy are the men who, living after this manner, dwell there; and therefore to this we are to look for the pattern of the state, and to cling to this, and to seek with all our might for one which is like this. The state which we have now in hand, when created, will be nearest to immortality and the only one which takes the second place; and after that, by the grace of God, we will complete the third one. And we will begin by speaking of the nature and origin of the second. Let the citizens at once distribute their land and houses, and not till the land in common, since a community of goods goes beyond their proposed origin, and nurture, and education. But in making the distribution, let the several possessors feel that their particular lots also belong to the whole city; and seeing that the earth is their parent, let them tend her more carefully than children do their mother. For she is a goddess and their queen, and they are her mortal subjects. Such also are the feelings which they ought to entertain to the Gods and demi-gods of the country. And in order that the distribution may always remain, they ought to consider further that the present number of families should be always retained, and neither increased nor diminished. This may be secured for the whole city in the following manner:--Let the possessor of a lot leave the one of his children who is his best beloved, and one only, to be the heir of his dwelling, and his successor in the duty of ministering to the Gods, the state and the family, as well the living members of it as those who are departed when he comes into the inheritance; but of his other children, if he have more than one, he shall give the females in marriage according to the law to be hereafter enacted, and the males he shall distribute as sons to those citizens who have no children, and are disposed to receive them; or if there should be none such, and particular individuals have too many children, male or female, or too few, as in the case of barrenness--in all these cases let the highest and most honourable magistracy created by us judge and determine what is to be done with the redundant or deficient, and devise a means that the number of 5040 houses shall always remain the same. There are many ways of regulating numbers; for they in whom generation is affluent may be made to refrain (compare Arist. Pol.), and, on the other hand, special care may be taken to increase the number of births by rewards and stigmas, or we may meet the evil by the elder men giving advice and administering rebuke to the younger--in this way the object may be attained. And if after all there be very great difficulty about the equal preservation of the 5040 houses, and there be an excess of citizens, owing to the too great love of those who live together, and we are at our wits' end, there is still the old device often mentioned by us of sending out a colony, which will part friends with us, and be composed of suitable persons. If, on the other hand, there come a wave bearing a deluge of disease, or a plague of war, and the inhabitants become much fewer than the appointed number by reason of bereavement, we ought not to introduce citizens of spurious birth and education, if this can be avoided; but even God is said not to be able to fight against necessity. Wherefore let us suppose this 'high argument' of ours to address us in the following terms:--Best of men, cease not to honour according to nature similarity and equality and sameness and agreement, as regards number and every good and noble quality. And, above all, observe the aforesaid number 5040 throughout life; in the second place, do not disparage the small and modest proportions of the inheritances which you received in the distribution, by buying and selling them to one another. For then neither will the God who gave you the lot be your friend, nor will the legislator; and indeed the law declares to the disobedient that these are the terms upon which he may or may not take the lot. In the first place, the earth as he is informed is sacred to the Gods; and in the next place, priests and priestesses will offer up prayers over a first, and second, and even a third sacrifice, that he who buys or sells the houses or lands which he has received, may suffer the punishment which he deserves; and these their prayers they shall write down in the temples, on tablets of cypress-wood, for the instruction of posterity. Moreover they will set a watch over all these things, that they may be observed;--the magistracy which has the sharpest eyes shall keep watch that any infringement of these commands may be discovered and punished as offences both against the law and the God. How great is the benefit of such an ordinance to all those cities, which obey and are administered accordingly, no bad man can ever know, as the old proverb says; but only a man of experience and good habits. For in such an order of things there will not be much opportunity for making money; no man either ought, or indeed will be allowed, to exercise any ignoble occupation, of which the vulgarity is a matter of reproach to a freeman, and should never want to acquire riches by any such means. Further, the law enjoins that no private man shall be allowed to possess gold and silver, but only coin for daily use, which is almost necessary in dealing with artisans, and for payment of hirelings, whether slaves or immigrants, by all those persons who require the use of them. Wherefore our citizens, as we say, should have a coin passing current among themselves, but not accepted among the rest of mankind; with a view, however, to expeditions and journeys to other lands,--for embassies, or for any other occasion which may arise of sending out a herald, the state must also possess a common Hellenic currency. If a private person is ever obliged to go abroad, let him have the consent of the magistrates and go; and if when he returns he has any foreign money remaining, let him give the surplus back to the treasury, and receive a corresponding sum in the local currency. And if he is discovered to appropriate it, let it be confiscated, and let him who knows and does not inform be subject to curse and dishonour equally him who brought the money, and also to a fine not less in amount than the foreign money which has been brought back. In marrying and giving in marriage, no one shall give or receive any dowry at all; and no one shall deposit money with another whom he does not trust as a friend, nor shall he lend money upon interest; and the borrower should be under no obligation to repay either capital or interest. That these principles are best, any one may see who compares them with the first principle and intention of a state. The intention, as we affirm, of a reasonable statesman, is not what the many declare to be the object of a good legislator, namely, that the state for the true interests of which he is advising should be as great and as rich as possible, and should possess gold and silver, and have the greatest empire by sea and land;--this they imagine to be the real object of legislation, at the same time adding, inconsistently, that the true legislator desires to have the city the best and happiest possible. But they do not see that some of these things are possible, and some of them are impossible; and he who orders the state will desire what is possible, and will not indulge in vain wishes or attempts to accomplish that which is impossible. The citizen must indeed be happy and good, and the legislator will seek to make him so; but very rich and very good at the same time he cannot be, not, at least, in the sense in which the many speak of riches. For they mean by 'the rich' the few who have the most valuable possessions, although the owner of them may quite well be a rogue. And if this is true, I can never assent to the doctrine that the rich man will be happy--he must be good as well as rich. And good in a high degree, and rich in a high degree at the same time, he cannot be. Some one will ask, why not? And we shall answer--Because acquisitions which come from sources which are just and unjust indifferently, are more than double those which come from just sources only; and the sums which are expended neither honourably nor disgracefully, are only half as great as those which are expended honourably and on honourable purposes. Thus, if the one acquires double and spends half, the other who is in the opposite case and is a good man cannot possibly be wealthier than he. The first--I am speaking of the saver and not of the spender--is not always bad; he may indeed in some cases be utterly bad, but, as I was saying, a good man he never is. For he who receives money unjustly as well as justly, and spends neither nor unjustly, will be a rich man if he be also thrifty. On the other hand, the utterly bad is in general profligate, and therefore very poor; while he who spends on noble objects, and acquires wealth by just means only, can hardly be remarkable for riches, any more than he can be very poor. Our statement, then, is true, that the very rich are not good, and, if they are not good, they are not happy. But the intention of our laws was, that the citizens should be as happy as may be, and as friendly as possible to one another. And men who are always at law with one another, and amongst whom there are many wrongs done, can never be friends to one another, but only those among whom crimes and lawsuits are few and slight. Therefore we say that gold and silver ought not to be allowed in the city, nor much of the vulgar sort of trade which is carried on by lending money, or rearing the meaner kinds of live stock; but only the produce of agriculture, and only so much of this as will not compel us in pursuing it to neglect that for the sake of which riches exist--I mean, soul and body, which without gymnastics, and without education, will never be worth anything; and therefore, as we have said not once but many times, the care of riches should have the last place in our thoughts. For there are in all three things about which every man has an interest; and the interest about money, when rightly regarded, is the third and lowest of them: midway comes the interest of the body; and, first of all, that of the soul; and the state which we are describing will have been rightly constituted if it ordains honours according to this scale. But if, in any of the laws which have been ordained, health has been preferred to temperance, or wealth to health and temperate habits, that law must clearly be wrong. Wherefore, also, the legislator ought often to impress upon himself the question--'What do I want?' and 'Do I attain my aim, or do I miss the mark?' In this way, and in this way only, he may acquit himself and free others from the work of legislation. Let the allottee then hold his lot upon the conditions which we have mentioned. It would be well that every man should come to the colony having all things equal; but seeing that this is not possible, and one man will have greater possessions than another, for many reasons and in particular in order to preserve equality in special crises of the state, qualifications of property must be unequal, in order that offices and contributions and distributions may be proportioned to the value of each person's wealth, and not solely to the virtue of his ancestors or himself, nor yet to the strength and beauty of his person, but also to the measure of his wealth or poverty; and so by a law of inequality, which will be in proportion to his wealth, he will receive honours and offices as equally as possible, and there will be no quarrels and disputes. To which end there should be four different standards appointed according to the amount of property: there should be a first and a second and a third and a fourth class, in which the citizens will be placed, and they will be called by these or similar names: they may continue in the same rank, or pass into another in any individual case, on becoming richer from being poorer, or poorer from being richer. The form of law which I should propose as the natural sequel would be as follows:--In a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues--not faction, but rather distraction;--there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty, nor, again, excess of wealth, for both are productive of both these evils. Now the legislator should determine what is to be the limit of poverty or wealth. Let the limit of poverty be the value of the lot; this ought to be preserved, and no ruler, nor any one else who aspires after a reputation for virtue, will allow the lot to be impaired in any case. This the legislator gives as a measure, and he will permit a man to acquire double or triple, or as much as four times the amount of this (compare Arist. Pol.). But if a person have yet greater riches, whether he has found them, or they have been given to him, or he has made them in business, or has acquired by any stroke of fortune that which is in excess of the measure, if he give back the surplus to the state, and to the Gods who are the patrons of the state, he shall suffer no penalty or loss of reputation; but if he disobeys this our law, any one who likes may inform against him and receive half the value of the excess, and the delinquent shall pay a sum equal to the excess out of his own property, and the other half of the excess shall belong to the Gods. And let every possession of every man, with the exception of the lot, be publicly registered before the magistrates whom the law appoints, so that all suits about money may be easy and quite simple. The next thing to be noted is, that the city should be placed as nearly as possible in the centre of the country; we should choose a place which possesses what is suitable for a city, and this may easily be imagined and described. Then we will divide the city into twelve portions, first founding temples to Hestia, to Zeus and to Athene, in a spot which we will call the Acropolis, and surround with a circular wall, making the division of the entire city and country radiate from this point. The twelve portions shall be equalized by the provision that those which are of good land shall be smaller, while those of inferior quality shall be larger. The number of the lots shall be 5040, and each of them shall be divided into two, and every allotment shall be composed of two such sections; one of land near the city, the other of land which is at a distance (compare Arist. Pol.). This arrangement shall be carried out in the following manner: The section which is near the city shall be added to that which is on the borders, and form one lot, and the portion which is next nearest shall be added to the portion which is next farthest; and so of the rest. Moreover, in the two sections of the lots the same principle of equalization of the soil ought to be maintained; the badness and goodness shall be compensated by more and less. And the legislator shall divide the citizens into twelve parts, and arrange the rest of their property, as far as possible, so as to form twelve equal parts; and there shall be a registration of all. After this they shall assign twelve lots to twelve Gods, and call them by their names, and dedicate to each God their several portions, and call the tribes after them. And they shall distribute the twelve divisions of the city in the same way in which they divided the country; and every man shall have two habitations, one in the centre of the country, and the other at the extremity. Enough of the manner of settlement. Now we ought by all means to consider that there can never be such a happy concurrence of circumstances as we have described; neither can all things coincide as they are wanted. Men who will not take offence at such a mode of living together, and will endure all their life long to have their property fixed at a moderate limit, and to beget children in accordance with our ordinances, and will allow themselves to be deprived of gold and other things which the legislator, as is evident from these enactments, will certainly forbid them; and will endure, further, the situation of the land with the city in the middle and dwellings round about;--all this is as if the legislator were telling his dreams, or making a city and citizens of wax. There is truth in these objections, and therefore every one should take to heart what I am going to say. Once more, then, the legislator shall appear and address us:--'O my friends,' he will say to us, 'do not suppose me ignorant that there is a certain degree of truth in your words; but I am of opinion that, in matters which are not present but future, he who exhibits a pattern of that at which he aims, should in nothing fall short of the fairest and truest; and that if he finds any part of this work impossible of execution he should avoid and not execute it, but he should contrive to carry out that which is nearest and most akin to it; you must allow the legislator to perfect his design, and when it is perfected, you should join with him in considering what part of his legislation is expedient and what will arouse opposition; for surely the artist who is to be deemed worthy of any regard at all, ought always to make his work self-consistent.' Having determined that there is to be a distribution into twelve parts, let us now see in what way this may be accomplished. There is no difficulty in perceiving that the twelve parts admit of the greatest number of divisions of that which they include, or in seeing the other numbers which are consequent upon them, and are produced out of them up to 5040; wherefore the law ought to order phratries and demes and villages, and also military ranks and movements, as well as coins and measures, dry and liquid, and weights, so as to be commensurable and agreeable to one another. Nor should we fear the appearance of minuteness, if the law commands that all the vessels which a man possesses should have a common measure, when we consider generally that the divisions and variations of numbers have a use in respect of all the variations of which they are susceptible, both in themselves and as measures of height and depth, and in all sounds, and in motions, as well those which proceed in a straight direction, upwards or downwards, as in those which go round and round. The legislator is to consider all these things and to bid the citizens, as far as possible, not to lose sight of numerical order; for no single instrument of youthful education has such mighty power, both as regards domestic economy and politics, and in the arts, as the study of arithmetic. Above all, arithmetic stirs up him who is by nature sleepy and dull, and makes him quick to learn, retentive, shrewd, and aided by art divine he makes progress quite beyond his natural powers (compare Republic). All such things, if only the legislator, by other laws and institutions, can banish meanness and covetousness from the souls of men, so that they can use them properly and to their own good, will be excellent and suitable instruments of education. But if he cannot, he will unintentionally create in them, instead of wisdom, the habit of craft, which evil tendency may be observed in the Egyptians and Phoenicians, and many other races, through the general vulgarity of their pursuits and acquisitions, whether some unworthy legislator of theirs has been the cause, or some impediment of chance or nature. For we must not fail to observe, O Megillus and Cleinias, that there is a difference in places, and that some beget better men and others worse; and we must legislate accordingly. Some places are subject to strange and fatal influences by reason of diverse winds and violent heats, some by reason of waters; or, again, from the character of the food given by the earth, which not only affects the bodies of men for good or evil, but produces similar results in their souls. And in all such qualities those spots excel in which there is a divine inspiration, and in which the demigods have their appointed lots, and are propitious, not adverse, to the settlers in them. To all these matters the legislator, if he have any sense in him, will attend as far as man can, and frame his laws accordingly. And this is what you, Cleinias, must do, and to matters of this kind you must turn your mind since you are going to colonize a new country."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Your words, Athenian Stranger, are excellent, and I will do as you say. BOOK VI."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And now having made an end of the preliminaries we will proceed to the appointment of magistracies."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In the ordering of a state there are two parts: first, the number of the magistracies, and the mode of establishing them; and, secondly, when they have been established, laws again will have to be provided for each of them, suitable in nature and number. But before electing the magistrates let us stop a little and say a word in season about the election of them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What have you got to say?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"This is what I have to say;--every one can see, that although the work of legislation is a most important matter, yet if a well-ordered city superadd to good laws unsuitable offices, not only will there be no use in having the good laws,--not only will they be ridiculous and useless, but the greatest political injury and evil will accrue from them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then now, my friend, let us observe what will happen in the constitution of out intended state. In the first place, you will acknowledge that those who are duly appointed to magisterial power, and their families, should severally have given satisfactory proof of what they are, from youth upward until the time of election; in the next place, those who are to elect should have been trained in habits of law, and be well educated, that they may have a right judgment, and may be able to select or reject men whom they approve or disapprove, as they are worthy of either. But how can we imagine that those who are brought together for the first time, and are strangers to one another, and also uneducated, will avoid making mistakes in the choice of magistrates?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The matter is serious, and excuses will not serve the turn. I will tell you, then, what you and I will have to do, since you, as you tell me, with nine others, have offered to settle the new state on behalf of the people of Crete, and I am to help you by the invention of the present romance. I certainly should not like to leave the tale wandering all over the world without a head;--a headless monster is such a hideous thing."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Excellent, Stranger."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes; and I will be as good as my word."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Let us by all means do as you propose."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That we will, by the grace of God, if old age will only permit us."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"But God will be gracious."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes; and under his guidance let us consider a further point."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us remember what a courageously mad and daring creation this our city is."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What had you in your mind when you said that?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I had in my mind the free and easy manner in which we are ordaining that the inexperienced colonists shall receive our laws. Now a man need not be very wise, Cleinias, in order to see that no one can easily receive laws at their first imposition. But if we could anyhow wait until those who have been imbued with them from childhood, and have been nurtured in them, and become habituated to them, take their part in the public elections of the state; I say, if this could be accomplished, and rightly accomplished by any way or contrivance--then, I think that there would be very little danger, at the end of the time, of a state thus trained not being permanent."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"A reasonable supposition."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then let us consider if we can find any way out of the difficulty; for I maintain, Cleinias, that the Cnosians, above all the other Cretans, should not be satisfied with barely discharging their duty to the colony, but they ought to take the utmost pains to establish the offices which are first created by them in the best and surest manner. Above all, this applies to the selection of the guardians of the law, who must be chosen first of all, and with the greatest care; the others are of less importance."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What method can we devise of electing them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"This will be the method:--Sons of the Cretans, I shall say to them, inasmuch as the Cnosians have precedence over the other states, they should, in common with those who join this settlement, choose a body of thirty-seven in all, nineteen of them being taken from the settlers, and the remainder from the citizens of Cnosus. Of these latter the Cnosians shall make a present to your colony, and you yourself shall be one of the eighteen, and shall become a citizen of the new state; and if you and they cannot be persuaded to go, the Cnosians may fairly use a little violence in order to make you."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"But why, Stranger, do not you and Megillus take a part in our new city?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"O, Cleinias, Athens is proud, and Sparta too; and they are both a long way off. But you and likewise the other colonists are conveniently situated as you describe. I have been speaking of the way in which the new citizens may be best managed under present circumstances; but in after-ages, if the city continues to exist, let the election be on this wise. All who are horse or foot soldiers, or have seen military service at the proper ages when they were severally fitted for it (compare Arist. Pol.), shall share in the election of magistrates; and the election shall be held in whatever temple the state deems most venerable, and every one shall carry his vote to the altar of the God, writing down on a tablet the name of the person for whom he votes, and his father's name, and his tribe, and ward; and at the side he shall write his own name in like manner. Any one who pleases may take away any tablet which he does not think properly filled up, and exhibit it in the Agora for a period of not less than thirty days. The tablets which are judged to be first, to the number of 300, shall be shown by the magistrates to the whole city, and the citizens shall in like manner select from these the candidates whom they prefer; and this second selection, to the number of 100, shall be again exhibited to the citizens; in the third, let any one who pleases select whom he pleases out of the 100, walking through the parts of victims, and let them choose for magistrates and proclaim the seven-and-thirty who have the greatest number of votes. But who, Cleinias and Megillus, will order for us in the colony all this matter of the magistrates, and the scrutinies of them? If we reflect, we shall see that cities which are in process of construction like ours must have some such persons, who cannot possibly be elected before there are any magistrates; and yet they must be elected in some way, and they are not to be inferior men, but the best possible. For as the proverb says, 'a good beginning is half the business'; and 'to have begun well' is praised by all, and in my opinion is a great deal more than half the business, and has never been praised by any one enough."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then let us recognize the difficulty, and make clear to our own minds how the beginning is to be accomplished. There is only one proposal which I have to offer, and that is one which, under our circumstances, is both necessary and expedient."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I maintain that this colony of ours has a father and mother, who are no other than the colonizing state. Well I know that many colonies have been, and will be, at enmity with their parents. But in early days the child, as in a family, loves and is beloved; even if there come a time later when the tie is broken, still, while he is in want of education, he naturally loves his parents and is beloved by them, and flies to his relatives for protection, and finds in them his only natural allies in time of need; and this parental feeling already exists in the Cnosians, as is shown by their care of the new city; and there is a similar feeling on the part of the young city towards Cnosus. And I repeat what I was saying--for there is no harm in repeating a good thing--that the Cnosians should take a common interest in all these matters, and choose, as far as they can, the eldest and best of the colonists, to the number of not less than a hundred; and let there be another hundred of the Cnosians themselves. These, I say, on their arrival, should have a joint care that the magistrates should be appointed according to law, and that when they are appointed they should undergo a scrutiny. When this has been effected, the Cnosians shall return home, and the new city do the best she can for her own preservation and happiness. I would have the seven-and-thirty now, and in all future time, chosen to fulfil the following duties:--Let them, in the first place, be the guardians of the law; and, secondly, of the registers in which each one registers before the magistrate the amount of his property, excepting four minae which are allowed to citizens of the first class, three allowed to the second, two to the third, and a single mina to the fourth. And if any one, despising the laws for the sake of gain, be found to possess anything more which has not been registered, let all that he has in excess be confiscated, and let him be liable to a suit which shall be the reverse of honourable or fortunate. And let any one who will, indict him on the charge of loving base gains, and proceed against him before the guardians of the law. And if he be cast, let him lose his share of the public possessions, and when there is any public distribution, let him have nothing but his original lot; and let him be written down a condemned man as long as he lives, in some place in which any one who pleases can read about his offences. The guardian of the law shall not hold office longer than twenty years, and shall not be less than fifty years of age when he is elected; or if he is elected when he is sixty years of age, he shall hold office for ten years only; and upon the same principle, he must not imagine that he will be permitted to hold such an important office as that of guardian of the laws after he is seventy years of age, if he live so long. These are the three first ordinances about the guardians of the law; as the work of legislation progresses, each law in turn will assign to them their further duties. And now we may proceed in order to speak of the election of other officers; for generals have to be elected, and these again must have their ministers, commanders, and colonels of horse, and commanders of brigades of foot, who would be more rightly called by their popular name of brigadiers. The guardians of the law shall propose as generals men who are natives of the city, and a selection from the candidates proposed shall be made by those who are or have been of the age for military service. And if one who is not proposed is thought by somebody to be better than one who is, let him name whom he prefers in the place of whom, and make oath that he is better, and propose him; and whichever of them is approved by vote shall be admitted to the final selection; and the three who have the greatest number of votes shall be appointed generals, and superintendents of military affairs, after previously undergoing a scrutiny, like the guardians of the law. And let the generals thus elected propose twelve brigadiers, one for each tribe; and there shall be a right of counter-proposal as in the case of the generals, and the voting and decision shall take place in the same way. Until the prytanes and council are elected, the guardians of the law shall convene the assembly in some holy spot which is suitable to the purpose, placing the hoplites by themselves, and the cavalry by themselves, and in a third division all the rest of the army. All are to vote for the generals (and for the colonels of horse), but the brigadiers are to be voted for only by those who carry shields (i.e. the hoplites). Let the body of cavalry choose phylarchs for the generals; but captains of light troops, or archers, or any other division of the army, shall be appointed by the generals for themselves. There only remains the appointment of officers of cavalry: these shall be proposed by the same persons who proposed the generals, and the election and the counter-proposal of other candidates shall be arranged in the same way as in the case of the generals, and let the cavalry vote and the infantry look on at the election; the two who have the greatest number of votes shall be the leaders of all the horse. Disputes about the voting may be raised once or twice; but if the dispute be raised a third time, the officers who preside at the several elections shall decide. The council shall consist of 30 x 12 members--360 will be a convenient number for sub-division. If we divide the whole number into four parts of ninety each, we get ninety counsellors for each class. First, all the citizens shall select candidates from the first class; they shall be compelled to vote, and, if they do not, shall be duly fined. When the candidates have been selected, some one shall mark them down; this shall be the business of the first day. And on the following day, candidates shall be selected from the second class in the same manner and under the same conditions as on the previous day; and on the third day a selection shall be made from the third class, at which every one may, if he likes vote, and the three first classes shall be compelled to vote; but the fourth and lowest class shall be under no compulsion, and any member of this class who does not vote shall not be punished. On the fourth day candidates shall be selected from the fourth and smallest class; they shall be selected by all, but he who is of the fourth class shall suffer no penalty, nor he who is of the third, if he be not willing to vote; but he who is of the first or second class, if he does not vote shall be punished;--he who is of the second class shall pay a fine of triple the amount which was exacted at first, and he who is of the first class quadruple. On the fifth day the rulers shall bring out the names noted down, for all the citizens to see, and every man shall choose out of them, under pain, if he do not, of suffering the first penalty; and when they have chosen 180 out of each of the classes, they shall choose one-half of them by lot, who shall undergo a scrutiny:--These are to form the council for the year. The mode of election which has been described is in a mean between monarchy and democracy, and such a mean the state ought always to observe; for servants and masters never can be friends, nor good and bad, merely because they are declared to have equal privileges. For to unequals equals become unequal, if they are not harmonised by measure; and both by reason of equality, and by reason of inequality, cities are filled with seditions. The old saying, that 'equality makes friendship,' is happy and also true; but there is obscurity and confusion as to what sort of equality is meant. For there are two equalities which are called by the same name, but are in reality in many ways almost the opposite of one another; one of them may be introduced without difficulty, by any state or any legislator in the distribution of honours: this is the rule of measure, weight, and number, which regulates and apportions them. But there is another equality, of a better and higher kind, which is not so easily recognized. This is the judgment of Zeus; among men it avails but little; that little, however, is the source of the greatest good to individuals and states. For it gives to the greater more, and to the inferior less and in proportion to the nature of each; and, above all, greater honour always to the greater virtue, and to the less less; and to either in proportion to their respective measure of virtue and education. And this is justice, and is ever the true principle of states, at which we ought to aim, and according to this rule order the new city which is now being founded, and any other city which may be hereafter founded. To this the legislator should look,--not to the interests of tyrants one or more, or to the power of the people, but to justice always; which, as I was saying, is the distribution of natural equality among unequals in each case. But there are times at which every state is compelled to use the words, 'just,' 'equal,' in a secondary sense, in the hope of escaping in some degree from factions. For equity and indulgence are infractions of the perfect and strict rule of justice. And this is the reason why we are obliged to use the equality of the lot, in order to avoid the discontent of the people; and so we invoke God and fortune in our prayers, and beg that they themselves will direct the lot with a view to supreme justice. And therefore, although we are compelled to use both equalities, we should use that into which the element of chance enters as seldom as possible. Thus, O my friends, and for the reasons given, should a state act which would endure and be saved. But as a ship sailing on the sea has to be watched night and day, in like manner a city also is sailing on a sea of politics, and is liable to all sorts of insidious assaults; and therefore from morning to night, and from night to morning, rulers must join hands with rulers, and watchers with watchers, receiving and giving up their trust in a perpetual succession. Now a multitude can never fulfil a duty of this sort with anything like energy. Moreover, the greater number of the senators will have to be left during the greater part of the year to order their concerns at their own homes. They will therefore have to be arranged in twelve portions, answering to the twelve months, and furnish guardians of the state, each portion for a single month. Their business is to be at hand and receive any foreigner or citizen who comes to them, whether to give information, or to put one of those questions, to which, when asked by other cities, a city should give an answer, and to which, if she ask them herself, she should receive an answer; or again, when there is a likelihood of internal commotions, which are always liable to happen in some form or other, they will, if they can, prevent their occurring; or if they have already occurred, will lose no time in making them known to the city, and healing the evil. Wherefore, also, this which is the presiding body of the state ought always to have the control of their assemblies, and of the dissolutions of them, ordinary as well as extraordinary. All this is to be ordered by the twelfth part of the council, which is always to keep watch together with the other officers of the state during one portion of the year, and to rest during the remaining eleven portions. Thus will the city be fairly ordered. And now, who is to have the superintendence of the country, and what shall be the arrangement? Seeing that the whole city and the entire country have been both of them divided into twelve portions, ought there not to be appointed superintendents of the streets of the city, and of the houses, and buildings, and harbours, and the agora, and fountains, and sacred domains, and temples, and the like?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure there ought."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us assume, then, that there ought to be servants of the temples, and priests and priestesses. There must also be superintendents of roads and buildings, who will have a care of men, that they may do no harm, and also of beasts, both within the enclosure and in the suburbs. Three kinds of officers will thus have to be appointed, in order that the city may be suitably provided according to her needs. Those who have the care of the city shall be called wardens of the city; and those who have the care of the agora shall be called wardens of the agora; and those who have the care of the temples shall be called priests. Those who hold hereditary offices as priests or priestesses, shall not be disturbed; but if there be few or none such, as is probable at the foundation of a new city, priests and priestesses shall be appointed to be servants of the Gods who have no servants. Some of our officers shall be elected, and others appointed by lot, those who are of the people and those who are not of the people mingling in a friendly manner in every place and city, that the state may be as far as possible of one mind. The officers of the temples shall be appointed by lot; in this way their election will be committed to God, that He may do what is agreeable to Him. And he who obtains a lot shall undergo a scrutiny, first, as to whether he is sound of body and of legitimate birth; and in the second place, in order to show that he is of a perfectly pure family, not stained with homicide or any similar impiety in his own person, and also that his father and mother have led a similar unstained life. Now the laws about all divine things should be brought from Delphi, and interpreters appointed, under whose direction they should be used. The tenure of the priesthood should always be for a year and no longer; and he who will duly execute the sacred office, according to the laws of religion, must be not less than sixty years of age--the laws shall be the same about priestesses. As for the interpreters, they shall be appointed thus:--Let the twelve tribes be distributed into groups of four, and let each group select four, one out of each tribe within the group, three times; and let the three who have the greatest number of votes (out of the twelve appointed by each group), after undergoing a scrutiny, nine in all, be sent to Delphi, in order that the God may return one out of each triad; their age shall be the same as that of the priests, and the scrutiny of them shall be conducted in the same manner; let them be interpreters for life, and when any one dies let the four tribes select another from the tribe of the deceased. Moreover, besides priests and interpreters, there must be treasurers, who will take charge of the property of the several temples, and of the sacred domains, and shall have authority over the produce and the letting of them; and three of them shall be chosen from the highest classes for the greater temples, and two for the lesser, and one for the least of all; the manner of their election and the scrutiny of them shall be the same as that of the generals. This shall be the order of the temples. Let everything have a guard as far as possible. Let the defence of the city be commited to the generals, and taxiarchs, and hipparchs, and phylarchs, and prytanes, and the wardens of the city, and of the agora, when the election of them has been completed. The defence of the country shall be provided for as follows:--The entire land has been already distributed into twelve as nearly as possible equal parts, and let the tribe allotted to a division provide annually for it five wardens of the country and commanders of the watch; and let each body of five have the power of selecting twelve others out of the youth of their own tribe,--these shall be not less than twenty-five years of age, and not more than thirty. And let there be allotted to them severally every month the various districts, in order that they may all acquire knowledge and experience of the whole country. The term of service for commanders and for watchers shall continue during two years. After having had their stations allotted to them, they will go from place to place in regular order, making their round from left to right as their commanders direct them; (when I speak of going to the right, I mean that they are to go to the east). And at the commencement of the second year, in order that as many as possible of the guards may not only get a knowledge of the country at any one season of the year, but may also have experience of the manner in which different places are affected at different seasons of the year, their then commanders shall lead them again towards the left, from place to place in succession, until they have completed the second year. In the third year other wardens of the country shall be chosen and commanders of the watch, five for each division, who are to be the superintendents of the bands of twelve. While on service at each station, their attention shall be directed to the following points:--In the first place, they shall see that the country is well protected against enemies; they shall trench and dig wherever this is required, and, as far as they can, they shall by fortifications keep off the evil-disposed, in order to prevent them from doing any harm to the country or the property; they shall use the beasts of burden and the labourers whom they find on the spot: these will be their instruments whom they will superintend, taking them, as far as possible, at the times when they are not engaged in their regular business. They shall make every part of the country inaccessible to enemies, and as accessible as possible to friends (compare Arist. Pol.); there shall be ways for man and beasts of burden and for cattle, and they shall take care to have them always as smooth as they can; and shall provide against the rains doing harm instead of good to the land, when they come down from the mountains into the hollow dells; and shall keep in the overflow by the help of works and ditches, in order that the valleys, receiving and drinking up the rain from heaven, and providing fountains and streams in the fields and regions which lie underneath, may furnish even to the dry places plenty of good water. The fountains of water, whether of rivers or of springs, shall be ornamented with plantations and buildings for beauty; and let them bring together the streams in subterraneous channels, and make all things plenteous; and if there be a sacred grove or dedicated precinct in the neighbourhood, they shall conduct the water to the actual temples of the Gods, and so beautify them at all seasons of the year. Everywhere in such places the youth shall make gymnasia for themselves, and warm baths for the aged, placing by them abundance of dry wood, for the benefit of those labouring under disease--there the weary frame of the rustic, worn with toil, will receive a kindly welcome, far better than he would at the hands of a not over-wise doctor. The building of these and the like works will be useful and ornamental; they will provide a pleasing amusement, but they will be a serious employment too; for the sixty wardens will have to guard their several divisions, not only with a view to enemies, but also with an eye to professing friends. When a quarrel arises among neighbours or citizens, and any one whether slave or freeman wrongs another, let the five wardens decide small matters on their own authority; but where the charge against another relates to greater matters, the seventeen composed of the fives and twelves, shall determine any charges which one man brings against another, not involving more than three minae. Every judge and magistrate shall be liable to give an account of his conduct in office, except those who, like kings, have the final decision. Moreover, as regards the aforesaid wardens of the country, if they do any wrong to those of whom they have the care, whether by imposing upon them unequal tasks, or by taking the produce of the soil or implements of husbandry without their consent; also if they receive anything in the way of a bribe, or decide suits unjustly, or if they yield to the influences of flattery, let them be publicly dishonoured; and in regard to any other wrong which they do to the inhabitants of the country, if the question be of a mina, let them submit to the decision of the villagers in the neighbourhood; but in suits of greater amount, or in case of lesser, if they refuse to submit, trusting that their monthly removal into another part of the country will enable them to escape--in such cases the injured party may bring his suit in the common court, and if he obtain a verdict he may exact from the defendant, who refused to submit, a double penalty. The wardens and the overseers of the country, while on their two years' service, shall have common meals at their several stations, and shall all live together; and he who is absent from the common meal, or sleeps out, if only for one day or night, unless by order of his commanders, or by reason of absolute necessity, if the five denounce him and inscribe his name in the agora as not having kept his guard, let him be deemed to have betrayed the city, as far as lay in his power, and let him be disgraced and beaten with impunity by any one who meets him and is willing to punish him. If any of the commanders is guilty of such an irregularity, the whole company of sixty shall see to it, and he who is cognisant of the offence, and does not bring the offender to trial, shall be amenable to the same laws as the younger offender himself, and shall pay a heavier fine, and be incapable of ever commanding the young. The guardians of the law are to be careful inspectors of these matters, and shall either prevent or punish offenders. Every man should remember the universal rule, that he who is not a good servant will not be a good master; a man should pride himself more upon serving well than upon commanding well: first upon serving the laws, which is also the service of the Gods; in the second place, upon having served ancient and honourable men in the days of his youth. Furthermore, during the two years in which any one is a warden of the country, his daily food ought to be of a simple and humble kind. When the twelve have been chosen, let them and the five meet together, and determine that they will be their own servants, and, like servants, will not have other slaves and servants for their own use, neither will they use those of the villagers and husbandmen for their private advantage, but for the public service only; and in general they should make up their minds to live independently by themselves, servants of each other and of themselves. Further, at all seasons of the year, summer and winter alike, let them be under arms and survey minutely the whole country; thus they will at once keep guard, and at the same time acquire a perfect knowledge of every locality. There can be no more important kind of information than the exact knowledge of a man's own country; and for this as well as for more general reasons of pleasure and advantage, hunting with dogs and other kinds of sports should be pursued by the young. The service to whom this is committed may be called the secret police or wardens of the country; the name does not much signify, but every one who has the safety of the state at heart will use his utmost diligence in this service. After the wardens of the country, we have to speak of the election of wardens of the agora and of the city. The wardens of the country were sixty in number, and the wardens of the city will be three, and will divide the twelve parts of the city into three; like the former, they shall have care of the ways, and of the different high roads which lead out of the country into the city, and of the buildings, that they may be all made according to law;--also of the waters, which the guardians of the supply preserve and convey to them, care being taken that they may reach the fountains pure and abundant, and be both an ornament and a benefit to the city. These also should be men of influence, and at leisure to take care of the public interest. Let every man propose as warden of the city any one whom he likes out of the highest class, and when the vote has been given on them, and the number is reduced to the six who have the greatest number of votes, let the electing officers choose by lot three out of the six, and when they have undergone a scrutiny let them hold office according to the laws laid down for them. Next, let the wardens of the agora be elected in like manner, out of the first and second class, five in number: ten are to be first elected, and out of the ten five are to be chosen by lot, as in the election of the wardens of the city:--these when they have undergone a scrutiny are to be declared magistrates. Every one shall vote for every one, and he who will not vote, if he be informed against before the magistrates, shall be fined fifty drachmae, and shall also be deemed a bad citizen. Let any one who likes go to the assembly and to the general council; it shall be compulsory to go on citizens of the first and second class, and they shall pay a fine of ten drachmae if they be found not answering to their names at the assembly. But the third and fourth class shall be under no compulsion, and shall be let off without a fine, unless the magistrates have commanded all to be present, in consequence of some urgent necessity. The wardens of the agora shall observe the order appointed by law for the agora, and shall have the charge of the temples and fountains which are in the agora; and they shall see that no one injures anything, and punish him who does, with stripes and bonds, if he be a slave or stranger; but if he be a citizen who misbehaves in this way, they shall have the power themselves of inflicting a fine upon him to the amount of a hundred drachmae, or with the consent of the wardens of the city up to double that amount. And let the wardens of the city have a similar power of imposing punishments and fines in their own department; and let them impose fines by their own department; and let them impose fines by their own authority, up to a mina, or up to two minae with the consent of the wardens of the agora. In the next place, it will be proper to appoint directors of music and gymnastic, two kinds of each--of the one kind the business will be education, of the other, the superintendence of contests. In speaking of education, the law means to speak of those who have the care of order and instruction in gymnasia and schools, and of the going to school, and of school buildings for boys and girls; and in speaking of contests, the law refers to the judges of gymnastics and of music; these again are divided into two classes, the one having to do with music, the other with gymnastics; and the same who judge of the gymnastic contests of men, shall judge of horses; but in music there shall be one set of judges of solo singing, and of imitation--I mean of rhapsodists, players on the harp, the flute and the like, and another who shall judge of choral song. First of all, we must choose directors for the choruses of boys, and men, and maidens, whom they shall follow in the amusement of the dance, and for our other musical arrangements;--one director will be enough for the choruses, and he should be not less than forty years of age. One director will also be enough to introduce the solo singers, and to give judgment on the competitors, and he ought not to be less than thirty years of age. The director and manager of the choruses shall be elected after the following manner:--Let any persons who commonly take an interest in such matters go to the meeting, and be fined if they do not go (the guardians of the law shall judge of their fault), but those who have no interest shall not be compelled. The elector shall propose as director some one who understands music, and he in the scrutiny may be challenged on the one part by those who say he has no skill, and defended on the other hand by those who say that he has. Ten are to be elected by vote, and he of the ten who is chosen by lot shall undergo a scrutiny, and lead the choruses for a year according to law. And in like manner the competitor who wins the lot shall be leader of the solo and concert music for that year; and he who is thus elected shall deliver the award to the judges. In the next place, we have to choose judges in the contests of horses and of men; these shall be selected from the third and also from the second class of citizens, and three first classes shall be compelled to go to the election, but the lowest may stay away with impunity; and let there be three elected by lot out of the twenty who have been chosen previously, and they must also have the vote and approval of the examiners. But if any one is rejected in the scrutiny at any ballot or decision, others shall be chosen in the same manner, and undergo a similar scrutiny. There remains the minister of the education of youth, male and female; he too will rule according to law; one such minister will be sufficient, and he must be fifty years old, and have children lawfully begotten, both boys and girls by preference, at any rate, one or the other. He who is elected, and he who is the elector, should consider that of all the great offices of state this is the greatest; for the first shoot of any plant, if it makes a good start towards the attainment of its natural excellence, has the greatest effect on its maturity; and this is not only true of plants, but of animals wild and tame, and also of men. Man, as we say, is a tame or civilized animal; nevertheless, he requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized (Arist. Pol.); but if he be insufficiently or ill educated he is the most savage of earthly creatures. Wherefore the legislator ought not to allow the education of children to become a secondary or accidental matter. In the first place, he who would be rightly provident about them, should begin by taking care that he is elected, who of all the citizens is in every way best; him the legislator shall do his utmost to appoint guardian and superintendent. To this end all the magistrates, with the exception of the council and prytanes, shall go to the temple of Apollo, and elect by ballot him of the guardians of the law whom they severally think will be the best superintendent of education. And he who has the greatest number of votes, after he has undergone a scrutiny at the hands of all the magistrates who have been his electors, with the exception of the guardians of the law,--shall hold office for five years; and in the sixth year let another be chosen in like manner to fill his office. If any one dies while he is holding a public office, and more than thirty days before his term of office expires, let those whose business it is elect another to the office in the same manner as before. And if any one who is entrusted with orphans dies, let the relations both on the father's and mother's side, who are residing at home, including cousins, appoint another guardian within ten days, or be fined a drachma a day for neglect to do so. A city which has no regular courts of law ceases to be a city; and again, if a judge is silent and says no more in preliminary proceedings than the litigants, as is the case in arbitrations, he will never be able to decide justly; wherefore a multitude of judges will not easily judge well, nor a few if they are bad. The point in dispute between the parties should be made clear; and time, and deliberation, and repeated examination, greatly tend to clear up doubts. For this reason, he who goes to law with another, should go first of all to his neighbours and friends who know best the questions at issue. And if he be unable to obtain from them a satisfactory decision, let him have recourse to another court; and if the two courts cannot settle the matter, let a third put an end to the suit. Now the establishment of courts of justice may be regarded as a choice of magistrates, for every magistrate must also be a judge of some things; and the judge, though he be not a magistrate, yet in certain respects is a very important magistrate on the day on which he is determining a suit. Regarding then the judges also as magistrates, let us say who are fit to be judges, and of what they are to be judges, and how many of them are to judge in each suit. Let that be the supreme tribunal which the litigants appoint in common for themselves, choosing certain persons by agreement. And let there be two other tribunals: one for private causes, when a citizen accuses another of wronging him and wishes to get a decision; the other for public causes, in which some citizen is of opinion that the public has been wronged by an individual, and is willing to vindicate the common interests. And we must not forget to mention how the judges are to be qualified, and who they are to be. In the first place, let there be a tribunal open to all private persons who are trying causes one against another for the third time, and let this be composed as follows:--All the officers of state, as well annual as those holding office for a longer period, when the new year is about to commence, in the month following after the summer solstice, on the last day but one of the year, shall meet in some temple, and calling God to witness, shall dedicate one judge from every magistracy to be their first-fruits, choosing in each office him who seems to them to be the best, and whom they deem likely to decide the causes of his fellow-citizens during the ensuing year in the best and holiest manner. And when the election is completed, a scrutiny shall be held in the presence of the electors themselves, and if any one be rejected another shall be chosen in the same manner. Those who have undergone the scrutiny shall judge the causes of those who have declined the inferior courts, and shall give their vote openly. The councillors and other magistrates who have elected them shall be required to be hearers and spectators of the causes; and any one else may be present who pleases. If one man charges another with having intentionally decided wrong, let him go to the guardians of the law and lay his accusation before them, and he who is found guilty in such a case shall pay damages to the injured party equal to half the injury; but if he shall appear to deserve a greater penalty, the judges shall determine what additional punishment he shall suffer, and how much more he ought to pay to the public treasury, and to the party who brought the suit. In the judgment of offences against the state, the people ought to participate, for when any one wrongs the state all are wronged, and may reasonably complain if they are not allowed to share in the decision. Such causes ought to originate with the people, and the ought also to have the final decision of them, but the trial of them shall take place before three of the highest magistrates, upon whom the plaintiff and the defendant shall agree; and if they are not able to come to an agreement themselves, the council shall choose one of the two proposed. And in private suits, too, as far as is possible, all should have a share; for he who has no share in the administration of justice, is apt to imagine that he has no share in the state at all. And for this reason there shall be a court of law in every tribe, and the judges shall be chosen by lot;--they shall give their decisions at once, and shall be inaccessible to entreaties. The final judgment shall rest with that court which, as we maintain, has been established in the most incorruptible form of which human things admit: this shall be the court established for those who are unable to get rid of their suits either in the courts of neighbours or of the tribes. Thus much of the courts of law, which, as I was saying, cannot be precisely defined either as being or not being offices; a superficial sketch has been given of them, in which some things have been told and others omitted. For the right place of an exact statement of the laws respecting suits, under their several heads, will be at the end of the body of legislation;--let us then expect them at the end. Hitherto our legislation has been chiefly occupied with the appointment of offices. Perfect unity and exactness, extending to the whole and every particular of political administration, cannot be attained to the full, until the discussion shall have a beginning, middle, and end, and is complete in every part. At present we have reached the election of magistrates, and this may be regarded as a sufficient termination of what preceded. And now there need no longer be any delay or hesitation in beginning the work of legislation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I like what you have said, Stranger; and I particularly like your manner of tacking on the beginning of your new discourse to the end of the former one."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Thus far, then, the old men's rational pastime has gone off well."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You mean, I suppose, their serious and noble pursuit?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Perhaps; but I should like to know whether you and I are agreed about a certain thing."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"About what thing?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"You know the endless labour which painters expend upon their pictures--they are always putting in or taking out colours, or whatever be the term which artists employ; they seem as if they would never cease touching up their works, which are always being made brighter and more beautiful."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I know something of these matters from report, although I have never had any great acquaintance with the art."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"No matter; we may make use of the illustration notwithstanding:--Suppose that some one had a mind to paint a figure in the most beautiful manner, in the hope that his work instead of losing would always improve as time went on--do you not see that being a mortal, unless he leaves some one to succeed him who will correct the flaws which time may introduce, and be able to add what is left imperfect through the defect of the artist, and who will further brighten up and improve the picture, all his great labour will last but a short time?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And is not the aim of the legislator similar? First, he desires that his laws should be written down with all possible exactness; in the second place, as time goes on and he has made an actual trial of his decrees, will he not find omissions? Do you imagine that there ever was a legislator so foolish as not to know that many things are necessarily omitted, which some one coming after him must correct, if the constitution and the order of government is not to deteriorate, but to improve in the state which he has established?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Assuredly, that is the sort of thing which every one would desire."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And if any one possesses any means of accomplishing this by word or deed, or has any way great or small by which he can teach a person to understand how he can maintain and amend the laws, he should finish what he has to say, and not leave the work incomplete."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And is not this what you and I have to do at the present moment?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What have we to do?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"As we are about to legislate and have chosen our guardians of the law, and are ourselves in the evening of life, and they as compared with us are young men, we ought not only to legislate for them, but to endeavour to make them not only guardians of the law but legislators themselves, as far as this is possible."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly; if we can."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"At any rate, we must do our best."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"We will say to them--O friends and saviours of our laws, in laying down any law, there are many particulars which we shall omit, and this cannot be helped; at the same time, we will do our utmost to describe what is important, and will give an outline which you shall fill up. And I will explain on what principle you are to act. Megillus and Cleinias and I have often spoken to one another touching these matters, and we are of opinion that we have spoken well. And we hope that you will be of the same mind with us, and become our disciples, and keep in view the things which in our united opinion the legislator and guardian of the law ought to keep in view. There was one main point about which we were agreed--that a man's whole energies throughout life should be devoted to the acquisition of the virtue proper to a man, whether this was to be gained by study, or habit, or some mode of acquisition, or desire, or opinion, or knowledge--and this applies equally to men and women, old and young--the aim of all should always be such as I have described; anything which may be an impediment, the good man ought to show that he utterly disregards. And if at last necessity plainly compels him to be an outlaw from his native land, rather than bow his neck to the yoke of slavery and be ruled by inferiors, and he has to fly, an exile he must be and endure all such trials, rather than accept another form of government, which is likely to make men worse. These are our original principles; and do you now, fixing your eyes upon the standard of what a man and a citizen ought or ought not to be, praise and blame the laws--blame those which have not this power of making the citizen better, but embrace those which have; and with gladness receive and live in them; bidding a long farewell to other institutions which aim at goods, as they are termed, of a different kind. Let us proceed to another class of laws, beginning with their foundation in religion. And we must first return to the number 5040--the entire number had, and has, a great many convenient divisions, and the number of the tribes which was a twelfth part of the whole, being correctly formed by 21 x 20 (5040\/(21 x 20), i.e., 5040\/420 = 12), also has them. And not only is the whole number divisible by twelve, but also the number of each tribe is divisible by twelve. Now every portion should be regarded by us as a sacred gift of Heaven, corresponding to the months and to the revolution of the universe (compare Tim.). Every city has a guiding and sacred principle given by nature, but in some the division or distribution has been more right than in others, and has been more sacred and fortunate. In our opinion, nothing can be more right than the selection of the number 5040, which may be divided by all numbers from one to twelve with the single exception of eleven, and that admits of a very easy correction; for if, turning to the dividend (5040), we deduct two families, the defect in the division is cured. And the truth of this may be easily proved when we have leisure. But for the present, trusting to the mere assertion of this principle, let us divide the state; and assigning to each portion some God or son of a God, let us give them altars and sacred rites, and at the altars let us hold assemblies for sacrifice twice in the month--twelve assemblies for the tribes, and twelve for the city, according to their divisions; the first in honour of the Gods and divine things, and the second to promote friendship and 'better acquaintance,' as the phrase is, and every sort of good fellowship with one another. For people must be acquainted with those into whose families and whom they marry and with those to whom they give in marriage; in such matters, as far as possible, a man should deem it all important to avoid a mistake, and with this serious purpose let games be instituted (compare Republic) in which youths and maidens shall dance together, seeing one another and being seen naked, at a proper age, and on a suitable occasion, not transgressing the rules of modesty. The directors of choruses will be the superintendents and regulators of these games, and they, together with the guardians of the law, will legislate in any matters which we have omitted; for, as we said, where there are numerous and minute details, the legislator must leave out something. And the annual officers who have experience, and know what is wanted, must make arrangements and improvements year by year, until such enactments and provisions are sufficiently determined. A ten years' experience of sacrifices and dances, if extending to all particulars, will be quite sufficient; and if the legislator be alive they shall communicate with him, but if he be dead then the several officers shall refer the omissions which come under their notice to the guardians of the law, and correct them, until all is perfect; and from that time there shall be no more change, and they shall establish and use the new laws with the others which the legislator originally gave them, and of which they are never, if they can help, to change aught; or, if some necessity overtakes them, the magistrates must be called into counsel, and the whole people, and they must go to all the oracles of the Gods; and if they are all agreed, in that case they may make the change, but if they are not agreed, by no manner of means, and any one who dissents shall prevail, as the law ordains. Whenever any one over twenty-five years of age, having seen and been seen by others, believes himself to have found a marriage connexion which is to his mind, and suitable for the procreation of children, let him marry if he be still under the age of five-and-thirty years; but let him first hear how he ought to seek after what is suitable and appropriate (compare Arist. Pol.). For, as Cleinias says, every law should have a suitable prelude."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You recollect at the right moment, Stranger, and do not miss the opportunity which the argument affords of saying a word in season."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I thank you. We will say to him who is born of good parents--O my son, you ought to make such a marriage as wise men would approve. Now they would advise you neither to avoid a poor marriage, nor specially to desire a rich one; but if other things are equal, always to honour inferiors, and with them to form connexions;--this will be for the benefit of the city and of the families which are united; for the equable and symmetrical tends infinitely more to virtue than the unmixed. And he who is conscious of being too headstrong, and carried away more than is fitting in all his actions, ought to desire to become the relation of orderly parents; and he who is of the opposite temper ought to seek the opposite alliance. Let there be one word concerning all marriages:--Every man shall follow, not after the marriage which is most pleasing to himself, but after that which is most beneficial to the state. For somehow every one is by nature prone to that which is likest to himself, and in this way the whole city becomes unequal in property and in disposition; and hence there arise in most states the very results which we least desire to happen. Now, to add to the law an express provision, not only that the rich man shall not marry into the rich family, nor the powerful into the family of the powerful, but that the slower natures shall be compelled to enter into marriage with the quicker, and the quicker with the slower, may awaken anger as well as laughter in the minds of many; for there is a difficulty in perceiving that the city ought to be well mingled like a cup, in which the maddening wine is hot and fiery, but when chastened by a soberer God, receives a fair associate and becomes an excellent and temperate drink (compare Statesman). Yet in marriage no one is able to see that the same result occurs. Wherefore also the law must let alone such matters, but we should try to charm the spirits of men into believing the equability of their children's disposition to be of more importance than equality in excessive fortune when they marry; and him who is too desirous of making a rich marriage we should endeavour to turn aside by reproaches, not, however, by any compulsion of written law. Let this then be our exhortation concerning marriage, and let us remember what was said before--that a man should cling to immortality, and leave behind him children's children to be the servants of God in his place for ever. All this and much more may be truly said by way of prelude about the duty of marriage. But if a man will not listen, and remains unsocial and alien among his fellow-citizens, and is still unmarried at thirty-five years of age, let him pay a yearly fine;--he who of the highest class shall pay a fine of a hundred drachmae, and he who is of the second class a fine of seventy drachmae; the third class shall pay sixty drachmae, and the fourth thirty drachmae, and let the money be sacred to Here; he who does not pay the fine annually shall owe ten times the sum, which the treasurer of the goddess shall exact; and if he fails in doing so, let him be answerable and give an account of the money at his audit. He who refuses to marry shall be thus punished in money, and also be deprived of all honour which the younger show to the elder; let no young man voluntarily obey him, and, if he attempt to punish any one, let every one come to the rescue and defend the injured person, and he who is present and does not come to the rescue, shall be pronounced by the law to be a coward and a bad citizen. Of the marriage portion I have already spoken; and again I say for the instruction of poor men that he who neither gives nor receives a dowry on account of poverty, has a compensation; for the citizens of our state are provided with the necessaries of life, and wives will be less likely to be insolent, and husbands to be mean and subservient to them on account of property. And he who obeys this law will do a noble action; but he who will not obey, and gives or receives more than fifty drachmae as the price of the marriage garments if he be of the lowest, or more than a mina, or a mina-and-a-half, if he be of the third or second classes, or two minae if he be of the highest class, shall owe to the public treasury a similar sum, and that which is given or received shall be sacred to Here and Zeus; and let the treasurers of these Gods exact the money, as was said before about the unmarried--that the treasurers of Here were to exact the money, or pay the fine themselves. The betrothal by a father shall be valid in the first degree, that by a grandfather in the second degree, and in the third degree, betrothal by brothers who have the same father; but if there are none of these alive, the betrothal by a mother shall be valid in like manner; in cases of unexampled fatality, the next of kin and the guardians shall have authority. What are to be the rites before marriages, or any other sacred acts, relating either to future, present, or past marriages, shall be referred to the interpreters; and he who follows their advice may be satisfied. Touching the marriage festival, they shall assemble not more than five male and five female friends of both families; and a like number of members of the family of either sex, and no man shall spend more than his means will allow; he who is of the richest class may spend a mina,--he who is of the second, half a mina, and in the same proportion as the census of each decreases: all men shall praise him who is obedient to the law; but he who is disobedient shall be punished by the guardians of the law as a man wanting in true taste, and uninstructed in the laws of bridal song. Drunkenness is always improper, except at the festivals of the God who gave wine; and peculiarly dangerous, when a man is engaged in the business of marriage; at such a crisis of their lives a bride and bridegroom ought to have all their wits about them--they ought to take care that their offspring may be born of reasonable beings; for on what day or night Heaven will give them increase, who can say? Moreover, they ought not to begetting children when their bodies are dissipated by intoxication, but their offspring should be compact and solid, quiet and compounded properly; whereas the drunkard is all abroad in all his actions, and beside himself both in body and soul. Wherefore, also, the drunken man is bad and unsteady in sowing the seed of increase, and is likely to beget offspring who will be unstable and untrustworthy, and cannot be expected to walk straight either in body or mind. Hence during the whole year and all his life long, and especially while he is begetting children, he ought to take care and not intentionally do what is injurious to health, or what involves insolence and wrong; for he cannot help leaving the impression of himself on the souls and bodies of his offspring, and he begets children in every way inferior. And especially on the day and night of marriage should a man abstain from such things. For the beginning, which is also a God dwelling in man, preserves all things, if it meet with proper respect from each individual. He who marries is further to consider, that one of the two houses in the lot is the nest and nursery of his young, and there he is to marry and make a home for himself and bring up his children, going away from his father and mother. For in friendships there must be some degree of desire, in order to cement and bind together diversities of character; but excessive intercourse not having the desire which is created by time, insensibly dissolves friendships from a feeling of satiety; wherefore a man and his wife shall leave to his and her father and mother their own dwelling-places, and themselves go as to a colony and dwell there, and visit and be visited by their parents; and they shall beget and bring up children, handing on the torch of life from one generation to another, and worshipping the Gods according to law for ever. In the next place, we have to consider what sort of property will be most convenient. There is no difficulty either in understanding or acquiring most kinds of property, but there is great difficulty in what relates to slaves. And the reason is, that we speak about them in a way which is right and which is not right; for what we say about our slaves is consistent and also inconsistent with our practice about them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I do not understand, Stranger, what you mean."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I am not surprised, Megillus, for the state of the Helots among the Lacedaemonians is of all Hellenic forms of slavery the most controverted and disputed about, some approving and some condemning it; there is less dispute about the slavery which exists among the Heracleots, who have subjugated the Mariandynians, and about the Thessalian Penestae. Looking at these and the like examples, what ought we to do concerning property in slaves? I made a remark, in passing, which naturally elicited a question about my meaning from you. It was this:--We know that all would agree that we should have the best and most attached slaves whom we can get. For many a man has found his slaves better in every way than brethren or sons, and many times they have saved the lives and property of their masters and their whole house--such tales are well known."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But may we not also say that the soul of the slave is utterly corrupt, and that no man of sense ought to trust them? And the wisest of our poets, speaking of Zeus, says: 'Far-seeing Zeus takes away half the understanding of men whom the day of slavery subdues.' Different persons have got these two different notions of slaves in their minds--some of them utterly distrust their servants, and, as if they were wild beasts, chastise them with goads and whips, and make their souls three times, or rather many times, as slavish as they were before;--and others do just the opposite."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Then what are we to do in our own country, Stranger, seeing that there are such differences in the treatment of slaves by their owners?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, Cleinias, there can be no doubt that man is a troublesome animal, and therefore he is not very manageable, nor likely to become so, when you attempt to introduce the necessary division of slave, and freeman, and master."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is obvious."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"He is a troublesome piece of goods, as has been often shown by the frequent revolts of the Messenians, and the great mischiefs which happen in states having many slaves who speak the same language, and the numerous robberies and lawless life of the Italian banditti, as they are called. A man who considers all this is fairly at a loss. Two remedies alone remain to us,--not to have the slaves of the same country, nor if possible, speaking the same language (compare Aris. Pol.); in this way they will more easily be held in subjection: secondly, we should tend them carefully, not only out of regard to them, but yet more out of respect to ourselves. And the right treatment of slaves is to behave properly to them, and to do to them, if possible, even more justice than to those who are our equals; for he who naturally and genuinely reverences justice, and hates injustice, is discovered in his dealings with any class of men to whom he can easily be unjust. And he who in regard to the natures and actions of his slaves is undefiled by impiety and injustice, will best sow the seeds of virtue in them; and this may be truly said of every master, and tyrant, and of every other having authority in relation to his inferiors. Slaves ought to be punished as they deserve, and not admonished as if they were freemen, which will only make them conceited. The language used to a servant ought always to be that of a command (compare Arist. Pol.), and we ought not to jest with them, whether they are males or females--this is a foolish way which many people have of setting up their slaves, and making the life of servitude more disagreeable both for them and for their masters."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Now that each of the citizens is provided, as far as possible, with a sufficient number of suitable slaves who can help him in what he has to do, we may next proceed to describe their dwellings."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The city being new and hitherto uninhabited, care ought to be taken of all the buildings, and the manner of building each of them, and also of the temples and walls. These, Cleinias, were matters which properly came before the marriages;--but, as we are only talking, there is no objection to changing the order. If, however, our plan of legislation is ever to take effect, then the house shall precede the marriage if God so will, and afterwards we will come to the regulations about marriage; but at present we are only describing these matters in a general outline."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The temples are to be placed all round the agora, and the whole city built on the heights in a circle (compare Arist. Pol.), for the sake of defence and for the sake of purity. Near the temples are to be placed buildings for the magistrates and the courts of law; in these plaintiff and defendant will receive their due, and the places will be regarded as most holy, partly because they have to do with holy things: and partly because they are the dwelling-places of holy Gods: and in them will be held the courts in which cases of homicide and other trials of capital offences may fitly take place. As to the walls, Megillus, I agree with Sparta in thinking that they should be allowed to sleep in the earth, and that we should not attempt to disinter them (compare Arist. Pol.); there is a poetical saying, which is finely expressed, that 'walls ought to be of steel and iron, and not of earth;' besides, how ridiculous of us to be sending out our young men annually into the country to dig and to trench, and to keep off the enemy by fortifications, under the idea that they are not to be allowed to set foot in our territory, and then, that we should surround ourselves with a wall, which, in the first place, is by no means conducive to the health of cities, and is also apt to produce a certain effeminacy in the minds of the inhabitants, inviting men to run thither instead of repelling their enemies, and leading them to imagine that their safety is due not to their keeping guard day and night, but that when they are protected by walls and gates, then they may sleep in safety; as if they were not meant to labour, and did not know that true repose comes from labour, and that disgraceful indolence and a careless temper of mind is only the renewal of trouble. But if men must have walls, the private houses ought to be so arranged from the first that the whole city may be one wall, having all the houses capable of defence by reason of their uniformity and equality towards the streets (compare Arist. Pol.). The form of the city being that of a single dwelling will have an agreeable aspect, and being easily guarded will be infinitely better for security. Until the original building is completed, these should be the principal objects of the inhabitants; and the wardens of the city should superintend the work, and should impose a fine on him who is negligent; and in all that relates to the city they should have a care of cleanliness, and not allow a private person to encroach upon any public property either by buildings or excavations. Further, they ought to take care that the rains from heaven flow off easily, and of any other matters which may have to be administered either within or without the city. The guardians of the law shall pass any further enactments which their experience may show to be necessary, and supply any other points in which the law may be deficient. And now that these matters, and the buildings about the agora, and the gymnasia, and places of instruction, and theatres, are all ready and waiting for scholars and spectators, let us proceed to the subjects which follow marriage in the order of legislation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Assuming that marriages exist already, Cleinias, the mode of life during the year after marriage, before children are born, will follow next in order. In what way bride and bridegroom ought to live in a city which is to be superior to other cities, is a matter not at all easy for us to determine. There have been many difficulties already, but this will be the greatest of them, and the most disagreeable to the many. Still I cannot but say what appears to me to be right and true, Cleinias."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"He who imagines that he can give laws for the public conduct of states, while he leaves the private life of citizens wholly to take care of itself; who thinks that individuals may pass the day as they please, and that there is no necessity of order in all things; he, I say, who gives up the control of their private lives, and supposes that they will conform to law in their common and public life, is making a great mistake. Why have I made this remark? Why, because I am going to enact that the bridegrooms should live at the common tables, just as they did before marriage. This was a singularity when first enacted by the legislator in your parts of the world, Megillus and Cleinias, as I should suppose, on the occasion of some war or other similar danger, which caused the passing of the law, and which would be likely to occur in thinly-peopled places, and in times of pressure. But when men had once tried and been accustomed to a common table, experience showed that the institution greatly conduced to security; and in some such manner the custom of having common tables arose among you."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Likely enough."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I said that there may have been singularity and danger in imposing such a custom at first, but that now there is not the same difficulty. There is, however, another institution which is the natural sequel to this, and would be excellent, if it existed anywhere, but at present it does not. The institution of which I am about to speak is not easily described or executed; and would be like the legislator 'combing wool into the fire,' as people say, or performing any other impossible and useless feat."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is the cause, Stranger, of this extreme hesitation?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"You shall hear without any fruitless loss of time. That which has law and order in a state is the cause of every good, but that which is disordered or ill-ordered is often the ruin of that which is well-ordered; and at this point the argument is now waiting. For with you, Cleinias and Megillus, the common tables of men are, as I said, a heaven-born and admirable institution, but you are mistaken in leaving the women unregulated by law. They have no similar institution of public tables in the light of day, and just that part of the human race which is by nature prone to secrecy and stealth on account of their weakness--I mean the female sex--has been left without regulation by the legislator, which is a great mistake. And, in consequence of this neglect, many things have grown lax among you, which might have been far better, if they had been only regulated by law; for the neglect of regulations about women may not only be regarded as a neglect of half the entire matter (Arist. Pol.), but in proportion as woman's nature is inferior to that of men in capacity for virtue, in that degree the consequence of such neglect is more than twice as important. The careful consideration of this matter, and the arranging and ordering on a common principle of all our institutions relating both to men and women, greatly conduces to the happiness of the state. But at present, such is the unfortunate condition of mankind, that no man of sense will even venture to speak of common tables in places and cities in which they have never been established at all; and how can any one avoid being utterly ridiculous, who attempts to compel women to show in public how much they eat and drink? There is nothing at which the sex is more likely to take offence. For women are accustomed to creep into dark places, and when dragged out into the light they will exert their utmost powers of resistance, and be far too much for the legislator. And therefore, as I said before, in most places they will not endure to have the truth spoken without raising a tremendous outcry, but in this state perhaps they may. And if we may assume that our whole discussion about the state has not been mere idle talk, I should like to prove to you, if you will consent to listen, that this institution is good and proper; but if you had rather not, I will refrain."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"There is nothing which we should both of us like better, Stranger, than to hear what you have to say."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Very good; and you must not be surprised if I go back a little, for we have plenty of leisure, and there is nothing to prevent us from considering in every point of view the subject of law."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then let us return once more to what we were saying at first. Every man should understand that the human race either had no beginning at all, and will never have an end, but always will be and has been; or that it began an immense while ago."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, and have there not been constitutions and destructions of states, and all sorts of pursuits both orderly and disorderly, and diverse desires of meats and drinks always, and in all the world, and all sorts of changes of the seasons in which animals may be expected to have undergone innumerable transformations of themselves?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"No doubt."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And may we not suppose that vines appeared, which had previously no existence, and also olives, and the gifts of Demeter and her daughter, of which one Triptolemus was the minister, and that, before these existed, animals took to devouring each other as they do still?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Again, the practice of men sacrificing one another still exists among many nations; while, on the other hand, we hear of other human beings who did not even venture to taste the flesh of a cow and had no animal sacrifices, but only cakes and fruits dipped in honey, and similar pure offerings, but no flesh of animals; from these they abstained under the idea that they ought not to eat them, and might not stain the altars of the Gods with blood. For in those days men are said to have lived a sort of Orphic life, having the use of all lifeless things, but abstaining from all living things."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Such has been the constant tradition, and is very likely true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Some one might say to us, What is the drift of all this?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"A very pertinent question, Stranger."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And therefore I will endeavour, Cleinias, if I can, to draw the natural inference."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I see that among men all things depend upon three wants and desires, of which the end is virtue, if they are rightly led by them, or the opposite if wrongly. Now these are eating and drinking, which begin at birth--every animal has a natural desire for them, and is violently excited, and rebels against him who says that he must not satisfy all his pleasures and appetites, and get rid of all the corresponding pains--and the third and greatest and sharpest want and desire breaks out last, and is the fire of sexual lust, which kindles in men every species of wantonness and madness. And these three disorders we must endeavour to master by the three great principles of fear and law and right reason; turning them away from that which is called pleasantest to the best, using the Muses and the Gods who preside over contests to extinguish their increase and influx. But to return:--After marriage let us speak of the birth of children, and after their birth of their nurture and education. In the course of discussion the several laws will be perfected, and we shall at last arrive at the common tables. Whether such associations are to be confined to men, or extended to women also, we shall see better when we approach and take a nearer view of them; and we may then determine what previous institutions are required and will have to precede them. As I said before, we shall see them more in detail, and shall be better able to lay down the laws which are proper or suited to them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us keep in mind the words which have now been spoken; for hereafter there may be need of them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you bid us keep in mind?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That which we comprehended under the three words--first, eating, secondly, drinking, thirdly, the excitement of love."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"We shall be sure to remember, Stranger."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Very good. Then let us now proceed to marriage, and teach persons in what way they shall beget children, threatening them, if they disobey, with the terrors of the law."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The bride and bridegroom should consider that they are to produce for the state the best and fairest specimens of children which they can. Now all men who are associated in any action always succeed when they attend and give their mind to what they are doing, but when they do not give their mind or have no mind, they fail; wherefore let the bridegroom give his mind to the bride and to the begetting of children, and the bride in like manner give her mind to the bridegroom, and particularly at the time when their children are not yet born. And let the women whom we have chosen be the overseers of such matters, and let them in whatever number, large or small, and at whatever time the magistrates may command, assemble every day in the temple of Eileithyia during a third part of the day, and being there assembled, let them inform one another of any one whom they see, whether man or woman, of those who are begetting children, disregarding the ordinances given at the time when the nuptial sacrifices and ceremonies were performed. Let the begetting of children and the supervision of those who are begetting them continue ten years and no longer, during the time when marriage is fruitful. But if any continue without children up to this time, let them take counsel with their kindred and with the women holding the office of overseer and be divorced for their mutual benefit. If, however, any dispute arises about what is proper and for the interest of either party, they shall choose ten of the guardians of the law and abide by their permission and appointment. The women who preside over these matters shall enter into the houses of the young, and partly by admonitions and partly by threats make them give over their folly and error: if they persist, let the women go and tell the guardians of the law, and the guardians shall prevent them. But if they too cannot prevent them, they shall bring the matter before the people; and let them write up their names and make oath that they cannot reform such and such an one; and let him who is thus written up, if he cannot in a court of law convict those who have inscribed his name, be deprived of the privileges of a citizen in the following respects:--let him not go to weddings nor to the thanksgivings after the birth of children; and if he go, let any one who pleases strike him with impunity; and let the same regulations hold about women: let not a woman be allowed to appear abroad, or receive honour, or go to nuptial and birthday festivals, if she in like manner be written up as acting disorderly and cannot obtain a verdict. And if, when they themselves have done begetting children according to the law, a man or woman have connexion with another man or woman who are still begetting children, let the same penalties be inflicted upon them as upon those who are still having a family; and when the time for procreation has passed let the man or woman who refrains in such matters be held in esteem, and let those who do not refrain be held in the contrary of esteem--that is to say, disesteem. Now, if the greater part of mankind behave modestly, the enactments of law may be left to slumber; but, if they are disorderly, the enactments having been passed, let them be carried into execution. To every man the first year is the beginning of life, and the time of birth ought to be written down in the temples of their fathers as the beginning of existence to every child, whether boy or girl. Let every phratria have inscribed on a whited wall the names of the successive archons by whom the years are reckoned. And near to them let the living members of the phratria be inscribed, and when they depart life let them be erased. The limit of marriageable ages for a woman shall be from sixteen to twenty years at the longest,--for a man, from thirty to thirty-five years; and let a woman hold office at forty, and a man at thirty years. Let a man go out to war from twenty to sixty years, and for a woman, if there appear any need to make use of her in military service, let the time of service be after she shall have brought forth children up to fifty years of age; and let regard be had to what is possible and suitable to each. BOOK VII. And now, assuming children of both sexes to have been born, it will be proper for us to consider, in the next place, their nurture and education; this cannot be left altogether unnoticed, and yet may be thought a subject fitted rather for precept and admonition than for law. In private life there are many little things, not always apparent, arising out of the pleasures and pains and desires of individuals, which run counter to the intention of the legislator, and make the characters of the citizens various and dissimilar:--this is an evil in states; for by reason of their smallness and frequent occurrence, there would be an unseemliness and want of propriety in making them penal by law; and if made penal, they are the destruction of the written law because mankind get the habit of frequently transgressing the law in small matters. The result is that you cannot legislate about them, and still less can you be silent. I speak somewhat darkly, but I shall endeavour also to bring my wares into the light of day, for I acknowledge that at present there is a want of clearness in what I am saying."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true. ATHENIAN. Am I not right in maintaining that a good education is that which tends most to the improvement of mind and body?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Undoubtedly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And nothing can be plainer than that the fairest bodies are those which grow up from infancy in the best and straightest manner?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And do we not further observe that the first shoot of every living thing is by far the greatest and fullest? Many will even contend that a man at twenty-five does not reach twice the height which he attained at five."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, and is not rapid growth without proper and abundant exercise the source endless evils in the body?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And the body should have the most exercise when it receives most nourishment?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"But, Stranger, are we to impose this great amount of exercise upon newly-born infants?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Nay, rather on the bodies of infants still unborn."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, my good sir? In the process of gestation?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Exactly. I am not at all surprised that you have never heard of this very peculiar sort of gymnastic applied to such little creatures, which, although strange, I will endeavour to explain to you."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The practice is more easy for us to understand than for you, by reason of certain amusements which are carried to excess by us at Athens. Not only boys, but often older persons, are in the habit of keeping quails and cocks (compare Republic), which they train to fight one another. And they are far from thinking that the contests in which they stir them up to fight with one another are sufficient exercise; for, in addition to this, they carry them about tucked beneath their armpits, holding the smaller birds in their hands, the larger under their arms, and go for a walk of a great many miles for the sake of health, that is to say, not their own health, but the health of the birds; whereby they prove to any intelligent person, that all bodies are benefited by shakings and movements, when they are moved without weariness, whether the motion proceeds from themselves, or is caused by a swing, or at sea, or on horseback, or by other bodies in whatever way moving, and that thus gaining the mastery over food and drink, they are able to impart beauty and health and strength. But admitting all this, what follows? Shall we make a ridiculous law that the pregnant woman shall walk about and fashion the embryo within as we fashion wax before it hardens, and after birth swathe the infant for two years? Suppose that we compel nurses, under penalty of a legal fine, to be always carrying the children somewhere or other, either to the temples, or into the country, or to their relations' houses, until they are well able to stand, and to take care that their limbs are not distorted by leaning on them when they are too young (compare Arist. Pol.),--they should continue to carry them until the infant has completed its third year; the nurses should be strong, and there should be more than one of them. Shall these be our rules, and shall we impose a penalty for the neglect of them? No, no; the penalty of which we were speaking will fall upon our own heads more than enough."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What penalty?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Ridicule, and the difficulty of getting the feminine and servant-like dispositions of the nurses to comply."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Then why was there any need to speak of the matter at all?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The reason is, that masters and freemen in states, when they hear of it, are very likely to arrive at a true conviction that without due regulation of private life in cities, stability in the laying down of laws is hardly to be expected (compare Republic); and he who makes this reflection may himself adopt the laws just now mentioned, and, adopting them, may order his house and state well and be happy."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Likely enough."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And therefore let us proceed with our legislation until we have determined the exercises which are suited to the souls of young children, in the same manner in which we have begun to go through the rules relating to their bodies."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us assume, then, as a first principle in relation both to the body and soul of very young creatures, that nursing and moving about by day and night is good for them all, and that the younger they are, the more they will need it (compare Arist. Pol.); infants should live, if that were possible, as if they were always rocking at sea. This is the lesson which we may gather from the experience of nurses, and likewise from the use of the remedy of motion in the rites of the Corybantes; for when mothers want their restless children to go to sleep they do not employ rest, but, on the contrary, motion--rocking them in their arms; nor do they give them silence, but they sing to them and lap them in sweet strains; and the Bacchic women are cured of their frenzy in the same manner by the use of the dance and of music."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Well, Stranger, and what is the reason of this?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The reason is obvious."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The affection both of the Bacchantes and of the children is an emotion of fear, which springs out of an evil habit of the soul. And when some one applies external agitation to affections of this sort, the motion coming from without gets the better of the terrible and violent internal one, and produces a peace and calm in the soul, and quiets the restless palpitation of the heart, which is a thing much to be desired, sending the children to sleep, and making the Bacchantes, although they remain awake, to dance to the pipe with the help of the Gods to whom they offer acceptable sacrifices, and producing in them a sound mind, which takes the place of their frenzy. And, to express what I mean in a word, there is a good deal to be said in favour of this treatment."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But if fear has such a power we ought to infer from these facts, that every soul which from youth upward has been familiar with fears, will be made more liable to fear (compare Republic), and every one will allow that this is the way to form a habit of cowardice and not of courage."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"No doubt."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And, on the other hand, the habit of overcoming, from our youth upwards, the fears and terrors which beset us, may be said to be an exercise of courage."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And we may say that the use of exercise and motion in the earliest years of life greatly contributes to create a part of virtue in the soul."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Further, a cheerful temper, or the reverse, may be regarded as having much to do with high spirit on the one hand, or with cowardice on the other."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then now we must endeavour to show how and to what extent we may, if we please, without difficulty implant either character in the young."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There is a common opinion, that luxury makes the disposition of youth discontented and irascible and vehemently excited by trifles; that on the other hand excessive and savage servitude makes men mean and abject, and haters of their kind, and therefore makes them undesirable associates."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"But how must the state educate those who do not as yet understand the language of the country, and are therefore incapable of appreciating any sort of instruction?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will tell you how:--Every animal that is born is wont to utter some cry, and this is especially the case with man, and he is also affected with the inclination to weep more than any other animal."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Do not nurses, when they want to know what an infant desires, judge by these signs?--when anything is brought to the infant and he is silent, then he is supposed to be pleased, but, when he weeps and cries out, then he is not pleased. For tears and cries are the inauspicious signs by which children show what they love and hate. Now the time which is thus spent is no less than three years, and is a very considerable portion of life to be passed ill or well."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Does not the discontented and ungracious nature appear to you to be full of lamentations and sorrows more than a good man ought to be?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, but if during these three years every possible care were taken that our nursling should have as little of sorrow and fear, and in general of pain as was possible, might we not expect in early childhood to make his soul more gentle and cheerful? (Compare Arist. Pol.)"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure, Stranger--more especially if we could procure him a variety of pleasures."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There I can no longer agree, Cleinias: you amaze me. To bring him up in such a way would be his utter ruin; for the beginning is always the most critical part of education. Let us see whether I am right."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The point about which you and I differ is of great importance, and I hope that you, Megillus, will help to decide between us. For I maintain that the true life should neither seek for pleasures, nor, on the other hand, entirely avoid pains, but should embrace the middle state (compare Republic), which I just spoke of as gentle and benign, and is a state which we by some divine presage and inspiration rightly ascribe to God. Now, I say, he among men, too, who would be divine ought to pursue after this mean habit--he should not rush headlong into pleasures, for he will not be free from pains; nor should we allow any one, young or old, male or female, to be thus given any more than ourselves, and least of all the newly-born infant, for in infancy more than at any other time the character is engrained by habit. Nay, more, if I were not afraid of appearing to be ridiculous, I would say that a woman during her year of pregnancy should of all women be most carefully tended, and kept from violent or excessive pleasures and pains, and should at that time cultivate gentleness and benevolence and kindness."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You need not ask Megillus, Stranger, which of us has most truly spoken; for I myself agree that all men ought to avoid the life of unmingled pain or pleasure, and pursue always a middle course. And having spoken well, may I add that you have been well answered?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Very good, Cleinias; and now let us all three consider a further point."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That all the matters which we are now describing are commonly called by the general name of unwritten customs, and what are termed the laws of our ancestors are all of similar nature. And the reflection which lately arose in our minds, that we can neither call these things laws, nor yet leave them unmentioned, is justified; for they are the bonds of the whole state, and come in between the written laws which are or are hereafter to be laid down; they are just ancestral customs of great antiquity, which, if they are rightly ordered and made habitual, shield and preserve the previously existing written law; but if they depart from right and fall into disorder, then they are like the props of builders which slip away out of their place and cause a universal ruin--one part drags another down, and the fair super-structure falls because the old foundations are undermined. Reflecting upon this, Cleinias, you ought to bind together the new state in every possible way, omitting nothing, whether great or small, of what are called laws or manners or pursuits, for by these means a city is bound together, and all these things are only lasting when they depend upon one another; and, therefore, we must not wonder if we find that many apparently trifling customs or usages come pouring in and lengthening out our laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true: we are disposed to agree with you."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Up to the age of three years, whether of boy or girl, if a person strictly carries out our previous regulations and makes them a principal aim, he will do much for the advantage of the young creatures. But at three, four, five, and even six years the childish nature will require sports; now is the time to get rid of self-will in him, punishing him, but not so as to disgrace him. We were saying about slaves, that we ought neither to add insult to punishment so as to anger them, nor yet to leave them unpunished lest they become self-willed; and a like rule is to be observed in the case of the free-born. Children at that age have certain natural modes of amusement which they find out for themselves when they meet. And all the children who are between the ages of three and six ought to meet at the temples of the villages, the several families of a village uniting on one spot. The nurses are to see that the children behave properly and orderly--they themselves and all their companies are to be under the control of twelve matrons, one for each company, who are annually selected to inspect them from the women previously mentioned [i.e. the women who have authority over marriage], whom the guardians of the law appoint. These matrons shall be chosen by the women who have authority over marriage, one out of each tribe; all are to be of the same age; and let each of them, as soon as she is appointed, hold office and go to the temples every day, punishing all offenders, male or female, who are slaves or strangers, by the help of some of the public slaves; but if any citizen disputes the punishment, let her bring him before the wardens of the city; or, if there be no dispute, let her punish him herself. After the age of six years the time has arrived for the separation of the sexes--let boys live with boys, and girls in like manner with girls. Now they must begin to learn--the boys going to teachers of horsemanship and the use of the bow, the javelin, and sling, and the girls too, if they do not object, at any rate until they know how to manage these weapons, and especially how to handle heavy arms; for I may note, that the practice which now prevails is almost universally misunderstood."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"In what respect?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In that the right and left hand are supposed to be by nature differently suited for our various uses of them; whereas no difference is found in the use of the feet and the lower limbs; but in the use of the hands we are, as it were, maimed by the folly of nurses and mothers; for although our several limbs are by nature balanced, we create a difference in them by bad habit. In some cases this is of no consequence, as, for example, when we hold the lyre in the left hand, and the plectrum in the right, but it is downright folly to make the same distinction in other cases. The custom of the Scythians proves our error; for they not only hold the bow from them with the left hand and draw the arrow to them with their right, but use either hand for both purposes. And there are many similar examples in charioteering and other things, from which we may learn that those who make the left side weaker than the right act contrary to nature. In the case of the plectrum, which is of horn only, and similar instruments, as I was saying, it is of no consequence, but makes a great difference, and may be of very great importance to the warrior who has to use iron weapons, bows and javelins, and the like; above all, when in heavy armour, he has to fight against heavy armour. And there is a very great difference between one who has learnt and one who has not, and between one who has been trained in gymnastic exercises and one who has not been. For as he who is perfectly skilled in the Pancratium or boxing or wrestling, is not unable to fight from his left side, and does not limp and draggle in confusion when his opponent makes him change his position, so in heavy-armed fighting, and in all other things, if I am not mistaken, the like holds--he who has these double powers of attack and defence ought not in any case to leave them either unused or untrained, if he can help; and if a person had the nature of Geryon or Briareus he ought to be able with his hundred hands to throw a hundred darts. Now, the magistrates, male and female, should see to all these things, the women superintending the nursing and amusements of the children, and the men superintending their education, that all of them, boys and girls alike, may be sound hand and foot, and may not, if they can help, spoil the gifts of nature by bad habits. Education has two branches--one of gymnastic, which is concerned with the body, and the other of music, which is designed for the improvement of the soul. And gymnastic has also two branches--dancing and wrestling; and one sort of dancing imitates musical recitation, and aims at preserving dignity and freedom, the other aims at producing health, agility, and beauty in the limbs and parts of the body, giving the proper flexion and extension to each of them, a harmonious motion being diffused everywhere, and forming a suitable accompaniment to the dance. As regards wrestling, the tricks which Antaeus and Cercyon devised in their systems out of a vain spirit of competition, or the tricks of boxing which Epeius or Amycus invented, are useless and unsuitable for war, and do not deserve to have much said about them; but the art of wrestling erect and keeping free the neck and hands and sides, working with energy and constancy, with a composed strength, for the sake of health--these are always useful, and are not to be neglected, but to be enjoined alike on masters and scholars, when we reach that part of legislation; and we will desire the one to give their instructions freely, and the others to receive them thankfully. Nor, again, must we omit suitable imitations of war in our choruses; here in Crete you have the armed dances of the Curetes, and the Lacedaemonians have those of the Dioscuri. And our virgin lady, delighting in the amusement of the dance, thought it not fit to amuse herself with empty hands; she must be clothed in a complete suit of armour, and in this attire go through the dance; and youths and maidens should in every respect imitate her, esteeming highly the favour of the Goddess, both with a view to the necessities of war, and to festive occasions: it will be right also for the boys, until such time as they go out to war, to make processions and supplications to all the Gods in goodly array, armed and on horseback, in dances and marches, fast or slow, offering up prayers to the Gods and to the sons of Gods; and also engaging in contests and preludes of contests, if at all, with these objects. For these sorts of exercises, and no others, are useful both in peace and war, and are beneficial alike to states and to private houses. But other labours and sports and exercises of the body are unworthy of freemen, O Megillus and Cleinias. I have now completely described the kind of gymnastic which I said at first ought to be described; if you know of any better, will you communicate your thoughts?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"It is not easy, Stranger, to put aside these principles of gymnastic and wrestling and to enunciate better ones."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Now we must say what has yet to be said about the gifts of the Muses and of Apollo: before, we fancied that we had said all, and that gymnastic alone remained; but now we see clearly what points have been omitted, and should be first proclaimed; of these, then, let us proceed to speak."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let me tell you once more--although you have heard me say the same before--that caution must be always exercised, both by the speaker and by the hearer, about anything that is very singular and unusual. For my tale is one which many a man would be afraid to tell, and yet I have a confidence which makes me go on."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What have you to say, Stranger?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I say that in states generally no one has observed that the plays of childhood have a great deal to do with the permanence or want of permanence in legislation. For when plays are ordered with a view to children having the same plays, and amusing themselves after the same manner, and finding delight in the same playthings, the more solemn institutions of the state are allowed to remain undisturbed. Whereas if sports are disturbed, and innovations are made in them, and they constantly change, and the young never speak of their having the same likings, or the same established notions of good and bad taste, either in the bearing of their bodies or in their dress, but he who devises something new and out of the way in figures and colours and the like is held in special honour, we may truly say that no greater evil can happen in a state; for he who changes the sports is secretly changing the manners of the young, and making the old to be dishonoured among them and the new to be honoured. And I affirm that there is nothing which is a greater injury to all states than saying or thinking thus. Will you hear me tell how great I deem the evil to be?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You mean the evil of blaming antiquity in states?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"If you are speaking of that, you will find in us hearers who are disposed to receive what you say not unfavourably but most favourably."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I should expect so."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, then, let us give all the greater heed to one another's words. The argument affirms that any change whatever except from evil is the most dangerous of all things; this is true in the case of the seasons and of the winds, in the management of our bodies and the habits of our minds--true of all things except, as I said before, of the bad. He who looks at the constitution of individuals accustomed to eat any sort of meat, or drink any drink, or to do any work which they can get, may see that they are at first disordered by them, but afterwards, as time goes on, their bodies grow adapted to them, and they learn to know and like variety, and have good health and enjoyment of life; and if ever afterwards they are confined again to a superior diet, at first they are troubled with disorders, and with difficulty become habituated to their new food. A similar principle we may imagine to hold good about the minds of men and the natures of their souls. For when they have been brought up in certain laws, which by some Divine Providence have remained unchanged during long ages, so that no one has any memory or tradition of their ever having been otherwise than they are, then every one is afraid and ashamed to change that which is established. The legislator must somehow find a way of implanting this reverence for antiquity, and I would propose the following way: People are apt to fancy, as I was saying before, that when the plays of children are altered they are merely plays, not seeing that the most serious and detrimental consequences arise out of the change; and they readily comply with the child's wishes instead of deterring him, not considering that these children who make innovations in their games, when they grow up to be men, will be different from the last generation of children, and, being different, will desire a different sort of life, and under the influence of this desire will want other institutions and laws; and no one of them reflects that there will follow what I just now called the greatest of evils to states. Changes in bodily fashions are no such serious evils, but frequent changes in the praise and censure of manners are the greatest of evils, and require the utmost prevision."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And now do we still hold to our former assertion, that rhythms and music in general are imitations of good and evil characters in men? What say you?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is the only doctrine which we can admit."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Must we not, then, try in every possible way to prevent our youth from even desiring to imitate new modes either in dance or song? nor must any one be allowed to offer them varieties of pleasures."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Can any of us imagine a better mode of effecting this object than that of the Egyptians?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is their method?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"To consecrate every sort of dance or melody. First we should ordain festivals--calculating for the year what they ought to be, and at what time, and in honour of what Gods, sons of Gods, and heroes they ought to be celebrated; and, in the next place, what hymns ought to be sung at the several sacrifices, and with what dances the particular festival is to be honoured. This has to be arranged at first by certain persons, and, when arranged, the whole assembly of the citizens are to offer sacrifices and libations to the Fates and all the other Gods, and to consecrate the several odes to Gods and heroes: and if any one offers any other hymns or dances to any one of the Gods, the priests and priestesses, acting in concert with the guardians of the law, shall, with the sanction of religion and the law, exclude him, and he who is excluded, if he do not submit, shall be liable all his life long to have a suit of impiety brought against him by any one who likes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In the consideration of this subject, let us remember what is due to ourselves."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To what are you referring?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I mean that any young man, and much more any old one, when he sees or hears anything strange or unaccustomed, does not at once run to embrace the paradox, but he stands considering, like a person who is at a place where three paths meet, and does not very well know his way--he may be alone or he may be walking with others, and he will say to himself and them, 'Which is the way?' and will not move forward until he is satisfied that he is going right. And this is what we must do in the present instance: A strange discussion on the subject of law has arisen, which requires the utmost consideration, and we should not at our age be too ready to speak about such great matters, or be confident that we can say anything certain all in a moment."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then we will allow time for reflection, and decide when we have given the subject sufficient consideration. But that we may not be hindered from completing the natural arrangement of our laws, let us proceed to the conclusion of them in due order; for very possibly, if God will, the exposition of them, when completed, may throw light on our present perplexity."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Excellent, Stranger; let us do as you propose."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us then affirm the paradox that strains of music are our laws (nomoi), and this latter being the name which the ancients gave to lyric songs, they probably would not have very much objected to our proposed application of the word. Some one, either asleep or awake, must have had a dreamy suspicion of their nature. And let our decree be as follows: No one in singing or dancing shall offend against public and consecrated models, and the general fashion among the youth, any more than he would offend against any other law. And he who observes this law shall be blameless; but he who is disobedient, as I was saying, shall be punished by the guardians of the laws, and by the priests and priestesses. Suppose that we imagine this to be our law."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Can any one who makes such laws escape ridicule? Let us see. I think that our only safety will be in first framing certain models for composers. One of these models shall be as follows: If when a sacrifice is going on, and the victims are being burnt according to law--if, I say, any one who may be a son or brother, standing by another at the altar and over the victims, horribly blasphemes, will not his words inspire despondency and evil omens and forebodings in the mind of his father and of his other kinsmen?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And this is just what takes place in almost all our cities. A magistrate offers a public sacrifice, and there come in not one but many choruses, who take up a position a little way from the altar, and from time to time pour forth all sorts of horrible blasphemies on the sacred rites, exciting the souls of the audience with words and rhythms and melodies most sorrowful to hear; and he who at the moment when the city is offering sacrifice makes the citizens weep most, carries away the palm of victory. Now, ought we not to forbid such strains as these? And if ever our citizens must hear such lamentations, then on some unblest and inauspicious day let there be choruses of foreign and hired minstrels, like those hirelings who accompany the departed at funerals with barbarous Carian chants. That is the sort of thing which will be appropriate if we have such strains at all; and let the apparel of the singers be, not circlets and ornaments of gold, but the reverse. Enough of all this. I will simply ask once more whether we shall lay down as one of our principles of song--"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That we should avoid every word of evil omen; let that kind of song which is of good omen be heard everywhere and always in our state. I need hardly ask again, but shall assume that you agree with me."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means; that law is approved by the suffrages of us all."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But what shall be our next musical law or type? Ought not prayers to be offered up to the Gods when we sacrifice?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And our third law, if I am not mistaken, will be to the effect that our poets, understanding prayers to be requests which we make to the Gods, will take especial heed that they do not by mistake ask for evil instead of good. To make such a prayer would surely be too ridiculous."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Were we not a little while ago quite convinced that no silver or golden Plutus should dwell in our state?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what has it been the object of our argument to show? Did we not imply that the poets are not always quite capable of knowing what is good or evil? And if one of them utters a mistaken prayer in song or words, he will make our citizens pray for the opposite of what is good in matters of the highest import; than which, as I was saying, there can be few greater mistakes. Shall we then propose as one of our laws and models relating to the Muses--"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What? will you explain the law more precisely?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Shall we make a law that the poet shall compose nothing contrary to the ideas of the lawful, or just, or beautiful, or good, which are allowed in the state? nor shall he be permitted to communicate his compositions to any private individuals, until he shall have shown them to the appointed judges and the guardians of the law, and they are satisfied with them. As to the persons whom we appoint to be our legislators about music and as to the director of education, these have been already indicated. Once more then, as I have asked more than once, shall this be our third law, and type, and model--What do you say?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Let it be so, by all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then it will be proper to have hymns and praises of the Gods, intermingled with prayers; and after the Gods prayers and praises should be offered in like manner to demigods and heroes, suitable to their several characters."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In the next place there will be no objection to a law, that citizens who are departed and have done good and energetic deeds, either with their souls or with their bodies, and have been obedient to the laws, should receive eulogies; this will be very fitting."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But to honour with hymns and panegyrics those who are still alive is not safe; a man should run his course, and make a fair ending, and then we will praise him; and let praise be given equally to women as well as men who have been distinguished in virtue. The order of songs and dances shall be as follows: There are many ancient musical compositions and dances which are excellent, and from these the newly-founded city may freely select what is proper and suitable; and they shall choose judges of not less than fifty years of age, who shall make the selection, and any of the old poems which they deem sufficient they shall include; any that are deficient or altogether unsuitable, they shall either utterly throw aside, or examine and amend, taking into their counsel poets and musicians, and making use of their poetical genius; but explaining to them the wishes of the legislator in order that they may regulate dancing, music, and all choral strains, according to the mind of the judges; and not allowing them to indulge, except in some few matters, their individual pleasures and fancies. Now the irregular strain of music is always made ten thousand times better by attaining to law and order, and rejecting the honeyed Muse--not however that we mean wholly to exclude pleasure, which is the characteristic of all music. And if a man be brought up from childhood to the age of discretion and maturity in the use of the orderly and severe music, when he hears the opposite he detests it, and calls it illiberal; but if trained in the sweet and vulgar music, he deems the severer kind cold and displeasing. So that, as I was saying before, while he who hears them gains no more pleasure from the one than from the other, the one has the advantage of making those who are trained in it better men, whereas the other makes them worse."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Again, we must distinguish and determine on some general principle what songs are suitable to women, and what to men, and must assign to them their proper melodies and rhythms. It is shocking for a whole harmony to be inharmonical, or for a rhythm to be unrhythmical, and this will happen when the melody is inappropriate to them. And therefore the legislator must assign to these also their forms. Now both sexes have melodies and rhythms which of necessity belong to them; and those of women are clearly enough indicated by their natural difference. The grand, and that which tends to courage, may be fairly called manly; but that which inclines to moderation and temperance, may be declared both in law and in ordinary speech to be the more womanly quality. This, then, will be the general order of them. Let us now speak of the manner of teaching and imparting them, and the persons to whom, and the time when, they are severally to be imparted. As the shipwright first lays down the lines of the keel, and thus, as it were, draws the ship in outline, so do I seek to distinguish the patterns of life, and lay down their keels according to the nature of different men's souls; seeking truly to consider by what means, and in what ways, we may go through the voyage of life best. Now human affairs are hardly worth considering in earnest, and yet we must be in earnest about them--a sad necessity constrains us. And having got thus far, there will be a fitness in our completing the matter, if we can only find some suitable method of doing so. But what do I mean? Some one may ask this very question, and quite rightly, too."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I say that about serious matters a man should be serious, and about a matter which is not serious he should not be serious; and that God is the natural and worthy object of our most serious and blessed endeavours, for man, as I said before, is made to be the plaything of God, and this, truly considered, is the best of him; wherefore also every man and woman should walk seriously, and pass life in the noblest of pastimes, and be of another mind from what they are at present."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"In what respect?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"At present they think that their serious pursuits should be for the sake of their sports, for they deem war a serious pursuit, which must be managed well for the sake of peace; but the truth is, that there neither is, nor has been, nor ever will be, either amusement or instruction in any degree worth speaking of in war, which is nevertheless deemed by us to be the most serious of our pursuits. And therefore, as we say, every one of us should live the life of peace as long and as well as he can. And what is the right way of living? Are we to live in sports always? If so, in what kind of sports? We ought to live sacrificing, and singing, and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the Gods, and to defend himself against his enemies and conquer them in battle. The type of song or dance by which he will propitiate them has been described, and the paths along which he is to proceed have been cut for him. He will go forward in the spirit of the poet: 'Telemachus, some things thou wilt thyself find in thy heart, but other things God will suggest; for I deem that thou wast not born or brought up without the will of the Gods.' And this ought to be the view of our alumni; they ought to think that what has been said is enough for them, and that any other things their Genius and God will suggest to them--he will tell them to whom, and when, and to what Gods severally they are to sacrifice and perform dances, and how they may propitiate the deities, and live according to the appointment of nature; being for the most part puppets, but having some little share of reality."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"You have a low opinion of mankind, Stranger."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Nay, Megillus, be not amazed, but forgive me: I was comparing them with the Gods; and under that feeling I spoke. Let us grant, if you wish, that the human race is not to be despised, but is worthy of some consideration. Next follow the buildings for gymnasia and schools open to all; these are to be in three places in the midst of the city; and outside the city and in the surrounding country, also in three places, there shall be schools for horse exercise, and large grounds arranged with a view to archery and the throwing of missiles, at which young men may learn and practise. Of these mention has already been made; and if the mention be not sufficiently explicit, let us speak further of them and embody them in laws. In these several schools let there be dwellings for teachers, who shall be brought from foreign parts by pay, and let them teach those who attend the schools the art of war and the art of music, and the children shall come not only if their parents please, but if they do not please; there shall be compulsory education, as the saying is, of all and sundry, as far as this is possible; and the pupils shall be regarded as belonging to the state rather than to their parents. My law would apply to females as well as males; they shall both go through the same exercises. I assert without fear of contradiction that gymnastic and horsemanship are as suitable to women as to men. Of the truth of this I am persuaded from ancient tradition, and at the present day there are said to be countless myriads of women in the neighbourhood of the Black Sea, called Sauromatides, who not only ride on horseback like men, but have enjoined upon them the use of bows and other weapons equally with the men. And I further affirm, that if these things are possible, nothing can be more absurd than the practice which prevails in our own country, of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strength and with one mind, for thus the state, instead of being a whole, is reduced to a half, but has the same imposts to pay and the same toils to undergo; and what can be a greater mistake for any legislator to make than this?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true; yet much of what has been asserted by us, Stranger, is contrary to the custom of states; still, in saying that the discourse should be allowed to proceed, and that when the discussion is completed, we should choose what seems best, you spoke very properly, and I now feel compunction for what I have said. Tell me, then, what you would next wish to say."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I should wish to say, Cleinias, as I said before, that if the possibility of these things were not sufficiently proven in fact, then there might be an objection to the argument, but the fact being as I have said, he who rejects the law must find some other ground of objection; and, failing this, our exhortation will still hold good, nor will any one deny that women ought to share as far as possible in education and in other ways with men. For consider; if women do not share in their whole life with men, then they must have some other order of life."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what arrangement of life to be found anywhere is preferable to this community which we are now assigning to them? Shall we prefer that which is adopted by the Thracians and many other races who use their women to till the ground and to be shepherds of their herds and flocks, and to minister to them like slaves? Or shall we do as we and people in our part of the world do--getting together, as the phrase is, all our goods and chattels into one dwelling, we entrust them to our women, who are the stewards of them, and who also preside over the shuttles and the whole art of spinning? Or shall we take a middle course, as in Lacedaemon, Megillus--letting the girls share in gymnastic and music, while the grown-up women, no longer employed in spinning wool, are hard at work weaving the web of life, which will be no cheap or mean employment, and in the duty of serving and taking care of the household and bringing up the children, in which they will observe a sort of mean, not participating in the toils of war; and if there were any necessity that they should fight for their city and families, unlike the Amazons, they would be unable to take part in archery or any other skilled use of missiles, nor could they, after the example of the Goddess, carry shield or spear, or stand up nobly for their country when it was being destroyed, and strike terror into their enemies, if only because they were seen in regular order? Living as they do, they would never dare at all to imitate the Sauromatides, who, when compared with ordinary women, would appear to be like men. Let him who will, praise your legislators, but I must say what I think. The legislator ought to be whole and perfect, and not half a man only; he ought not to let the female sex live softly and waste money and have no order of life, while he takes the utmost care of the male sex, and leaves half of life only blest with happiness, when he might have made the whole state happy."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"What shall we do, Cleinias? Shall we allow a stranger to run down Sparta in this fashion?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes; for as we have given him liberty of speech we must let him go on until we have perfected the work of legislation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then now I may proceed?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"What will be the manner of life among men who may be supposed to have their food and clothing provided for them in moderation, and who have entrusted the practice of the arts to others, and whose husbandry committed to slaves paying a part of the produce, brings them a return sufficient for men living temperately; who, moreover, have common tables in which the men are placed apart, and near them are the common tables of their families, of their daughters and mothers, which day by day, the officers, male and female, are to inspect--they shall see to the behaviour of the company, and so dismiss them; after which the presiding magistrate and his attendants shall honour with libations those Gods to whom that day and night are dedicated, and then go home? To men whose lives are thus ordered, is there no work remaining to be done which is necessary and fitting, but shall each one of them live fattening like a beast? Such a life is neither just nor honourable, nor can he who lives it fail of meeting his due; and the due reward of the idle fatted beast is that he should be torn in pieces by some other valiant beast whose fatness is worn down by brave deeds and toil. These regulations, if we duly consider them, will never be exactly carried into execution under present circumstances, nor as long as women and children and houses and all other things are the private property of individuals; but if we can attain the second-best form of polity, we shall be very well off. And to men living under this second polity there remains a work to be accomplished which is far from being small or insignificant, but is the greatest of all works, and ordained by the appointment of righteous law. For the life which may be truly said to be concerned with the virtue of body and soul is twice, or more than twice, as full of toil and trouble as the pursuit after Pythian and Olympic victories, which debars a man from every employment of life. For there ought to be no bye-work interfering with the greater work of providing the necessary exercise and nourishment for the body, and instruction and education for the soul. Night and day are not long enough for the accomplishment of their perfection and consummation; and therefore to this end all freemen ought to arrange the way in which they will spend their time during the whole course of the day, from morning till evening and from evening till the morning of the next sunrise. There may seem to be some impropriety in the legislator determining minutely the numberless details of the management of the house, including such particulars as the duty of wakefulness in those who are to be perpetual watchmen of the whole city; for that any citizen should continue during the whole of any night in sleep, instead of being seen by all his servants, always the first to awake and get up--this, whether the regulation is to be called a law or only a practice, should be deemed base and unworthy of a freeman; also that the mistress of the house should be awakened by her hand-maidens instead of herself first awakening them, is what the slaves, male and female, and the serving-boys, and, if that were possible, everybody and everything in the house should regard as base. If they rise early, they may all of them do much of their public and of their household business, as magistrates in the city, and masters and mistresses in their private houses, before the sun is up. Much sleep is not required by nature, either for our souls or bodies, or for the actions which they perform. For no one who is asleep is good for anything, any more than if he were dead; but he of us who has the most regard for life and reason keeps awake as long as he can, reserving only so much time for sleep as is expedient for health; and much sleep is not required, if the habit of moderation be once rightly formed. Magistrates in states who keep awake at night are terrible to the bad, whether enemies or citizens, and are honoured and reverenced by the just and temperate, and are useful to themselves and to the whole state. A night which is passed in such a manner, in addition to all the above-mentioned advantages, infuses a sort of courage into the minds of the citizens. When the day breaks, the time has arrived for youth to go to their schoolmasters. Now neither sheep nor any other animals can live without a shepherd, nor can children be left without tutors, or slaves without masters. And of all animals the boy is the most unmanageable, inasmuch as he has the fountain of reason in him not yet regulated; he is the most insidious, sharp-witted, and insubordinate of animals. Wherefore he must be bound with many bridles; in the first place, when he gets away from mothers and nurses, he must be under the management of tutors on account of his childishness and foolishness; then, again, being a freeman, he must be controlled by teachers, no matter what they teach, and by studies; but he is also a slave, and in that regard any freeman who comes in his way may punish him and his tutor and his instructor, if any of them does anything wrong; and he who comes across him and does not inflict upon him the punishment which he deserves, shall incur the greatest disgrace; and let the guardian of the law, who is the director of education, see to him who coming in the way of the offences which we have mentioned, does not chastise them when he ought, or chastises them in a way which he ought not; let him keep a sharp look-out, and take especial care of the training of our children, directing their natures, and always turning them to good according to the law. But how can our law sufficiently train the director of education himself; for as yet all has been imperfect, and nothing has been said either clear or satisfactory? Now, as far as possible, the law ought to leave nothing to him, but to explain everything, that he may be an interpreter and tutor to others. About dances and music and choral strains, I have already spoken both as to the character of the selection of them, and the manner in which they are to be amended and consecrated. But we have not as yet spoken, O illustrious guardian of education, of the manner in which your pupils are to use those strains which are written in prose, although you have been informed what martial strains they are to learn and practise; what relates in the first place to the learning of letters, and secondly, to the lyre, and also to calculation, which, as we were saying, is needful for them all to learn, and any other things which are required with a view to war and the management of house and city, and, looking to the same object, what is useful in the revolutions of the heavenly bodies--the stars and sun and moon, and the various regulations about these matters which are necessary for the whole state--I am speaking of the arrangements of days in periods of months, and of months in years, which are to be observed, in order that seasons and sacrifices and festivals may have their regular and natural order, and keep the city alive and awake, the Gods receiving the honours due to them, and men having a better understanding about them: all these things, O my friend, have not yet been sufficiently declared to you by the legislator. Attend, then, to what I am now going to say: We were telling you, in the first place, that you were not sufficiently informed about letters, and the objection was to this effect--that you were never told whether he who was meant to be a respectable citizen should apply himself in detail to that sort of learning, or not apply himself at all; and the same remark holds good of the study of the lyre. But now we say that he ought to attend to them. A fair time for a boy of ten years old to spend in letters is three years; the age of thirteen is the proper time for him to begin to handle the lyre, and he may continue at this for another three years, neither more nor less, and whether his father or himself like or dislike the study, he is not to be allowed to spend more or less time in learning music than the law allows. And let him who disobeys the law be deprived of those youthful honours of which we shall hereafter speak. Hear, however, first of all, what the young ought to learn in the early years of life, and what their instructors ought to teach them. They ought to be occupied with their letters until they are able to read and write; but the acquisition of perfect beauty or quickness in writing, if nature has not stimulated them to acquire these accomplishments in the given number of years, they should let alone. And as to the learning of compositions committed to writing which are not set to the lyre, whether metrical or without rhythmical divisions, compositions in prose, as they are termed, having no rhythm or harmony--seeing how dangerous are the writings handed down to us by many writers of this class--what will you do with them, O most excellent guardians of the law? or how can the lawgiver rightly direct you about them? I believe that he will be in great difficulty."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What troubles you, Stranger? and why are you so perplexed in your mind?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"You naturally ask, Cleinias, and to you and Megillus, who are my partners in the work of legislation, I must state the more difficult as well as the easier parts of the task."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To what do you refer in this instance?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will tell you. There is a difficulty in opposing many myriads of mouths."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Well, and have we not already opposed the popular voice in many important enactments?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That is quite true; and you mean to imply that the road which we are taking may be disagreeable to some but is agreeable to as many others, or if not to as many, at any rate to persons not inferior to the others, and in company with them you bid me, at whatever risk, to proceed along the path of legislation which has opened out of our present discourse, and to be of good cheer, and not to faint."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And I do not faint; I say, indeed, that we have a great many poets writing in hexameter, trimeter, and all sorts of measures--some who are serious, others who aim only at raising a laugh--and all mankind declare that the youth who are rightly educated should be brought up in them and saturated with them; some insist that they should be constantly hearing them read aloud, and always learning them, so as to get by heart entire poets; while others select choice passages and long speeches, and make compendiums of them, saying that these ought to be committed to memory, if a man is to be made good and wise by experience and learning of many things. And you want me now to tell them plainly in what they are right and in what they are wrong."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, I do."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But how can I in one word rightly comprehend all of them? I am of opinion, and, if I am not mistaken, there is a general agreement, that every one of these poets has said many things well and many things the reverse of well; and if this be true, then I do affirm that much learning is dangerous to youth."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How would you advise the guardian of the law to act?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In what respect?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I mean to what pattern should he look as his guide in permitting the young to learn some things and forbidding them to learn others. Do not shrink from answering."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"My good Cleinias, I rather think that I am fortunate."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I think that I am not wholly in want of a pattern, for when I consider the words which we have spoken from early dawn until now, and which, as I believe, have been inspired by Heaven, they appear to me to be quite like a poem. When I reflected upon all these words of ours, I naturally felt pleasure, for of all the discourses which I have ever learnt or heard, either in poetry or prose, this seemed to me to be the justest, and most suitable for young men to hear; I cannot imagine any better pattern than this which the guardian of the law who is also the director of education can have. He cannot do better than advise the teachers to teach the young these words and any which are of a like nature, if he should happen to find them, either in poetry or prose, or if he come across unwritten discourses akin to ours, he should certainly preserve them, and commit them to writing. And, first of all, he shall constrain the teachers themselves to learn and approve them, and any of them who will not, shall not be employed by him, but those whom he finds agreeing in his judgment, he shall make use of and shall commit to them the instruction and education of youth. And here and on this wise let my fanciful tale about letters and teachers of letters come to an end."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I do not think, Stranger, that we have wandered out of the proposed limits of the argument; but whether we are right or not in our whole conception, I cannot be very certain."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The truth, Cleinias, may be expected to become clearer when, as we have often said, we arrive at the end of the whole discussion about laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And now that we have done with the teacher of letters, the teacher of the lyre has to receive orders from us."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I think that we have only to recollect our previous discussions, and we shall be able to give suitable regulations touching all this part of instruction and education to the teachers of the lyre."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To what do you refer?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"We were saying, if I remember rightly, that the sixty years old choristers of Dionysus were to be specially quick in their perceptions of rhythm and musical composition, that they might be able to distinguish good and bad imitation, that is to say, the imitation of the good or bad soul when under the influence of passion, rejecting the one and displaying the other in hymns and songs, charming the souls of youth, and inviting them to follow and attain virtue by the way of imitation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And with this view the teacher and the learner ought to use the sounds of the lyre, because its notes are pure, the player who teaches and his pupil rendering note for note in unison; but complexity, and variation of notes, when the strings give one sound and the poet or composer of the melody gives another--also when they make concords and harmonies in which lesser and greater intervals, slow and quick, or high and low notes, are combined--or, again, when they make complex variations of rhythms, which they adapt to the notes of the lyre--all that sort of thing is not suited to those who have to acquire speedy and useful knowledge of music in three years; for opposite principles are confusing, and create a difficulty in learning, and our young men should learn quickly, and their mere necessary acquirements are not few or trifling, as will be shown in due course. Let the director of education attend to the principles concerning music which we are laying down. As to the songs and words themselves which the masters of choruses are to teach and the character of them, they have been already described by us, and are the same which, when consecrated and adapted to the different festivals, we said were to benefit cities by affording them an innocent amusement."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That, again, is true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then let him who has been elected a director of music receive these rules from us as containing the very truth; and may he prosper in his office! Let us now proceed to lay down other rules in addition to the preceding about dancing and gymnastic exercise in general. Having said what remained to be said about the teaching of music, let us speak in like manner about gymnastic. For boys and girls ought to learn to dance and practise gymnastic exercises--ought they not?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then the boys ought to have dancing masters, and the girls dancing mistresses to exercise them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then once more let us summon him who has the chief concern in the business, the superintendent of youth [i.e. the director of education]; he will have plenty to do, if he is to have the charge of music and gymnastic."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"But how will an old man be able to attend to such great charges?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"O my friend, there will be no difficulty, for the law has already given and will give him permission to select as his assistants in this charge any citizens, male or female, whom he desires; and he will know whom he ought to choose, and will be anxious not to make a mistake, from a due sense of responsibility, and from a consciousness of the importance of his office, and also because he will consider that if young men have been and are well brought up, then all things go swimmingly, but if not, it is not meet to say, nor do we say, what will follow, lest the regarders of omens should take alarm about our infant state. Many things have been said by us about dancing and about gymnastic movements in general; for we include under gymnastics all military exercises, such as archery, and all hurling of weapons, and the use of the light shield, and all fighting with heavy arms, and military evolutions, and movements of armies, and encampings, and all that relates to horsemanship. Of all these things there ought to be public teachers, receiving pay from the state, and their pupils should be the men and boys in the state, and also the girls and women, who are to know all these things. While they are yet girls they should have practised dancing in arms and the whole art of fighting--when grown-up women, they should apply themselves to evolutions and tactics, and the mode of grounding and taking up arms; if for no other reason, yet in case the whole military force should have to leave the city and carry on operations of war outside, that those who will have to guard the young and the rest of the city may be equal to the task; and, on the other hand, when enemies, whether barbarian or Hellenic, come from without with mighty force and make a violent assault upon them, and thus compel them to fight for the possession of the city, which is far from being an impossibility, great would be the disgrace to the state, if the women had been so miserably trained that they could not fight for their young, as birds will, against any creature however strong, and die or undergo any danger, but must instantly rush to the temples and crowd at the altars and shrines, and bring upon human nature the reproach, that of all animals man is the most cowardly!"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Such a want of education, Stranger, is certainly an unseemly thing to happen in a state, as well as a great misfortune."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Suppose that we carry our law to the extent of saying that women ought not to neglect military matters, but that all citizens, male and female alike, shall attend to them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I quite agree."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Of wrestling we have spoken in part, but of what I should call the most important part we have not spoken, and cannot easily speak without showing at the same time by gesture as well as in word what we mean; when word and action combine, and not till then, we shall explain clearly what has been said, pointing out that of all movements wrestling is most akin to the military art, and is to be pursued for the sake of this, and not this for the sake of wrestling."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Excellent. ATHENIAN: Enough of wrestling; we will now proceed to speak of other movements of the body. Such motion may be in general called dancing, and is of two kinds: one of nobler figures, imitating the honourable, the other of the more ignoble figures, imitating the mean; and of both these there are two further subdivisions. Of the serious, one kind is of those engaged in war and vehement action, and is the exercise of a noble person and a manly heart; the other exhibits a temperate soul in the enjoyment of prosperity and modest pleasures, and may be truly called and is the dance of peace. The warrior dance is different from the peaceful one, and may be rightly termed Pyrrhic; this imitates the modes of avoiding blows and missiles by dropping or giving way, or springing aside, or rising up or falling down; also the opposite postures which are those of action, as, for example, the imitation of archery and the hurling of javelins, and of all sorts of blows. And when the imitation is of brave bodies and souls, and the action is direct and muscular, giving for the most part a straight movement to the limbs of the body--that, I say, is the true sort; but the opposite is not right. In the dance of peace what we have to consider is whether a man bears himself naturally and gracefully, and after the manner of men who duly conform to the law. But before proceeding I must distinguish the dancing about which there is any doubt, from that about which there is no doubt. Which is the doubtful kind, and how are the two to be distinguished? There are dances of the Bacchic sort, both those in which, as they say, they imitate drunken men, and which are named after the Nymphs, and Pan, and Silenuses, and Satyrs; and also those in which purifications are made or mysteries celebrated--all this sort of dancing cannot be rightly defined as having either a peaceful or a warlike character, or indeed as having any meaning whatever, and may, I think, be most truly described as distinct from the warlike dance, and distinct from the peaceful, and not suited for a city at all. There let it lie; and so leaving it to lie, we will proceed to the dances of war and peace, for with these we are undoubtedly concerned. Now the unwarlike muse, which honours in dance the Gods and the sons of the Gods, is entirely associated with the consciousness of prosperity; this class may be subdivided into two lesser classes, of which one is expressive of an escape from some labour or danger into good, and has greater pleasures, the other expressive of preservation and increase of former good, in which the pleasure is less exciting--in all these cases, every man when the pleasure is greater, moves his body more, and less when the pleasure is less; and, again, if he be more orderly and has learned courage from discipline he moves less, but if he be a coward, and has no training or self-control, he makes greater and more violent movements, and in general when he is speaking or singing he is not altogether able to keep his body still; and so out of the imitation of words in gestures the whole art of dancing has arisen. And in these various kinds of imitation one man moves in an orderly, another in a disorderly manner; and as the ancients may be observed to have given many names which are according to nature and deserving of praise, so there is an excellent one which they have given to the dances of men who in their times of prosperity are moderate in their pleasures--the giver of names, whoever he was, assigned to them a very true, and poetical, and rational name, when he called them Emmeleiai, or dances of order, thus establishing two kinds of dances of the nobler sort, the dance of war which he called the Pyrrhic, and the dance of peace which he called Emmeleia, or the dance of order; giving to each their appropriate and becoming name. These things the legislator should indicate in general outline, and the guardian of the law should enquire into them and search them out, combining dancing with music, and assigning to the several sacrificial feasts that which is suitable to them; and when he has consecrated all of them in due order, he shall for the future change nothing, whether of dance or song. Thenceforward the city and the citizens shall continue to have the same pleasures, themselves being as far as possible alike, and shall live well and happily. I have described the dances which are appropriate to noble bodies and generous souls. But it is necessary also to consider and know uncomely persons and thoughts, and those which are intended to produce laughter in comedy, and have a comic character in respect of style, song, and dance, and of the imitations which these afford. For serious things cannot be understood without laughable things, nor opposites at all without opposites, if a man is really to have intelligence of either; but he cannot carry out both in action, if he is to have any degree of virtue. And for this very reason he should learn them both, in order that he may not in ignorance do or say anything which is ridiculous and out of place--he should command slaves and hired strangers to imitate such things, but he should never take any serious interest in them himself, nor should any freeman or freewoman be discovered taking pains to learn them; and there should always be some element of novelty in the imitation. Let these then be laid down, both in law and in our discourse, as the regulations of laughable amusements which are generally called comedy. And, if any of the serious poets, as they are termed, who write tragedy, come to us and say--'O strangers, may we go to your city and country or may we not, and shall we bring with us our poetry--what is your will about these matters?'--how shall we answer the divine men? I think that our answer should be as follows: Best of strangers, we will say to them, we also according to our ability are tragic poets, and our tragedy is the best and noblest; for our whole state is an imitation of the best and noblest life, which we affirm to be indeed the very truth of tragedy. You are poets and we are poets, both makers of the same strains, rivals and antagonists in the noblest of dramas, which true law can alone perfect, as our hope is. Do not then suppose that we shall all in a moment allow you to erect your stage in the agora, or introduce the fair voices of your actors, speaking above our own, and permit you to harangue our women and children, and the common people, about our institutions, in language other than our own, and very often the opposite of our own. For a state would be mad which gave you this licence, until the magistrates had determined whether your poetry might be recited, and was fit for publication or not. Wherefore, O ye sons and scions of the softer Muses, first of all show your songs to the magistrates, and let them compare them with our own, and if they are the same or better we will give you a chorus; but if not, then, my friends, we cannot. Let these, then, be the customs ordained by law about all dances and the teaching of them, and let matters relating to slaves be separated from those relating to masters, if you do not object."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"We can have no hesitation in assenting when you put the matter thus."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There still remain three studies suitable for freemen. Arithmetic is one of them; the measurement of length, surface, and depth is the second; and the third has to do with the revolutions of the stars in relation to one another. Not every one has need to toil through all these things in a strictly scientific manner, but only a few, and who they are to be we will hereafter indicate at the end, which will be the proper place; not to know what is necessary for mankind in general, and what is the truth, is disgraceful to every one: and yet to enter into these matters minutely is neither easy, nor at all possible for every one; but there is something in them which is necessary and cannot be set aside, and probably he who made the proverb about God originally had this in view when he said, that 'not even God himself can fight against necessity;' he meant, if I am not mistaken, divine necessity; for as to the human necessities of which the many speak, when they talk in this manner, nothing can be more ridiculous than such an application of the words."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And what necessities of knowledge are there, Stranger, which are divine and not human?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I conceive them to be those of which he who has no use nor any knowledge at all cannot be a God, or demi-god, or hero to mankind, or able to take any serious thought or charge of them. And very unlike a divine man would he be, who is unable to count one, two, three, or to distinguish odd and even numbers, or is unable to count at all, or reckon night and day, and who is totally unacquainted with the revolution of the sun and moon, and the other stars. There would be great folly in supposing that all these are not necessary parts of knowledge to him who intends to know anything about the highest kinds of knowledge; but which these are, and how many there are of them, and when they are to be learned, and what is to be learned together and what apart, and the whole correlation of them, must be rightly apprehended first; and these leading the way we may proceed to the other parts of knowledge. For so necessity grounded in nature constrains us, against which we say that no God contends, or ever will contend."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I think, Stranger, that what you have now said is very true and agreeable to nature."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes, Cleinias, that is so. But it is difficult for the legislator to begin with these studies; at a more convenient time we will make regulations for them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You seem, Stranger, to be afraid of our habitual ignorance of the subject: there is no reason why that should prevent you from speaking out."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I certainly am afraid of the difficulties to which you allude, but I am still more afraid of those who apply themselves to this sort of knowledge, and apply themselves badly. For entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with an ill bringing up, are far more fatal."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"All freemen I conceive, should learn as much of these branches of knowledge as every child in Egypt is taught when he learns the alphabet. In that country arithmetical games have been invented for the use of mere children, which they learn as a pleasure and amusement. They have to distribute apples and garlands, using the same number sometimes for a larger and sometimes for a lesser number of persons; and they arrange pugilists and wrestlers as they pair together by lot or remain over, and show how their turns come in natural order. Another mode of amusing them is to distribute vessels, sometimes of gold, brass, silver, and the like, intermixed with one another, sometimes of one metal only; as I was saying they adapt to their amusement the numbers in common use, and in this way make more intelligible to their pupils the arrangements and movements of armies and expeditions, and in the management of a household they make people more useful to themselves, and more wide awake; and again in measurements of things which have length, and breadth, and depth, they free us from that natural ignorance of all these things which is so ludicrous and disgraceful."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What kind of ignorance do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"O my dear Cleinias, I, like yourself, have late in life heard with amazement of our ignorance in these matters; to me we appear to be more like pigs than men, and I am quite ashamed, not only of myself, but of all Hellenes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"About what? Say, Stranger, what you mean."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will; or rather I will show you my meaning by a question, and do you please to answer me: You know, I suppose, what length is?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what breadth is?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And you know that these are two distinct things, and that there is a third thing called depth?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And do not all these seem to you to be commensurable with themselves?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That is to say, length is naturally commensurable with length, and breadth with breadth, and depth in like manner with depth?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Undoubtedly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But if some things are commensurable and others wholly incommensurable, and you think that all things are commensurable, what is your position in regard to them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly, far from good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Concerning length and breadth when compared with depth, or breadth and length when compared with one another, are not all the Hellenes agreed that these are commensurable with one another in some way?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But if they are absolutely incommensurable, and yet all of us regard them as commensurable, have we not reason to be ashamed of our compatriots; and might we not say to them: O ye best of Hellenes, is not this one of the things of which we were saying that not to know them is disgraceful, and of which to have a bare knowledge only is no great distinction?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And there are other things akin to these, in which there spring up other errors of the same family."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The natures of commensurable and incommensurable quantities in their relation to one another. A man who is good for anything ought to be able, when he thinks, to distinguish them; and different persons should compete with one another in asking questions, which will be a far better and more graceful way of passing their time than the old man's game of draughts."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I dare say; and these pastimes are not so very unlike a game of draughts."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And these, as I maintain, Cleinias, are the studies which our youth ought to learn, for they are innocent and not difficult; the learning of them will be an amusement, and they will benefit the state. If any one is of another mind, let him say what he has to say."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then if these studies are such as we maintain, we will include them; if not, they shall be excluded."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Assuredly: but may we not now, Stranger, prescribe these studies as necessary, and so fill up the lacunae of our laws?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"They shall be regarded as pledges which may be hereafter redeemed and removed from our state, if they do not please either us who give them, or you who accept them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"A fair condition."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Next let us see whether we are or are not willing that the study of astronomy shall be proposed for our youth."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Here occurs a strange phenomenon, which certainly cannot in any point of view be tolerated."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To what are you referring?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Men say that we ought not to enquire into the supreme God and the nature of the universe, nor busy ourselves in searching out the causes of things, and that such enquiries are impious; whereas the very opposite is the truth."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Perhaps what I am saying may seem paradoxical, and at variance with the usual language of age. But when any one has any good and true notion which is for the advantage of the state and in every way acceptable to God, he cannot abstain from expressing it."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Your words are reasonable enough; but shall we find any good or true notion about the stars?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"My good friends, at this hour all of us Hellenes tell lies, if I may use such an expression, about those great Gods, the Sun and the Moon."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Lies of what nature?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"We say that they and divers other stars do not keep the same path, and we call them planets or wanderers."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true, Stranger; and in the course of my life I have often myself seen the morning star and the evening star and divers others not moving in their accustomed course, but wandering out of their path in all manner of ways, and I have seen the sun and moon doing what we all know that they do."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Just so, Megillus and Cleinias; and I maintain that our citizens and our youth ought to learn about the nature of the Gods in heaven, so far as to be able to offer sacrifices and pray to them in pious language, and not to blaspheme about them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"There you are right, if such a knowledge be only attainable; and if we are wrong in our mode of speaking now, and can be better instructed and learn to use better language, then I quite agree with you that such a degree of knowledge as will enable us to speak rightly should be acquired by us. And now do you try to explain to us your whole meaning, and we, on our part, will endeavour to understand you."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There is some difficulty in understanding my meaning, but not a very great one, nor will any great length of time be required. And of this I am myself a proof; for I did not know these things long ago, nor in the days of my youth, and yet I can explain them to you in a brief space of time; whereas if they had been difficult I could certainly never have explained them all, old as I am, to old men like yourselves."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True; but what is this study which you describe as wonderful and fitting for youth to learn, but of which we are ignorant? Try and explain the nature of it to us as clearly as you can."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will. For, O my good friends, that other doctrine about the wandering of the sun and the moon and the other stars is not the truth, but the very reverse of the truth. Each of them moves in the same path--not in many paths, but in one only, which is circular, and the varieties are only apparent. Nor are we right in supposing that the swiftest of them is the slowest, nor conversely, that the slowest is the quickest. And if what I say is true, only just imagine that we had a similar notion about horses running at Olympia, or about men who ran in the long course, and that we addressed the swiftest as the slowest and the slowest as the swiftest, and sang the praises of the vanquished as though he were the victor--in that case our praises would not be true, nor very agreeable to the runners, though they be but men; and now, to commit the same error about the Gods which would have been ludicrous and erroneous in the case of men--is not that ludicrous and erroneous?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Worse than ludicrous, I should say."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"At all events, the Gods cannot like us to be spreading a false report of them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Most true, if such is the fact."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And if we can show that such is really the fact, then all these matters ought to be learned so far as is necessary for the avoidance of impiety; but if we cannot, they may be let alone, and let this be our decision."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Enough of laws relating to education and learning. But hunting and similar pursuits in like manner claim our attention. For the legislator appears to have a duty imposed upon him which goes beyond mere legislation. There is something over and above law which lies in a region between admonition and law, and has several times occurred to us in the course of discussion; for example, in the education of very young children there were things, as we maintain, which are not to be defined, and to regard them as matters of positive law is a great absurdity. Now, our laws and the whole constitution of our state having been thus delineated, the praise of the virtuous citizen is not complete when he is described as the person who serves the laws best and obeys them most, but the higher form of praise is that which describes him as the good citizen who passes through life undefiled and is obedient to the words of the legislator, both when he is giving laws and when he assigns praise and blame. This is the truest word that can be spoken in praise of a citizen; and the true legislator ought not only to write his laws, but also to interweave with them all such things as seem to him honourable and dishonourable. And the perfect citizen ought to seek to strengthen these no less than the principles of law which are sanctioned by punishments. I will adduce an example which will clear up my meaning, and will be a sort of witness to my words. Hunting is of wide extent, and has a name under which many things are included, for there is a hunting of creatures in the water, and of creatures in the air, and there is a great deal of hunting of land animals of all kinds, and not of wild beasts only. The hunting after man is also worthy of consideration; there is the hunting after him in war, and there is often a hunting after him in the way of friendship, which is praised and also blamed; and there is thieving, and the hunting which is practised by robbers, and that of armies against armies. Now the legislator, in laying down laws about hunting, can neither abstain from noting these things, nor can he make threatening ordinances which will assign rules and penalties about all of them. What is he to do? He will have to praise and blame hunting with a view to the exercise and pursuits of youth. And, on the other hand, the young man must listen obediently; neither pleasure nor pain should hinder him, and he should regard as his standard of action the praises and injunctions of the legislator rather than the punishments which he imposes by law. This being premised, there will follow next in order moderate praise and censure of hunting; the praise being assigned to that kind which will make the souls of young men better, and the censure to that which has the opposite effect. And now let us address young men in the form of a prayer for their welfare: O friends, we will say to them, may no desire or love of hunting in the sea, or of angling or of catching the creatures in the waters, ever take possession of you, either when you are awake or when you are asleep, by hook or with weels, which latter is a very lazy contrivance; and let not any desire of catching men and of piracy by sea enter into your souls and make you cruel and lawless hunters. And as to the desire of thieving in town or country, may it never enter into your most passing thoughts; nor let the insidious fancy of catching birds, which is hardly worthy of freemen, come into the head of any youth. There remains therefore for our athletes only the hunting and catching of land animals, of which the one sort is called hunting by night, in which the hunters sleep in turn and are lazy; this is not to be commended any more than that which has intervals of rest, in which the wild strength of beasts is subdued by nets and snares, and not by the victory of a laborious spirit. Thus, only the best kind of hunting is allowed at all--that of quadrupeds, which is carried on with horses and dogs and men's own persons, and they get the victory over the animals by running them down and striking them and hurling at them, those who have a care of godlike manhood taking them with their own hands. The praise and blame which is assigned to all these things has now been declared; and let the law be as follows: Let no one hinder these who verily are sacred hunters from following the chase wherever and whithersoever they will; but the hunter by night, who trusts to his nets and gins, shall not be allowed to hunt anywhere. The fowler in the mountains and waste places shall be permitted, but on cultivated ground and on consecrated wilds he shall not be permitted; and any one who meets him may stop him. As to the hunter in waters, he may hunt anywhere except in harbours or sacred streams or marshes or pools, provided only that he do not pollute the water with poisonous juices. And now we may say that all our enactments about education are complete."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good. BOOK VIII."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Next, with the help of the Delphian oracle, we have to institute festivals and make laws about them, and to determine what sacrifices will be for the good of the city, and to what Gods they shall be offered; but when they shall be offered, and how often, may be partly regulated by us."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"The number--yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then we will first determine the number; and let the whole number be 365--one for every day--so that one magistrate at least will sacrifice daily to some God or demi-god on behalf of the city, and the citizens, and their possessions. And the interpreters, and priests, and priestesses, and prophets shall meet, and, in company with the guardians of the law, ordain those things which the legislator of necessity omits; and I may remark that they are the very persons who ought to take note of what is omitted. The law will say that there are twelve feasts dedicated to the twelve Gods, after whom the several tribes are named; and that to each of them they shall sacrifice every month, and appoint choruses, and musical and gymnastic contests, assigning them so as to suit the Gods and seasons of the year. And they shall have festivals for women, distinguishing those which ought to be separated from the men's festivals, and those which ought not. Further, they shall not confuse the infernal deities and their rites with the Gods who are termed heavenly and their rites, but shall separate them, giving to Pluto his own in the twelfth month, which is sacred to him, according to the law. To such a deity warlike men should entertain no aversion, but they should honour him as being always the best friend of man. For the connexion of soul and body is no way better than the dissolution of them, as I am ready to maintain quite seriously. Moreover, those who would regulate these matters rightly should consider, that our city among existing cities has no fellow, either in respect of leisure or command of the necessaries of life, and that like an individual she ought to live happily. And those who would live happily should in the first place do no wrong to one another, and ought not themselves to be wronged by others; to attain the first is not difficult, but there is great difficulty in acquiring the power of not being wronged. No man can be perfectly secure against wrong, unless he has become perfectly good; and cities are like individuals in this, for a city if good has a life of peace, but if evil, a life of war within and without. Wherefore the citizens ought to practise war--not in time of war, but rather while they are at peace. And every city which has any sense, should take the field at least for one day in every month, and for more if the magistrates think fit, having no regard to winter cold or summer heat; and they should go out en masse, including their wives and their children, when the magistrates determine to lead forth the whole people, or in separate portions when summoned by them; and they should always provide that there should be games and sacrificial feasts, and they should have tournaments, imitating in as lively a manner as they can real battles. And they should distribute prizes of victory and valour to the competitors, passing censures and encomiums on one another according to the characters which they bear in the contests and in their whole life, honouring him who seems to be the best, and blaming him who is the opposite. And let poets celebrate the victors--not however every poet, but only one who in the first place is not less than fifty years of age; nor should he be one who, although he may have musical and poetical gifts, has never in his life done any noble or illustrious action; but those who are themselves good and also honourable in the state, creators of noble actions--let their poems be sung, even though they be not very musical. And let the judgment of them rest with the instructor of youth and the other guardians of the laws, who shall give them this privilege, and they alone shall be free to sing; but the rest of the world shall not have this liberty. Nor shall any one dare to sing a song which has not been approved by the judgment of the guardians of the laws, not even if his strain be sweeter than the songs of Thamyras and Orpheus; but only such poems as have been judged sacred and dedicated to the Gods, and such as are the works of good men, in which praise or blame has been awarded and which have been deemed to fulfil their design fairly. The regulations about war, and about liberty of speech in poetry, ought to apply equally to men and women. The legislator may be supposed to argue the question in his own mind: Who are my citizens for whom I have set in order the city? Are they not competitors in the greatest of all contests, and have they not innumerable rivals? To be sure, will be the natural reply. Well, but if we were training boxers, or pancratiasts, or any other sort of athletes, would they never meet until the hour of contest arrived; and should we do nothing to prepare ourselves previously by daily practice? Surely, if we were boxers, we should have been learning to fight for many days before, and exercising ourselves in imitating all those blows and wards which we were intending to use in the hour of conflict; and in order that we might come as near to reality as possible, instead of cestuses we should put on boxing-gloves, that the blows and the wards might be practised by us to the utmost of our power. And if there were a lack of competitors, the ridicule of fools would not deter us from hanging up a lifeless image and practising at that. Or if we had no adversary at all, animate or inanimate, should we not venture in the dearth of antagonists to spar by ourselves? In what other manner could we ever study the art of self-defence?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"The way which you mention, Stranger, would be the only way."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And shall the warriors of our city, who are destined when occasion calls to enter the greatest of all contests, and to fight for their lives, and their children, and their property, and the whole city, be worse prepared than boxers? And will the legislator, because he is afraid that their practising with one another may appear to some ridiculous, abstain from commanding them to go out and fight; will he not ordain that soldiers shall perform lesser exercises without arms every day, making dancing and all gymnastic tend to this end; and also will he not require that they shall practise some gymnastic exercises, greater as well as lesser, as often as every month; and that they shall have contests one with another in every part of the country, seizing upon posts and lying in ambush, and imitating in every respect the reality of war; fighting with boxing-gloves and hurling javelins, and using weapons somewhat dangerous, and as nearly as possible like the true ones, in order that the sport may not be altogether without fear, but may have terrors and to a certain degree show the man who has and who has not courage; and that the honour and dishonour which are assigned to them respectively, may prepare the whole city for the true conflict of life? If any one dies in these mimic contests, the homicide is involuntary, and we will make the slayer, when he has been purified according to law, to be pure of blood, considering that if a few men should die, others as good as they will be born; but that if fear is dead, then the citizens will never find a test of superior and inferior natures, which is a far greater evil to the state than the loss of a few."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"We are quite agreed, Stranger, that we should legislate about such things, and that the whole state should practise them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what is the reason that dances and contests of this sort hardly ever exist in states, at least not to any extent worth speaking of? Is this due to the ignorance of mankind and their legislators?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Perhaps."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Certainly not, sweet Cleinias; there are two causes, which are quite enough to account for the deficiency."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"One cause is the love of wealth, which wholly absorbs men, and never for a moment allows them to think of anything but their own private possessions; on this the soul of every citizen hangs suspended, and can attend to nothing but his daily gain; mankind are ready to learn any branch of knowledge, and to follow any pursuit which tends to this end, and they laugh at every other: that is one reason why a city will not be in earnest about such contests or any other good and honourable pursuit. But from an insatiable love of gold and silver, every man will stoop to any art or contrivance, seemly or unseemly, in the hope of becoming rich; and will make no objection to performing any action, holy, or unholy and utterly base; if only like a beast he have the power of eating and drinking all kinds of things, and procuring for himself in every sort of way the gratification of his lusts."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let this, then, be deemed one of the causes which prevent states from pursuing in an efficient manner the art of war, or any other noble aim, but makes the orderly and temperate part of mankind into merchants, and captains of ships, and servants, and converts the valiant sort into thieves and burglars, and robbers of temples, and violent, tyrannical persons; many of whom are not without ability, but they are unfortunate."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Must not they be truly unfortunate whose souls are compelled to pass through life always hungering?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Then that is one cause, Stranger; but you spoke of another."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Thank you for reminding me."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"The insatiable lifelong love of wealth, as you were saying, is one cause which absorbs mankind, and prevents them from rightly practising the arts of war: Granted; and now tell me, what is the other?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Do you imagine that I delay because I am in a perplexity?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"No; but we think that you are too severe upon the money-loving temper, of which you seem in the present discussion to have a peculiar dislike."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That is a very fair rebuke, Cleinias; and I will now proceed to the second cause."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I say that governments are a cause--democracy, oligarchy, tyranny, concerning which I have often spoken in the previous discourse; or rather governments they are not, for none of them exercises a voluntary rule over voluntary subjects; but they may be truly called states of discord, in which while the government is voluntary, the subjects always obey against their will, and have to be coerced; and the ruler fears the subject, and will not, if he can help, allow him to become either noble, or rich, or strong, or valiant, or warlike at all. These two are the chief causes of almost all evils, and of the evils of which I have been speaking they are notably the causes. But our state has escaped both of them; for her citizens have the greatest leisure, and they are not subject to one another, and will, I think, be made by these laws the reverse of lovers of money. Such a constitution may be reasonably supposed to be the only one existing which will accept the education which we have described, and the martial pastimes which have been perfected according to our idea."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then next we must remember, about all gymnastic contests, that only the warlike sort of them are to be practised and to have prizes of victory; and those which are not military are to be given up. The military sort had better be completely described and established by law; and first, let us speak of running and swiftness."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Certainly the most military of all qualities is general activity of body, whether of foot or hand. For escaping or for capturing an enemy, quickness of foot is required; but hand-to-hand conflict and combat need vigour and strength."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Neither of them can attain their greatest efficiency without arms."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How can they?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then our herald, in accordance with the prevailing practice, will first summon the runner--he will appear armed, for to an unarmed competitor we will not give a prize. And he shall enter first who is to run the single course bearing arms; next, he who is to run the double course; third, he who is to run the horse-course; and fourthly, he who is to run the long course; the fifth whom we start, shall be the first sent forth in heavy armour, and shall run a course of sixty stadia to some temple of Ares--and we will send forth another, whom we will style the more heavily armed, to run over smoother ground. There remains the archer; and he shall run in the full equipments of an archer a distance of 100 stadia over mountains, and across every sort of country, to a temple of Apollo and Artemis; this shall be the order of the contest, and we will wait for them until they return, and will give a prize to the conqueror in each."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us suppose that there are three kinds of contests--one of boys, another of beardless youths, and a third of men. For the youths we will fix the length of the contest at two-thirds, and for the boys at half of the entire course, whether they contend as archers or as heavy-armed. Touching the women, let the girls who are not grown up compete naked in the stadium and the double course, and the horse-course and the long course, and let them run on the race-ground itself; those who are thirteen years of age and upwards until their marriage shall continue to share in contests if they are not more than twenty, and shall be compelled to run up to eighteen; and they shall descend into the arena in suitable dresses. Let these be the regulations about contests in running both for men and women. Respecting contests of strength, instead of wrestling and similar contests of the heavier sort, we will institute conflicts in armour of one against one, and two against two, and so on up to ten against ten. As to what a man ought not to suffer or do, and to what extent, in order to gain the victory--as in wrestling, the masters of the art have laid down what is fair and what is not fair, so in fighting in armour--we ought to call in skilful persons, who shall judge for us and be our assessors in the work of legislation; they shall say who deserves to be victor in combats of this sort, and what he is not to do or have done to him, and in like manner what rule determines who is defeated; and let these ordinances apply to women until they are married as well as to men. The pancration shall have a counterpart in a combat of the light-armed; they shall contend with bows and with light shields and with javelins and in the throwing of stones by slings and by hand: and laws shall be made about it, and rewards and prizes given to him who best fulfils the ordinances of the law. Next in order we shall have to legislate about the horse contests. Now we do not need many horses, for they cannot be of much use in a country like Crete, and hence we naturally do not take great pains about the rearing of them or about horse races. There is no one who keeps a chariot among us, and any rivalry in such matters would be altogether out of place; there would be no sense nor any shadow of sense in instituting contests which are not after the manner of our country. And therefore we give our prizes for single horses--for colts who have not yet cast their teeth, and for those who are intermediate, and for the full-grown horses themselves; and thus our equestrian games will accord with the nature of the country. Let them have conflict and rivalry in these matters in accordance with the law, and let the colonels and generals of horse decide together about all courses and about the armed competitors in them. But we have nothing to say to the unarmed either in gymnastic exercises or in these contests. On the other hand, the Cretan bowman or javelin-man who fights in armour on horseback is useful, and therefore we may as well place a competition of this sort among our amusements. Women are not to be forced to compete by laws and ordinances; but if from previous training they have acquired the habit and are strong enough and like to take part, let them do so, girls as well as boys, and no blame to them. Thus the competition in gymnastic and the mode of learning it have been described; and we have spoken also of the toils of the contest, and of daily exercises under the superintendence of masters. Likewise, what relates to music has been, for the most part, completed. But as to rhapsodes and the like, and the contests of choruses which are to perform at feasts, all this shall be arranged when the months and days and years have been appointed for Gods and demi-gods, whether every third year, or again every fifth year, or in whatever way or manner the Gods may put into men's minds the distribution and order of them. At the same time, we may expect that the musical contests will be celebrated in their turn by the command of the judges and the director of education and the guardians of the law meeting together for this purpose, and themselves becoming legislators of the times and nature and conditions of the choral contests and of dancing in general. What they ought severally to be in language and song, and in the admixture of harmony with rhythm and the dance, has been often declared by the original legislator; and his successors ought to follow him, making the games and sacrifices duly to correspond at fitting times, and appointing public festivals. It is not difficult to determine how these and the like matters may have a regular order; nor, again, will the alteration of them do any great good or harm to the state. There is, however, another matter of great importance and difficulty, concerning which God should legislate, if there were any possibility of obtaining from Him an ordinance about it. But seeing that divine aid is not to be had, there appears to be a need of some bold man who specially honours plainness of speech, and will say outright what he thinks best for the city and citizens--ordaining what is good and convenient for the whole state amid the corruptions of human souls, opposing the mightiest lusts, and having no man his helper but himself standing alone and following reason only."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is this, Stranger, that you are saying? For we do not as yet understand your meaning."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Very likely; I will endeavour to explain myself more clearly. When I came to the subject of education, I beheld young men and maidens holding friendly intercourse with one another. And there naturally arose in my mind a sort of apprehension--I could not help thinking how one is to deal with a city in which youths and maidens are well nurtured, and have nothing to do, and are not undergoing the excessive and servile toils which extinguish wantonness, and whose only cares during their whole life are sacrifices and festivals and dances. How, in such a state as this, will they abstain from desires which thrust many a man and woman into perdition; and from which reason, assuming the functions of law, commands them to abstain? The ordinances already made may possibly get the better of most of these desires; the prohibition of excessive wealth is a very considerable gain in the direction of temperance, and the whole education of our youth imposes a law of moderation on them; moreover, the eye of the rulers is required always to watch over the young, and never to lose sight of them; and these provisions do, as far as human means can effect anything, exercise a regulating influence upon the desires in general. But how can we take precautions against the unnatural loves of either sex, from which innumerable evils have come upon individuals and cities? How shall we devise a remedy and way of escape out of so great a danger? Truly, Cleinias, here is a difficulty. In many ways Crete and Lacedaemon furnish a great help to those who make peculiar laws; but in the matter of love, as we are alone, I must confess that they are quite against us. For if any one following nature should lay down the law which existed before the days of Laius, and denounce these lusts as contrary to nature, adducing the animals as a proof that such unions were monstrous, he might prove his point, but he would be wholly at variance with the custom of your states. Further, they are repugnant to a principle which we say that a legislator should always observe; for we are always enquiring which of our enactments tends to virtue and which not. And suppose we grant that these loves are accounted by law to the honourable, or at least not disgraceful, in what degree will they contribute to virtue? Will such passions implant in the soul of him who is seduced the habit of courage, or in the soul of the seducer the principle of temperance? Who will ever believe this? or rather, who will not blame the effeminacy of him who yields to pleasures and is unable to hold out against them? Will not all men censure as womanly him who imitates the woman? And who would ever think of establishing such a practice by law? certainly no one who had in his mind the image of true law. How can we prove that what I am saying is true? He who would rightly consider these matters must see the nature of friendship and desire, and of these so-called loves, for they are of two kinds, and out of the two arises a third kind, having the same name; and this similarity of name causes all the difficulty and obscurity."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How is that?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Dear is the like in virtue to the like, and the equal to the equal; dear also, though unlike, is he who has abundance to him who is in want. And when either of these friendships becomes excessive, we term the excess love."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The friendship which arises from contraries is horrible and coarse, and has often no tie of communion; but that which arises from likeness is gentle, and has a tie of communion which lasts through life. As to the mixed sort which is made up of them both, there is, first of all, a difficulty in determining what he who is possessed by this third love desires; moreover, he is drawn different ways, and is in doubt between the two principles; the one exhorting him to enjoy the beauty of youth, and the other forbidding him. For the one is a lover of the body, and hungers after beauty, like ripe fruit, and would fain satisfy himself without any regard to the character of the beloved; the other holds the desire of the body to be a secondary matter, and looking rather than loving and with his soul desiring the soul of the other in a becoming manner, regards the satisfaction of the bodily love as wantonness; he reverences and respects temperance and courage and magnanimity and wisdom, and wishes to live chastely with the chaste object of his affection. Now the sort of love which is made up of the other two is that which we have described as the third. Seeing then that there are these three sorts of love, ought the law to prohibit and forbid them all to exist among us? Is it not rather clear that we should wish to have in the state the love which is of virtue and which desires the beloved youth to be the best possible; and the other two, if possible, we should hinder? What do you say, friend Megillus?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I think, Stranger, that you are perfectly right in what you have been now saying. Athenian: I knew well, my friend, that I should obtain your assent, which I accept, and therefore have no need to analyze your custom any further. Cleinias shall be prevailed upon to give me his assent at some other time. Enough of this; and now let us proceed to the laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Upon reflection I see a way of imposing the law, which, in one respect, is easy, but, in another, is of the utmost difficulty."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"We are all aware that most men, in spite of their lawless natures, are very strictly and precisely restrained from intercourse with the fair, and this is not at all against their will, but entirely with their will."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"When do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"When any one has a brother or sister who is fair; and about a son or daughter the same unwritten law holds, and is a most perfect safeguard, so that no open or secret connexion ever takes place between them. Nor does the thought of such a thing ever enter at all into the minds of most of them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Does not a little word extinguish all pleasures of that sort?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"What word?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The declaration that they are unholy, hated of God, and most infamous; and is not the reason of this that no one has ever said the opposite, but every one from his earliest childhood has heard men speaking in the same manner about them always and everywhere, whether in comedy or in the graver language of tragedy? When the poet introduces on the stage a Thyestes or an Oedipus, or a Macareus having secret intercourse with his sister, he represents him, when found out, ready to kill himself as the penalty of his sin."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"You are very right in saying that tradition, if no breath of opposition ever assails it, has a marvellous power."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Am I not also right in saying that the legislator who wants to master any of the passions which master man may easily know how to subdue them? He will consecrate the tradition of their evil character among all, slaves and freemen, women and children, throughout the city: that will be the surest foundation of the law which he can make."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Yes; but will he ever succeed in making all mankind use the same language about them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"A good objection; but was I not just now saying that I had a way to make men use natural love and abstain from unnatural, not intentionally destroying the seeds of human increase, or sowing them in stony places, in which they will take no root; and that I would command them to abstain too from any female field of increase in which that which is sown is not likely to grow? Now if a law to this effect could only be made perpetual, and gain an authority such as already prevents intercourse of parents and children--such a law, extending to other sensual desires, and conquering them, would be the source of ten thousand blessings. For, in the first place, moderation is the appointment of nature, and deters men from all frenzy and madness of love, and from all adulteries and immoderate use of meats and drinks, and makes them good friends to their own wives. And innumerable other benefits would result if such a law could only be enforced. I can imagine some lusty youth who is standing by, and who, on hearing this enactment, declares in scurrilous terms that we are making foolish and impossible laws, and fills the world with his outcry. And therefore I said that I knew a way of enacting and perpetuating such a law, which was very easy in one respect, but in another most difficult. There is no difficulty in seeing that such a law is possible, and in what way; for, as I was saying, the ordinance once consecrated would master the soul of every man, and terrify him into obedience. But matters have now come to such a pass that even then the desired result seems as if it could not be attained, just as the continuance of an entire state in the practice of common meals is also deemed impossible. And although this latter is partly disproven by the fact of their existence among you, still even in your cities the common meals of women would be regarded as unnatural and impossible. I was thinking of the rebelliousness of the human heart when I said that the permanent establishment of these things is very difficult."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Shall I try and find some sort of persuasive argument which will prove to you that such enactments are possible, and not beyond human nature?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Is a man more likely to abstain from the pleasures of love and to do what he is bidden about them, when his body is in a good condition, or when he is in an ill condition, and out of training?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"He will be far more temperate when he is in training."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And have we not heard of Iccus of Tarentum, who, with a view to the Olympic and other contests, in his zeal for his art, and also because he was of a manly and temperate disposition, never had any connexion with a woman or a youth during the whole time of his training? And the same is said of Crison and Astylus and Diopompus and many others; and yet, Cleinias, they were far worse educated in their minds than your and my citizens, and in their bodies far more lusty."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"No doubt this fact has been often affirmed positively by the ancients of these athletes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And had they the courage to abstain from what is ordinarily deemed a pleasure for the sake of a victory in wrestling, running, and the like; and shall our young men be incapable of a similar endurance for the sake of a much nobler victory, which is the noblest of all, as from their youth upwards we will tell them, charming them, as we hope, into the belief of this by tales and sayings and songs?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of what victory are you speaking?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Of the victory over pleasure, which if they win, they will live happily; or if they are conquered, the reverse of happily. And, further, may we not suppose that the fear of impiety will enable them to master that which other inferior people have mastered?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I dare say."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And since we have reached this point in our legislation, and have fallen into a difficulty by reason of the vices of mankind, I affirm that our ordinance should simply run in the following terms: Our citizens ought not to fall below the nature of birds and beasts in general, who are born in great multitudes, and yet remain until the age for procreation virgin and unmarried, but when they have reached the proper time of life are coupled, male and female, and lovingly pair together, and live the rest of their lives in holiness and innocence, abiding firmly in their original compact: surely, we will say to them, you should be better than the animals. But if they are corrupted by the other Hellenes and the common practice of barbarians, and they see with their eyes and hear with their ears of the so-called free love everywhere prevailing among them, and they themselves are not able to get the better of the temptation, the guardians of the law, exercising the functions of lawgivers, shall devise a second law against them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And what law would you advise them to pass if this one failed?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Clearly, Cleinias, the one which would naturally follow."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is that?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Our citizens should not allow pleasures to strengthen with indulgence, but should by toil divert the aliment and exuberance of them into other parts of the body; and this will happen if no immodesty be allowed in the practice of love. Then they will be ashamed of frequent intercourse, and they will find pleasure, if seldom enjoyed, to be a less imperious mistress. They should not be found out doing anything of the sort. Concealment shall be honourable, and sanctioned by custom and made law by unwritten prescription; on the other hand, to be detected shall be esteemed dishonourable, but not, to abstain wholly. In this way there will be a second legal standard of honourable and dishonourable, involving a second notion of right. Three principles will comprehend all those corrupt natures whom we call inferior to themselves, and who form but one class, and will compel them not to transgress."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The principle of piety, the love of honour, and the desire of beauty, not in the body but in the soul. These are, perhaps, romantic aspirations; but they are the noblest of aspirations, if they could only be realised in all states, and, God willing, in the matter of love we may be able to enforce one of two things--either that no one shall venture to touch any person of the freeborn or noble class except his wedded wife, or sow the unconsecrated and bastard seed among harlots, or in barren and unnatural lusts; or at least we may abolish altogether the connection of men with men; and as to women, if any man has to do with any but those who come into his house duly married by sacred rites, whether they be bought or acquired in any other way, and he offends publicly in the face of all mankind, we shall be right in enacting that he be deprived of civic honours and privileges, and be deemed to be, as he truly is, a stranger. Let this law, then, whether it is one, or ought rather to be called two, be laid down respecting love in general, and the intercourse of the sexes which arises out of the desires, whether rightly or wrongly indulged."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I, for my part, Stranger, would gladly receive this law. Cleinias shall speak for himself, and tell you what is his opinion."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I will, Megillus, when an opportunity offers; at present, I think that we had better allow the Stranger to proceed with his laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"We had got about as far as the establishment of the common tables, which in most places would be difficult, but in Crete no one would think of introducing any other custom. There might arise a question about the manner of them--whether they shall be such as they are here in Crete, or such as they are in Lacedaemon--or is there a third kind which may be better than either of them? The answer to this question might be easily discovered, but the discovery would do no great good, for at present they are very well ordered. Leaving the common tables, we may therefore proceed to the means of providing food. Now, in cities the means of life are gained in many ways and from divers sources, and in general from two sources, whereas our city has only one. For most of the Hellenes obtain their food from sea and land, but our citizens from land only. And this makes the task of the legislator less difficult--half as many laws will be enough, and much less than half; and they will be of a kind better suited to free men. For he has nothing to do with laws about shipowners and merchants and retailers and inn-keepers and tax collectors and mines and moneylending and compound interest and innumerable other things--bidding good-bye to these, he gives laws to husbandmen and shepherds and bee-keepers, and to the guardians and superintendents of their implements; and he has already legislated for greater matters, as for example, respecting marriage and the procreation and nurture of children, and for education, and the establishment of offices--and now he must direct his laws to those who provide food and labour in preparing it. Let us first of all, then, have a class of laws which shall be called the laws of husbandmen. And let the first of them be the law of Zeus, the God of boundaries. Let no one shift the boundary line either of a fellow-citizen who is a neighbour, or, if he dwells at the extremity of the land, of any stranger who is conterminous with him, considering that this is truly 'to move the immovable,' and every one should be more willing to move the largest rock which is not a landmark, than the least stone which is the sworn mark of friendship and hatred between neighbours; for Zeus, the god of kindred, is the witness of the citizen, and Zeus, the god of strangers, of the stranger, and when aroused, terrible are the wars which they stir up. He who obeys the law will never know the fatal consequences of disobedience, but he who despises the law shall be liable to a double penalty, the first coming from the Gods, and the second from the law. For let no one wilfully remove the boundaries of his neighbour's land, and if any one does, let him who will inform the landowners, and let them bring him into court, and if he be convicted of re-dividing the land by stealth or by force, let the court determine what he ought to suffer or pay. In the next place, many small injuries done by neighbours to one another, through their multiplication, may cause a weight of enmity, and make neighbourhood a very disagreeable and bitter thing. Wherefore a man ought to be very careful of committing any offence against his neighbour, and especially of encroaching on his neighbour's land; for any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another. He who encroaches on his neighbour's land, and transgresses his boundaries, shall make good the damage, and, to cure him of his impudence and also of his meanness, he shall pay a double penalty to the injured party. Of these and the like matters the wardens of the country shall take cognizance, and be the judges of them and assessors of the damage; in the more important cases, as has been already said, the whole number of them belonging to any one of the twelve divisions shall decide, and in the lesser cases the commanders: or, again, if any one pastures his cattle on his neighbour's land, they shall see the injury, and adjudge the penalty. And if any one, by decoying the bees, gets possession of another's swarms, and draws them to himself by making noises, he shall pay the damage; or if any one sets fire to his own wood and takes no care of his neighbour's property, he shall be fined at the discretion of the magistrates. And if in planting he does not leave a fair distance between his own and his neighbour's land, he shall be punished, in accordance with the enactments of many lawgivers, which we may use, not deeming it necessary that the great legislator of our state should determine all the trifles which might be decided by any body; for example, husbandmen have had of old excellent laws about waters, and there is no reason why we should propose to divert their course: He who likes may draw water from the fountain-head of the common stream on to his own land, if he do not cut off the spring which clearly belongs to some other owner; and he may take the water in any direction which he pleases, except through a house or temple or sepulchre, but he must be careful to do no harm beyond the channel. And if there be in any place a natural dryness of the earth, which keeps in the rain from heaven, and causes a deficiency in the supply of water, let him dig down on his own land as far as the clay, and if at this depth he finds no water, let him obtain water from his neighbours, as much as is required for his servants' drinking, and if his neighbours, too, are limited in their supply, let him have a fixed measure, which shall be determined by the wardens of the country. This he shall receive each day, and on these terms have a share of his neighbours' water. If there be heavy rain, and one of those on the lower ground injures some tiller of the upper ground, or some one who has a common wall, by refusing to give them an outlet for water; or, again, if some one living on the higher ground recklessly lets off the water on his lower neighbour, and they cannot come to terms with one another, let him who will call in a warden of the city, if he be in the city, or if he be in the country, a warden of the country, and let him obtain a decision determining what each of them is to do. And he who will not abide by the decision shall suffer for his malignant and morose temper, and pay a fine to the injured party, equivalent to double the value of the injury, because he was unwilling to submit to the magistrates. Now the participation of fruits shall be ordered on this wise. The goddess of Autumn has two gracious gifts: one the joy of Dionysus which is not treasured up; the other, which nature intends to be stored. Let this be the law, then, concerning the fruits of autumn: He who tastes the common or storing fruits of autumn, whether grapes or figs, before the season of vintage which coincides with Arcturus, either on his own land or on that of others--let him pay fifty drachmae, which shall be sacred to Dionysus, if he pluck them from his own land; and if from his neighbour's land, a mina, and if from any others', two-thirds of a mina. And he who would gather the 'choice' grapes or the 'choice' figs, as they are now termed, if he take them off his own land, let him pluck them how and when he likes; but if he take them from the ground of others without their leave, let him in that case be always punished in accordance with the law which ordains that he should not move what he has not laid down. And if a slave touches any fruit of this sort, without the consent of the owner of the land, he shall be beaten with as many blows as there are grapes on the bunch, or figs on the fig-tree. Let a metic purchase the 'choice' autumnal fruit, and then, if he pleases, he may gather it; but if a stranger is passing along the road, and desires to eat, let him take of the 'choice' grape for himself and a single follower without payment, as a tribute of hospitality. The law however forbids strangers from sharing in the sort which is not used for eating; and if any one, whether he be master or slave, takes of them in ignorance, let the slave be beaten, and the freeman dismissed with admonitions, and instructed to take of the other autumnal fruits which are unfit for making raisins and wine, or for laying by as dried figs. As to pears, and apples, and pomegranates, and similar fruits, there shall be no disgrace in taking them secretly; but he who is caught, if he be of less than thirty years of age, shall be struck and beaten off, but not wounded; and no freeman shall have any right of satisfaction for such blows. Of these fruits the stranger may partake, just as he may of the fruits of autumn. And if an elder, who is more than thirty years of age, eat of them on the spot, let him, like the stranger, be allowed to partake of all such fruits, but he must carry away nothing. If, however, he will not obey the law, let him run the risk of failing in the competition of virtue, in case any one takes notice of his actions before the judges at the time. Water is the greatest element of nutrition in gardens, but is easily polluted. You cannot poison the soil, or the sun, or the air, which are the other elements of nutrition in plants, or divert them, or steal them; but all these things may very likely happen in regard to water, which must therefore be protected by law. And let this be the law: If any one intentionally pollutes the water of another, whether the water of a spring, or collected in reservoirs, either by poisonous substances, or by digging, or by theft, let the injured party bring the cause before the wardens of the city, and claim in writing the value of the loss; if the accused be found guilty of injuring the water by deleterious substances, let him not only pay damages, but purify the stream or the cistern which contains the water, in such manner as the laws of the interpreters order the purification to be made by the offender in each case. With respect to the gathering in of the fruits of the soil, let a man, if he pleases, carry his own fruits through any place in which he either does no harm to any one, or himself gains three times as much as his neighbour loses. Now of these things the magistrates should be cognizant, as of all other things in which a man intentionally does injury to another or to the property of another, by fraud or force, in the use which he makes of his own property. All these matters a man should lay before the magistrates, and receive damages, supposing the injury to be not more than three minae; or if he have a charge against another which involves a larger amount, let him bring his suit into the public courts and have the evil-doer punished. But if any of the magistrates appear to adjudge the penalties which he imposes in an unjust spirit, let him be liable to pay double to the injured party. Any one may bring the offences of magistrates, in any particular case, before the public courts. There are innumerable little matters relating to the modes of punishment, and applications for suits, and summonses and the witnesses to summonses--for example, whether two witnesses should be required for a summons, or how many--and all such details, which cannot be omitted in legislation, but are beneath the wisdom of an aged legislator. These lesser matters, as they indeed are in comparison with the greater ones, let a younger generation regulate by law, after the patterns which have preceded, and according to their own experience of the usefulness and necessity of such laws; and when they are duly regulated let there be no alteration, but let the citizens live in the observance of them. Now of artisans, let the regulations be as follows: In the first place, let no citizen or servant of a citizen be occupied in handicraft arts; for he who is to secure and preserve the public order of the state, has an art which requires much study and many kinds of knowledge, and does not admit of being made a secondary occupation; and hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly, or of practising one art himself, and superintending some one else who is practising another. Let this, then, be our first principle in the state: No one who is a smith shall also be a carpenter, and if he be a carpenter, he shall not superintend the smith's art rather than his own, under the pretext that in superintending many servants who are working for him, he is likely to superintend them better, because more revenue will accrue to him from them than from his own art; but let every man in the state have one art, and get his living by that. Let the wardens of the city labour to maintain this law, and if any citizen incline to any other art rather than the study of virtue, let them punish him with disgrace and infamy, until they bring him back into his own right course; and if any stranger profess two arts, let them chastise him with bonds and money penalties, and expulsion from the state, until they compel him to be one only and not many. But as touching payments for hire, and contracts of work, or in case any one does wrong to any of the citizens, or they do wrong to any other, up to fifty drachmae, let the wardens of the city decide the case; but if a greater amount be involved, then let the public courts decide according to law. Let no one pay any duty either on the importation or exportation of goods; and as to frankincense and similar perfumes, used in the service of the Gods, which come from abroad, and purple and other dyes which are not produced in the country, or the materials of any art which have to be imported, and which are not necessary--no one should import them; nor, again, should any one export anything which is wanted in the country. Of all these things let there be inspectors and superintendents, taken from the guardians of the law; and they shall be the twelve next in order to the five seniors. Concerning arms, and all implements which are required for military purposes, if there be need of introducing any art, or plant, or metal, or chains of any kind, or animals for use in war, let the commanders of the horse and the generals have authority over their importation and exportation; the city shall send them out and also receive them, and the guardians of the law shall make fit and proper laws about them. But let there be no retail trade for the sake of moneymaking, either in these or any other articles, in the city or country at all. With respect to food and the distribution of the produce of the country, the right and proper way seems to be nearly that which is the custom of Crete; for all should be required to distribute the fruits of the soil into twelve parts, and in this way consume them. Let the twelfth portion of each as for instance of wheat and barley, to which the rest of the fruits of the earth shall be added, as well as the animals which are for sale in each of the twelve divisions, be divided in due proportion into three parts; one part for freemen, another for their servants, and a third for craftsmen and in general for strangers, whether sojourners who may be dwelling in the city, and like other men must live, or those who come on some business which they have with the state, or with some individual. Let only this third part of all necessaries be required to be sold; out of the other two-thirds no one shall be compelled to sell. And how will they be best distributed? In the first place, we see clearly that the distribution will be of equals in one point of view, and in another point of view of unequals."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I mean that the earth of necessity produces and nourishes the various articles of food, sometimes better and sometimes worse."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Such being the case, let no one of the three portions be greater than either of the other two--neither that which is assigned to masters or to slaves, nor again that of the stranger; but let the distribution to all be equal and alike, and let every citizen take his two portions and distribute them among slaves and freemen, he having power to determine the quantity and quality. And what remains he shall distribute by measure and number among the animals who have to be sustained from the earth, taking the whole number of them. In the second place, our citizens should have separate houses duly ordered; and this will be the order proper for men like them. There shall be twelve hamlets, one in the middle of each twelfth portion, and in each hamlet they shall first set apart a market-place, and the temples of the Gods, and of their attendant demi-gods; and if there be any local deities of the Magnetes, or holy seats of other ancient deities, whose memory has been preserved, to these let them pay their ancient honours. But Hestia, and Zeus, and Athene will have temples everywhere together with the God who presides in each of the twelve districts. And the first erection of houses shall be around these temples, where the ground is highest, in order to provide the safest and most defensible place of retreat for the guards. All the rest of the country they shall settle in the following manner: They shall make thirteen divisions of the craftsmen; one of them they shall establish in the city, and this, again, they shall subdivide into twelve lesser divisions, among the twelve districts of the city, and the remainder shall be distributed in the country round about; and in each village they shall settle various classes of craftsmen, with a view to the convenience of the husbandmen. And the chief officers of the wardens of the country shall superintend all these matters, and see how many of them, and which class of them, each place requires; and fix them where they are likely to be least troublesome, and most useful to the husbandman. And the wardens of the city shall see to similar matters in the city. Now the wardens of the agora ought to see to the details of the agora. Their first care, after the temples which are in the agora have been seen to, should be to prevent any one from doing any wrong in dealings between man and man; in the second place, as being inspectors of temperance and violence, they should chastise him who requires chastisement. Touching articles of sale, they should first see whether the articles which the citizens are under regulations to sell to strangers are sold to them, as the law ordains. And let the law be as follows: On the first day of the month, the persons in charge, whoever they are, whether strangers or slaves, who have the charge on behalf of the citizens, shall produce to the strangers the portion which falls to them, in the first place, a twelfth portion of the corn--the stranger shall purchase corn for the whole month, and other cereals, on the first market day; and on the tenth day of the month the one party shall sell, and the other buy, liquids sufficient to last during the whole month; and on the twenty-third day there shall be a sale of animals by those who are willing to sell to the people who want to buy, and of implements and other things which husbandmen sell, (such as skins and all kinds of clothing, either woven or made of felt and other goods of the same sort) and which strangers are compelled to buy and purchase of others. As to the retail trade in these things, whether of barley or wheat set apart for meal and flour, or any other kind of food, no one shall sell them to citizens or their slaves, nor shall any one buy of a citizen; but let the stranger sell them in the market of strangers, to artisans and their slaves, making an exchange of wine and food, which is commonly called retail trade. And butchers shall offer for sale parts of dismembered animals to the strangers, and artisans, and their servants. Let any stranger who likes buy fuel from day to day wholesale, from those who have the care of it in the country, and let him sell to the strangers as much as he pleases and when he pleases. As to other goods and implements which are likely to be wanted, they shall sell them in the common market, at any place which the guardians of the law and the wardens of the market and city, choosing according to their judgment, shall determine; at such places they shall exchange money for goods, and goods for money, neither party giving credit to the other; and he who gives credit must be satisfied, whether he obtain his money or not, for in such exchanges he will not be protected by law. But whenever property has been bought or sold, greater in quantity or value than is allowed by the law, which has determined within what limits a man may increase and diminish his possessions, let the excess be registered in the books of the guardians of the law; or in case of diminution, let there be an erasure made. And let the same rule be observed about the registration of the property of the metics. Any one who likes may come and be a metic on certain conditions; a foreigner, if he likes, and is able to settle, may dwell in the land, but he must practise an art, and not abide more than twenty years from the time at which he has registered himself; and he shall pay no sojourner's tax, however small, except good conduct, nor any other tax for buying and selling. But when the twenty years have expired, he shall take his property with him and depart. And if in the course of these years he should chance to distinguish himself by any considerable benefit which he confers on the state, and he thinks that he can persuade the council and assembly, either to grant him delay in leaving the country, or to allow him to remain for the whole of his life, let him go and persuade the city, and whatever they assent to at his instance shall take effect. For the children of the metics, being artisans, and of fifteen years of age, let the time of their sojourn commence after their fifteenth year; and let them remain for twenty years, and then go where they like; but any of them who wishes to remain, may do so, if he can persuade the council and assembly. And if he depart, let him erase all the entries which have been made by him in the register kept by the magistrates. BOOK IX. Next to all the matters which have preceded in the natural order of legislation will come suits of law. Of suits those which relate to agriculture have been already described, but the more important have not been described. Having mentioned them severally under their usual names, we will proceed to say what punishments are to be inflicted for each offence, and who are to be the judges of them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There is a sense of disgrace in legislating, as we are about to do, for all the details of crime in a state which, as we say, is to be well regulated and will be perfectly adapted to the practice of virtue. To assume that in such a state there will arise some one who will be guilty of crimes as heinous as any which are ever perpetrated in other states, and that we must legislate for him by anticipation, and threaten and make laws against him if he should arise, in order to deter him, and punish his acts, under the idea that he will arise--this, as I was saying, is in a manner disgraceful. Yet seeing that we are not like the ancient legislators, who gave laws to heroes and sons of gods, being, according to the popular belief, themselves the offspring of the gods, and legislating for others, who were also the children of divine parents, but that we are only men who are legislating for the sons of men, there is no uncharitableness in apprehending that some one of our citizens may be like a seed which has touched the ox's horn, having a heart so hard that it cannot be softened any more than those seeds can be softened by fire. Among our citizens there may be those who cannot be subdued by all the strength of the laws; and for their sake, though an ungracious task, I will proclaim my first law about the robbing of temples, in case any one should dare to commit such a crime. I do not expect or imagine that any well-brought-up citizen will ever take the infection, but their servants, and strangers, and strangers' servants may be guilty of many impieties. And with a view to them especially, and yet not without a provident eye to the weakness of human nature generally, I will proclaim the law about robbers of temples and similar incurable, or almost incurable, criminals. Having already agreed that such enactments ought always to have a short prelude, we may speak to the criminal, whom some tormenting desire by night and by day tempts to go and rob a temple, the fewest possible words of admonition and exhortation: O sir, we will say to him, the impulse which moves you to rob temples is not an ordinary human malady, nor yet a visitation of heaven, but a madness which is begotten in a man from ancient and unexpiated crimes of his race, an ever-recurring curse--against this you must guard with all your might, and how you are to guard we will explain to you. When any such thought comes into your mind, go and perform expiations, go as a suppliant to the temples of the Gods who avert evils, go to the society of those who are called good men among you; hear them tell and yourself try to repeat after them, that every man should honour the noble and the just. Fly from the company of the wicked--fly and turn not back; and if your disorder is lightened by these remedies, well and good, but if not, then acknowledge death to be nobler than life, and depart hence. Such are the preludes which we sing to all who have thoughts of unholy and treasonable actions, and to him who hearkens to them the law has nothing to say. But to him who is disobedient when the prelude is over, cry with a loud voice--He who is taken in the act of robbing temples, if he be a slave or stranger, shall have his evil deed engraven on his face and hands, and shall be beaten with as many stripes as may seem good to the judges, and be cast naked beyond the borders of the land. And if he suffers this punishment he will probably return to his right mind and be improved; for no penalty which the law inflicts is designed for evil, but always makes him who suffers either better or not so much worse as he would have been. But if any citizen be found guilty of any great or unmentionable wrong, either in relation to the Gods, or his parents, or the state, let the judge deem him to be incurable, remembering that after receiving such an excellent education and training from youth upward, he has not abstained from the greatest of crimes. His punishment shall be death, which to him will be the least of evils; and his example will benefit others, if he perish ingloriously, and be cast beyond the borders of the land. But let his children and family, if they avoid the ways of their father, have glory, and let honourable mention be made of them, as having nobly and manfully escaped out of evil into good. None of them should have their goods confiscated to the state, for the lots of the citizens ought always to continue the same and equal. Touching the exaction of penalties, when a man appears to have done anything which deserves a fine, he shall pay the fine, if he have anything in excess of the lot which is assigned to him; but more than that he shall not pay. And to secure exactness, let the guardians of the law refer to the registers, and inform the judges of the precise truth, in order that none of the lots may go uncultivated for want of money. But if any one seems to deserve a greater penalty, let him undergo a long and public imprisonment and be dishonoured, unless some of his friends are willing to be surety for him, and liberate him by assisting him to pay the fine. No criminal shall go unpunished, not even for a single offence, nor if he have fled the country; but let the penalty be according to his deserts--death, or bonds, or blows, or degrading places of sitting or standing, or removal to some temple on the borders of the land; or let him pay fines, as we said before. In cases of death, let the judges be the guardians of the law, and a court selected by merit from the last year's magistrates. But how the causes are to be brought into court, how the summonses are to be served, and the like, these things may be left to the younger generation of legislators to determine; the manner of voting we must determine ourselves. Let the vote be given openly; but before they come to the vote let the judges sit in order of seniority over against plaintiff and defendant, and let all the citizens who can spare time hear and take a serious interest in listening to such causes. First of all the plaintiff shall make one speech, and then the defendant shall make another; and after the speeches have been made the eldest judge shall begin to examine the parties, and proceed to make an adequate enquiry into what has been said; and after the oldest has spoken, the rest shall proceed in order to examine either party as to what he finds defective in the evidence, whether of statement or omission; and he who has nothing to ask shall hand over the examination to another. And on so much of what has been said as is to the purpose all the judges shall set their seals, and place the writings on the altar of Hestia. On the next day they shall meet again, and in like manner put their questions and go through the cause, and again set their seals upon the evidence; and when they have three times done this, and have had witnesses and evidence enough, they shall each of them give a holy vote, after promising by Hestia that they will decide justly and truly to the utmost of their power; and so they shall put an end to the suit. Next, after what relates to the Gods, follows what relates to the dissolution of the state: Whoever by permitting a man to power enslaves the laws, and subjects the city to factions, using violence and stirring up sedition contrary to law, him we will deem the greatest enemy of the whole state. But he who takes no part in such proceedings, and, being one of the chief magistrates of the state, has no knowledge of treason, or, having knowledge of it, by reason of cowardice does not interfere on behalf of his country, such an one we must consider nearly as bad. Every man who is worth anything will inform the magistrates, and bring the conspirator to trial for making a violent and illegal attempt to change the government. The judges of such cases shall be the same as of the robbers of temples; and let the whole proceeding be carried on in the same way, and the vote of the majority condemn to death. But let there be a general rule, that the disgrace and punishment of the father is not to be visited on the children, except in the case of some one whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather have successively undergone the penalty of death. Such persons the city shall send away with all their possessions to the city and country of their ancestors, retaining only and wholly their appointed lot. And out of the citizens who have more than one son of not less than ten years of age, they shall select ten whom their father or grandfather by the mother's or father's side shall appoint, and let them send to Delphi the names of those who are selected, and him whom the God chooses they shall establish as heir of the house which has failed; and may he have better fortune than his predecessors!"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Once more let there be a third general law respecting the judges who are to give judgment, and the manner of conducting suits against those who are tried on an accusation of treason; and as concerning the remaining or departure of their descendants--there shall be one law for all three, for the traitor, and the robber of temples, and the subverter by violence of the laws of the state. For a thief, whether he steal much or little, let there be one law, and one punishment for all alike: in the first place, let him pay double the amount of the theft if he be convicted, and if he have so much over and above the allotment--if he have not, he shall be bound until he pay the penalty, or persuade him who has obtained the sentence against him to forgive him. But if a person be convicted of a theft against the state, then if he can persuade the city, or if he will pay back twice the amount of the theft, he shall be set free from his bonds."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What makes you say, Stranger, that a theft is all one, whether the thief may have taken much or little, and either from sacred or secular places--and these are not the only differences in thefts--seeing, then, that they are of many kinds, ought not the legislator to adapt himself to them, and impose upon them entirely different penalties?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Excellent. I was running on too fast, Cleinias, and you impinged upon me, and brought me to my senses, reminding me of what, indeed, had occurred to my mind already, that legislation was never yet rightly worked out, as I may say in passing. Do you remember the image in which I likened the men for whom laws are now made to slaves who are doctored by slaves? For of this you may be very sure, that if one of those empirical physicians, who practise medicine without science, were to come upon the gentleman physician talking to his gentleman patient, and using the language almost of philosophy, beginning at the beginning of the disease and discoursing about the whole nature of the body, he would burst into a hearty laugh--he would say what most of those who are called doctors always have at their tongue's end: Foolish fellow, he would say, you are not healing the sick man, but you are educating him; and he does not want to be made a doctor, but to get well."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And would he not be right?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Perhaps he would; and he might remark upon us, that he who discourses about laws, as we are now doing, is giving the citizens education and not laws; that would be rather a telling observation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But we are fortunate."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"In what way?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Inasmuch as we are not compelled to give laws, but we may take into consideration every form of government, and ascertain what is best and what is most needful, and how they may both be carried into execution; and we may also, if we please, at this very moment choose what is best, or, if we prefer, what is most necessary--which shall we do?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"There is something ridiculous, Stranger, in our proposing such an alternative, as if we were legislators, simply bound under some great necessity which cannot be deferred to the morrow. But we, as I may by the grace of Heaven affirm, like gatherers of stones or beginners of some composite work, may gather a heap of materials, and out of this, at our leisure, select what is suitable for our projected construction. Let us then suppose ourselves to be at leisure, not of necessity building, but rather like men who are partly providing materials, and partly putting them together. And we may truly say that some of our laws, like stones, are already fixed in their places, and others lie at hand."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Certainly, in that case, Cleinias, our view of law will be more in accordance with nature. For there is another matter affecting legislators, which I must earnestly entreat you to consider."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There are many writings to be found in cities, and among them there are discourses composed by legislators as well as by other persons."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Shall we give heed rather to the writings of those others--poets and the like, who either in metre or out of metre have recorded their advice about the conduct of life, and not to the writings of legislators? or shall we give heed to them above all?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes; to them far above all others."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And ought the legislator alone among writers to withhold his opinion about the beautiful, the good, and the just, and not to teach what they are, and how they are to be pursued by those who intend to be happy?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And is it disgraceful for Homer and Tyrtaeus and other poets to lay down evil precepts in their writings respecting life and the pursuits of men, but not so disgraceful for Lycurgus and Solon and others who were legislators as well as writers? Is it not true that of all the writings to be found in cities, those which relate to laws, when you unfold and read them, ought to be by far the noblest and the best? and should not other writings either agree with them, or if they disagree, be deemed ridiculous? We should consider whether the laws of states ought not to have the character of loving and wise parents, rather than of tyrants and masters, who command and threaten, and, after writing their decrees on walls, go their ways; and whether, in discoursing of laws, we should not take the gentler view of them which may or may not be attainable--at any rate, we will show our readiness to entertain such a view, and be prepared to undergo whatever may be the result. And may the result be good, and if God be gracious, it will be good!"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Excellent; let us do as you say."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then we will now consider accurately, as we proposed, what relates to robbers of temples, and all kinds of thefts, and offences in general; and we must not be annoyed if, in the course of legislation, we have enacted some things, and have not made up our minds about some others; for as yet we are not legislators, but we may soon be. Let us, if you please, consider these matters."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Concerning all things honourable and just, let us then endeavour to ascertain how far we are consistent with ourselves, and how far we are inconsistent, and how far the many, from whom at any rate we should profess a desire to differ, agree and disagree among themselves."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What are the inconsistencies which you observe in us?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will endeavour to explain. If I am not mistaken, we are all agreed that justice, and just men and things and actions, are all fair, and, if a person were to maintain that just men, even when they are deformed in body, are still perfectly beautiful in respect of the excellent justice of their minds, no one would say that there was any inconsistency in this."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"They would be quite right."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Perhaps; but let us consider further, that if all things which are just are fair and honourable, in the term 'all' we must include just sufferings which are the correlatives of just actions."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And what is the inference?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The inference is, that a just action in partaking of the just partakes also in the same degree of the fair and honourable."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And must not a suffering which partakes of the just principle be admitted to be in the same degree fair and honourable, if the argument is consistently carried out?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But then if we admit suffering to be just and yet dishonourable, and the term 'dishonourable' is applied to justice, will not the just and the honourable disagree?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"A thing not difficult to understand; the laws which have been already enacted would seem to announce principles directly opposed to what we are saying."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To what?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"We had enacted, if I am not mistaken, that the robber of temples, and he who was the enemy of law and order, might justly be put to death, and we were proceeding to make divers other enactments of a similar nature. But we stopped short, because we saw that these sufferings are infinite in number and degree, and that they are, at once, the most just and also the most dishonourable of all sufferings. And if this be true, are not the just and the honourable at one time all the same, and at another time in the most diametrical opposition?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Such appears to be the case."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In this discordant and inconsistent fashion does the language of the many rend asunder the honourable and just."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true, Stranger."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then now, Cleinias, let us see how far we ourselves are consistent about these matters."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Consistent in what?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I think that I have clearly stated in the former part of the discussion, but if I did not, let me now state--"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That all bad men are always involuntarily bad; and from this I must proceed to draw a further inference."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That the unjust man may be bad, but that he is bad against his will. Now that an action which is voluntary should be done involuntarily is a contradiction; wherefore he who maintains that injustice is involuntary will deem that the unjust does injustice involuntarily. I too admit that all men do injustice involuntarily, and if any contentious or disputatious person says that men are unjust against their will, and yet that many do injustice willingly, I do not agree with him. But, then, how can I avoid being inconsistent with myself, if you, Cleinias, and you, Megillus, say to me--Well, Stranger, if all this be as you say, how about legislating for the city of the Magnetes--shall we legislate or not--what do you advise? Certainly we will, I should reply. Then will you determine for them what are voluntary and what are involuntary crimes, and shall we make the punishments greater of voluntary errors and crimes and less for the involuntary? or shall we make the punishment of all to be alike, under the idea that there is no such thing as voluntary crime?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good, Stranger; and what shall we say in answer to these objections?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"That is a very fair question. In the first place, let us--"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Do what?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us remember what has been well said by us already, that our ideas of justice are in the highest degree confused and contradictory. Bearing this in mind, let us proceed to ask ourselves once more whether we have discovered a way out of the difficulty. Have we ever determined in what respect these two classes of actions differ from one another? For in all states and by all legislators whatsoever, two kinds of actions have been distinguished--the one, voluntary, the other, involuntary; and they have legislated about them accordingly. But shall this new word of ours, like an oracle of God, be only spoken, and get away without giving any explanation or verification of itself? How can a word not understood be the basis of legislation? Impossible. Before proceeding to legislate, then, we must prove that they are two, and what is the difference between them, that when we impose the penalty upon either, every one may understand our proposal, and be able in some way to judge whether the penalty is fitly or unfitly inflicted."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I agree with you, Stranger; for one of two things is certain: either we must not say that all unjust acts are involuntary, or we must show the meaning and truth of this statement."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Of these two alternatives, the one is quite intolerable--not to speak what I believe to be the truth would be to me unlawful and unholy. But if acts of injustice cannot be divided into voluntary and involuntary, I must endeavour to find some other distinction between them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true, Stranger; there cannot be two opinions among us upon that point."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Reflect, then; there are hurts of various kinds done by the citizens to one another in the intercourse of life, affording plentiful examples both of the voluntary and involuntary."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I would not have any one suppose that all these hurts are injuries, and that these injuries are of two kinds--one, voluntary, and the other, involuntary; for the involuntary hurts of all men are quite as many and as great as the voluntary. And please to consider whether I am right or quite wrong in what I am going to say; for I deny, Cleinias and Megillus, that he who harms another involuntarily does him an injury involuntarily, nor should I legislate about such an act under the idea that I am legislating for an involuntary injury. But I should rather say that such a hurt, whether great or small, is not an injury at all; and, on the other hand, if I am right, when a benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the benefit may often be said to injure. For I maintain, O my friends, that the mere giving or taking away of anything is not to be described either as just or unjust; but the legislator has to consider whether mankind do good or harm to one another out of a just principle and intention. On the distinction between injustice and hurt he must fix his eye; and when there is hurt, he must, as far as he can, make the hurt good by law, and save that which is ruined, and raise up that which is fallen, and make that which is dead or wounded whole. And when compensation has been given for injustice, the law must always seek to win over the doers and sufferers of the several hurts from feelings of enmity to those of friendship."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then as to unjust hurts (and gains also, supposing the injustice to bring gain), of these we may heal as many as are capable of being healed, regarding them as diseases of the soul; and the cure of injustice will take the following direction."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What direction?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"When any one commits any injustice, small or great, the law will admonish and compel him either never at all to do the like again, or never voluntarily, or at any rate in a far less degree; and he must in addition pay for the hurt. Whether the end is to be attained by word or action, with pleasure or pain, by giving or taking away privileges, by means of fines or gifts, or in whatsoever way the law shall proceed to make a man hate injustice, and love or not hate the nature of the just--this is quite the noblest work of law. But if the legislator sees any one who is incurable, for him he will appoint a law and a penalty. He knows quite well that to such men themselves there is no profit in the continuance of their lives, and that they would do a double good to the rest of mankind if they would take their departure, inasmuch as they would be an example to other men not to offend, and they would relieve the city of bad citizens. In such cases, and in such cases only, the legislator ought to inflict death as the punishment of offences."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What you have said appears to me to be very reasonable, but will you favour me by stating a little more clearly the difference between hurt and injustice, and the various complications of the voluntary and involuntary which enter into them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will endeavour to do as you wish: Concerning the soul, thus much would be generally said and allowed, that one element in her nature is passion, which may be described either as a state or a part of her, and is hard to be striven against and contended with, and by irrational force overturns many things."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And pleasure is not the same with passion, but has an opposite power, working her will by persuasion and by the force of deceit in all things."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"A man may truly say that ignorance is a third cause of crimes. Ignorance, however, may be conveniently divided by the legislator into two sorts: there is simple ignorance, which is the source of lighter offences, and double ignorance, which is accompanied by a conceit of wisdom; and he who is under the influence of the latter fancies that he knows all about matters of which he knows nothing. This second kind of ignorance, when possessed of power and strength, will be held by the legislator to be the source of great and monstrous crimes, but when attended with weakness, will only result in the errors of children and old men; and these he will treat as errors, and will make laws accordingly for those who commit them, which will be the mildest and most merciful of all laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You are perfectly right."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"We all of us remark of one man that he is superior to pleasure and passion, and of another that he is inferior to them; and this is true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But no one was ever yet heard to say that one of us is superior and another inferior to ignorance."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"We are speaking of motives which incite men to the fulfilment of their will; although an individual may be often drawn by them in opposite directions at the same time."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, often."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And now I can define to you clearly, and without ambiguity, what I mean by the just and unjust, according to my notion of them: When anger and fear, and pleasure and pain, and jealousies and desires, tyrannize over the soul, whether they do any harm or not--I call all this injustice. But when the opinion of the best, in whatever part of human nature states or individuals may suppose that to dwell, has dominion in the soul and orders the life of every man, even if it be sometimes mistaken, yet what is done in accordance therewith, and the principle in individuals which obeys this rule, and is best for the whole life of man, is to be called just; although the hurt done by mistake is thought by many to be involuntary injustice. Leaving the question of names, about which we are not going to quarrel, and having already delineated three sources of error, we may begin by recalling them somewhat more vividly to our memory: One of them was of the painful sort, which we denominate anger and fear."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite right."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There was a second consisting of pleasures and desires, and a third of hopes, which aimed at true opinion about the best. The latter being subdivided into three, we now get five sources of actions, and for these five we will make laws of two kinds."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What are the two kinds?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There is one kind of actions done by violence and in the light of day, and another kind of actions which are done in darkness and with secret deceit, or sometimes both with violence and deceit; the laws concerning these last ought to have a character of severity."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Naturally."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And now let us return from this digression and complete the work of legislation. Laws have been already enacted by us concerning the robbers of the Gods, and concerning traitors, and also concerning those who corrupt the laws for the purpose of subverting the government. A man may very likely commit some of these crimes, either in a state of madness or when affected by disease, or under the influence of extreme old age, or in a fit of childish wantonness, himself no better than a child. And if this be made evident to the judges elected to try the cause, on the appeal of the criminal or his advocate, and he be judged to have been in this state when he committed the offence, he shall simply pay for the hurt which he may have done to another; but he shall be exempt from other penalties, unless he have slain some one, and have on his hands the stain of blood. And in that case he shall go to another land and country, and there dwell for a year; and if he return before the expiration of the time which the law appoints, or even set his foot at all on his native land, he shall be bound by the guardians of the law in the public prison for two years, and then go free. Having begun to speak of homicide, let us endeavour to lay down laws concerning every different kind of homicide; and, first of all, concerning violent and involuntary homicides. If any one in an athletic contest, and at the public games, involuntarily kills a friend, and he dies either at the time or afterwards of the blows which he has received; or if the like misfortune happens to any one in war, or military exercises, or mimic contests of which the magistrates enjoin the practice, whether with or without arms, when he has been purified according to the law brought from Delphi relating to these matters, he shall be innocent. And so in the case of physicians: if their patient dies against their will, they shall be held guiltless by the law. And if one slay another with his own hand, but unintentionally, whether he be unarmed or have some instrument or dart in his hand; or if he kill him by administering food or drink, or by the application of fire or cold, or by suffocating him, whether he do the deed by his own hand, or by the agency of others, he shall be deemed the agent, and shall suffer one of the following penalties: If he kill the slave of another in the belief that he is his own, he shall bear the master of the dead man harmless from loss, or shall pay a penalty of twice the value of the dead man, which the judges shall assess; but purifications must be used greater and more numerous than for those who committed homicide at the games--what they are to be, the interpreters whom the God appoints shall be authorised to declare. And if a man kills his own slave, when he has been purified according to law, he shall be quit of the homicide. And if a man kills a freeman unintentionally, he shall undergo the same purification as he did who killed the slave. But let him not forget also a tale of olden time, which is to this effect: He who has suffered a violent end, when newly dead, if he has had the soul of a freeman in life, is angry with the author of his death; and being himself full of fear and panic by reason of his violent end, when he sees his murderer walking about in his own accustomed haunts, he is stricken with terror and becomes disordered, and this disorder of his, aided by the guilty recollection of the other, is communicated by him with overwhelming force to the murderer and his deeds. Wherefore also the murderer must go out of the way of his victim for the entire period of a year, and not himself be found in any spot which was familiar to him throughout the country. And if the dead man be a stranger, the homicide shall be kept from the country of the stranger during a like period. If any one voluntarily obeys this law, the next of kin to the deceased, seeing all that has happened, shall take pity on him, and make peace with him, and show him all gentleness. But if any one is disobedient, and either ventures to go to any of the temples and sacrifice unpurified, or will not continue in exile during the appointed time, the next of kin to the deceased shall proceed against him for murder; and if he be convicted, every part of his punishment shall be doubled. And if the next of kin do not proceed against the perpetrator of the crime, then the pollution shall be deemed to fall upon his own head--the murdered man will fix the guilt upon his kinsman, and he who has a mind to proceed against him may compel him to be absent from his country during five years, according to law. If a stranger unintentionally kill a stranger who is dwelling in the city, he who likes shall prosecute the cause according to the same rules. If he be a metic, let him be absent for a year, or if he be an entire stranger, in addition to the purification, whether he have slain a stranger, or a metic, or a citizen, he shall be banished for life from the country which is in possession of our laws. And if he return contrary to law, let the guardians of the law punish him with death; and let them hand over his property, if he have any, to him who is next of kin to the sufferer. And if he be wrecked, and driven on the coast against his will, he shall take up his abode on the seashore, wetting his feet in the sea, and watching for an opportunity of sailing; but if he be brought by land, and is not his own master, let the magistrate whom he first comes across in the city, release him and send him unharmed over the border. If any one slays a freeman with his own hand, and the deed be done in passion, in the case of such actions we must begin by making a distinction. For a deed is done from passion either when men suddenly, and without intention to kill, cause the death of another by blows and the like on a momentary impulse, and are sorry for the deed immediately afterwards; or again, when after having been insulted in deed or word, men pursue revenge, and kill a person intentionally, and are not sorry for the act. And, therefore, we must assume that these homicides are of two kinds, both of them arising from passion, which may be justly said to be in a mean between the voluntary and involuntary; at the same time, they are neither of them anything more than a likeness or shadow of either. He who treasures up his anger, and avenges himself, not immediately and at the moment, but with insidious design, and after an interval, is like the voluntary; but he who does not treasure up his anger, and takes vengeance on the instant, and without malice prepense, approaches to the involuntary; and yet even he is not altogether involuntary, but is only the image or shadow of the involuntary; wherefore about homicides committed in hot blood, there is a difficulty in determining whether in legislating we shall reckon them as voluntary or as partly involuntary. The best and truest view is to regard them respectively as likenesses only of the voluntary and involuntary, and to distinguish them accordingly as they are done with or without premeditation. And we should make the penalties heavier for those who commit homicide with angry premeditation, and lighter for those who do not premeditate, but smite upon the instant; for that which is like a greater evil should be punished more severely, and that which is like a less evil should be punished less severely: this shall be the rule of our laws."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us proceed: If any one slays a freeman with his own hand, and the deed be done in a moment of anger, and without premeditation, let the offender suffer in other respects as the involuntary homicide would have suffered, and also undergo an exile of two years, that he may learn to school his passions. But he who slays another from passion, yet with premeditation, shall in other respects suffer as the former; and to this shall be added an exile of three instead of two years--his punishment is to be longer because his passion is greater. The manner of their return shall be on this wise: (and here the law has difficulty in determining exactly; for in some cases the murderer who is judged by the law to be the worse may really be the less cruel, and he who is judged the less cruel may be really the worse, and may have executed the murder in a more savage manner, whereas the other may have been gentler. But in general the degrees of guilt will be such as we have described them. Of all these things the guardians of the law must take cognizance): When a homicide of either kind has completed his term of exile, the guardians shall send twelve judges to the borders of the land; these during the interval shall have informed themselves of the actions of the criminals, and they shall judge respecting their pardon and reception; and the homicides shall abide by their judgment. But if after they have returned home, any one of them in a moment of anger repeats the deed, let him be an exile, and return no more; or if he returns, let him suffer as the stranger was to suffer in a similar case. He who kills his own slave shall undergo a purification, but if he kills the slave of another in anger, he shall pay twice the amount of the loss to his owner. And if any homicide is disobedient to the law, and without purification pollutes the agora, or the games, or the temples, he who pleases may bring to trial the next of kin to the dead man for permitting him, and the murderer with him, and may compel the one to exact and the other to suffer a double amount of fines and purifications; and the accuser shall himself receive the fine in accordance with the law. If a slave in a fit of passion kills his master, the kindred of the deceased man may do with the murderer (provided only they do not spare his life) whatever they please, and they will be pure; or if he kills a freeman, who is not his master, the owner shall give up the slave to the relatives of the deceased, and they shall be under an obligation to put him to death, but this may be done in any manner which they please. And if (which is a rare occurrence, but does sometimes happen) a father or a mother in a moment of passion slays a son or daughter by blows, or some other violence, the slayer shall undergo the same purification as in other cases, and be exiled during three years; but when the exile returns the wife shall separate from the husband, and the husband from the wife, and they shall never afterwards beget children together, or live under the same roof, or partake of the same sacred rites with those whom they have deprived of a child or of a brother. And he who is impious and disobedient in such a case shall be brought to trial for impiety by any one who pleases. If in a fit of anger a husband kills his wedded wife, or the wife her husband, the slayer shall undergo the same purification, and the term of exile shall be three years. And when he who has committed any such crime returns, let him have no communication in sacred rites with his children, neither let him sit at the same table with them, and the father or son who disobeys shall be liable to be brought to trial for impiety by any one who pleases. If a brother or a sister in a fit of passion kills a brother or a sister, they shall undergo purification and exile, as was the case with parents who killed their offspring: they shall not come under the same roof, or share in the sacred rites of those whom they have deprived of their brethren, or of their children. And he who is disobedient shall be justly liable to the law concerning impiety, which relates to these matters. If any one is so violent in his passion against his parents, that in the madness of his anger he dares to kill one of them, if the murdered person before dying freely forgives the murderer, let him undergo the purification which is assigned to those who have been guilty of involuntary homicide, and do as they do, and he shall be pure. But if he be not acquitted, the perpetrator of such a deed shall be amenable to many laws--he shall be amenable to the extreme punishments for assault, and impiety, and robbing of temples, for he has robbed his parent of life; and if a man could be slain more than once, most justly would he who in a fit of passion has slain father or mother, undergo many deaths. How can he, whom, alone of all men, even in defence of his life, and when about to suffer death at the hands of his parents, no law will allow to kill his father or his mother who are the authors of his being, and whom the legislator will command to endure any extremity rather than do this--how can he, I say, lawfully receive any other punishment? Let death then be the appointed punishment of him who in a fit of passion slays his father or his mother. But if brother kills brother in a civil broil, or under other like circumstances, if the other has begun, and he only defends himself, let him be free from guilt, as he would be if he had slain an enemy; and the same rule will apply if a citizen kill a citizen, or a stranger a stranger. Or if a stranger kill a citizen or a citizen a stranger in self-defence, let him be free from guilt in like manner; and so in the case of a slave who has killed a slave; but if a slave have killed a freeman in self-defence, let him be subject to the same law as he who has killed a father; and let the law about the remission of penalties in the case of parricide apply equally to every other remission. Whenever any sufferer of his own accord remits the guilt of homicide to another, under the idea that his act was involuntary, let the perpetrator of the deed undergo a purification and remain in exile for a year, according to law. Enough has been said of murders violent and involuntary and committed in passion: we have now to speak of voluntary crimes done with injustice of every kind and with premeditation, through the influence of pleasures, and desires, and jealousies."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us first speak, as far as we are able, of their various kinds. The greatest cause of them is lust, which gets the mastery of the soul maddened by desire; and this is most commonly found to exist where the passion reigns which is strongest and most prevalent among the mass of mankind: I mean where the power of wealth breeds endless desires of never-to-be-satisfied acquisition, originating in natural disposition, and a miserable want of education. Of this want of education, the false praise of wealth which is bruited about both among Hellenes and barbarians is the cause; they deem that to be the first of goods which in reality is only the third. And in this way they wrong both posterity and themselves, for nothing can be nobler and better than that the truth about wealth should be spoken in all states--namely, that riches are for the sake of the body, as the body is for the sake of the soul. They are good, and wealth is intended by nature to be for the sake of them, and is therefore inferior to them both, and third in order of excellence. This argument teaches us that he who would be happy ought not to seek to be rich, or rather he should seek to be rich justly and temperately, and then there would be no murders in states requiring to be purged away by other murders. But now, as I said at first, avarice is the chiefest cause and source of the worst trials for voluntary homicide. A second cause is ambition: this creates jealousies, which are troublesome companions, above all to the jealous man himself, and in a less degree to the chiefs of the state. And a third cause is cowardly and unjust fear, which has been the occasion of many murders. When a man is doing or has done something which he desires that no one should know him to be doing or to have done, he will take the life of those who are likely to inform of such things, if he have no other means of getting rid of them. Let this be said as a prelude concerning crimes of violence in general; and I must not omit to mention a tradition which is firmly believed by many, and has been received by them from those who are learned in the mysteries: they say that such deeds will be punished in the world below, and also that when the perpetrators return to this world they will pay the natural penalty which is due to the sufferer, and end their lives in like manner by the hand of another. If he who is about to commit murder believes this, and is made by the mere prelude to dread such a penalty, there is no need to proceed with the proclamation of the law. But if he will not listen, let the following law be declared and registered against him: Whoever shall wrongfully and of design slay with his own hand any of his kinsmen, shall in the first place be deprived of legal privileges; and he shall not pollute the temples, or the agora, or the harbours, or any other place of meeting, whether he is forbidden of men or not; for the law, which represents the whole state, forbids him, and always is and will be in the attitude of forbidding him. And if a cousin or nearer relative of the deceased, whether on the male or female side, does not prosecute the homicide when he ought, and have him proclaimed an outlaw, he shall in the first place be involved in the pollution, and incur the hatred of the Gods, even as the curse of the law stirs up the voices of men against him; and in the second place he shall be liable to be prosecuted by any one who is willing to inflict retribution on behalf of the dead. And he who would avenge a murder shall observe all the precautionary ceremonies of lavation, and any others which the God commands in cases of this kind. Let him have proclamation made, and then go forth and compel the perpetrator to suffer the execution of justice according to the law. Now the legislator may easily show that these things must be accomplished by prayers and sacrifices to certain Gods, who are concerned with the prevention of murders in states. But who these Gods are, and what should be the true manner of instituting such trials with due regard to religion, the guardians of the law, aided by the interpreters, and the prophets, and the God, shall determine, and when they have determined let them carry on the prosecution at law. The cause shall have the same judges who are appointed to decide in the case of those who plunder temples. Let him who is convicted be punished with death, and let him not be buried in the country of the murdered man, for this would be shameless as well as impious. But if he fly and will not stand his trial, let him fly for ever; or, if he set foot anywhere on any part of the murdered man's country, let any relation of the deceased, or any other citizen who may first happen to meet with him, kill him with impunity, or bind and deliver him to those among the judges of the case who are magistrates, that they may put him to death. And let the prosecutor demand surety of him whom he prosecutes; three sureties sufficient in the opinion of the magistrates who try the cause shall be provided by him, and they shall undertake to produce him at the trial. But if he be unwilling or unable to provide sureties, then the magistrates shall take him and keep him in bonds, and produce him at the day of trial. If a man do not commit a murder with his own hand, but contrives the death of another, and is the author of the deed in intention and design, and he continues to dwell in the city, having his soul not pure of the guilt of murder, let him be tried in the same way, except in what relates to the sureties; and also, if he be found guilty, his body after execution may have burial in his native land, but in all other respects his case shall be as the former; and whether a stranger shall kill a citizen, or a citizen a stranger, or a slave a slave, there shall be no difference as touching murder by one's own hand or by contrivance, except in the matter of sureties; and these, as has been said, shall be required of the actual murderer only, and he who brings the accusation shall bind them over at the time. If a slave be convicted of slaying a freeman voluntarily, either by his own hand or by contrivance, let the public executioner take him in the direction of the sepulchre, to a place whence he can see the tomb of the dead man, and inflict upon him as many stripes as the person who caught him orders, and if he survive, let him put him to death. And if any one kills a slave who has done no wrong, because he is afraid that he may inform of some base and evil deeds of his own, or for any similar reason, in such a case let him pay the penalty of murder, as he would have done if he had slain a citizen. There are things about which it is terrible and unpleasant to legislate, but impossible not to legislate. If, for example, there should be murders of kinsmen, either perpetrated by the hands of kinsmen, or by their contrivance, voluntary and purely malicious, which most often happen in ill-regulated and ill-educated states, and may perhaps occur even in a country where a man would not expect to find them, we must repeat once more the tale which we narrated a little while ago, in the hope that he who hears us will be the more disposed to abstain voluntarily on these grounds from murders which are utterly abominable. For the myth, or saying, or whatever we ought to call it, has been plainly set forth by priests of old; they have pronounced that the justice which guards and avenges the blood of kindred, follows the law of retaliation, and ordains that he who has done any murderous act should of necessity suffer that which he has done. He who has slain a father shall himself be slain at some time or other by his children--if a mother, he shall of necessity take a woman's nature, and lose his life at the hands of his offspring in after ages; for where the blood of a family has been polluted there is no other purification, nor can the pollution be washed out until the homicidal soul which did the deed has given life for life, and has propitiated and laid to sleep the wrath of the whole family. These are the retributions of Heaven, and by such punishments men should be deterred. But if they are not deterred, and any one should be incited by some fatality to deprive his father, or mother, or brethren, or children, of life voluntarily and of purpose, for him the earthly lawgiver legislates as follows: There shall be the same proclamations about outlawry, and there shall be the same sureties which have been enacted in the former cases. But in his case, if he be convicted, the servants of the judges and the magistrates shall slay him at an appointed place without the city where three ways meet, and there expose his body naked, and each of the magistrates on behalf of the whole city shall take a stone and cast it upon the head of the dead man, and so deliver the city from pollution; after that, they shall bear him to the borders of the land, and cast him forth unburied, according to law. And what shall he suffer who slays him who of all men, as they say, is his own best friend? I mean the suicide, who deprives himself by violence of his appointed share of life, not because the law of the state requires him, nor yet under the compulsion of some painful and inevitable misfortune which has come upon him, nor because he has had to suffer from irremediable and intolerable shame, but who from sloth or want of manliness imposes upon himself an unjust penalty. For him, what ceremonies there are to be of purification and burial God knows, and about these the next of kin should enquire of the interpreters and of the laws thereto relating, and do according to their injunctions. They who meet their death in this way shall be buried alone, and none shall be laid by their side; they shall be buried ingloriously in the borders of the twelve portions of the land, in such places as are uncultivated and nameless, and no column or inscription shall mark the place of their interment. And if a beast of burden or other animal cause the death of any one, except in the case of anything of that kind happening to a competitor in the public contests, the kinsmen of the deceased shall prosecute the slayer for murder, and the wardens of the country, such, and so many as the kinsmen appoint, shall try the cause, and let the beast when condemned be slain by them, and let them cast it beyond the borders. And if any lifeless thing deprive a man of life, except in the case of a thunderbolt or other fatal dart sent from the Gods--whether a man is killed by lifeless objects falling upon him, or by his falling upon them, the nearest of kin shall appoint the nearest neighbour to be a judge, and thereby acquit himself and the whole family of guilt. And he shall cast forth the guilty thing beyond the border, as has been said about the animals. If a man is found dead, and his murderer be unknown, and after a diligent search cannot be detected, there shall be the same proclamation as in the previous cases, and the same interdict on the murderer; and having proceeded against him, they shall proclaim in the agora by a herald, that he who has slain such and such a person, and has been convicted of murder, shall not set his foot in the temples, nor at all in the country of the murdered man, and if he appears and is discovered, he shall die, and be cast forth unburied beyond the border. Let this one law then be laid down by us about murder; and let cases of this sort be so regarded. And now let us say in what cases and under what circumstances the murderer is rightly free from guilt: If a man catch a thief coming into his house by night to steal, and he take and kill him, or if he slay a footpad in self-defence, he shall be guiltless. And any one who does violence to a free woman or a youth, shall be slain with impunity by the injured person, or by his or her father or brothers or sons. If a man find his wife suffering violence, he may kill the violator, and be guiltless in the eye of the law; or if a person kill another in warding off death from his father or mother or children or brethren or wife who are doing no wrong, he shall assuredly be guiltless. Thus much as to the nurture and education of the living soul of man, having which, he can, and without which, if he unfortunately be without them, he cannot live; and also concerning the punishments which are to be inflicted for violent deaths, let thus much be enacted. Of the nurture and education of the body we have spoken before, and next in order we have to speak of deeds of violence, voluntary and involuntary, which men do to one another; these we will now distinguish, as far as we are able, according to their nature and number, and determine what will be the suitable penalties of each, and so assign to them their proper place in the series of our enactments. The poorest legislator will have no difficulty in determining that wounds and mutilations arising out of wounds should follow next in order after deaths. Let wounds be divided as homicides were divided--into those which are involuntary, and which are given in passion or from fear, and those inflicted voluntarily and with premeditation. Concerning all this, we must make some such proclamation as the following: Mankind must have laws, and conform to them, or their life would be as bad as that of the most savage beast. And the reason of this is that no man's nature is able to know what is best for human society; or knowing, always able and willing to do what is best. In the first place, there is a difficulty in apprehending that the true art of politics is concerned, not with private but with public good (for public good binds together states, but private only distracts them); and that both the public and private good as well of individuals as of states is greater when the state and not the individual is first considered. In the second place, although a person knows in the abstract that this is true, yet if he be possessed of absolute and irresponsible power, he will never remain firm in his principles or persist in regarding the public good as primary in the state, and the private good as secondary. Human nature will be always drawing him into avarice and selfishness, avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure without any reason, and will bring these to the front, obscuring the juster and better; and so working darkness in his soul will at last fill with evils both him and the whole city. For if a man were born so divinely gifted that he could naturally apprehend the truth, he would have no need of laws to rule over him; for there is no law or order which is above knowledge, nor can mind, without impiety, be deemed the subject or slave of any man, but rather the lord of all. I speak of mind, true and free, and in harmony with nature. But then there is no such mind anywhere, or at least not much; and therefore we must choose law and order, which are second best. These look at things as they exist for the most part only, and are unable to survey the whole of them. And therefore I have spoken as I have. And now we will determine what penalty he ought to pay or suffer who has hurt or wounded another. Any one may easily imagine the questions which have to be asked in all such cases: What did he wound, or whom, or how, or when? for there are innumerable particulars of this sort which greatly vary from one another. And to allow courts of law to determine all these things, or not to determine any of them, is alike impossible. There is one particular which they must determine in all cases--the question of fact. And then, again, that the legislator should not permit them to determine what punishment is to be inflicted in any of these cases, but should himself decide about all of them, small or great, is next to impossible."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Then what is to be the inference?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The inference is, that some things should be left to courts of law; others the legislator must decide for himself."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And what ought the legislator to decide, and what ought he to leave to the courts of law?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I may reply, that in a state in which the courts are bad and mute, because the judges conceal their opinions and decide causes clandestinely; or what is worse, when they are disorderly and noisy, as in a theatre, clapping or hooting in turn this or that orator--I say that then there is a very serious evil, which affects the whole state. Unfortunate is the necessity of having to legislate for such courts, but where the necessity exists, the legislator should only allow them to ordain the penalties for the smallest offences; if the state for which he is legislating be of this character, he must take most matters into his own hands and speak distinctly. But when a state has good courts, and the judges are well trained and scrupulously tested, the determination of the penalties or punishments which shall be inflicted on the guilty may fairly and with advantage be left to them. And we are not to be blamed for not legislating concerning all that large class of matters which judges far worse educated than ours would be able to determine, assigning to each offence what is due both to the perpetrator and to the sufferer. We believe those for whom we are legislating to be best able to judge, and therefore to them the greater part may be left. At the same time, as I have often said, we should exhibit to the judges, as we have done, the outline and form of the punishments to be inflicted, and then they will not transgress the just rule. That was an excellent practice, which we observed before, and which now that we are resuming the work of legislation, may with advantage be repeated by us. Let the enactment about wounding be in the following terms: If any one has a purpose and intention to slay another who is not his enemy, and whom the law does not permit him to slay, and he wounds him, but is unable to kill him, he who had the intent and has wounded him is not to be pitied--he deserves no consideration, but should be regarded as a murderer and be tried for murder. Still having respect to the fortune which has in a manner favoured him, and to the providence which in pity to him and to the wounded man saved the one from a fatal blow, and the other from an accursed fate and calamity--as a thank-offering to this deity, and in order not to oppose his will--in such a case the law will remit the punishment of death, and only compel the offender to emigrate to a neighbouring city for the rest of his life, where he shall remain in the enjoyment of all his possessions. But if he have injured the wounded man, he shall make such compensation for the injury as the court deciding the cause shall assess, and the same judges shall decide who would have decided if the man had died of his wounds. And if a child intentionally wound his parents, or a servant his master, death shall be the penalty. And if a brother or a sister intentionally wound a brother or a sister, and is found guilty, death shall be the penalty. And if a husband wound a wife, or a wife a husband, with intent to kill, let him or her undergo perpetual exile; if they have sons or daughters who are still young, the guardians shall take care of their property, and have charge of the children as orphans. If their sons are grown up, they shall be under no obligation to support the exiled parent, but they shall possess the property themselves. And if he who meets with such a misfortune has no children, the kindred of the exiled man to the degree of sons of cousins, both on the male and female side, shall meet together, and after taking counsel with the guardians of the law and the priests, shall appoint a 5040th citizen to be the heir of the house, considering and reasoning that no house of all the 5040 belongs to the inhabitant or to the whole family, but is the public and private property of the state. Now the state should seek to have its houses as holy and happy as possible. And if any one of the houses be unfortunate, and stained with impiety, and the owner leave no posterity, but dies unmarried, or married and childless, having suffered death as the penalty of murder or some other crime committed against the Gods or against his fellow-citizens, of which death is the penalty distinctly laid down in the law; or if any of the citizens be in perpetual exile, and also childless, that house shall first of all be purified and undergo expiation according to law; and then let the kinsmen of the house, as we were just now saying, and the guardians of the law, meet and consider what family there is in the state which is of the highest repute for virtue and also for good fortune, in which there are a number of sons; from that family let them take one and introduce him to the father and forefathers of the dead man as their son, and, for the sake of the omen, let him be called so, that he may be the continuer of their family, the keeper of their hearth, and the minister of their sacred rites with better fortune than his father had; and when they have made this supplication, they shall make him heir according to law, and the offending person they shall leave nameless and childless and portionless when calamities such as these overtake him. Now the boundaries of some things do not touch one another, but there is a borderland which comes in between, preventing them from touching. And we were saying that actions done from passion are of this nature, and come in between the voluntary and involuntary. If a person be convicted of having inflicted wounds in a passion, in the first place he shall pay twice the amount of the injury, if the wound be curable, or, if incurable, four times the amount of the injury; or if the wound be curable, and at the same time cause great and notable disgrace to the wounded person, he shall pay fourfold. And whenever any one in wounding another injures not only the sufferer, but also the city, and makes him incapable of defending his country against the enemy, he, besides the other penalties, shall pay a penalty for the loss which the state has incurred. And the penalty shall be, that in addition to his own times of service, he shall serve on behalf of the disabled person, and shall take his place in war; or, if he refuse, he shall be liable to be convicted by law of refusal to serve. The compensation for the injury, whether to be twofold or threefold or fourfold, shall be fixed by the judges who convict him. And if, in like manner, a brother wounds a brother, the parents and kindred of either sex, including the children of cousins, whether on the male or female side, shall meet, and when they have judged the cause, they shall entrust the assessment of damages to the parents, as is natural; and if the estimate be disputed, then the kinsmen on the male side shall make the estimate, or if they cannot, they shall commit the matter to the guardians of the law. And when similar charges of wounding are brought by children against their parents, those who are more than sixty years of age, having children of their own, not adopted, shall be required to decide; and if any one is convicted, they shall determine whether he or she ought to die, or suffer some other punishment either greater than death, or, at any rate, not much less. A kinsman of the offender shall not be allowed to judge the cause, not even if he be of the age which is prescribed by the law. If a slave in a fit of anger wound a freeman, the owner of the slave shall give him up to the wounded man, who may do as he pleases with him, and if he do not give him up he shall himself make good the injury. And if any one says that the slave and the wounded man are conspiring together, let him argue the point, and if he is cast, he shall pay for the wrong three times over, but if he gains his case, the freeman who conspired with the slave shall be liable to an action for kidnapping. And if any one unintentionally wounds another he shall simply pay for the harm, for no legislator is able to control chance. In such a case the judges shall be the same as those who are appointed in the case of children suing their parents; and they shall estimate the amount of the injury. All the preceding injuries and every kind of assault are deeds of violence; and every man, woman, or child ought to consider that the elder has the precedence of the younger in honour, both among the Gods and also among men who would live in security and happiness. Wherefore it is a foul thing and hateful to the Gods to see an elder man assaulted by a younger in the city, and it is reasonable that a young man when struck by an elder should lightly endure his anger, laying up in store for himself a like honour when he is old. Let this be the law: Every one shall reverence his elder in word and deed; he shall respect any one who is twenty years older than himself, whether male or female, regarding him or her as his father or mother; and he shall abstain from laying hands on any one who is of an age to have been his father or mother, out of reverence to the Gods who preside over birth; similarly he shall keep his hands from a stranger, whether he be an old inhabitant or newly arrived; he shall not venture to correct such an one by blows, either as the aggressor or in self-defence. If he thinks that some stranger has struck him out of wantonness or insolence, and ought to be punished, he shall take him to the wardens of the city, but let him not strike him, that the stranger may be kept far away from the possibility of lifting up his hand against a citizen, and let the wardens of the city take the offender and examine him, not forgetting their duty to the God of Strangers, and in case the stranger appears to have struck the citizen unjustly, let them inflict upon him as many blows with the scourge as he was himself inflicted, and quell his presumption. But if he be innocent, they shall threaten and rebuke the man who arrested him, and let them both go. If a person strikes another of the same age or somewhat older than himself, who has no children, whether he be an old man who strikes an old man or a young man who strikes a young man, let the person struck defend himself in the natural way without a weapon and with his hands only. He who, being more than forty years of age, dares to fight with another, whether he be the aggressor or in self-defence, shall be regarded as rude and ill-mannered and slavish--this will be a disgraceful punishment, and therefore suitable to him. The obedient nature will readily yield to such exhortations, but the disobedient, who heeds not the prelude, shall have the law ready for him: If any man smite another who is older than himself, either by twenty or by more years, in the first place, he who is at hand, not being younger than the combatants, nor their equal in age, shall separate them, or be disgraced according to law; but if he be the equal in age of the person who is struck or younger, he shall defend the person injured as he would a brother or father or still older relative. Further, let him who dares to smite an elder be tried for assault, as I have said, and if he be found guilty, let him be imprisoned for a period of not less than a year, or if the judges approve of a longer period, their decision shall be final. But if a stranger or metic smite one who is older by twenty years or more, the same law shall hold about the bystanders assisting, and he who is found guilty in such a suit, if he be a stranger but not resident, shall be imprisoned during a period of two years; and a metic who disobeys the laws shall be imprisoned for three years, unless the court assign him a longer term. And let him who was present in any of these cases and did not assist according to law be punished, if he be of the highest class, by paying a fine of a mina; or if he be of the second class, of fifty drachmas; or if of the third class, by a fine of thirty drachmas; or if he be of the fourth class, by a fine of twenty drachmas; and the generals and taxiarchs and phylarchs and hipparchs shall form the court in such cases. Laws are partly framed for the sake of good men, in order to instruct them how they may live on friendly terms with one another, and partly for the sake of those who refuse to be instructed, whose spirit cannot be subdued, or softened, or hindered from plunging into evil. These are the persons who cause the word to be spoken which I am about to utter; for them the legislator legislates of necessity, and in the hope that there may be no need of his laws. He who shall dare to lay violent hands upon his father or mother, or any still older relative, having no fear either of the wrath of the Gods above, or of the punishments that are spoken of in the world below, but transgresses in contempt of ancient and universal traditions as though he were too wise to believe in them, requires some extreme measure of prevention. Now death is not the worst that can happen to men; far worse are the punishments which are said to pursue them in the world below. But although they are most true tales, they work on such souls no prevention; for if they had any effect there would be no slayers of mothers, or impious hands lifted up against parents; and therefore the punishments of this world which are inflicted during life ought not in such cases to fall short, if possible, of the terrors of the world below. Let our enactment then be as follows: If a man dare to strike his father or his mother, or their fathers or mothers, he being at the time of sound mind, then let any one who is at hand come to the rescue as has been already said, and the metic or stranger who comes to the rescue shall be called to the first place in the games; but if he do not come he shall suffer the punishment of perpetual exile. He who is not a metic, if he comes to the rescue, shall have praise, and if he do not come, blame. And if a slave come to the rescue, let him be made free, but if he do not come to the rescue, let him receive 100 strokes of the whip, by order of the wardens of the agora, if the occurrence take place in the agora; or if somewhere in the city beyond the limits of the agora, any warden of the city who is in residence shall punish him; or if in the country, then the commanders of the wardens of the country. If those who are near at the time be inhabitants of the same place, whether they be youths, or men, or women, let them come to the rescue and denounce him as the impious one; and he who does not come to the rescue shall fall under the curse of Zeus, the God of kindred and of ancestors, according to law. And if any one is found guilty of assaulting a parent, let him in the first place be forever banished from the city into the country, and let him abstain from the temples; and if he do not abstain, the wardens of the country shall punish him with blows, or in any way which they please, and if he return he shall be put to death. And if any freeman eat or drink, or have any other sort of intercourse with him, or only meeting him have voluntarily touched him, he shall not enter into any temple, nor into the agora, nor into the city, until he is purified; for he should consider that he has become tainted by a curse. And if he disobeys the law, and pollutes the city and the temples contrary to law, and one of the magistrates sees him and does not indict him, when he gives in his account this omission shall be a most serious charge. If a slave strike a freeman, whether a stranger or a citizen, let any one who is present come to the rescue, or pay the penalty already mentioned; and let the bystanders bind him, and deliver him up to the injured person, and he receiving him shall put him in chains, and inflict on him as many stripes as he pleases; but having punished him he must surrender him to his master according to law, and not deprive him of his property. Let the law be as follows: The slave who strikes a freeman, not at the command of the magistrates, his owner shall receive bound from the man whom he has stricken, and not release him until the slave has persuaded the man whom he has stricken that he ought to be released. And let there be the same laws about women in relation to women, and about men and women in relation to one another. BOOK X. And now having spoken of assaults, let us sum up all acts of violence under a single law, which shall be as follows: No one shall take or carry away any of his neighbour's goods, neither shall he use anything which is his neighbour's without the consent of the owner; for these are the offences which are and have been, and will ever be, the source of all the aforesaid evils. The greatest of them are excesses and insolences of youth, and are offences against the greatest when they are done against religion; and especially great when in violation of public and holy rites, or of the partly-common rites in which tribes and phratries share; and in the second degree great when they are committed against private rites and sepulchres, and in the third degree (not to repeat the acts formerly mentioned), when insults are offered to parents; the fourth kind of violence is when any one, regardless of the authority of the rulers, takes or carries away or makes use of anything which belongs to them, not having their consent; and the fifth kind is when the violation of the civil rights of an individual demands reparation. There should be a common law embracing all these cases. For we have already said in general terms what shall be the punishment of sacrilege, whether fraudulent or violent, and now we have to determine what is to be the punishment of those who speak or act insolently toward the Gods. But first we must give them an admonition which may be in the following terms: No one who in obedience to the laws believed that there were Gods, ever intentionally did any unholy act, or uttered any unlawful word; but he who did must have supposed one of three things--either that they did not exist--which is the first possibility, or secondly, that, if they did, they took no care of man, or thirdly, that they were easily appeased and turned aside from their purpose by sacrifices and prayers."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What shall we say or do to these persons?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"My good friend, let us first hear the jests which I suspect that they in their superiority will utter against us."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What jests?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"They will make some irreverent speech of this sort: 'O inhabitants of Athens, and Sparta, and Cnosus,' they will reply, 'in that you speak truly; for some of us deny the very existence of the Gods, while others, as you say, are of opinion that they do not care about us; and others that they are turned from their course by gifts. Now we have a right to claim, as you yourself allowed, in the matter of laws, that before you are hard upon us and threaten us, you should argue with us and convince us--you should first attempt to teach and persuade us that there are Gods by reasonable evidences, and also that they are too good to be unrighteous, or to be propitiated, or turned from their course by gifts. For when we hear such things said of them by those who are esteemed to be the best of poets, and orators, and prophets, and priests, and by innumerable others, the thoughts of most of us are not set upon abstaining from unrighteous acts, but upon doing them and atoning for them. When lawgivers profess that they are gentle and not stern, we think that they should first of all use persuasion to us, and show us the existence of Gods, if not in a better manner than other men, at any rate in a truer; and who knows but that we shall hearken to you? If then our request is a fair one, please to accept our challenge."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"But is there any difficulty in proving the existence of the Gods?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"How would you prove it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How? In the first place, the earth and the sun, and the stars and the universe, and the fair order of the seasons, and the division of them into years and months, furnish proofs of their existence, and also there is the fact that all Hellenes and barbarians believe in them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I fear, my sweet friend, though I will not say that I much regard, the contempt with which the profane will be likely to assail us. For you do not understand the nature of their complaint, and you fancy that they rush into impiety only from a love of sensual pleasure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Why, Stranger, what other reason is there?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"One which you who live in a different atmosphere would never guess."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"A very grievous sort of ignorance which is imagined to be the greatest wisdom."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"At Athens there are tales preserved in writing which the virtue of your state, as I am informed, refuses to admit. They speak of the Gods in prose as well as verse, and the oldest of them tell of the origin of the heavens and of the world, and not far from the beginning of their story they proceed to narrate the birth of the Gods, and how after they were born they behaved to one another. Whether these stories have in other ways a good or a bad influence, I should not like to be severe upon them, because they are ancient; but, looking at them with reference to the duties of children to their parents, I cannot praise them, or think that they are useful, or at all true. Of the words of the ancients I have nothing more to say; and I should wish to say of them only what is pleasing to the Gods. But as to our younger generation and their wisdom, I cannot let them off when they do mischief. For do but mark the effect of their words: when you and I argue for the existence of the Gods, and produce the sun, moon, stars, and earth, claiming for them a divine being, if we would listen to the aforesaid philosophers we should say that they are earth and stones only, which can have no care at all of human affairs, and that all religion is a cooking up of words and a make-believe."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"One such teacher, O stranger, would be bad enough, and you imply that there are many of them, which is worse."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, then; what shall we say or do? Shall we assume that some one is accusing us among unholy men, who are trying to escape from the effect of our legislation; and that they say of us--How dreadful that you should legislate on the supposition that there are Gods! Shall we make a defence of ourselves? or shall we leave them and return to our laws, lest the prelude should become longer than the law? For the discourse will certainly extend to great length, if we are to treat the impiously disposed as they desire, partly demonstrating to them at some length the things of which they demand an explanation, partly making them afraid or dissatisfied, and then proceed to the requisite enactments."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, Stranger; but then how often have we repeated already that on the present occasion there is no reason why brevity should be preferred to length; for who is 'at our heels?' as the saying goes, and it would be paltry and ridiculous to prefer the shorter to the better. It is a matter of no small consequence, in some way or other to prove that there are Gods, and that they are good, and regard justice more than men do. The demonstration of this would be the best and noblest prelude of all our laws. And therefore, without impatience, and without hurry, let us unreservedly consider the whole matter, summoning up all the power of persuasion which we possess."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Seeing you thus in earnest, I would fain offer up a prayer that I may succeed: but I must proceed at once. Who can be calm when he is called upon to prove the existence of the Gods? Who can avoid hating and abhorring the men who are and have been the cause of this argument; I speak of those who will not believe the tales which they have heard as babes and sucklings from their mothers and nurses, repeated by them both in jest and earnest, like charms, who have also heard them in the sacrificial prayers, and seen sights accompanying them--sights and sounds delightful to children--and their parents during the sacrifices showing an intense earnestness on behalf of their children and of themselves, and with eager interest talking to the Gods, and beseeching them, as though they were firmly convinced of their existence; who likewise see and hear the prostrations and invocations which are made by Hellenes and barbarians at the rising and setting of the sun and moon, in all the vicissitudes of life, not as if they thought that there were no Gods, but as if there could be no doubt of their existence, and no suspicion of their non-existence; when men, knowing all these things, despise them on no real grounds, as would be admitted by all who have any particle of intelligence, and when they force us to say what we are now saying, how can any one in gentle terms remonstrate with the like of them, when he has to begin by proving to them the very existence of the Gods? Yet the attempt must be made; for it would be unseemly that one half of mankind should go mad in their lust of pleasure, and the other half in their indignation at such persons. Our address to these lost and perverted natures should not be spoken in passion; let us suppose ourselves to select some one of them, and gently reason with him, smothering our anger: O my son, we will say to him, you are young, and the advance of time will make you reverse many of the opinions which you now hold. Wait awhile, and do not attempt to judge at present of the highest things; and that is the highest of which you now think nothing--to know the Gods rightly and to live accordingly. And in the first place let me indicate to you one point which is of great importance, and about which I cannot be deceived: You and your friends are not the first who have held this opinion about the Gods. There have always been persons more or less numerous who have had the same disorder. I have known many of them, and can tell you, that no one who had taken up in youth this opinion, that the Gods do not exist, ever continued in the same until he was old; the two other notions certainly do continue in some cases, but not in many; the notion, I mean, that the Gods exist, but take no heed of human things, and the other notion that they do take heed of them, but are easily propitiated with sacrifices and prayers. As to the opinion about the Gods which may some day become clear to you, I advise you to wait and consider if it be true or not; ask of others, and above all of the legislator. In the meantime take care that you do not offend against the Gods. For the duty of the legislator is and always will be to teach you the truth of these matters."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Our address, Stranger, thus far, is excellent."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Quite true, Megillus and Cleinias, but I am afraid that we have unconsciously lighted on a strange doctrine."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What doctrine do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The wisest of all doctrines, in the opinion of many."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I wish that you would speak plainer."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The doctrine that all things do become, have become, and will become, some by nature, some by art, and some by chance."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Is not that true?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, philosophers are probably right; at any rate we may as well follow in their track, and examine what is the meaning of them and their disciples."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"They say that the greatest and fairest things are the work of nature and of chance, the lesser of art, which, receiving from nature the greater and primeval creations, moulds and fashions all those lesser works which are generally termed artificial."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How is that?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will explain my meaning still more clearly. They say that fire and water, and earth and air, all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art, and that as to the bodies which come next in order--earth, and sun, and moon, and stars--they have been created by means of these absolutely inanimate existences. The elements are severally moved by chance and some inherent force according to certain affinities among them--of hot with cold, or of dry with moist, or of soft with hard, and according to all the other accidental admixtures of opposites which have been formed by necessity. After this fashion and in this manner the whole heaven has been created, and all that is in the heaven, as well as animals and all plants, and all the seasons come from these elements, not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any God, or from art, but as I was saying, by nature and chance only. Art sprang up afterwards and out of these, mortal and of mortal birth, and produced in play certain images and very partial imitations of the truth, having an affinity to one another, such as music and painting create and their companion arts. And there are other arts which have a serious purpose, and these co-operate with nature, such, for example, as medicine, and husbandry, and gymnastic. And they say that politics co-operate with nature, but in a less degree, and have more of art; also that legislation is entirely a work of art, and is based on assumptions which are not true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In the first place, my dear friend, these people would say that the Gods exist not by nature, but by art, and by the laws of states, which are different in different places, according to the agreement of those who make them; and that the honourable is one thing by nature and another thing by law, and that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature, but that mankind are always disputing about them and altering them; and that the alterations which are made by art and by law have no basis in nature, but are of authority for the moment and at the time at which they are made. These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might, and in this way the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine; and hence arise factions, these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is, to live in real dominion over others, and not in legal subjection to them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What a dreadful picture, Stranger, have you given, and how great is the injury which is thus inflicted on young men to the ruin both of states and families!"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"True, Cleinias; but then what should the lawgiver do when this evil is of long standing? should he only rise up in the state and threaten all mankind, proclaiming that if they will not say and think that the Gods are such as the law ordains (and this may be extended generally to the honourable, the just, and to all the highest things, and to all that relates to virtue and vice), and if they will not make their actions conform to the copy which the law gives them, then he who refuses to obey the law shall die, or suffer stripes and bonds, or privation of citizenship, or in some cases be punished by loss of property and exile? Should he not rather, when he is making laws for men, at the same time infuse the spirit of persuasion into his words, and mitigate the severity of them as far as he can?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Why, Stranger, if such persuasion be at all possible, then a legislator who has anything in him ought never to weary of persuading men; he ought to leave nothing unsaid in support of the ancient opinion that there are Gods, and of all those other truths which you were just now mentioning; he ought to support the law and also art, and acknowledge that both alike exist by nature, and no less than nature, if they are the creations of mind in accordance with right reason, as you appear to me to maintain, and I am disposed to agree with you in thinking."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes, my enthusiastic Cleinias; but are not these things when spoken to a multitude hard to be understood, not to mention that they take up a dismal length of time?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Why, Stranger, shall we, whose patience failed not when drinking or music were the themes of discourse, weary now of discoursing about the Gods, and about divine things? And the greatest help to rational legislation is that the laws when once written down are always at rest; they can be put to the test at any future time, and therefore, if on first hearing they seem difficult, there is no reason for apprehension about them, because any man however dull can go over them and consider them again and again; nor if they are tedious but useful, is there any reason or religion, as it seems to me, in any man refusing to maintain the principles of them to the utmost of his power."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Stranger, I like what Cleinias is saying."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes, Megillus, and we should do as he proposes; for if impious discourses were not scattered, as I may say, throughout the world, there would have been no need for any vindication of the existence of the Gods--but seeing that they are spread far and wide, such arguments are needed; and who should come to the rescue of the greatest laws, when they are being undermined by bad men, but the legislator himself?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"There is no more proper champion of them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, then, tell me, Cleinias--for I must ask you to be my partner--does not he who talks in this way conceive fire and water and earth and air to be the first elements of all things? these he calls nature, and out of these he supposes the soul to be formed afterwards; and this is not a mere conjecture of ours about his meaning, but is what he really means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then, by Heaven, we have discovered the source of this vain opinion of all those physical investigators; and I would have you examine their arguments with the utmost care, for their impiety is a very serious matter; they not only make a bad and mistaken use of argument, but they lead away the minds of others: that is my opinion of them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You are right; but I should like to know how this happens."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I fear that the argument may seem singular."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Do not hesitate, Stranger; I see that you are afraid of such a discussion carrying you beyond the limits of legislation. But if there be no other way of showing our agreement in the belief that there are Gods, of whom the law is said now to approve, let us take this way, my good sir."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then I suppose that I must repeat the singular argument of those who manufacture the soul according to their own impious notions; they affirm that which is the first cause of the generation and destruction of all things, to be not first, but last, and that which is last to be first, and hence they have fallen into error about the true nature of the Gods."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Still I do not understand you."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Nearly all of them, my friends, seem to be ignorant of the nature and power of the soul, especially in what relates to her origin: they do not know that she is among the first of things, and before all bodies, and is the chief author of their changes and transpositions. And if this is true, and if the soul is older than the body, must not the things which are of the soul's kindred be of necessity prior to those which appertain to the body?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then thought and attention and mind and art and law will be prior to that which is hard and soft and heavy and light; and the great and primitive works and actions will be works of art; they will be the first, and after them will come nature and works of nature, which however is a wrong term for men to apply to them; these will follow, and will be under the government of art and mind."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"But why is the word 'nature' wrong?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Because those who use the term mean to say that nature is the first creative power; but if the soul turn out to be the primeval element, and not fire or air, then in the truest sense and beyond other things the soul may be said to exist by nature; and this would be true if you proved that the soul is older than the body, but not otherwise."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You are quite right."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Shall we, then, take this as the next point to which our attention should be directed?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us be on our guard lest this most deceptive argument with its youthful looks, beguiling us old men, give us the slip and make a laughing-stock of us. Who knows but we may be aiming at the greater, and fail of attaining the lesser? Suppose that we three have to pass a rapid river, and I, being the youngest of the three and experienced in rivers, take upon me the duty of making the attempt first by myself; leaving you in safety on the bank, I am to examine whether the river is passable by older men like yourselves, and if such appears to be the case then I shall invite you to follow, and my experience will help to convey you across; but if the river is impassable by you, then there will have been no danger to anybody but myself--would not that seem to be a very fair proposal? I mean to say that the argument in prospect is likely to be too much for you, out of your depth and beyond your strength, and I should be afraid that the stream of my questions might create in you who are not in the habit of answering, giddiness and confusion of mind, and hence a feeling of unpleasantness and unsuitableness might arise. I think therefore that I had better first ask the questions and then answer them myself while you listen in safety; in that way I can carry on the argument until I have completed the proof that the soul is prior to the body."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Excellent, Stranger, and I hope that you will do as you propose."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Come, then, and if ever we are to call upon the Gods, let us call upon them now in all seriousness to come to the demonstration of their own existence. And so holding fast to the rope we will venture upon the depths of the argument. When questions of this sort are asked of me, my safest answer would appear to be as follows: Some one says to me, 'O Stranger, are all things at rest and nothing in motion, or is the exact opposite of this true, or are some things in motion and others at rest?' To this I shall reply that some things are in motion and others at rest. 'And do not things which move move in a place, and are not the things which are at rest at rest in a place?' Certainly. 'And some move or rest in one place and some in more places than one?' You mean to say, we shall rejoin, that those things which rest at the centre move in one place, just as the circumference goes round of globes which are said to be at rest? 'Yes.' And we observe that, in the revolution, the motion which carries round the larger and the lesser circle at the same time is proportionally distributed to greater and smaller, and is greater and smaller in a certain proportion. Here is a wonder which might be thought an impossibility, that the same motion should impart swiftness and slowness in due proportion to larger and lesser circles. 'Very true.' And when you speak of bodies moving in many places, you seem to me to mean those which move from one place to another, and sometimes have one centre of motion and sometimes more than one because they turn upon their axis; and whenever they meet anything, if it be stationary, they are divided by it; but if they get in the midst between bodies which are approaching and moving towards the same spot from opposite directions, they unite with them. 'I admit the truth of what you are saying.' Also when they unite they grow, and when they are divided they waste away--that is, supposing the constitution of each to remain, or if that fails, then there is a second reason of their dissolution. 'And when are all things created and how?' Clearly, they are created when the first principle receives increase and attains to the second dimension, and from this arrives at the one which is neighbour to this, and after reaching the third becomes perceptible to sense. Everything which is thus changing and moving is in process of generation; only when at rest has it real existence, but when passing into another state it is destroyed utterly. Have we not mentioned all motions that there are, and comprehended them under their kinds and numbered them with the exception, my friends, of two?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Which are they?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Just the two, with which our present enquiry is concerned."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Speak plainer."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I suppose that our enquiry has reference to the soul?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us assume that there is a motion able to move other things, but not to move itself; that is one kind; and there is another kind which can move itself as well as other things, working in composition and decomposition, by increase and diminution and generation and destruction--that is also one of the many kinds of motion."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Granted."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And we will assume that which moves other, and is changed by other, to be the ninth, and that which changes itself and others, and is coincident with every action and every passion, and is the true principle of change and motion in all that is--that we shall be inclined to call the tenth."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And which of these ten motions ought we to prefer as being the mightiest and most efficient?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I must say that the motion which is able to move itself is ten thousand times superior to all the others."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Very good; but may I make one or two corrections in what I have been saying?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"When I spoke of the tenth sort of motion, that was not quite correct."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What was the error?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"According to the true order, the tenth was really the first in generation and power; then follows the second, which was strangely enough termed the ninth by us."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I mean this: when one thing changes another, and that another, of such will there be any primary changing element? How can a thing which is moved by another ever be the beginning of change? Impossible. But when the self-moved changes other, and that again other, and thus thousands upon tens of thousands of bodies are set in motion, must not the beginning of all this motion be the change of the self-moving principle?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true, and I quite agree."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Or, to put the question in another way, making answer to ourselves: If, as most of these philosophers have the audacity to affirm, all things were at rest in one mass, which of the above-mentioned principles of motion would first spring up among them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly the self-moving; for there could be no change in them arising out of any external cause; the change must first take place in themselves."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then we must say that self-motion being the origin of all motions, and the first which arises among things at rest as well as among things in motion, is the eldest and mightiest principle of change, and that which is changed by another and yet moves other is second."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"At this stage of the argument let us put a question."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What question?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"If we were to see this power existing in any earthy, watery, or fiery substance, simple or compound--how should we describe it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You mean to ask whether we should call such a self-moving power life?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly we should."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And when we see soul in anything, must we not do the same--must we not admit that this is life?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"We must."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And now, I beseech you, reflect--you would admit that we have a threefold knowledge of things?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I mean that we know the essence, and that we know the definition of the essence, and the name--these are the three; and there are two questions which may be raised about anything."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How two?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Sometimes a person may give the name and ask the definition; or he may give the definition and ask the name. I may illustrate what I mean in this way."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Number like some other things is capable of being divided into equal parts; when thus divided, number is named 'even,' and the definition of the name 'even' is 'number divisible into two equal parts'?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I mean, that when we are asked about the definition and give the name, or when we are asked about the name and give the definition--in either case, whether we give name or definition, we speak of the same thing, calling 'even' the number which is divided into two equal parts."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what is the definition of that which is named 'soul'? Can we conceive of any other than that which has been already given--the motion which can move itself?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You mean to say that the essence which is defined as the self-moved is the same with that which has the name soul?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes; and if this is true, do we still maintain that there is anything wanting in the proof that the soul is the first origin and moving power of all that is, or has become, or will be, and their contraries, when she has been clearly shown to be the source of change and motion in all things?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not; the soul as being the source of motion, has been most satisfactorily shown to be the oldest of all things."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And is not that motion which is produced in another, by reason of another, but never has any self-moving power at all, being in truth the change of an inanimate body, to be reckoned second, or by any lower number which you may prefer?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then we are right, and speak the most perfect and absolute truth, when we say that the soul is prior to the body, and that the body is second and comes afterwards, and is born to obey the soul, which is the ruler?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Nothing can be more true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Do you remember our old admission, that if the soul was prior to the body the things of the soul were also prior to those of the body?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then characters and manners, and wishes and reasonings, and true opinions, and reflections, and recollections are prior to length and breadth and depth and strength of bodies, if the soul is prior to the body."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In the next place, we must not of necessity admit that the soul is the cause of good and evil, base and honourable, just and unjust, and of all other opposites, if we suppose her to be the cause of all things?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"We must."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And as the soul orders and inhabits all things that move, however moving, must we not say that she orders also the heavens?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"One soul or more? More than one--I will answer for you; at any rate, we must not suppose that there are less than two--one the author of good, and the other of evil."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes, very true; the soul then directs all things in heaven, and earth, and sea by her movements, and these are described by the terms--will, consideration, attention, deliberation, opinion true and false, joy and sorrow, confidence, fear, hatred, love, and other primary motions akin to these; which again receive the secondary motions of corporeal substances, and guide all things to growth and decay, to composition and decomposition, and to the qualities which accompany them, such as heat and cold, heaviness and lightness, hardness and softness, blackness and whiteness, bitterness and sweetness, and all those other qualities which the soul uses, herself a goddess, when truly receiving the divine mind she disciplines all things rightly to their happiness; but when she is the companion of folly, she does the very contrary of all this. Shall we assume so much, or do we still entertain doubts?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"There is no room at all for doubt."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Shall we say then that it is the soul which controls heaven and earth, and the whole world? that it is a principle of wisdom and virtue, or a principle which has neither wisdom nor virtue? Suppose that we make answer as follows:"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How would you answer?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"If, my friend, we say that the whole path and movement of heaven, and of all that is therein, is by nature akin to the movement and revolution and calculation of mind, and proceeds by kindred laws, then, as is plain, we must say that the best soul takes care of the world and guides it along the good path."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But if the world moves wildly and irregularly, then the evil soul guides it."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True again."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Of what nature is the movement of mind? To this question it is not easy to give an intelligent answer; and therefore I ought to assist you in framing one."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then let us not answer as if we would look straight at the sun, making ourselves darkness at midday--I mean as if we were under the impression that we could see with mortal eyes, or know adequately the nature of mind--it will be safer to look at the image only."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us select of the ten motions the one which mind chiefly resembles; this I will bring to your recollection, and will then make the answer on behalf of us all."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That will be excellent."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"You will surely remember our saying that all things were either at rest or in motion?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And that of things in motion some were moving in one place, and others in more than one?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Of these two kinds of motion, that which moves in one place must move about a centre like globes made in a lathe, and is most entirely akin and similar to the circular movement of mind."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In saying that both mind and the motion which is in one place move in the same and like manner, in and about the same, and in relation to the same, and according to one proportion and order, and are like the motion of a globe, we invented a fair image, which does no discredit to our ingenuity."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"It does us great credit."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And the motion of the other sort which is not after the same manner, nor in the same, nor about the same, nor in relation to the same, nor in one place, nor in order, nor according to any rule or proportion, may be said to be akin to senselessness and folly?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is most true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then, after what has been said, there is no difficulty in distinctly stating, that since soul carries all things round, either the best soul or the contrary must of necessity carry round and order and arrange the revolution of the heaven."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And judging from what has been said, Stranger, there would be impiety in asserting that any but the most perfect soul or souls carries round the heavens."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"You have understood my meaning right well, Cleinias, and now let me ask you another question."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What are you going to ask?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"If the soul carries round the sun and moon, and the other stars, does she not carry round each individual of them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then of one of them let us speak, and the same argument will apply to all."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Which will you take?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Every one sees the body of the sun, but no one sees his soul, nor the soul of any other body living or dead; and yet there is great reason to believe that this nature, unperceived by any of our senses, is circumfused around them all, but is perceived by mind; and therefore by mind and reflection only let us apprehend the following point."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is that?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"If the soul carries round the sun, we shall not be far wrong in supposing one of three alternatives."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Either the soul which moves the sun this way and that, resides within the circular and visible body, like the soul which carries us about every way; or the soul provides herself with an external body of fire or air, as some affirm, and violently propels body by body; or thirdly, she is without such a body, but guides the sun by some extraordinary and wonderful power."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly; the soul can only order all things in one of these three ways."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And this soul of the sun, which is therefore better than the sun, whether taking the sun about in a chariot to give light to men, or acting from without, or in whatever way, ought by every man to be deemed a God."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, by every man who has the least particle of sense."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And of the stars too, and of the moon, and of the years and months and seasons, must we not say in like manner, that since a soul or souls having every sort of excellence are the causes of all of them, those souls are Gods, whether they are living beings and reside in bodies, and in this way order the whole heaven, or whatever be the place and mode of their existence--and will any one who admits all this venture to deny that all things are full of Gods?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"No one, Stranger, would be such a madman."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And now, Megillus and Cleinias, let us offer terms to him who has hitherto denied the existence of the Gods, and leave him."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What terms?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Either he shall teach us that we were wrong in saying that the soul is the original of all things, and arguing accordingly; or, if he be not able to say anything better, then he must yield to us and live for the remainder of his life in the belief that there are Gods. Let us see, then, whether we have said enough or not enough to those who deny that there are Gods."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly, quite enough, Stranger."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then to them we will say no more. And now we are to address him who, believing that there are Gods, believes also that they take no heed of human affairs: To him we say--O thou best of men, in believing that there are Gods you are led by some affinity to them, which attracts you towards your kindred and makes you honour and believe in them. But the fortunes of evil and unrighteous men in private as well as public life, which, though not really happy, are wrongly counted happy in the judgment of men, and are celebrated both by poets and prose writers--these draw you aside from your natural piety. Perhaps you have seen impious men growing old and leaving their children's children in high offices, and their prosperity shakes your faith--you have known or heard or been yourself an eyewitness of many monstrous impieties, and have beheld men by such criminal means from small beginnings attaining to sovereignty and the pinnacle of greatness; and considering all these things you do not like to accuse the Gods of them, because they are your relatives; and so from some want of reasoning power, and also from an unwillingness to find fault with them, you have come to believe that they exist indeed, but have no thought or care of human things. Now, that your present evil opinion may not grow to still greater impiety, and that we may if possible use arguments which may conjure away the evil before it arrives, we will add another argument to that originally addressed to him who utterly denied the existence of the Gods. And do you, Megillus and Cleinias, answer for the young man as you did before; and if any impediment comes in our way, I will take the word out of your mouths, and carry you over the river as I did just now."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good; do as you say, and we will help you as well as we can."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There will probably be no difficulty in proving to him that the Gods care about the small as well as about the great. For he was present and heard what was said, that they are perfectly good, and that the care of all things is most entirely natural to them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"No doubt he heard that."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us consider together in the next place what we mean by this virtue which we ascribe to them. Surely we should say that to be temperate and to possess mind belongs to virtue, and the contrary to vice?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes; and courage is a part of virtue, and cowardice of vice?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And the one is honourable, and the other dishonourable?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And the one, like other meaner things, is a human quality, but the Gods have no part in anything of the sort?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That again is what everybody will admit."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But do we imagine carelessness and idleness and luxury to be virtues? What do you think?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Decidedly not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"They rank under the opposite class?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And their opposites, therefore, would fall under the opposite class?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But are we to suppose that one who possesses all these good qualities will be luxurious and heedless and idle, like those whom the poet compares to stingless drones?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And the comparison is a most just one."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Surely God must not be supposed to have a nature which He Himself hates? he who dares to say this sort of thing must not be tolerated for a moment."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course not. How could he have?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Should we not on any principle be entirely mistaken in praising any one who has some special business entrusted to him, if he have a mind which takes care of great matters and no care of small ones? Reflect; he who acts in this way, whether he be God or man, must act from one of two principles."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Either he must think that the neglect of the small matters is of no consequence to the whole, or if he knows that they are of consequence, and he neglects them, his neglect must be attributed to carelessness and indolence. Is there any other way in which his neglect can be explained? For surely, when it is impossible for him to take care of all, he is not negligent if he fails to attend to these things great or small, which a God or some inferior being might be wanting in strength or capacity to manage?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Now, then, let us examine the offenders, who both alike confess that there are Gods, but with a difference--the one saying that they may be appeased, and the other that they have no care of small matters: there are three of us and two of them, and we will say to them--In the first place, you both acknowledge that the Gods hear and see and know all things, and that nothing can escape them which is matter of sense and knowledge: do you admit this?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And do you admit also that they have all power which mortals and immortals can have?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"They will, of course, admit this also."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And surely we three and they two--five in all--have acknowledged that they are good and perfect?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Assuredly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But, if they are such as we conceive them to be, can we possibly suppose that they ever act in the spirit of carelessness and indolence? For in us inactivity is the child of cowardice, and carelessness of inactivity and indolence."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then not from inactivity and carelessness is any God ever negligent; for there is no cowardice in them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then the alternative which remains is, that if the Gods neglect the lighter and lesser concerns of the universe, they neglect them because they know that they ought not to care about such matters--what other alternative is there but the opposite of their knowing?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"There is none."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And, O most excellent and best of men, do I understand you to mean that they are careless because they are ignorant, and do not know that they ought to take care, or that they know, and yet like the meanest sort of men, knowing the better, choose the worse because they are overcome by pleasures and pains?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Do not all human things partake of the nature of soul? And is not man the most religious of all animals?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is not to be denied."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And we acknowledge that all mortal creatures are the property of the Gods, to whom also the whole of heaven belongs?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And, therefore, whether a person says that these things are to the Gods great or small--in either case it would not be natural for the Gods who own us, and who are the most careful and the best of owners, to neglect us. There is also a further consideration."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Sensation and power are in an inverse ratio to each other in respect to their ease and difficulty."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I mean that there is greater difficulty in seeing and hearing the small than the great, but more facility in moving and controlling and taking care of small and unimportant things than of their opposites."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Far more."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Suppose the case of a physician who is willing and able to cure some living thing as a whole--how will the whole fare at his hands if he takes care only of the greater and neglects the parts which are lesser?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Decidedly not well."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"No better would be the result with pilots or generals, or householders or statesmen, or any other such class, if they neglected the small and regarded only the great--as the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Of course not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us not, then, deem God inferior to human workmen, who, in proportion to their skill, finish and perfect their works, small as well as great, by one and the same art; or that God, the wisest of beings, who is both willing and able to take care, is like a lazy good-for-nothing, or a coward, who turns his back upon labour and gives no thought to smaller and easier matters, but to the greater only."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Never, Stranger, let us admit a supposition about the Gods which is both impious and false."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I think that we have now argued enough with him who delights to accuse the Gods of neglect."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"He has been forced to acknowledge that he is in error, but he still seems to me to need some words of consolation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What consolation will you offer him?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us say to the youth: The ruler of the universe has ordered all things with a view to the excellence and preservation of the whole, and each part, as far as may be, has an action and passion appropriate to it. Over these, down to the least fraction of them, ministers have been appointed to preside, who have wrought out their perfection with infinitesimal exactness. And one of these portions of the universe is thine own, unhappy man, which, however little, contributes to the whole; and you do not seem to be aware that this and every other creation is for the sake of the whole, and in order that the life of the whole may be blessed; and that you are created for the sake of the whole, and not the whole for the sake of you. For every physician and every skilled artist does all things for the sake of the whole, directing his effort towards the common good, executing the part for the sake of the whole, and not the whole for the sake of the part. And you are annoyed because you are ignorant how what is best for you happens to you and to the universe, as far as the laws of the common creation admit. Now, as the soul combining first with one body and then with another undergoes all sorts of changes, either of herself, or through the influence of another soul, all that remains to the player of the game is that he should shift the pieces; sending the better nature to the better place, and the worse to the worse, and so assigning to them their proper portion."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"In what way do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In a way which may be supposed to make the care of all things easy to the Gods. If any one were to form or fashion all things without any regard to the whole--if, for example, he formed a living element of water out of fire, instead of forming many things out of one or one out of many in regular order attaining to a first or second or third birth, the transmutation would have been infinite; but now the ruler of the world has a wonderfully easy task."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will explain: When the king saw that our actions had life, and that there was much virtue in them and much vice, and that the soul and body, although not, like the Gods of popular opinion, eternal, yet having once come into existence, were indestructible (for if either of them had been destroyed, there would have been no generation of living beings); and when he observed that the good of the soul was ever by nature designed to profit men, and the evil to harm them--he, seeing all this, contrived so to place each of the parts that their position might in the easiest and best manner procure the victory of good and the defeat of evil in the whole. And he contrived a general plan by which a thing of a certain nature found a certain seat and room. But the formation of qualities he left to the wills of individuals. For every one of us is made pretty much what he is by the bent of his desires and the nature of his soul."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is probably true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then all things which have a soul change, and possess in themselves a principle of change, and in changing move according to law and to the order of destiny: natures which have undergone a lesser change move less and on the earth's surface, but those which have suffered more change and have become more criminal sink into the abyss, that is to say, into Hades and other places in the world below, of which the very names terrify men, and which they picture to themselves as in a dream, both while alive and when released from the body. And whenever the soul receives more of good or evil from her own energy and the strong influence of others--when she has communion with divine virtue and becomes divine, she is carried into another and better place, which is perfect in holiness; but when she has communion with evil, then she also changes the place of her life. 'This is the justice of the Gods who inhabit Olympus.' O youth or young man, who fancy that you are neglected by the Gods, know that if you become worse you shall go to the worse souls, or if better to the better, and in every succession of life and death you will do and suffer what like may fitly suffer at the hands of like. This is the justice of heaven, which neither you nor any other unfortunate will ever glory in escaping, and which the ordaining powers have specially ordained; take good heed thereof, for it will be sure to take heed of you. If you say: I am small and will creep into the depths of the earth, or I am high and will fly up to heaven, you are not so small or so high but that you shall pay the fitting penalty, either here or in the world below or in some still more savage place whither you shall be conveyed. This is also the explanation of the fate of those whom you saw, who had done unholy and evil deeds, and from small beginnings had grown great, and you fancied that from being miserable they had become happy; and in their actions, as in a mirror, you seemed to see the universal neglect of the Gods, not knowing how they make all things work together and contribute to the great whole. And thinkest thou, bold man, that thou needest not to know this? he who knows it not can never form any true idea of the happiness or unhappiness of life or hold any rational discourse respecting either. If Cleinias and this our reverend company succeed in proving to you that you know not what you say of the Gods, then will God help you; but should you desire to hear more, listen to what we say to the third opponent, if you have any understanding whatsoever. For I think that we have sufficiently proved the existence of the Gods, and that they care for men: The other notion that they are appeased by the wicked, and take gifts, is what we must not concede to any one, and what every man should disprove to the utmost of his power."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good; let us do as you say."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, then, by the Gods themselves I conjure you to tell me--if they are to be propitiated, how are they to be propitiated? Who are they, and what is their nature? Must they not be at least rulers who have to order unceasingly the whole heaven?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And to what earthly rulers can they be compared, or who to them? How in the less can we find an image of the greater? Are they charioteers of contending pairs of steeds, or pilots of vessels? Perhaps they might be compared to the generals of armies, or they might be likened to physicians providing against the diseases which make war upon the body, or to husbandmen observing anxiously the effects of the seasons on the growth of plants; or perhaps to shepherds of flocks. For as we acknowledge the world to be full of many goods and also of evils, and of more evils than goods, there is, as we affirm, an immortal conflict going on among us, which requires marvellous watchfulness; and in that conflict the Gods and demigods are our allies, and we are their property. Injustice and insolence and folly are the destruction of us, and justice and temperance and wisdom are our salvation; and the place of these latter is in the life of the Gods, although some vestige of them may occasionally be discerned among mankind. But upon this earth we know that there dwell souls possessing an unjust spirit, who may be compared to brute animals, which fawn upon their keepers, whether dogs or shepherds, or the best and most perfect masters; for they in like manner, as the voices of the wicked declare, prevail by flattery and prayers and incantations, and are allowed to make their gains with impunity. And this sin, which is termed dishonesty, is an evil of the same kind as what is termed disease in living bodies or pestilence in years or seasons of the year, and in cities and governments has another name, which is injustice."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"What else can he say who declares that the Gods are always lenient to the doers of unjust acts, if they divide the spoil with them? As if wolves were to toss a portion of their prey to the dogs, and they, mollified by the gift, suffered them to tear the flocks. Must not he who maintains that the Gods can be propitiated argue thus?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Precisely so."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And to which of the above-mentioned classes of guardians would any man compare the Gods without absurdity? Will he say that they are like pilots, who are themselves turned away from their duty by 'libations of wine and the savour of fat,' and at last overturn both ship and sailors?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Assuredly not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And surely they are not like charioteers who are bribed to give up the victory to other chariots?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That would be a fearful image of the Gods."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Nor are they like generals, or physicians, or husbandmen, or shepherds; and no one would compare them to dogs who have been silenced by wolves."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"A thing not to be spoken of."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And are not all the Gods the chiefest of all guardians, and do they not guard our highest interests?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes; the chiefest."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And shall we say that those who guard our noblest interests, and are the best of guardians, are inferior in virtue to dogs, and to men even of moderate excellence, who would never betray justice for the sake of gifts which unjust men impiously offer them?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not; nor is such a notion to be endured, and he who holds this opinion may be fairly singled out and characterized as of all impious men the wickedest and most impious."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then are the three assertions--that the Gods exist, and that they take care of men, and that they can never be persuaded to do injustice, now sufficiently demonstrated? May we say that they are?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"You have our entire assent to your words."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I have spoken with vehemence because I am zealous against evil men; and I will tell you, dear Cleinias, why I am so. I would not have the wicked think that, having the superiority in argument, they may do as they please and act according to their various imaginations about the Gods; and this zeal has led me to speak too vehemently; but if we have at all succeeded in persuading the men to hate themselves and love their opposites, the prelude of our laws about impiety will not have been spoken in vain."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"So let us hope; and even if we have failed, the style of our argument will not discredit the lawgiver."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"After the prelude shall follow a discourse, which will be the interpreter of the law; this shall proclaim to all impious persons that they must depart from their ways and go over to the pious. And to those who disobey, let the law about impiety be as follows: If a man is guilty of any impiety in word or deed, any one who happens to be present shall give information to the magistrates, in aid of the law; and let the magistrates who first receive the information bring him before the appointed court according to the law; and if a magistrate, after receiving information, refuses to act, he shall be tried for impiety at the instance of any one who is willing to vindicate the laws; and if any one be cast, the court shall estimate the punishment of each act of impiety; and let all such criminals be imprisoned. There shall be three prisons in the state: the first of them is to be the common prison in the neighbourhood of the agora for the safe-keeping of the generality of offenders; another is to be in the neighbourhood of the nocturnal council, and is to be called the 'House of Reformation'; another, to be situated in some wild and desolate region in the centre of the country, shall be called by some name expressive of retribution. Now, men fall into impiety from three causes, which have been already mentioned, and from each of these causes arise two sorts of impiety, in all six, which are worth distinguishing, and should not all have the same punishment. For he who does not believe in the Gods, and yet has a righteous nature, hates the wicked and dislikes and refuses to do injustice, and avoids unrighteous men, and loves the righteous. But they who besides believing that the world is devoid of Gods are intemperate, and have at the same time good memories and quick wits, are worse; although both of them are unbelievers, much less injury is done by the one than by the other. The one may talk loosely about the Gods and about sacrifices and oaths, and perhaps by laughing at other men he may make them like himself, if he be not punished. But the other who holds the same opinions and is called a clever man, is full of stratagem and deceit--men of this class deal in prophecy and jugglery of all kinds, and out of their ranks sometimes come tyrants and demagogues and generals and hierophants of private mysteries and the Sophists, as they are termed, with their ingenious devices. There are many kinds of unbelievers, but two only for whom legislation is required; one the hypocritical sort, whose crime is deserving of death many times over, while the other needs only bonds and admonition. In like manner also the notion that the Gods take no thought of men produces two other sorts of crimes, and the notion that they may be propitiated produces two more. Assuming these divisions, let those who have been made what they are only from want of understanding, and not from malice or an evil nature, be placed by the judge in the House of Reformation, and ordered to suffer imprisonment during a period of not less than five years. And in the meantime let them have no intercourse with the other citizens, except with members of the nocturnal council, and with them let them converse with a view to the improvement of their soul's health. And when the time of their imprisonment has expired, if any of them be of sound mind let him be restored to sane company, but if not, and if he be condemned a second time, let him be punished with death. As to that class of monstrous natures who not only believe that there are no Gods, or that they are negligent, or to be propitiated, but in contempt of mankind conjure the souls of the living and say that they can conjure the dead and promise to charm the Gods with sacrifices and prayers, and will utterly overthrow individuals and whole houses and states for the sake of money--let him who is guilty of any of these things be condemned by the court to be bound according to law in the prison which is in the centre of the land, and let no freeman ever approach him, but let him receive the rations of food appointed by the guardians of the law from the hands of the public slaves; and when he is dead let him be cast beyond the borders unburied, and if any freeman assist in burying him, let him pay the penalty of impiety to any one who is willing to bring a suit against him. But if he leaves behind him children who are fit to be citizens, let the guardians of orphans take care of them, just as they would of any other orphans, from the day on which their father is convicted. In all these cases there should be one law, which will make men in general less liable to transgress in word or deed, and less foolish, because they will not be allowed to practise religious rites contrary to law. And let this be the simple form of the law: No man shall have sacred rites in a private house. When he would sacrifice, let him go to the temples and hand over his offerings to the priests and priestesses, who see to the sanctity of such things, and let him pray himself, and let any one who pleases join with him in prayer. The reason of this is as follows: Gods and temples are not easily instituted, and to establish them rightly is the work of a mighty intellect. And women especially, and men too, when they are sick or in danger, or in any sort of difficulty, or again on their receiving any good fortune, have a way of consecrating the occasion, vowing sacrifices, and promising shrines to Gods, demigods, and sons of Gods; and when they are awakened by terrible apparitions and dreams or remember visions, they find in altars and temples the remedies of them, and will fill every house and village with them, placing them in the open air, or wherever they may have had such visions; and with a view to all these cases we should obey the law. The law has also regard to the impious, and would not have them fancy that by the secret performance of these actions--by raising temples and by building altars in private houses, they can propitiate the God secretly with sacrifices and prayers, while they are really multiplying their crimes infinitely, bringing guilt from heaven upon themselves, and also upon those who permit them, and who are better men than they are; and the consequence is that the whole state reaps the fruit of their impiety, which, in a certain sense, is deserved. Assuredly God will not blame the legislator, who will enact the following law: No one shall possess shrines of the Gods in private houses, and he who is found to possess them, and perform any sacred rites not publicly authorised--supposing the offender to be some man or woman who is not guilty of any other great and impious crime--shall be informed against by him who is acquainted with the fact, which shall be announced by him to the guardians of the law; and let them issue orders that he or she shall carry away their private rites to the public temples, and if they do not persuade them, let them inflict a penalty on them until they comply. And if a person be proven guilty of impiety, not merely from childish levity, but such as grown-up men may be guilty of, whether he have sacrificed publicly or privately to any Gods, let him be punished with death, for his sacrifice is impure. Whether the deed has been done in earnest, or only from childish levity, let the guardians of the law determine, before they bring the matter into court and prosecute the offender for impiety. BOOK XI. In the next place, dealings between man and man require to be suitably regulated. The principle of them is very simple: Thou shalt not, if thou canst help, touch that which is mine, or remove the least thing which belongs to me without my consent; and may I be of a sound mind, and do to others as I would that they should do to me. First, let us speak of treasure-trove: May I never pray the Gods to find the hidden treasure, which another has laid up for himself and his family, he not being one of my ancestors, nor lift, if I should find, such a treasure. And may I never have any dealings with those who are called diviners, and who in any way or manner counsel me to take up the deposit entrusted to the earth, for I should not gain so much in the increase of my possessions, if I take up the prize, as I should grow in justice and virtue of soul, if I abstain; and this will be a better possession to me than the other in a better part of myself; for the possession of justice in the soul is preferable to the possession of wealth. And of many things it is well said--'Move not the immovables,' and this may be regarded as one of them. And we shall do well to believe the common tradition which says, that such deeds prevent a man from having a family. Now as to him who is careless about having children and regardless of the legislator, taking up that which neither he deposited, nor any ancestor of his, without the consent of the depositor, violating the simplest and noblest of laws which was the enactment of no mean man: 'Take not up that which was not laid down by thee'--of him, I say, who despises these two legislators, and takes up, not some small matter which he has not deposited, but perhaps a great heap of treasure, what he ought to suffer at the hands of the Gods, God only knows; but I would have the first person who sees him go and tell the wardens of the city, if the occurrence has taken place in the city, or if the occurrence has taken place in the agora he shall tell the wardens of the agora, or if in the country he shall tell the wardens of the country and their commanders. When information has been received the city shall send to Delphi, and, whatever the God answers about the money and the remover of the money, that the city shall do in obedience to the oracle; the informer, if he be a freeman, shall have the honour of doing rightly, and he who informs not, the dishonour of doing wrongly; and if he be a slave who gives information, let him be freed, as he ought to be, by the state, which shall give his master the price of him; but if he do not inform he shall be punished with death. Next in order shall follow a similar law, which shall apply equally to matters great and small: If a man happens to leave behind him some part of his property, whether intentionally or unintentionally, let him who may come upon the left property suffer it to remain, reflecting that such things are under the protection of the Goddess of ways, and are dedicated to her by the law. But if any one defies the law, and takes the property home with him, let him, if the thing is of little worth, and the man who takes it a slave, be beaten with many stripes by him who meets him, being a person of not less than thirty years of age. Or if he be a freeman, in addition to being thought a mean person and a despiser of the laws, let him pay ten times the value of the treasure which he has moved to the leaver. And if some one accuses another of having anything which belongs to him, whether little or much, and the other admits that he has this thing, but denies that the property in dispute belongs to the other, if the property be registered with the magistrates according to law, the claimant shall summon the possessor, who shall bring it before the magistrates; and when it is brought into court, if it be registered in the public registers, to which of the litigants it belonged, let him take it and go his way. Or if the property be registered as belonging to some one who is not present, whoever will offer sufficient surety on behalf of the absent person that he will give it up to him, shall take it away as the representative of the other. But if the property which is deposited be not registered with the magistrates, let it remain until the time of trial with three of the eldest of the magistrates; and if it be an animal which is deposited, then he who loses the suit shall pay the magistrates for its keep, and they shall determine the cause within three days. Any one who is of sound mind may arrest his own slave, and do with him whatever he will of such things as are lawful; and he may arrest the runaway slave of any of his friends or kindred with a view to his safe-keeping. And if any one takes away him who is being carried off as a slave, intending to liberate him, he who is carrying him off shall let him go; but he who takes him away shall give three sufficient sureties; and if he give them, and not without giving them, he may take him away, but if he take him away after any other manner he shall be deemed guilty of violence, and being convicted shall pay as a penalty double the amount of the damages claimed to him who has been deprived of the slave. Any man may also carry off a freedman, if he do not pay respect or sufficient respect to him who freed him. Now the respect shall be, that the freedman go three times in the month to the hearth of the person who freed him, and offer to do whatever he ought, so far as he can; and he shall agree to make such a marriage as his former master approves. He shall not be permitted to have more property than he who gave him liberty, and what more he has shall belong to his master. The freedman shall not remain in the state more than twenty years, but like other foreigners shall go away, taking his entire property with him, unless he has the consent of the magistrates and of his former master to remain. If a freedman or any other stranger has a property greater than the census of the third class, at the expiration of thirty days from the day on which this comes to pass, he shall take that which is his and go his way, and in this case he shall not be allowed to remain any longer by the magistrates. And if any one disobeys this regulation, and is brought into court and convicted, he shall be punished with death, and his property shall be confiscated. Suits about these matters shall take place before the tribes, unless the plaintiff and defendant have got rid of the accusation either before their neighbours or before judges chosen by them. If a man lay claim to any animal or anything else which he declares to be his, let the possessor refer to the seller or to some honest and trustworthy person, who has given, or in some legitimate way made over the property to him; if he be a citizen or a metic, sojourning in the city, within thirty days, or, if the property have been delivered to him by a stranger, within five months, of which the middle month shall include the summer solstice. When goods are exchanged by selling and buying, a man shall deliver them, and receive the price of them, at a fixed place in the agora, and have done with the matter; but he shall not buy or sell anywhere else, nor give credit. And if in any other manner or in any other place there be an exchange of one thing for another, and the seller give credit to the man who buys from him, he must do this on the understanding that the law gives no protection in cases of things sold not in accordance with these regulations. Again, as to contributions, any man who likes may go about collecting contributions as a friend among friends, but if any difference arises about the collection, he is to act on the understanding that the law gives no protection in such cases. He who sells anything above the value of fifty drachmas shall be required to remain in the city for ten days, and the purchaser shall be informed of the house of the seller, with a view to the sort of charges which are apt to arise in such cases, and the restitutions which the law allows. And let legal restitution be on this wise: If a man sells a slave who is in a consumption, or who has the disease of the stone, or of strangury, or epilepsy, or some other tedious and incurable disorder of body or mind, which is not discernible to the ordinary man, if the purchaser be a physician or trainer, he shall have no right of restitution; nor shall there be any right of restitution if the seller has told the truth beforehand to the buyer. But if a skilled person sells to another who is not skilled, let the buyer appeal for restitution within six months, except in the case of epilepsy, and then the appeal may be made within a year. The cause shall be determined by such physicians as the parties may agree to choose; and the defendant, if he lose the suit, shall pay double the price at which he sold. If a private person sell to another private person, he shall have the right of restitution, and the decision shall be given as before, but the defendant, if he be cast, shall only pay back the price of the slave. If a person sells a homicide to another, and they both know of the fact, let there be no restitution in such a case, but if he do not know of the fact, there shall be a right of restitution, whenever the buyer makes the discovery; and the decision shall rest with the five youngest guardians of the law, and if the decision be that the seller was cognisant of the fact, he shall purify the house of the purchaser, according to the law of the interpreters, and shall pay back three times the purchase-money. If a man exchanges either money for money, or anything whatever for anything else, either with or without life, let him give and receive them genuine and unadulterated, in accordance with the law. And let us have a prelude about all this sort of roguery, like the preludes of our other laws. Every man should regard adulteration as of one and the same class with falsehood and deceit, concerning which the many are too fond of saying that at proper times and places the practice may often be right. But they leave the occasion, and the when, and the where, undefined and unsettled, and from this want of definiteness in their language they do a great deal of harm to themselves and to others. Now a legislator ought not to leave the matter undetermined; he ought to prescribe some limit, either greater or less. Let this be the rule prescribed: No one shall call the Gods to witness, when he says or does anything false or deceitful or dishonest, unless he would be the most hateful of mankind to them. And he is most hateful to them who takes a false oath, and pays no heed to the Gods; and in the next degree, he who tells a falsehood in the presence of his superiors. Now better men are the superiors of worse men, and in general elders are the superiors of the young; wherefore also parents are the superiors of their offspring, and men of women and children, and rulers of their subjects; for all men ought to reverence any one who is in any position of authority, and especially those who are in state offices. And this is the reason why I have spoken of these matters. For every one who is guilty of adulteration in the agora tells a falsehood, and deceives, and when he invokes the Gods, according to the customs and cautions of the wardens of the agora, he does but swear without any respect for God or man. Certainly, it is an excellent rule not lightly to defile the names of the Gods, after the fashion of men in general, who care little about piety and purity in their religious actions. But if a man will not conform to this rule, let the law be as follows: He who sells anything in the agora shall not ask two prices for that which he sells, but he shall ask one price, and if he do not obtain this, he shall take away his goods; and on that day he shall not value them either at more or less; and there shall be no praising of any goods, or oath taken about them. If a person disobeys this command, any citizen who is present, not being less than thirty years of age, may with impunity chastise and beat the swearer, but if instead of obeying the laws he takes no heed, he shall be liable to the charge of having betrayed them. If a man sells any adulterated goods and will not obey these regulations, he who knows and can prove the fact, and does prove it in the presence of the magistrates, if he be a slave or a metic, shall have the adulterated goods; but if he be a citizen, and do not pursue the charge, he shall be called a rogue, and deemed to have robbed the Gods of the agora; or if he proves the charge, he shall dedicate the goods to the Gods of the agora. He who is proved to have sold any adulterated goods, in addition to losing the goods themselves, shall be beaten with stripes--a stripe for a drachma, according to the price of the goods; and the herald shall proclaim in the agora the offence for which he is going to be beaten. The wardens of the agora and the guardians of the law shall obtain information from experienced persons about the rogueries and adulterations of the sellers, and shall write up what the seller ought and ought not to do in each case; and let them inscribe their laws on a column in front of the court of the wardens of the agora, that they may be clear instructors of those who have business in the agora. Enough has been said in what has preceded about the wardens of the city, and if anything seems to be wanting, let them communicate with the guardians of the law, and write down the omission, and place on a column in the court of the wardens of the city the primary and secondary regulations which are laid down for them about their office. After the practices of adulteration naturally follow the practices of retail trade. Concerning these, we will first of all give a word of counsel and reason, and the law shall come afterwards. Retail trade in a city is not by nature intended to do any harm, but quite the contrary; for is not he a benefactor who reduces the inequalities and incommensurabilities of goods to equality and common measure? And this is what the power of money accomplishes, and the merchant may be said to be appointed for this purpose. The hireling and the tavern-keeper, and many other occupations, some of them more and others less seemly--all alike have this object--they seek to satisfy our needs and equalize our possessions. Let us then endeavour to see what has brought retail trade into ill-odour, and wherein lies the dishonour and unseemliness of it, in order that if not entirely, we may yet partially, cure the evil by legislation. To effect this is no easy matter, and requires a great deal of virtue."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Dear Cleinias, the class of men is small--they must have been rarely gifted by nature, and trained by education--who, when assailed by wants and desires, are able to hold out and observe moderation, and when they might make a great deal of money are sober in their wishes, and prefer a moderate to a large gain. But the mass of mankind are the very opposite: their desires are unbounded, and when they might gain in moderation they prefer gains without limit; wherefore all that relates to retail trade, and merchandise, and the keeping of taverns, is denounced and numbered among dishonourable things. For if what I trust may never be and will not be, we were to compel, if I may venture to say a ridiculous thing, the best men everywhere to keep taverns for a time, or carry on retail trade, or do anything of that sort; or if, in consequence of some fate or necessity, the best women were compelled to follow similar callings, then we should know how agreeable and pleasant all these things are; and if all such occupations were managed on incorrupt principles, they would be honoured as we honour a mother or a nurse. But now that a man goes to desert places and builds houses which can only be reached by long journeys, for the sake of retail trade, and receives strangers who are in need at the welcome resting-place, and gives them peace and calm when they are tossed by the storm, or cool shade in the heat; and then instead of behaving to them as friends, and showing the duties of hospitality to his guests, treats them as enemies and captives who are at his mercy, and will not release them until they have paid the most unjust, abominable, and extortionate ransom--these are the sort of practises, and foul evils they are, which cast a reproach upon the succour of adversity. And the legislator ought always to be devising a remedy for evils of this nature. There is an ancient saying, which is also a true one--'To fight against two opponents is a difficult thing,' as is seen in diseases and in many other cases. And in this case also the war is against two enemies--wealth and poverty; one of whom corrupts the soul of man with luxury, while the other drives him by pain into utter shamelessness. What remedy can a city of sense find against this disease? In the first place, they must have as few retail traders as possible; and in the second place, they must assign the occupation to that class of men whose corruption will be the least injury to the state; and in the third place, they must devise some way whereby the followers of these occupations themselves will not readily fall into habits of unbridled shamelessness and meanness. After this preface let our law run as follows, and may fortune favour us: No landowner among the Magnetes, whose city the God is restoring and resettling--no one, that is, of the 5040 families, shall become a retail trader either voluntarily or involuntarily; neither shall he be a merchant, or do any service for private persons unless they equally serve him, except for his father or his mother, and their fathers and mothers; and in general for his elders who are freemen, and whom he serves as a freeman. Now it is difficult to determine accurately the things which are worthy or unworthy of a freeman, but let those who have obtained the prize of virtue give judgment about them in accordance with their feelings of right and wrong. He who in any way shares in the illiberality of retail trades may be indicted for dishonouring his race by any one who likes, before those who have been judged to be the first in virtue; and if he appear to throw dirt upon his father's house by an unworthy occupation, let him be imprisoned for a year and abstain from that sort of thing; and if he repeat the offence, for two years; and every time that he is convicted let the length of his imprisonment be doubled. This shall be the second law: He who engages in retail trade must be either a metic or a stranger. And a third law shall be: In order that the retail trader who dwells in our city may be as good or as little bad as possible, the guardians of the law shall remember that they are not only guardians of those who may be easily watched and prevented from becoming lawless or bad, because they are well-born and bred; but still more should they have a watch over those who are of another sort, and follow pursuits which have a very strong tendency to make men bad. And, therefore, in respect of the multifarious occupations of retail trade, that is to say, in respect of such of them as are allowed to remain, because they seem to be quite necessary in a state--about these the guardians of the law should meet and take counsel with those who have experience of the several kinds of retail trade, as we before commanded concerning adulteration (which is a matter akin to this), and when they meet they shall consider what amount of receipts, after deducting expenses, will produce a moderate gain to the retail trades, and they shall fix in writing and strictly maintain what they find to be the right percentage of profit; this shall be seen to by the wardens of the agora, and by the wardens of the city, and by the wardens of the country. And so retail trade will benefit every one, and do the least possible injury to those in the state who practise it. When a man makes an agreement which he does not fulfil, unless the agreement be of a nature which the law or a vote of the assembly does not allow, or which he has made under the influence of some unjust compulsion, or which he is prevented from fulfilling against his will by some unexpected chance, the other party may go to law with him in the courts of the tribes, for not having completed his agreement, if the parties are not able previously to come to terms before arbiters or before their neighbours. The class of craftsmen who have furnished human life with the arts is dedicated to Hephaestus and Athene; and there is a class of craftsmen who preserve the works of all craftsmen by arts of defence, the votaries of Ares and Athene, to which divinities they too are rightly dedicated. All these continue through life serving the country and the people; some of them are leaders in battle; others make for hire implements and works, and they ought not to deceive in such matters, out of respect to the Gods who are their ancestors. If any craftsman through indolence omit to execute his work in a given time, not reverencing the God who gives him the means of life, but considering, foolish fellow, that he is his own God and will let him off easily, in the first place, he shall suffer at the hands of the God, and in the second place, the law shall follow in a similar spirit. He shall owe to him who contracted with him the price of the works which he has failed in performing, and he shall begin again and execute them gratis in the given time. When a man undertakes a work, the law gives him the same advice which was given to the seller, that he should not attempt to raise the price, but simply ask the value; this the law enjoins also on the contractor; for the craftsman assuredly knows the value of his work. Wherefore, in free states the man of art ought not to attempt to impose upon private individuals by the help of his art, which is by nature a true thing; and he who is wronged in a matter of this sort, shall have a right of action against the party who has wronged him. And if any one lets out work to a craftsman, and does not pay him duly according to the lawful agreement, disregarding Zeus the guardian of the city and Athene, who are the partners of the state, and overthrows the foundations of society for the sake of a little gain, in his case let the law and the Gods maintain the common bonds of the state. And let him who, having already received the work in exchange, does not pay the price in the time agreed, pay double the price; and if a year has elapsed, although interest is not to be taken on loans, yet for every drachma which he owes to the contractor let him pay a monthly interest of an obol. Suits about these matters are to be decided by the courts of the tribes; and by the way, since we have mentioned craftsmen at all, we must not forget that other craft of war, in which generals and tacticians are the craftsmen, who undertake voluntarily or involuntarily the work of our safety, as other craftsmen undertake other public works--if they execute their work well the law will never tire of praising him who gives them those honours which are the just rewards of the soldier; but if any one, having already received the benefit of any noble service in war, does not make the due return of honour, the law will blame him. Let this then be the law, having an ingredient of praise, not compelling but advising the great body of the citizens to honour the brave men who are the saviours of the whole state, whether by their courage or by their military skill--they should honour them, I say, in the second place; for the first and highest tribute of respect is to be given to those who are able above other men to honour the words of good legislators. The greater part of the dealings between man and man have been now regulated by us with the exception of those that relate to orphans and the supervision of orphans by their guardians. These follow next in order, and must be regulated in some way. But to arrive at them we must begin with the testamentary wishes of the dying and the case of those who may have happened to die intestate. When I said, Cleinias, that we must regulate them, I had in my mind the difficulty and perplexity in which all such matters are involved. You cannot leave them unregulated, for individuals would make regulations at variance with one another, and repugnant to the laws and habits of the living and to their own previous habits, if a person were simply allowed to make any will which he pleased, and this were to take effect in whatever state he may have been at the end of his life; for most of us lose our senses in a manner, and feel crushed when we think that we are about to die."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Stranger?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"O Cleinias, a man when he is about to die is an intractable creature, and is apt to use language which causes a great deal of anxiety and trouble to the legislator."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"In what way?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"He wants to have the entire control of all his property, and will use angry words."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Such as what?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"O ye Gods, he will say, how monstrous that I am not allowed to give, or not to give, my own to whom I will--less to him who has been bad to me, and more to him who has been good to me, and whose badness and goodness have been tested by me in time of sickness or in old age and in every other sort of fortune!"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Well, Stranger, and may he not very fairly say so?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In my opinion, Cleinias, the ancient legislators were too good-natured, and made laws without sufficient observation or consideration of human things."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I mean, my friend, that they were afraid of the testator's reproaches, and so they passed a law to the effect that a man should be allowed to dispose of his property in all respects as he liked; but you and I, if I am not mistaken, will have something better to say to our departing citizens."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"O my friends, we will say to them, hard is it for you, who are creatures of a day, to know what is yours--hard too, as the Delphic oracle says, to know yourselves at this hour. Now I, as the legislator, regard you and your possessions, not as belonging to yourselves, but as belonging to your whole family, both past and future, and yet more do I regard both family and possessions as belonging to the state; wherefore, if some one steals upon you with flattery, when you are tossed on the sea of disease or old age, and persuades you to dispose of your property in a way that is not for the best, I will not, if I can help, allow this; but I will legislate with a view to the whole, considering what is best both for the state and for the family, esteeming as I ought the feelings of an individual at a lower rate; and I hope that you will depart in peace and kindness towards us, as you are going the way of all mankind; and we will impartially take care of all your concerns, not neglecting any of them, if we can possibly help. Let this be our prelude and consolation to the living and dying, Cleinias, and let the law be as follows: He who makes a disposition in a testament, if he be the father of a family, shall first of all inscribe as his heir any one of his sons whom he may think fit; and if he gives any of his children to be adopted by another citizen, let the adoption be inscribed. And if he has a son remaining over and above who has not been adopted upon any lot, and who may be expected to be sent out to a colony according to law, to him his father may give as much as he pleases of the rest of his property, with the exception of the paternal lot and the fixtures on the lot. And if there are other sons, let him distribute among them what there is more than the lot in such portions as he pleases. And if one of the sons has already a house of his own, he shall not give him of the money, nor shall he give money to a daughter who has been betrothed, but if she is not betrothed he may give her money. And if any of the sons or daughters shall be found to have another lot of land in the country, which has accrued after the testament has been made, they shall leave the lot which they have inherited to the heir of the man who has made the will. If the testator has no sons, but only daughters, let him choose the husband of any one of his daughters whom he pleases, and leave and inscribe him as his son and heir. And if a man have lost his son, when he was a child, and before he could be reckoned among grown up men, whether his own or an adopted son, let the testator make mention of the circumstance and inscribe whom he will to be his second son in hope of better fortune. If the testator has no children at all, he may select and give to any one whom he pleases the tenth part of the property which he has acquired; but let him not be blamed if he gives all the rest to his adopted son, and makes a friend of him according to the law. If the sons of a man require guardians, and the father when he dies leaves a will appointing guardians, those who have been named by him, whoever they are and whatever their number be, if they are able and willing to take charge of the children, shall be recognised according to the provisions of the will. But if he dies and has made no will, or a will in which he has appointed no guardians, then the next of kin, two on the father's and two on the mother's side, and one of the friends of the deceased, shall have the authority of guardians, whom the guardians of the law shall appoint when the orphans require guardians. And the fifteen eldest guardians of the law shall have the whole care and charge of the orphans, divided into threes according to seniority--a body of three for one year, and then another body of three for the next year, until the cycle of the five periods is complete; and this, as far as possible, is to continue always. If a man dies, having made no will at all, and leaves sons who require the care of guardians, they shall share in the protection which is afforded by these laws. And if a man dying by some unexpected fate leaves daughters behind him, let him pardon the legislator if when he gives them in marriage, he have a regard only to two out of three conditions--nearness of kin and the preservation of the lot, and omits the third condition, which a father would naturally consider, for he would choose out of all the citizens a son for himself, and a husband for his daughter, with a view to his character and disposition--the father, I say, shall forgive the legislator if he disregards this, which to him is an impossible consideration. Let the law about these matters where practicable be as follows: If a man dies without making a will, and leaves behind him daughters, let his brother, being the son of the same father or of the same mother, having no lot, marry the daughter and have the lot of the dead man. And if he have no brother, but only a brother's son, in like manner let them marry, if they be of a suitable age; and if there be not even a brother's son, but only the son of a sister, let them do likewise, and so in the fourth degree, if there be only the testator's father's brother, or in the fifth degree, his father's brother's son, or in the sixth degree, the child of his father's sister. Let kindred be always reckoned in this way: if a person leaves daughters the relationship shall proceed upwards through brothers and sisters, and brothers' and sisters' children, and first the males shall come, and after them the females in the same family. The judge shall consider and determine the suitableness or unsuitableness of age in marriage; he shall make an inspection of the males naked, and of the women naked down to the navel. And if there be a lack of kinsmen in a family extending to grandchildren of a brother, or to the grandchildren of a grandfather's children, the maiden may choose with the consent of her guardians any one of the citizens who is willing and whom she wills, and he shall be the heir of the dead man, and the husband of his daughter. Circumstances vary, and there may sometimes be a still greater lack of relations within the limits of the state; and if any maiden has no kindred living in the city, and there is some one who has been sent out to a colony, and she is disposed to make him the heir of her father's possessions, if he be indeed of her kindred, let him proceed to take the lot according to the regulation of the law; but if he be not of her kindred, she having no kinsmen within the city, and he be chosen by the daughter of the dead man, and empowered to marry by the guardians, let him return home and take the lot of him who died intestate. And if a man has no children, either male or female, and dies without making a will, let the previous law in general hold; and let a man and a woman go forth from the family and share the deserted house, and let the lot belong absolutely to them; and let the heiress in the first degree be a sister, and in a second degree a daughter of a brother, and in the third, a daughter of a sister, in the fourth degree the sister of a father, and in the fifth degree the daughter of a father's brother, and in a sixth degree of a father's sister; and these shall dwell with their male kinsmen, according to the degree of relationship and right, as we enacted before. Now we must not conceal from ourselves that such laws are apt to be oppressive and that there may sometimes be a hardship in the lawgiver commanding the kinsman of the dead man to marry his relation; he may be thought not to have considered the innumerable hindrances which may arise among men in the execution of such ordinances; for there may be cases in which the parties refuse to obey, and are ready to do anything rather than marry, when there is some bodily or mental malady or defect among those who are bidden to marry or be married. Persons may fancy that the legislator never thought of this, but they are mistaken; wherefore let us make a common prelude on behalf of the lawgiver and of his subjects, the law begging the latter to forgive the legislator, in that he, having to take care of the common weal, cannot order at the same time the various circumstances of individuals, and begging him to pardon them if naturally they are sometimes unable to fulfil the act which he in his ignorance imposes upon them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And how, Stranger, can we act most fairly under the circumstances?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There must be arbiters chosen to deal with such laws and the subjects of them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I mean to say, that a case may occur in which the nephew, having a rich father, will be unwilling to marry the daughter of his uncle; he will have a feeling of pride, and he will wish to look higher. And there are cases in which the legislator will be imposing upon him the greatest calamity, and he will be compelled to disobey the law, if he is required, for example, to take a wife who is mad, or has some other terrible malady of soul or body, such as makes life intolerable to the sufferer. Then let what we are saying concerning these cases be embodied in a law: If any one finds fault with the established laws respecting testaments, both as to other matters and especially in what relates to marriage, and asserts that the legislator, if he were alive and present, would not compel him to obey--that is to say, would not compel those who are by our law required to marry or be given in marriage, to do either--and some kinsman or guardian dispute this, the reply is that the legislator left fifteen of the guardians of the law to be arbiters and fathers of orphans, male or female, and to them let the disputants have recourse, and by their aid determine any matters of the kind, admitting their decision to be final. But if any one thinks that too great power is thus given to the guardians of the law, let him bring his adversaries into the court of the select judges, and there have the points in dispute determined. And he who loses the cause shall have censure and blame from the legislator, which, by a man of sense, is felt to be a penalty far heavier than a great loss of money. Thus will orphan children have a second birth. After their first birth we spoke of their nurture and education, and after their second birth, when they have lost their parents, we ought to take measures that the misfortune of orphanhood may be as little sad to them as possible. In the first place, we say that the guardians of the law are lawgivers and fathers to them, not inferior to their natural fathers. Moreover, they shall take charge of them year by year as of their own kindred; and we have given both to them and to the children's own guardians as suitable admonition concerning the nurture of orphans. And we seem to have spoken opportunely in our former discourse, when we said that the souls of the dead have the power after death of taking an interest in human affairs, about which there are many tales and traditions, long indeed, but true; and seeing that they are so many and so ancient, we must believe them, and we must also believe the lawgivers, who tell us that these things are true, if they are not to be regarded as utter fools. But if these things are really so, in the first place men should have a fear of the Gods above, who regard the loneliness of the orphans; and in the second place of the souls of the departed, who by nature incline to take an especial care of their own children, and are friendly to those who honour, and unfriendly to those who dishonour them. Men should also fear the souls of the living who are aged and high in honour; wherever a city is well ordered and prosperous, their descendants cherish them, and so live happily; old persons are quick to see and hear all that relates to them, and are propitious to those who are just in the fulfilment of such duties, and they punish those who wrong the orphan and the desolate, considering that they are the greatest and most sacred of trusts. To all which matters the guardian and magistrate ought to apply his mind, if he has any, and take heed of the nurture and education of the orphans, seeking in every possible way to do them good, for he is making a contribution to his own good and that of his children. He who obeys the tale which precedes the law, and does no wrong to an orphan, will never experience the wrath of the legislator. But he who is disobedient, and wrongs any one who is bereft of father or mother, shall pay twice the penalty which he would have paid if he had wronged one whose parents had been alive. As touching other legislation concerning guardians in their relation to orphans, or concerning magistrates and their superintendence of the guardians, if they did not possess examples of the manner in which children of freemen would be brought up in the bringing up of their own children, and of the care of their property in the care of their own, or if they had not just laws fairly stated about these very things--there would have been reason in making laws for them, under the idea that they were a peculiar class, and we might distinguish and make separate rules for the life of those who are orphans and of those who are not orphans. But as the case stands, the condition of orphans with us is not different from the case of those who have a father, though in regard to honour and dishonour, and the attention given to them, the two are not usually placed upon a level. Wherefore, touching the legislation about orphans, the law speaks in serious accents, both of persuasion and threatening, and such a threat as the following will be by no means out of place: He who is the guardian of an orphan of either sex, and he among the guardians of the law to whom the superintendence of this guardian has been assigned, shall love the unfortunate orphan as though he were his own child, and he shall be as careful and diligent in the management of his possessions as he would be if they were his own, or even more careful and diligent. Let every one who has the care of an orphan observe this law. But any one who acts contrary to the law on these matters, if he be a guardian of the child, may be fined by a magistrate, or, if he be himself a magistrate, the guardian may bring him before the court of select judges, and punish him, if convicted, by exacting a fine of double the amount of that inflicted by the court. And if a guardian appears to the relations of the orphan, or to any other citizen, to act negligently or dishonestly, let them bring him before the same court, and whatever damages are given against him, let him pay fourfold, and let half belong to the orphan and half to him who procured the conviction. If any orphan arrives at years of discretion, and thinks that he has been ill-used by his guardians, let him within five years of the expiration of the guardianship be allowed to bring them to trial; and if any of them be convicted, the court shall determine what he shall pay or suffer. And if a magistrate shall appear to have wronged the orphan by neglect, and he be convicted, let the court determine what he shall suffer or pay to the orphan, and if there be dishonesty in addition to neglect, besides paying the fine, let him be deposed from his office of guardian of the law, and let the state appoint another guardian of the law for the city and for the country in his room. Greater differences than there ought to be sometimes arise between fathers and sons, on the part either of fathers who will be of opinion that the legislator should enact that they may, if they wish, lawfully renounce their son by the proclamation of a herald in the face of the world, or of sons who think that they should be allowed to indict their fathers on the charge of imbecility when they are disabled by disease or old age. These things only happen, as a matter of fact, where the natures of men are utterly bad; for where only half is bad, as, for example, if the father be not bad, but the son be bad, or conversely, no great calamity is the result of such an amount of hatred as this. In another state, a son disowned by his father would not of necessity cease to be a citizen, but in our state, of which these are to be the laws, the disinherited must necessarily emigrate into another country, for no addition can be made even of a single family to the 5040 households; and, therefore, he who deserves to suffer these things must be renounced not only by his father, who is a single person, but by the whole family, and what is done in these cases must be regulated by some such law as the following: He who in the sad disorder of his soul has a mind, justly or unjustly, to expel from his family a son whom he has begotten and brought up, shall not lightly or at once execute his purpose; but first of all he shall collect together his own kinsmen, extending to cousins, and in like manner his son's kinsmen by the mother's side, and in their presence he shall accuse his son, setting forth that he deserves at the hands of them all to be dismissed from the family; and the son shall be allowed to address them in a similar manner, and show that he does not deserve to suffer any of these things. And if the father persuades them, and obtains the suffrages of more than half of his kindred, exclusive of the father and mother and the offender himself--I say, if he obtains more than half the suffrages of all the other grown-up members of the family, of both sexes, the father shall be permitted to put away his son, but not otherwise. And if any other citizen is willing to adopt the son who is put away, no law shall hinder him; for the characters of young men are subject to many changes in the course of their lives. And if he has been put away, and in a period of ten years no one is willing to adopt him, let those who have the care of the superabundant population which is sent out into colonies, see to him, in order that he may be suitably provided for in the colony. And if disease or age or harshness of temper, or all these together, makes a man to be more out of his mind than the rest of the world are--but this is not observable, except to those who live with him--and he, being master of his property, is the ruin of the house, and his son doubts and hesitates about indicting his father for insanity, let the law in that case ordain that he shall first of all go to the eldest guardians of the law and tell them of his father's misfortune, and they shall duly look into the matter, and take counsel as to whether he shall indict him or not. And if they advise him to proceed, they shall be both his witnesses and his advocates; and if the father is cast, he shall henceforth be incapable of ordering the least particular of his life; let him be as a child dwelling in the house for the remainder of his days. And if a man and his wife have an unfortunate incompatibility of temper, ten of the guardians of the law, who are impartial, and ten of the women who regulate marriages, shall look to the matter, and if they are able to reconcile them they shall be formally reconciled; but if their souls are too much tossed with passion, they shall endeavour to find other partners. Now they are not likely to have very gentle tempers; and, therefore, we must endeavour to associate with them deeper and softer natures. Those who have no children, or only a few, at the time of their separation, should choose their new partners with a view to the procreation of children; but those who have a sufficient number of children should separate and marry again in order that they may have some one to grow old with and that the pair may take care of one another in age. If a woman dies, leaving children, male or female, the law will advise rather than compel the husband to bring up the children without introducing into the house a stepmother. But if he have no children, then he shall be compelled to marry until he has begotten a sufficient number of sons to his family and to the state. And if a man dies leaving a sufficient number of children, the mother of his children shall remain with them and bring them up. But if she appears to be too young to live virtuously without a husband, let her relations communicate with the women who superintend marriage, and let both together do what they think best in these matters; if there is a lack of children, let the choice be made with a view to having them; two children, one of either sex, shall be deemed sufficient in the eye of the law. When a child is admitted to be the offspring of certain parents and is acknowledged by them, but there is need of a decision as to which parent the child is to follow--in case a female slave have intercourse with a male slave, or with a freeman or freedman, the offspring shall always belong to the master of the female slave. Again, if a free woman have intercourse with a male slave, the offspring shall belong to the master of the slave; but if a child be born either of a slave by her master, or of his mistress by a slave--and this be proven--the offspring of the woman and its father shall be sent away by the women who superintend marriage into another country, and the guardians of the law shall send away the offspring of the man and its mother. Neither God, nor a man who has understanding, will ever advise any one to neglect his parents. To a discourse concerning the honour and dishonour of parents, a prelude such as the following, about the service of the Gods, will be a suitable introduction: There are ancient customs about the Gods which are universal, and they are of two kinds: some of the Gods we see with our eyes and we honour them, of others we honour the images, raising statues of them which we adore; and though they are lifeless, yet we imagine that the living Gods have a good will and gratitude to us on this account. Now, if a man has a father or mother, or their fathers or mothers treasured up in his house stricken in years, let him consider that no statue can be more potent to grant his requests than they are, who are sitting at his hearth, if only he knows how to show true service to them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And what do you call the true mode of service?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I will tell you, O my friend, for such things are worth listening to."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Oedipus, as tradition says, when dishonoured by his sons, invoked on them curses which every one declares to have been heard and ratified by the Gods, and Amyntor in his wrath invoked curses on his son Phoenix, and Theseus upon Hippolytus, and innumerable others have also called down wrath upon their children, whence it is clear that the Gods listen to the imprecations of parents; for the curses of parents are, as they ought to be, mighty against their children as no others are. And shall we suppose that the prayers of a father or mother who is specially dishonoured by his or her children, are heard by the Gods in accordance with nature; and that if a parent is honoured by them, and in the gladness of his heart earnestly entreats the Gods in his prayers to do them good, he is not equally heard, and that they do not minister to his request? If not, they would be very unjust ministers of good, and that we affirm to be contrary to their nature."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"May we not think, as I was saying just now, that we can possess no image which is more honoured by the Gods, than that of a father or grandfather, or of a mother stricken in years? whom when a man honours, the heart of the God rejoices, and he is ready to answer their prayers. And, truly, the figure of an ancestor is a wonderful thing, far higher than that of a lifeless image. For the living, when they are honoured by us, join in our prayers, and when they are dishonoured, they utter imprecations against us; but lifeless objects do neither. And therefore, if a man makes a right use of his father and grandfather and other aged relations, he will have images which above all others will win him the favour of the Gods."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Excellent."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Every man of any understanding fears and respects the prayers of parents, knowing well that many times and to many persons they have been accomplished. Now these things being thus ordered by nature, good men think it a blessing from heaven if their parents live to old age and reach the utmost limit of human life, or if taken away before their time they are deeply regretted by them; but to bad men parents are always a cause of terror. Wherefore let every man honour with every sort of lawful honour his own parents, agreeably to what has now been said. But if this prelude be an unmeaning sound in the ears of any one, let the law follow, which may be rightly imposed in these terms: If any one in this city be not sufficiently careful of his parents, and do not regard and gratify in every respect their wishes more than those of his sons and of his other offspring or of himself--let him who experiences this sort of treatment either come himself, or send some one to inform the three eldest guardians of the law, and three of the women who have the care of marriages; and let them look to the matter and punish youthful evil-doers with stripes and bonds if they are under thirty years of age, that is to say, if they be men, or if they be women, let them undergo the same punishment up to forty years of age. But if, when they are still more advanced in years, they continue the same neglect of their parents, and do any hurt to any of them, let them be brought before a court in which every single one of the eldest citizens shall be the judges, and if the offender be convicted, let the court determine what he ought to pay or suffer, and any penalty may be imposed on him which a man can pay or suffer. If the person who has been wronged be unable to inform the magistrates, let any freeman who hears of his case inform, and if he do not, he shall be deemed base, and shall be liable to have a suit for damage brought against him by any one who likes. And if a slave inform, he shall receive freedom; and if he be the slave of the injurer or injured party, he shall be set free by the magistrates, or if he belong to any other citizen, the public shall pay a price on his behalf to the owner; and let the magistrates take heed that no one wrongs him out of revenge, because he has given information. Cases in which one man injures another by poisons, and which prove fatal, have been already discussed; but about other cases in which a person intentionally and of malice harms another with meats, or drinks, or ointments, nothing has as yet been determined. For there are two kinds of poisons used among men, which cannot clearly be distinguished. There is the kind just now explicitly mentioned, which injures bodies by the use of other bodies according to a natural law; there is also another kind which persuades the more daring class that they can do injury by sorceries, and incantations, and magic knots, as they are termed, and makes others believe that they above all persons are injured by the powers of the magician. Now it is not easy to know the nature of all these things; nor if a man do know can he readily persuade others to believe him. And when men are disturbed in their minds at the sight of waxen images fixed either at their doors, or in a place where three ways meet, or on the sepulchres of parents, there is no use in trying to persuade them that they should despise all such things because they have no certain knowledge about them. But we must have a law in two parts, concerning poisoning, in whichever of the two ways the attempt is made, and we must entreat, and exhort, and advise men not to have recourse to such practises, by which they scare the multitude out of their wits, as if they were children, compelling the legislator and the judge to heal the fears which the sorcerer arouses, and to tell them in the first place, that he who attempts to poison or enchant others knows not what he is doing, either as regards the body (unless he has a knowledge of medicine), or as regards his enchantments (unless he happens to be a prophet or diviner). Let the law, then, run as follows about poisoning or witchcraft: He who employs poison to do any injury, not fatal, to a man himself, or to his servants, or any injury, whether fatal or not, to his cattle or his bees, if he be a physician, and be convicted of poisoning, shall be punished with death; or if he be a private person, the court shall determine what he is to pay or suffer. But he who seems to be the sort of man who injures others by magic knots, or enchantments, or incantations, or any of the like practices, if he be a prophet or diviner, let him die; and if, not being a prophet, he be convicted of witchcraft, as in the previous case, let the court fix what he ought to pay or suffer. When a man does another any injury by theft or violence, for the greater injury let him pay greater damages to the injured man, and less for the smaller injury; but in all cases, whatever the injury may have been, as much as will compensate the loss. And besides the compensation of the wrong, let a man pay a further penalty for the chastisement of his offence: he who has done the wrong instigated by the folly of another, through the lightheartedness of youth or the like, shall pay a lighter penalty; but he who has injured another through his own folly, when overcome by pleasure or pain, in cowardly fear, or lust, or envy, or implacable anger, shall endure a heavier punishment. Not that he is punished because he did wrong, for that which is done can never be undone, but in order that in future times, he, and those who see him corrected, may utterly hate injustice, or at any rate abate much of their evil-doing. Having an eye to all these things, the law, like a good archer, should aim at the right measure of punishment, and in all cases at the deserved punishment. In the attainment of this the judge shall be a fellow-worker with the legislator, whenever the law leaves to him to determine what the offender shall suffer or pay; and the legislator, like a painter, shall give a rough sketch of the cases in which the law is to be applied. This is what we must do, Megillus and Cleinias, in the best and fairest manner that we can, saying what the punishments are to be of all actions of theft and violence, and giving laws of such a kind as the Gods and sons of Gods would have us give. If a man is mad he shall not be at large in the city, but his relations shall keep him at home in any way which they can; or if not, let them pay a penalty--he who is of the highest class shall pay a penalty of one hundred drachmas, whether he be a slave or a freeman whom he neglects; and he of the second class shall pay four-fifths of a mina; and he of the third class three-fifths; and he of the fourth class two-fifths. Now there are many sorts of madness, some arising out of disease, which we have already mentioned; and there are other kinds, which originate in an evil and passionate temperament, and are increased by bad education; out of a slight quarrel this class of madmen will often raise a storm of abuse against one another, and nothing of that sort ought to be allowed to occur in a well-ordered state. Let this, then, be the law about abuse, which shall relate to all cases: No one shall speak evil of another; and when a man disputes with another he shall teach and learn of the disputant and the company, but he shall abstain from evil-speaking; for out of the imprecations which men utter against one another, and the feminine habit of casting aspersions on one another, and using foul names, out of words light as air, in very deed the greatest enmities and hatreds spring up. For the speaker gratifies his anger, which is an ungracious element of his nature; and nursing up his wrath by the entertainment of evil thoughts, and exacerbating that part of his soul which was formerly civilised by education, he lives in a state of savageness and moroseness, and pays a bitter penalty for his anger. And in such cases almost all men take to saying something ridiculous about their opponent, and there is no man who is in the habit of laughing at another who does not miss virtue and earnestness altogether, or lose the better half of greatness. Wherefore let no one utter any taunting word at a temple, or at the public sacrifices, or at the games, or in the agora, or in a court of justice, or in any public assembly. And let the magistrate who presides on these occasions chastise an offender, and he shall be blameless; but if he fails in doing so, he shall not claim the prize of virtue; for he is one who heeds not the laws, and does not do what the legislator commands. And if in any other place any one indulges in these sort of revilings, whether he has begun the quarrel or is only retaliating, let any elder who is present support the law, and control with blows those who indulge in passion, which is another great evil; and if he do not, let him be liable to pay the appointed penalty. And we say now, that he who deals in reproaches against others cannot reproach them without attempting to ridicule them; and this, when done in a moment of anger, is what we make matter of reproach against him. But then, do we admit into our state the comic writers who are so fond of making mankind ridiculous, if they attempt in a good-natured manner to turn the laugh against our citizens? or do we draw the distinction of jest and earnest, and allow a man to make use of ridicule in jest and without anger about any thing or person; though as we were saying, not if he be angry and have a set purpose? We forbid earnest--that is unalterably fixed; but we have still to say who are to be sanctioned or not to be sanctioned by the law in the employment of innocent humour. A comic poet, or maker of iambic or satirical lyric verse, shall not be permitted to ridicule any of the citizens, either by word or likeness, either in anger or without anger. And if any one is disobedient, the judges shall either at once expel him from the country, or he shall pay a fine of three minae, which shall be dedicated to the God who presides over the contests. Those only who have received permission shall be allowed to write verses at one another, but they shall be without anger and in jest; in anger and in serious earnest they shall not be allowed. The decision of this matter shall be left to the superintendent of the general education of the young, and whatever he may license, the writer shall be allowed to produce, and whatever he rejects let not the poet himself exhibit, or ever teach anybody else, slave or freeman, under the penalty of being dishonoured, and held disobedient to the laws. Now he is not to be pitied who is hungry, or who suffers any bodily pain, but he who is temperate, or has some other virtue, or part of a virtue, and at the same time suffers from misfortune; it would be an extraordinary thing if such an one, whether slave or freeman, were utterly forsaken and fell into the extremes of poverty in any tolerably well-ordered city or government. Wherefore the legislator may safely make a law applicable to such cases in the following terms: Let there be no beggars in our state; and if anybody begs, seeking to pick up a livelihood by unavailing prayers, let the wardens of the agora turn him out of the agora, and the wardens of the city out of the city, and the wardens of the country send him out of any other parts of the land across the border, in order that the land may be cleared of this sort of animal. If a slave of either sex injure anything, which is not his or her own, through inexperience, or some improper practice, and the person who suffers damage be not himself in part to blame, the master of the slave who has done the harm shall either make full satisfaction, or give up the slave who has done the injury. But if the master argue that the charge has arisen by collusion between the injured party and the injurer, with the view of obtaining the slave, let him sue the person, who says that he has been injured, for malpractices. And if he gain a conviction, let him receive double the value which the court fixes as the price of the slave; and if he lose his suit, let him make amends for the injury, and give up the slave. And if a beast of burden, or horse, or dog, or any other animal, injure the property of a neighbour, the owner shall in like manner pay for the injury. If any man refuses to be a witness, he who wants him shall summon him, and he who is summoned shall come to the trial; and if he knows and is willing to bear witness, let him bear witness, but if he says he does not know let him swear by the three divinities Zeus, and Apollo, and Themis, that he does not, and have no more to do with the cause. And he who is summoned to give witness and does not answer to his summoner, shall be liable for the harm which ensues according to law. And if a person calls up as a witness any one who is acting as a judge, let him give his witness, but he shall not afterwards vote in the cause. A free woman may give her witness and plead, if she be more than forty years of age, and may bring an action if she have no husband; but if her husband be alive she shall only be allowed to bear witness. A slave of either sex and a child shall be allowed to give evidence and to plead, but only in cases of murder; and they must produce sufficient sureties that they will certainly remain until the trial, in case they should be charged with false witness. And either of the parties in a cause may bring an accusation of perjury against witnesses, touching their evidence in whole or in part, if he asserts that such evidence has been given; but the accusation must be brought previous to the final decision of the cause. The magistrates shall preserve the accusations of false witness, and have them kept under the seal of both parties, and produce them on the day when the trial for false witness takes place. If a man be twice convicted of false witness, he shall not be required, and if thrice, he shall not be allowed to bear witness; and if he dare to witness after he has been convicted three times, let any one who pleases inform against him to the magistrates, and let the magistrates hand him over to the court, and if he be convicted he shall be punished with death. And in any case in which the evidence is rightly found to be false, and yet to have given the victory to him who wins the suit, and more than half the witnesses are condemned, the decision which was gained by these means shall be rescinded, and there shall be a discussion and a decision as to whether the suit was determined by that false evidence or not; and in whichever way the decision may be given, the previous suit shall be determined accordingly. There are many noble things in human life, but to most of them attach evils which are fated to corrupt and spoil them. Is not justice noble, which has been the civiliser of humanity? How then can the advocate of justice be other than noble? And yet upon this profession which is presented to us under the fair name of art has come an evil reputation. In the first place, we are told that by ingenious pleas and the help of an advocate the law enables a man to win a particular cause, whether just or unjust; and that both the art, and the power of speech which is thereby imparted, are at the service of him who is willing to pay for them. Now in our state this so-called art, whether really an art or only an experience and practice destitute of any art, ought if possible never to come into existence, or if existing among us should listen to the request of the legislator and go away into another land, and not speak contrary to justice. If the offenders obey we say no more; but for those who disobey, the voice of the law is as follows: If any one thinks that he will pervert the power of justice in the minds of the judges, and unseasonably litigate or advocate, let any one who likes indict him for malpractices of law and dishonest advocacy, and let him be judged in the court of select judges; and if he be convicted, let the court determine whether he may be supposed to act from a love of money or from contentiousness. And if he is supposed to act from contentiousness, the court shall fix a time during which he shall not be allowed to institute or plead a cause; and if he is supposed to act as he does from love of money, in case he be a stranger, he shall leave the country, and never return under penalty of death; but if he be a citizen, he shall die, because he is a lover of money, in whatever manner gained; and equally, if he be judged to have acted more than once from contentiousness, he shall die. BOOK XII. If a herald or an ambassador carry a false message from our city to any other, or bring back a false message from the city to which he is sent, or be proved to have brought back, whether from friends or enemies, in his capacity of herald or ambassador, what they have never said, let him be indicted for having violated, contrary to the law, the commands and duties imposed upon him by Hermes and Zeus, and let there be a penalty fixed, which he shall suffer or pay if he be convicted. Theft is a mean, and robbery a shameless thing; and none of the sons of Zeus delight in fraud and violence, or ever practised either. Wherefore let no one be deluded by poets or mythologers into a mistaken belief of such things, nor let him suppose, when he thieves or is guilty of violence, that he is doing nothing base, but only what the Gods themselves do. For such tales are untrue and improbable; and he who steals or robs contrary to the law, is never either a God or the son of a God; of this the legislator ought to be better informed than all the poets put together. Happy is he and may he be for ever happy, who is persuaded and listens to our words; but he who disobeys shall have to contend against the following law: If a man steal anything belonging to the public, whether that which he steals be much or little, he shall have the same punishment. For he who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power, and he who takes up a greater amount, not having deposited it, is wholly unjust. Wherefore the law is not disposed to inflict a less penalty on the one than on the other because his theft is less, but on the ground that the thief may possibly be in one case still curable, and may in another case be incurable. If any one convict in a court of law a stranger or a slave of a theft of public property, let the court determine what punishment he shall suffer, or what penalty he shall pay, bearing in mind that he is probably not incurable. But the citizen who has been brought up as our citizens will have been, if he be found guilty of robbing his country by fraud or violence, whether he be caught in the act or not, shall be punished with death; for he is incurable. Now for expeditions of war much consideration and many laws are required; the great principle of all is that no one of either sex should be without a commander; nor should the mind of any one be accustomed to do anything, either in jest or earnest, of his own motion, but in war and in peace he should look to and follow his leader, even in the least things being under his guidance; for example, he should stand or move, or exercise, or wash, or take his meals, or get up in the night to keep guard and deliver messages when he is bidden; and in the hour of danger he should not pursue and not retreat except by order of his superior; and in a word, not teach the soul or accustom her to know or understand how to do anything apart from others. Of all soldiers the life should be always and in all things as far as possible in common and together; there neither is nor ever will be a higher, or better, or more scientific principle than this for the attainment of salvation and victory in war. And we ought in time of peace from youth upwards to practise this habit of commanding others, and of being commanded by others; anarchy should have no place in the life of man or of the beasts who are subject to man. I may add that all dances ought to be performed with a view to military excellence; and agility and ease should be cultivated for the same object, and also endurance of the want of meats and drinks, and of winter cold and summer heat, and of hard couches; and, above all, care should be taken not to destroy the peculiar qualities of the head and the feet by surrounding them with extraneous coverings, and so hindering their natural growth of hair and soles. For these are the extremities, and of all the parts of the body, whether they are preserved or not is of the greatest consequence; the one is the servant of the whole body, and the other the master, in whom all the ruling senses are by nature set. Let the young men imagine that he hears in what has preceded the praises of the military life; the law shall be as follows: He shall serve in war who is on the roll or appointed to some special service, and if any one is absent from cowardice, and without the leave of the generals, he shall be indicted before the military commanders for failure of service when the army comes home; and the soldiers shall be his judges; the heavy-armed, and the cavalry, and the other arms of the service shall form separate courts; and they shall bring the heavy-armed before the heavy-armed, and the horsemen before the horsemen, and the others in like manner before their peers; and he who is found guilty shall never be allowed to compete for any prize of valour, or indict another for not serving on an expedition, or be an accuser at all in any military matters. Moreover, the court shall further determine what punishment he shall suffer, or what penalty he shall pay. When the suits for failure of service are completed, the leaders of the several kinds of troops shall again hold an assembly, and they shall adjudge the prizes of valour; and he who likes searching for judgment in his own branch of the service, saying nothing about any former expedition, nor producing any proof or witnesses to confirm his statement, but speaking only of the present occasion. The crown of victory shall be an olive wreath which the victor shall offer up at the temple of any war-god whom he likes, adding an inscription for a testimony to last during life, that such an one has received the first, the second, or the third prize. If any one goes on an expedition, and returns home before the appointed time, when the generals have not withdrawn the army, he shall be indicted for desertion before the same persons who took cognizance of failure of service, and if he be found guilty, the same punishment shall be inflicted on him. Now every man who is engaged in any suit ought to be very careful of bringing false witness against any one, either intentionally or unintentionally, if he can help; for justice is truly said to be an honourable maiden, and falsehood is naturally repugnant to honour and justice. A witness ought to be very careful not to sin against justice, as for example in what relates to the throwing away of arms--he must distinguish the throwing them away when necessary, and not make that a reproach, or bring an action against some innocent person on that account. To make the distinction may be difficult; but still the law must attempt to define the different kinds in some way. Let me endeavour to explain my meaning by an ancient tale: If Patroclus had been brought to the tent still alive but without his arms (and this has happened to innumerable persons), the original arms, which the poet says were presented to Peleus by the Gods as a nuptial gift when he married Thetis, remaining in the hands of Hector, then the base spirits of that day might have reproached the son of Menoetius with having cast away his arms. Again, there is the case of those who have been thrown down precipices and lost their arms; and of those who at sea, and in stormy places, have been suddenly overwhelmed by floods of water; and there are numberless things of this kind which one might adduce by way of extenuation, and with the view of justifying a misfortune which is easily misrepresented. We must, therefore, endeavour to divide to the best of our power the greater and more serious evil from the lesser. And a distinction may be drawn in the use of terms of reproach. A man does not always deserve to be called the thrower away of his shield; he may be only the loser of his arms. For there is a great or rather absolute difference between him who is deprived of his arms by a sufficient force, and him who voluntarily lets his shield go. Let the law then be as follows: If a person having arms is overtaken by the enemy and does not turn round and defend himself, but lets them go voluntarily or throws them away, choosing a base life and a swift escape rather than a courageous and noble and blessed death--in such a case of the throwing away of arms let justice be done, but the judge need take no note of the case just now mentioned; for the bad men ought always to be punished, in the hope that he may be improved, but not the unfortunate, for there is no advantage in that. And what shall be the punishment suited to him who has thrown away his weapons of defence? Tradition says that Caeneus, the Thessalian, was changed by a God from a woman into a man; but the converse miracle cannot now be wrought, or no punishment would be more proper than that the man who throws away his shield should be changed into a woman. This however is impossible, and therefore let us make a law as nearly like this as we can--that he who loves his life too well shall be in no danger for the remainder of his days, but shall live for ever under the stigma of cowardice. And let the law be in the following terms: When a man is found guilty of disgracefully throwing away his arms in war, no general or military officer shall allow him to serve as a soldier, or give him any place at all in the ranks of soldiers; and the officer who gives the coward any place, shall suffer a penalty which the public examiner shall exact of him; and if he be of the highest class, he shall pay a thousand drachmae; or if he be of the second class, five minae; or if he be of the third, three minae; or if he be of the fourth class, one mina. And he who is found guilty of cowardice, shall not only be dismissed from manly dangers, which is a disgrace appropriate to his nature, but he shall pay a thousand drachmae, if he be of the highest class, and five minae if he be of the second class, and three if he be of the third class, and a mina, like the preceding, if he be of the fourth class. What regulations will be proper about examiners, seeing that some of our magistrates are elected by lot, and for a year, and some for a longer time and from selected persons? Of such magistrates, who will be a sufficient censor or examiner, if any of them, weighed down by the pressure of office or his own inability to support the dignity of his office, be guilty of any crooked practice? It is by no means easy to find a magistrate who excels other magistrates in virtue, but still we must endeavour to discover some censor or examiner who is more than man. For the truth is, that there are many elements of dissolution in a state, as there are also in a ship, or in an animal; they all have their cords, and girders, and sinews--one nature diffused in many places, and called by many names; and the office of examiner is a most important element in the preservation and dissolution of states. For if the examiners are better than the magistrates, and their duty is fulfilled justly and without blame, then the whole state and country flourishes and is happy; but if the examination of the magistrates is carried on in a wrong way, then, by the relaxation of that justice which is the uniting principle of all constitutions, every power in the state is rent asunder from every other; they no longer incline in the same direction, but fill the city with faction, and make many cities out of one, and soon bring all to destruction. Wherefore the examiners ought to be admirable in every sort of virtue. Let us invent a mode of creating them, which shall be as follows: Every year, after the summer solstice, the whole city shall meet in the common precincts of Helios and Apollo, and shall present to the God three men out of their own number in the manner following: Each citizen shall select, not himself, but some other citizen whom he deems in every way the best, and who is not less than fifty years of age. And out of the selected persons who have the greatest number of votes, they shall make a further selection until they reduce them to one-half, if they are an even number; but if they are not an even number, they shall subtract the one who has the smallest number of votes, and make them an even number, and then leave the half which have the greater number of votes. And if two persons have an equal number of votes, and thus increase the number beyond one-half, they shall withdraw the younger of the two and do away the excess; and then including all the rest they shall again vote, until there are left three having an unequal number of votes. But if all the three, or two out of the three, have equal votes, let them commit the election to good fate and fortune, and separate off by lot the first, and the second, and the third; these they shall crown with an olive wreath and give them the prize of excellence, at the same time proclaiming to all the world that the city of the Magnetes, by the providence of the Gods, is again preserved, and presents to the Sun and to Apollo her three best men as first-fruits, to be a common offering to them, according to the ancient law, as long as their lives answer to the judgment formed of them. And these shall appoint in their first year twelve examiners, to continue until each has completed seventy-five years, to whom three shall afterwards be added yearly; and let these divide all the magistracies into twelve parts, and prove the holders of them by every sort of test to which a freeman may be subjected; and let them live while they hold office in the precinct of Helios and Apollo, in which they were chosen, and let each one form a judgment of some things individually, and of others in company with his colleagues; and let him place a writing in the agora about each magistracy, and what the magistrate ought to suffer or pay, according to the decision of the examiners. And if a magistrate does not admit that he has been justly judged, let him bring the examiners before the select judges, and if he be acquitted by their decision, let him, if he will, accuse the examiners themselves; if, however, he be convicted, and have been condemned to death by the examiners, let him die (and of course he can only die once): but any other penalties which admit of being doubled let him suffer twice over. And now let us pass under review the examiners themselves; what will their examination be, and how conducted? During the life of these men, whom the whole state counts worthy of the rewards of virtue, they shall have the first seat at all public assemblies, and at all Hellenic sacrifices and sacred missions, and other public and holy ceremonies in which they share. The chiefs of each sacred mission shall be selected from them, and they only of all the citizens shall be adorned with a crown of laurel; they shall all be priests of Apollo and Helios; and one of them, who is judged first of the priests created in that year, shall be high priest; and they shall write up his name in each year to be a measure of time as long as the city lasts; and after their death they shall be laid out and carried to the grave and entombed in a manner different from the other citizens. They shall be decked in a robe all of white, and there shall be no crying or lamentation over them; but a chorus of fifteen maidens, and another of boys, shall stand around the bier on either side, hymning the praises of the departed priests in alternate responses, declaring their blessedness in song all day long; and at dawn a hundred of the youths who practise gymnastic exercises, and whom the relations of the departed shall choose, shall carry the bier to the sepulchre, the young men marching first, dressed in the garb of warriors--the cavalry with their horses, the heavy-armed with their arms, and the others in like manner. And boys near the bier and in front of it shall sing their national hymn, and maidens shall follow behind, and with them the women who have passed the age of child-bearing; next, although they are interdicted from other burials, let priests and priestesses follow, unless the Pythian oracle forbid them; for this burial is free from pollution. The place of burial shall be an oblong vaulted chamber underground, constructed of tufa, which will last for ever, having stone couches placed side by side. And here they will lay the blessed person, and cover the sepulchre with a circular mound of earth and plant a grove of trees around on every side but one; and on that side the sepulchre shall be allowed to extend for ever, and a new mound will not be required. Every year they shall have contests in music and gymnastics, and in horsemanship, in honour of the dead. These are the honours which shall be given to those who at the examination are found blameless; but if any of them, trusting to the scrutiny being over, should, after the judgment has been given, manifest the wickedness of human nature, let the law ordain that he who pleases shall indict him, and let the cause be tried in the following manner. In the first place, the court shall be composed of the guardians of the law, and to them the surviving examiners shall be added, as well as the court of select judges; and let the pursuer lay his indictment in this form--he shall say that so-and-so is unworthy of the prize of virtue and of his office; and if the defendant be convicted let him be deprived of his office, and of the burial, and of the other honours given him. But if the prosecutor do not obtain the fifth part of the votes, let him, if he be of the first-class, pay twelve minae, and eight if he be of the second class, and six if he be of the third class, and two minae if he be of the fourth class. The so-called decision of Rhadamanthus is worthy of all admiration. He knew that the men of his own time believed and had no doubt that there were Gods, which was a reasonable belief in those days, because most men were the sons of Gods, and according to tradition he was one himself. He appears to have thought that he ought to commit judgment to no man, but to the Gods only, and in this way suits were simply and speedily decided by him. For he made the two parties take an oath respecting the points in dispute, and so got rid of the matter speedily and safely. But now that a certain portion of mankind do not believe at all in the existence of the Gods, and others imagine that they have no care of us, and the opinion of most men, and of the worst men, is that in return for a small sacrifice and a few flattering words they will be their accomplices in purloining large sums and save them from many terrible punishments, the way of Rhadamanthus is no longer suited to the needs of justice; for as the opinions of men about the Gods are changed, the laws should also be changed--in the granting of suits a rational legislation ought to do away with the oaths of the parties on either side--he who obtains leave to bring an action should write down the charges, but should not add an oath; and the defendant in like manner should give his denial to the magistrates in writing, and not swear; for it is a dreadful thing to know, when many lawsuits are going on in a state, that almost half the people who meet one another quite unconcernedly at the public meals and in other companies and relations of private life are perjured. Let the law, then, be as follows: A judge who is about to give judgment shall take an oath, and he who is choosing magistrates for the state shall either vote on oath or with a voting tablet which he brings from a temple; so too the judge of dances and of all music, and the superintendents and umpires of gymnastic and equestrian contests, and any matters in which, as far as men can judge, there is nothing to be gained by a false oath; but all cases in which a denial confirmed by an oath clearly results in a great advantage to the taker of the oath, shall be decided without the oath of the parties to the suit, and the presiding judges shall not permit either of them to use an oath for the sake of persuading, nor to call down curses on himself and his race, nor to use unseemly supplications or womanish laments. But they shall ever be teaching and learning what is just in auspicious words; and he who does otherwise shall be supposed to speak beside the point, and the judges shall again bring him back to the question at issue. On the other hand, strangers in their dealings with strangers shall as at present have power to give and receive oaths, for they will not often grow old in the city or leave a fry of young ones like themselves to be the sons and heirs of the land. As to the initiation of private suits, let the manner of deciding causes between all citizens be the same as in cases in which any freeman is disobedient to the state in minor matters, of which the penalty is not stripes, imprisonment, or death. But as regards attendance at choruses or processions or other shows, and as regards public services, whether the celebration of sacrifice in peace, or the payment of contributions in war--in all these cases, first comes the necessity of providing a remedy for the loss; and by those who will not obey, there shall be security given to the officers whom the city and the law empower to exact the sum due; and if they forfeit their security, let the goods which they have pledged be sold and the money given to the city; but if they ought to pay a larger sum, the several magistrates shall impose upon the disobedient a suitable penalty, and bring them before the court, until they are willing to do what they are ordered. Now a state which makes money from the cultivation of the soil only, and has no foreign trade, must consider what it will do about the emigration of its own people to other countries, and the reception of strangers from elsewhere. About these matters the legislator has to consider, and he will begin by trying to persuade men as far as he can. The intercourse of cities with one another is apt to create a confusion of manners; strangers are always suggesting novelties to strangers. When states are well governed by good laws the mixture causes the greatest possible injury; but seeing that most cities are the reverse of well-ordered, the confusion which arises in them from the reception of strangers, and from the citizens themselves rushing off into other cities, when any one either young or old desires to travel anywhere abroad at whatever time, is of no consequence. On the other hand, the refusal of states to receive others, and for their own citizens never to go to other places, is an utter impossibility, and to the rest of the world is likely to appear ruthless and uncivilised; it is a practice adopted by people who use harsh words, such as xenelasia or banishment of strangers, and who have harsh and morose ways, as men think. And to be thought or not to be thought well of by the rest of the world is no light matter; for the many are not so far wrong in their judgment of who are bad and who are good, as they are removed from the nature of virtue in themselves. Even bad men have a divine instinct which guesses rightly, and very many who are utterly depraved form correct notions and judgments of the differences between the good and bad. And the generality of cities are quite right in exhorting us to value a good reputation in the world, for there is no truth greater and more important than this--that he who is really good (I am speaking of the men who would be perfect) seeks for reputation with, but not without, the reality of goodness. And our Cretan colony ought also to acquire the fairest and noblest reputation for virtue from other men; and there is every reason to expect that, if the reality answers to the idea, she will be one of the few well-ordered cities which the sun and the other Gods behold. Wherefore, in the matter of journeys to other countries and the reception of strangers, we enact as follows: In the first place, let no one be allowed to go anywhere at all into a foreign country who is less than forty years of age; and no one shall go in a private capacity, but only in some public one, as a herald, or on an embassy, or on a sacred mission. Going abroad on an expedition or in war is not to be included among travels of the class authorised by the state. To Apollo at Delphi and to Zeus at Olympia and to Nemea and to the Isthmus, citizens should be sent to take part in the sacrifices and games there dedicated to the Gods; and they should send as many as possible, and the best and fairest that can be found, and they will make the city renowned at holy meetings in time of peace, procuring a glory which shall be the converse of that which is gained in war; and when they come home they shall teach the young that the institutions of other states are inferior to their own. And they shall send spectators of another sort, if they have the consent of the guardians, being such citizens as desire to look a little more at leisure at the doings of other men; and these no law shall hinder. For a city which has no experience of good and bad men or intercourse with them, can never be thoroughly and perfectly civilised, nor, again, can the citizens of a city properly observe the laws by habit only, and without an intelligent understanding of them. And there always are in the world a few inspired men whose acquaintance is beyond price, and who spring up quite as much in ill-ordered as in well-ordered cities. These are they whom the citizens of a well-ordered city should be ever seeking out, going forth over sea and over land to find him who is incorruptible--that he may establish more firmly institutions in his own state which are good already, and amend what is deficient; for without this examination and enquiry a city will never continue perfect any more than if the examination is ill-conducted."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How can we have an examination and also a good one?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In this way: In the first place, our spectator shall be of not less than fifty years of age; he must be a man of reputation, especially in war, if he is to exhibit to other cities a model of the guardians of the law, but when he is more than sixty years of age he shall no longer continue in his office of spectator. And when he has carried on his inspection during as many out of the ten years of his office as he pleases, on his return home let him go to the assembly of those who review the laws. This shall be a mixed body of young and old men, who shall be required to meet daily between the hour of dawn and the rising of the sun. They shall consist, in the first place, of the priests who have obtained the rewards of virtue; and, in the second place, of guardians of the law, the ten eldest being chosen; the general superintendent of education shall also be a member, as well as the last appointed as those who have been released from the office; and each of them shall take with him as his companion a young man, whomsoever he chooses, between the ages of thirty and forty. These shall be always holding conversation and discourse about the laws of their own city or about any specially good ones which they may hear to be existing elsewhere; also about kinds of knowledge which may appear to be of use and will throw light upon the examination, or of which the want will make the subject of laws dark and uncertain to them. Any knowledge of this sort which the elders approve, the younger men shall learn with all diligence; and if any one of those who have been invited appear to be unworthy, the whole assembly shall blame him who invited him. The rest of the city shall watch over those among the young men who distinguish themselves, having an eye upon them, and especially honouring them if they succeed, but dishonouring them above the rest if they turn out to be inferior. This is the assembly to which he who has visited the institutions of other men, on his return home shall straightway go, and if he have discovered any one who has anything to say about the enactment of laws or education or nurture, or if he have himself made any observations, let him communicate his discoveries to the whole assembly. And if he be seen to have come home neither better nor worse, let him be praised at any rate for his enthusiasm; and if he be much better, let him be praised so much the more; and not only while he lives but after his death let the assembly honour him with fitting honours. But if on his return home he appear to have been corrupted, pretending to be wise when he is not, let him hold no communication with any one, whether young or old; and if he will hearken to the rulers, then he shall be permitted to live as a private individual; but if he will not, let him die, if he be convicted in a court of law of interfering about education and the laws. And if he deserve to be indicted, and none of the magistrates indict him, let that be counted as a disgrace to them when the rewards of virtue are decided. Let such be the character of the person who goes abroad, and let him go abroad under these conditions. In the next place, the stranger who comes from abroad should be received in a friendly spirit. Now there are four kinds of strangers, of whom we must make some mention--the first is he who comes and stays throughout the summer; this class are like birds of passage, taking wing in pursuit of commerce, and flying over the sea to other cities, while the season lasts; he shall be received in market-places and harbours and public buildings, near the city but outside, by those magistrates who are appointed to superintend these matters; and they shall take care that a stranger, whoever he be, duly receives justice; but he shall not be allowed to make any innovation. They shall hold the intercourse with him which is necessary, and this shall be as little as possible. The second kind is just a spectator who comes to see with his eyes and hear with his ears the festivals of the Muses; such ought to have entertainment provided them at the temples by hospitable persons, and the priests and ministers of the temples should see and attend to them. But they should not remain more than a reasonable time; let them see and hear that for the sake of which they came, and then go away, neither having suffered nor done any harm. The priests shall be their judges, if any of them receive or do any wrong up to the sum of fifty drachmae, but if any greater charge be brought, in such cases the suit shall come before the wardens of the agora. The third kind of stranger is he who comes on some public business from another land, and is to be received with public honours. He is to be received only by the generals and commanders of horse and foot, and the host by whom he is entertained, in conjunction with the Prytanes, shall have the sole charge of what concerns him. There is a fourth class of persons answering to our spectators, who come from another land to look at ours. In the first place, such visits will be rare, and the visitor should be at least fifty years of age; he may possibly be wanting to see something that is rich and rare in other states, or himself to show something in like manner to another city. Let such an one, then, go unbidden to the doors of the wise and rich, being one of them himself: let him go, for example, to the house of the superintendent of education, confident that he is a fitting guest of such a host, or let him go to the house of some of those who have gained the prize of virtue and hold discourse with them, both learning from them, and also teaching them; and when he has seen and heard all, he shall depart, as a friend taking leave of friends, and be honoured by them with gifts and suitable tributes of respect. These are the customs, according to which our city should receive all strangers of either sex who come from other countries, and should send forth her own citizens, showing respect to Zeus, the God of hospitality, not forbidding strangers at meals and sacrifices, as is the manner which prevails among the children of the Nile, nor driving them away by savage proclamations. When a man becomes surety, let him give the security in a distinct form, acknowledging the whole transaction in a written document, and in the presence of not less than three witnesses if the sum be under a thousand drachmae, and of not less than five witnesses if the sum be above a thousand drachmae. The agent of a dishonest or untrustworthy seller shall himself be responsible; both the agent and the principal shall be equally liable. If a person wishes to find anything in the house of another, he shall enter naked, or wearing only a short tunic and without a girdle, having first taken an oath by the customary Gods that he expects to find it there; he shall then make his search, and the other shall throw open his house and allow him to search things both sealed and unsealed. And if a person will not allow the searcher to make his search, he who is prevented shall go to law with him, estimating the value of the goods after which he is searching, and if the other be convicted he shall pay twice the value of the article. If the master be absent from home, the dwellers in the house shall let him search the unsealed property, and on the sealed property the searcher shall set another seal, and shall appoint any one whom he likes to guard them during five days; and if the master of the house be absent during a longer time, he shall take with him the wardens of the city, and so make his search, opening the sealed property as well as the unsealed, and then, together with the members of the family and the wardens of the city, he shall seal them up again as they were before. There shall be a limit of time in the case of disputed things, and he who has had possession of them during a certain time shall no longer be liable to be disturbed. As to houses and lands there can be no dispute in this state of ours; but if a man has any other possessions which he has used and openly shown in the city and in the agora and in the temples, and no one has put in a claim to them, and some one says that he was looking for them during this time, and the possessor is proved to have made no concealment, if they have continued for a year, the one having the goods and the other looking for them, the claim of the seeker shall not be allowed after the expiration of the year; or if he does not use or show the lost property in the market or in the city, but only in the country, and no one offers himself as the owner during five years, at the expiration of the five years the claim shall be barred for ever after; or if he uses them in the city but within the house, then the appointed time of claiming the goods shall be three years, or ten years if he has them in the country in private. And if he has them in another land, there shall be no limit of time or prescription, but whenever the owner finds them he may claim them. If any one prevents another by force from being present at a trial, whether a principal party or his witnesses; if the person prevented be a slave, whether his own or belonging to another, the suit shall be incomplete and invalid; but if he who is prevented be a freeman, besides the suit being incomplete, the other who has prevented him shall be imprisoned for a year, and shall be prosecuted for kidnapping by any one who pleases. And if any one hinders by force a rival competitor in gymnastic or music, or any other sort of contest, from being present at the contest, let him who has a mind inform the presiding judges, and they shall liberate him who is desirous of competing; and if they are not able, and he who hinders the other from competing wins the prize, then they shall give the prize of victory to him who is prevented, and inscribe him as the conqueror in any temples which he pleases; and he who hinders the other shall not be permitted to make any offering or inscription having reference to that contest, and in any case he shall be liable for damages, whether he be defeated or whether he conquer. If any one knowingly receives anything which has been stolen, he shall undergo the same punishment as the thief, and if a man receives an exile he shall be punished with death. Every man should regard the friend and enemy of the state as his own friend and enemy; and if any one makes peace or war with another on his own account, and without the authority of the state, he, like the receiver of the exile, shall undergo the penalty of death. And if any fraction of the city declare war or peace against any, the generals shall indict the authors of this proceeding, and if they are convicted death shall be the penalty. Those who serve their country ought to serve without receiving gifts, and there ought to be no excusing or approving the saying, 'Men should receive gifts as the reward of good, but not of evil deeds'; for to know which we are doing, and to stand fast by our knowledge, is no easy matter. The safest course is to obey the law which says, 'Do no service for a bribe,' and let him who disobeys, if he be convicted, simply die. With a view to taxation, for various reasons, every man ought to have had his property valued: and the tribesmen should likewise bring a register of the yearly produce to the wardens of the country, that in this way there may be two valuations; and the public officers may use annually whichever on consideration they deem the best, whether they prefer to take a certain portion of the whole value, or of the annual revenue, after subtracting what is paid to the common tables. Touching offerings to the Gods, a moderate man should observe moderation in what he offers. Now the land and the hearth of the house of all men is sacred to all Gods; wherefore let no man dedicate them a second time to the Gods. Gold and silver, whether possessed by private persons or in temples, are in other cities provocative of envy, and ivory, the product of a dead body, is not a proper offering; brass and iron, again, are instruments of war; but of wood let a man bring what offering he likes, provided it be a single block, and in like manner of stone, to the public temples; of woven work let him not offer more than one woman can execute in a month. White is a colour suitable to the Gods, especially in woven works, but dyes should only be used for the adornments of war. The most divine of gifts are birds and images, and they should be such as one painter can execute in a single day. And let all other offerings follow a similar rule. Now that the whole city has been divided into parts of which the nature and number have been described, and laws have been given about all the most important contracts as far as this was possible, the next thing will be to have justice done. The first of the courts shall consist of elected judges, who shall be chosen by the plaintiff and the defendant in common: these shall be called arbiters rather than judges. And in the second court there shall be judges of the villages and tribes corresponding to the twelvefold division of the land, and before these the litigants shall go to contend for greater damages, if the suit be not decided before the first judges; the defendant, if he be defeated the second time, shall pay a fifth more than the damages mentioned in the indictment; and if he find fault with his judges and would try a third time, let him carry the suit before the select judges, and if he be again defeated, let him pay the whole of the damages and half as much again. And the plaintiff, if when defeated before the first judges he persist in going on to the second, shall if he wins receive in addition to the damages a fifth part more, and if defeated he shall pay a like sum; but if he is not satisfied with the previous decision, and will insist on proceeding to a third court, then if he win he shall receive from the defendant the amount of the damages and, as I said before, half as much again, and the plaintiff, if he lose, shall pay half of the damages claimed. Now the assignment by lot of judges to courts and the completion of the number of them, and the appointment of servants to the different magistrates, and the times at which the several causes should be heard, and the votings and delays, and all the things that necessarily concern suits, and the order of causes, and the time in which answers have to be put in and parties are to appear--of these and other things akin to these we have indeed already spoken, but there is no harm in repeating what is right twice or thrice: All lesser and easier matters which the elder legislator has omitted may be supplied by the younger one. Private courts will be sufficiently regulated in this way, and the public and state courts, and those which the magistrates must use in the administration of their several offices, exist in many other states. Many very respectable institutions of this sort have been framed by good men, and from them the guardians of the law may by reflection derive what is necessary for the order of our new state, considering and correcting them, and bringing them to the test of experience, until every detail appears to be satisfactorily determined; and then putting the final seal upon them, and making them irreversible, they shall use them for ever afterwards. As to what relates to the silence of judges and the abstinence from words of evil omen and the reverse, and the different notions of the just and good and honourable which exist in our own as compared with other states, they have been partly mentioned already, and another part of them will be mentioned hereafter as we draw near the end. To all these matters he who would be an equal judge shall justly look, and he shall possess writings about them that he may learn them. For of all kinds of knowledge the knowledge of good laws has the greatest power of improving the learner; otherwise there would be no meaning in the divine and admirable law possessing a name akin to mind (nous, nomos). And of all other words, such as the praises and censures of individuals which occur in poetry and also in prose, whether written down or uttered in daily conversation, whether men dispute about them in the spirit of contention or weakly assent to them, as is often the case--of all these the one sure test is the writings of the legislator, which the righteous judge ought to have in his mind as the antidote of all other words, and thus make himself and the city stand upright, procuring for the good the continuance and increase of justice, and for the bad, on the other hand, a conversion from ignorance and intemperance, and in general from all unrighteousness, as far as their evil minds can be healed, but to those whose web of life is in reality finished, giving death, which is the only remedy for souls in their condition, as I may say truly again and again. And such judges and chiefs of judges will be worthy of receiving praise from the whole city. When the suits of the year are completed the following laws shall regulate their execution: In the first place, the judge shall assign to the party who wins the suit the whole property of him who loses, with the exception of mere necessaries, and the assignment shall be made through the herald immediately after each decision in the hearing of the judges; and when the month arrives following the month in which the courts are sitting, (unless the gainer of the suit has been previously satisfied) the court shall follow up the case, and hand over to the winner the goods of the loser; but if they find that he has not the means of paying, and the sum deficient is not less than a drachma, the insolvent person shall not have any right of going to law with any other man until he have satisfied the debt of the winning party; but other persons shall still have the right of bringing suits against him. And if any one after he is condemned refuses to acknowledge the authority which condemned him, let the magistrates who are thus deprived of their authority bring him before the court of the guardians of the law, and if he be cast, let him be punished with death, as a subverter of the whole state and of the laws. Thus a man is born and brought up, and after this manner he begets and brings up his own children, and has his share of dealings with other men, and suffers if he has done wrong to any one, and receives satisfaction if he has been wronged, and so at length in due time he grows old under the protection of the laws, and his end comes in the order of nature. Concerning the dead of either sex, the religious ceremonies which may fittingly be performed, whether appertaining to the Gods of the under-world or of this, shall be decided by the interpreters with absolute authority. Their sepulchres are not to be in places which are fit for cultivation, and there shall be no monuments in such spots, either large or small, but they shall occupy that part of the country which is naturally adapted for receiving and concealing the bodies of the dead with as little hurt as possible to the living. No man, living or dead, shall deprive the living of the sustenance which the earth, their foster-parent, is naturally inclined to provide for them. And let not the mound be piled higher than would be the work of five men completed in five days; nor shall the stone which is placed over the spot be larger than would be sufficient to receive the praises of the dead included in four heroic lines. Nor shall the laying out of the dead in the house continue for a longer time than is sufficient to distinguish between him who is in a trance only and him who is really dead, and speaking generally, the third day after death will be a fair time for carrying out the body to the sepulchre. Now we must believe the legislator when he tells us that the soul is in all respects superior to the body, and that even in life what makes each one of us to be what we are is only the soul; and that the body follows us about in the likeness of each of us, and therefore, when we are dead, the bodies of the dead are quite rightly said to be our shades or images; for the true and immortal being of each one of us which is called the soul goes on her way to other Gods, before them to give an account--which is an inspiring hope to the good, but very terrible to the bad, as the laws of our fathers tell us; and they also say that not much can be done in the way of helping a man after he is dead. But the living--he should be helped by all his kindred, that while in life he may be the holiest and justest of men, and after death may have no great sins to be punished in the world below. If this be true, a man ought not to waste his substance under the idea that all this lifeless mass of flesh which is in process of burial is connected with him; he should consider that the son, or brother, or the beloved one, whoever he may be, whom he thinks he is laying in the earth, has gone away to complete and fulfil his own destiny, and that his duty is rightly to order the present, and to spend moderately on the lifeless altar of the Gods below. But the legislator does not intend moderation to be taken in the sense of meanness. Let the law, then, be as follows: The expenditure on the entire funeral of him who is of the highest class, shall not exceed five minae; and for him who is of the second class, three minae, and for him who is of the third class, two minae, and for him who is of the fourth class, one mina, will be a fair limit of expense. The guardians of the law ought to take especial care of the different ages of life, whether childhood, or manhood, or any other age. And at the end of all, let there be some one guardian of the law presiding, who shall be chosen by the friends of the deceased to superintend, and let it be glory to him to manage with fairness and moderation what relates to the dead, and a discredit to him if they are not well managed. Let the laying out and other ceremonies be in accordance with custom, but to the statesman who adopts custom as his law we must give way in certain particulars. It would be monstrous for example that he should command any man to weep or abstain from weeping over the dead; but he may forbid cries of lamentation, and not allow the voice of the mourner to be heard outside the house; also, he may forbid the bringing of the dead body into the open streets, or the processions of mourners in the streets, and may require that before daybreak they should be outside the city. Let these, then, be our laws relating to such matters, and let him who obeys be free from penalty; but he who disobeys even a single guardian of the law shall be punished by them all with a fitting penalty. Other modes of burial, or again the denial of burial, which is to be refused in the case of robbers of temples and parricides and the like, have been devised and are embodied in the preceding laws, so that now our work of legislation is pretty nearly at an end; but in all cases the end does not consist in doing something or acquiring something or establishing something--the end will be attained and finally accomplished, when we have provided for the perfect and lasting continuance of our institutions; until then our creation is incomplete."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is very good, Stranger; but I wish you would tell me more clearly what you mean."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"O Cleinias, many things of old time were well said and sung; and the saying about the Fates was one of them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The saying that Lachesis or the giver of the lots is the first of them, and that Clotho or the spinster is the second of them, and that Atropos or the unchanging one is the third of them; and that she is the preserver of the things which we have spoken, and which have been compared in a figure to things woven by fire, they both (i.e. Atropos and the fire) producing the quality of unchangeableness. I am speaking of the things which in a state and government give not only health and salvation to the body, but law, or rather preservation of the law, in the soul; and, if I am not mistaken, this seems to be still wanting in our laws: we have still to see how we can implant in them this irreversible nature."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"It will be no small matter if we can only discover how such a nature can be implanted in anything."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"But it certainly can be; so much I clearly see."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Then let us not think of desisting until we have imparted this quality to our laws; for it is ridiculous, after a great deal of labour has been spent, to place a thing at last on an insecure foundation."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I approve of your suggestion, and am quite of the same mind with you."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good: And now what, according to you, is to be the salvation of our government and of our laws, and how is it to be effected?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Were we not saying that there must be in our city a council which was to be of this sort: The ten oldest guardians of the law, and all those who have obtained prizes of virtue, were to meet in the same assembly, and the council was also to include those who had visited foreign countries in the hope of hearing something that might be of use in the preservation of the laws, and who, having come safely home, and having been tested in these same matters, had proved themselves to be worthy to take part in the assembly--each of the members was to select some young man of not less than thirty years of age, he himself judging in the first instance whether the young man was worthy by nature and education, and then suggesting him to the others, and if he seemed to them also to be worthy they were to adopt him; but if not, the decision at which they arrived was to be kept a secret from the citizens at large, and, more especially, from the rejected candidate. The meeting of the council was to be held early in the morning, when everybody was most at leisure from all other business, whether public or private--was not something of this sort said by us before?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then, returning to the council, I would say further, that if we let it down to be the anchor of the state, our city, having everything which is suitable to her, will preserve all that we wish to preserve."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Now is the time for me to speak the truth in all earnestness."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Well said, and I hope that you will fulfil your intention."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Know, Cleinias, that everything, in all that it does, has a natural saviour, as of an animal the soul and the head are the chief saviours."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Once more, what do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The well-being of those two is obviously the preservation of every living thing."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How is that?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"The soul, besides other things, contains mind, and the head, besides other things, contains sight and hearing; and the mind, mingling with the noblest of the senses, and becoming one with them, may be truly called the salvation of all."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, quite so."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed; but with what is that intellect concerned which, mingling with the senses, is the salvation of ships in storms as well as in fair weather? In a ship, when the pilot and the sailors unite their perceptions with the piloting mind, do they not save both themselves and their craft?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"We do not want many illustrations about such matters: What aim would the general of an army, or what aim would a physician propose to himself, if he were seeking to attain salvation?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Does not the general aim at victory and superiority in war, and do not the physician and his assistants aim at producing health in the body?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And a physician who is ignorant about the body, that is to say, who knows not that which we just now called health, or a general who knows not victory, or any others who are ignorant of the particulars of the arts which we mentioned, cannot be said to have understanding about any of these matters."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"They cannot."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And what would you say of the state? If a person proves to be ignorant of the aim to which the statesman should look, ought he, in the first place, to be called a ruler at all; and further, will he ever be able to preserve that of which he does not even know the aim?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And therefore, if our settlement of the country is to be perfect, we ought to have some institution, which, as I was saying, will tell what is the aim of the state, and will inform us how we are to attain this, and what law or what man will advise us to that end. Any state which has no such institution is likely to be devoid of mind and sense, and in all her actions will proceed by mere chance."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In which, then, of the parts or institutions of the state is any such guardian power to be found? Can we say?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I am not quite certain, Stranger; but I have a suspicion that you are referring to the assembly which you just now said was to meet at night."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"You understand me perfectly, Cleinias; and we must assume, as the argument implies, that this council possesses all virtue; and the beginning of virtue is not to make mistakes by guessing many things, but to look steadily at one thing, and on this to fix all our aims."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then now we shall see why there is nothing wonderful in states going astray--the reason is that their legislators have such different aims; nor is there anything wonderful in some laying down as their rule of justice, that certain individuals should bear rule in the state, whether they be good or bad, and others that the citizens should be rich, not caring whether they are the slaves of other men or not. The tendency of others, again, is towards freedom; and some legislate with a view to two things at once--they want to be at the same time free and the lords of other states; but the wisest men, as they deem themselves to be, look to all these and similar aims, and there is no one of them which they exclusively honour, and to which they would have all things look."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Then, Stranger, our former assertion will hold; for we were saying that laws generally should look to one thing only; and this, as we admitted, was rightly said to be virtue."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And we said that virtue was of four kinds?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"And that mind was the leader of the four, and that to her the three other virtues and all other things ought to have regard?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"You follow me capitally, Cleinias, and I would ask you to follow me to the end, for we have already said that the mind of the pilot, the mind of the physician and of the general look to that one thing to which they ought to look; and now we may turn to mind political, of which, as of a human creature, we will ask a question: O wonderful being, and to what are you looking? The physician is able to tell his single aim in life, but you, the superior, as you declare yourself to be, of all intelligent beings, when you are asked are not able to tell. Can you, Megillus, and you, Cleinias, say distinctly what is the aim of mind political, in return for the many explanations of things which I have given you?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"We cannot, Stranger."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, but ought we not to desire to see it, and to see where it is to be found?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"For example, where?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"For example, we were saying that there are four kinds of virtue, and as there are four of them, each of them must be one."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And further, all four of them we call one; for we say that courage is virtue, and that prudence is virtue, and the same of the two others, as if they were in reality not many but one, that is, virtue."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Quite so."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"There is no difficulty in seeing in what way the two differ from one another, and have received two names, and so of the rest. But there is more difficulty in explaining why we call these two and the rest of them by the single name of virtue."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I have no difficulty in explaining what I mean. Let us distribute the subject into questions and answers."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Once more, what do you mean?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Ask me what is that one thing which I call virtue, and then again speak of as two, one part being courage and the other wisdom. I will tell you how that occurs: One of them has to do with fear; in this the beasts also participate, and quite young children--I mean courage; for a courageous temper is a gift of nature and not of reason. But without reason there never has been, or is, or will be a wise and understanding soul; it is of a different nature."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"I have now told you in what way the two are different, and do you in return tell me in what way they are one and the same. Suppose that I ask you in what way the four are one, and when you have answered me, you will have a right to ask of me in return in what way they are four; and then let us proceed to enquire whether in the case of things which have a name and also a definition to them, true knowledge consists in knowing the name only and not the definition. Can he who is good for anything be ignorant of all this without discredit where great and glorious truths are concerned?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I suppose not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And is there anything greater to the legislator and the guardian of the law, and to him who thinks that he excels all other men in virtue, and has won the palm of excellence, than these very qualities of which we are now speaking--courage, temperance, wisdom, justice?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How can there be anything greater?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And ought not the interpreters, the teachers, the lawgivers, the guardians of the other citizens, to excel the rest of mankind, and perfectly to show him who desires to learn and know or whose evil actions require to be punished and reproved, what is the nature of virtue and vice? Or shall some poet who has found his way into the city, or some chance person who pretends to be an instructor of youth, show himself to be better than him who has won the prize for every virtue? And can we wonder that when the guardians are not adequate in speech or action, and have no adequate knowledge of virtue, the city being unguarded should experience the common fate of cities in our day?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Wonder! no."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, then, must we do as we said? Or can we give our guardians a more precise knowledge of virtue in speech and action than the many have? or is there any way in which our city can be made to resemble the head and senses of rational beings because possessing such a guardian power?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What, Stranger, is the drift of your comparison?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Do we not see that the city is the trunk, and are not the younger guardians, who are chosen for their natural gifts, placed in the head of the state, having their souls all full of eyes, with which they look about the whole city? They keep watch and hand over their perceptions to the memory, and inform the elders of all that happens in the city; and those whom we compared to the mind, because they have many wise thoughts--that is to say, the old men--take counsel, and making use of the younger men as their ministers, and advising with them--in this way both together truly preserve the whole state: Shall this or some other be the order of our state? Are all our citizens to be equal in acquirements, or shall there be special persons among them who have received a more careful training and education?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"That they should be equal, my good sir, is impossible."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then we ought to proceed to some more exact training than any which has preceded."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And must not that of which we are in need be the one to which we were just now alluding?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Did we not say that the workman or guardian, if he be perfect in every respect, ought not only to be able to see the many aims, but he should press onward to the one? This he should know, and knowing, order all things with a view to it."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And can any one have a more exact way of considering or contemplating anything, than the being able to look at one idea gathered from many different things?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Perhaps not."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Not 'Perhaps not,' but 'Certainly not,' my good sir, is the right answer. There never has been a truer method than this discovered by any man."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I bow to your authority, Stranger; let us proceed in the way which you propose."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Then, as would appear, we must compel the guardians of our divine state to perceive, in the first place, what that principle is which is the same in all the four--the same, as we affirm, in courage and in temperance, and in justice and in prudence, and which, being one, we call as we ought, by the single name of virtue. To this, my friends, we will, if you please, hold fast, and not let go until we have sufficiently explained what that is to which we are to look, whether to be regarded as one, or as a whole, or as both, or in whatever way. Are we likely ever to be in a virtuous condition, if we cannot tell whether virtue is many, or four, or one? Certainly, if we take counsel among ourselves, we shall in some way contrive that this principle has a place amongst us; but if you have made up your mind that we should let the matter alone, we will."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"We must not, Stranger, by the God of strangers I swear that we must not, for in our opinion you speak most truly; but we should like to know how you will accomplish your purpose."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Wait a little before you ask; and let us, first of all, be quite agreed with one another that the purpose has to be accomplished."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly, it ought to be, if it can be."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Well, and about the good and the honourable, are we to take the same view? Are our guardians only to know that each of them is many, or also how and in what way they are one?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"They must consider also in what sense they are one."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And are they to consider only, and to be unable to set forth what they think?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not; that would be the state of a slave."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"And may not the same be said of all good things--that the true guardians of the laws ought to know the truth about them, and to be able to interpret them in words, and carry them out in action, judging of what is and of what is not well, according to nature?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Is not the knowledge of the Gods which we have set forth with so much zeal one of the noblest sorts of knowledge--to know that they are, and know how great is their power, as far as in man lies? We do indeed excuse the mass of the citizens, who only follow the voice of the laws, but we refuse to admit as guardians any who do not labour to obtain every possible evidence that there is respecting the Gods; our city is forbidden and not allowed to choose as a guardian of the law, or to place in the select order of virtue, him who is not an inspired man, and has not laboured at these things."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"It is certainly just, as you say, that he who is indolent about such matters or incapable should be rejected, and that things honourable should be put away from him."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Are we assured that there are two things which lead men to believe in the Gods, as we have already stated?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"One is the argument about the soul, which has been already mentioned--that it is the eldest and most divine of all things, to which motion attaining generation gives perpetual existence; the other was an argument from the order of the motion of the stars, and of all things under the dominion of the mind which ordered the universe. If a man look upon the world not lightly or ignorantly, there was never any one so godless who did not experience an effect opposite to that which the many imagine. For they think that those who handle these matters by the help of astronomy, and the accompanying arts of demonstration, may become godless, because they see, as far as they can see, things happening by necessity, and not by an intelligent will accomplishing good."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"But what is the fact?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Just the opposite, as I said, of the opinion which once prevailed among men, that the sun and stars are without soul. Even in those days men wondered about them, and that which is now ascertained was then conjectured by some who had a more exact knowledge of them--that if they had been things without soul, and had no mind, they could never have moved with numerical exactness so wonderful; and even at that time some ventured to hazard the conjecture that mind was the orderer of the universe. But these same persons again mistaking the nature of the soul, which they conceived to be younger and not older than the body, once more overturned the world, or rather, I should say, themselves; for the bodies which they saw moving in heaven all appeared to be full of stones, and earth, and many other lifeless substances, and to these they assigned the causes of all things. Such studies gave rise to much atheism and perplexity, and the poets took occasion to be abusive--comparing the philosophers to she-dogs uttering vain howlings, and talking other nonsense of the same sort. But now, as I said, the case is reversed."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"No man can be a true worshipper of the Gods who does not know these two principles--that the soul is the eldest of all things which are born, and is immortal and rules over all bodies; moreover, as I have now said several times, he who has not contemplated the mind of nature which is said to exist in the stars, and gone through the previous training, and seen the connexion of music with these things, and harmonized them all with laws and institutions, is not able to give a reason of such things as have a reason. And he who is unable to acquire this in addition to the ordinary virtues of a citizen, can hardly be a good ruler of a whole state; but he should be the subordinate of other rulers. Wherefore, Cleinias and Megillus, let us consider whether we may not add to all the other laws which we have discussed this further one--that the nocturnal assembly of the magistrates, which has also shared in the whole scheme of education proposed by us, shall be a guard set according to law for the salvation of the state. Shall we propose this?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly, my good friend, we will if the thing is in any degree possible."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"Let us make a common effort to gain such an object; for I too will gladly share in the attempt. Of these matters I have had much experience, and have often considered them, and I dare say that I shall be able to find others who will also help."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"I agree, Stranger, that we should proceed along the road in which God is guiding us; and how we can proceed rightly has now to be investigated and explained."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"O Megillus and Cleinias, about these matters we cannot legislate further until the council is constituted; when that is done, then we will determine what authority they shall have of their own; but the explanation of how this is all to be ordered would only be given rightly in a long discourse."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, and what new thing is this?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"In the first place, a list would have to be made out of those who by their ages and studies and dispositions and habits are well fitted for the duty of a guardian. In the next place, it will not be easy for them to discover themselves what they ought to learn, or become the disciple of one who has already made the discovery. Furthermore, to write down the times at which, and during which, they ought to receive the several kinds of instruction, would be a vain thing; for the learners themselves do not know what is learned to advantage until the knowledge which is the result of learning has found a place in the soul of each. And so these details, although they could not be truly said to be secret, might be said to be incapable of being stated beforehand, because when stated they would have no meaning."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"What then are we to do, Stranger, under these circumstances?"}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"ATHENIAN","Dialogue":"As the proverb says, the answer is no secret, but open to all of us: We must risk the whole on the chance of throwing, as they say, thrice six or thrice ace, and I am willing to share with you the danger by stating and explaining to you my views about education and nurture, which is the question coming to the surface again. The danger is not a slight or ordinary one, and I would advise you, Cleinias, in particular, to see to the matter; for if you order rightly the city of the Magnetes, or whatever name God may give it, you will obtain the greatest glory; or at any rate you will be thought the most courageous of men in the estimation of posterity. Dear companions, if this our divine assembly can only be established, to them we will hand over the city; none of the present company of legislators, as I may call them, would hesitate about that. And the state will be perfected and become a waking reality, which a little while ago we attempted to create as a dream and in idea only, mingling together reason and mind in one image, in the hope that our citizens might be duly mingled and rightly educated; and being educated, and dwelling in the citadel of the land, might become perfect guardians, such as we have never seen in all our previous life, by reason of the saving virtue which is in them."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"Dear Cleinias, after all that has been said, either we must detain the Stranger, and by supplications and in all manner of ways make him share in the foundation of the city, or we must give up the undertaking."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"CLEINIAS","Dialogue":"Very true, Megillus; and you must join with me in detaining him."}
{"Book":"laws","Speaker":"MEGILLUS","Dialogue":"I will. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LAWS *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"SCENE","Dialogue":"The House of Callias."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"COMPANION","Dialogue":"Where do you come from, Socrates? And yet I need hardly ask the question, for I know that you have been in chase of the fair Alcibiades. I saw him the day before yesterday; and he had got a beard like a man,--and he is a man, as I may tell you in your ear. But I thought that he was still very charming."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What of his beard? Are you not of Homer's opinion, who says 'Youth is most charming when the beard first appears'? And that is now the charm of Alcibiades."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"COMPANION","Dialogue":"Well, and how do matters proceed? Have you been visiting him, and was he gracious to you?"}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, I thought that he was very gracious; and especially to-day, for I have just come from him, and he has been helping me in an argument. But shall I tell you a strange thing? I paid no attention to him, and several times I quite forgot that he was present."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"COMPANION","Dialogue":"What is the meaning of this? Has anything happened between you and him? For surely you cannot have discovered a fairer love than he is; certainly not in this city of Athens."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, much fairer."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"COMPANION","Dialogue":"What do you mean--a citizen or a foreigner?"}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A foreigner."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"COMPANION","Dialogue":"Of what country?"}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Of Abdera."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"COMPANION","Dialogue":"And is this stranger really in your opinion a fairer love than the son of Cleinias?"}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not the wiser always the fairer, sweet friend?"}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"COMPANION","Dialogue":"But have you really met, Socrates, with some wise one?"}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Say rather, with the wisest of all living men, if you are willing to accord that title to Protagoras."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"COMPANION","Dialogue":"What! Is Protagoras in Athens?"}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes; he has been here two days."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"COMPANION","Dialogue":"And do you just come from an interview with him?"}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes; and I have heard and said many things."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"COMPANION","Dialogue":"Then, if you have no engagement, suppose that you sit down and tell me what passed, and my attendant here shall give up his place to you."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"To be sure; and I shall be grateful to you for listening."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"COMPANION","Dialogue":"Thank you, too, for telling us."}
{"Book":"protagoras","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is thank you twice over. Listen then:-- Last night, or rather very early this morning, Hippocrates, the son of Apollodorus and the brother of Phason, gave a tremendous thump with his staff at my door; some one opened to him, and he came rushing in and bawled out: Socrates, are you awake or asleep? I knew his voice, and said: Hippocrates, is that you? and do you bring any news? Good news, he said; nothing but good. Delightful, I said; but what is the news? and why have you come hither at this unearthly hour? He drew nearer to me and said: Protagoras is come. Yes, I replied; he came two days ago: have you only just heard of his arrival? Yes, by the gods, he said; but not until yesterday evening. At the same time he felt for the truckle-bed, and sat down at my feet, and then he said: Yesterday quite late in the evening, on my return from Oenoe whither I had gone in pursuit of my runaway slave Satyrus, as I meant to have told you, if some other matter had not come in the way;--on my return, when we had done supper and were about to retire to rest, my brother said to me: Protagoras is come. I was going to you at once, and then I thought that the night was far spent. But the moment sleep left me after my fatigue, I got up and came hither direct. I, who knew the very courageous madness of the man, said: What is the matter? Has Protagoras robbed you of anything? He replied, laughing: Yes, indeed he has, Socrates, of the wisdom which he keeps from me. But, surely, I said, if you give him money, and make friends with him, he will make you as wise as he is himself. Would to heaven, he replied, that this were the case! He might take all that I have, and all that my friends have, if he pleased. But that is why I have come to you now, in order that you may speak to him on my behalf; for I am young, and also I have never seen nor heard him; (when he visited Athens before I was but a child;) and all men praise him, Socrates; he is reputed to be the most accomplished of speakers. There is no reason why we should not go to him at once, and then we shall find him at home. He lodges, as I hear, with Callias the son of Hipponicus: let us start. I replied: Not yet, my good friend; the hour is too early. But let us rise and take a turn in the court and wait about there until day-break; when the day breaks, then we will go. For Protagoras is generally at home, and we shall be sure to find him; never fear. Upon this we got up and walked about in the court, and I thought that I would make trial of the strength of his resolution. So I examined him and put questions to him. Tell me, Hippocrates, I said, as you are going to Protagoras, and will be paying your money to him, what is he to whom you are going? and what will he make of you? If, for example, you had thought of going to Hippocrates of Cos, the Asclepiad, and were about to give him your money, and some one had said to you: You are paying money to your namesake Hippocrates, O Hippocrates; tell me, what is he that you give him money? how would you have answered? I should say, he replied, that I gave money to him as a physician. And what will he make of you? A physician, he said. And if you were resolved to go to Polycleitus the Argive, or Pheidias the Athenian, and were intending to give them money, and some one had asked you: What are Polycleitus and Pheidias? and why do you give them this money?--how would you have answered? I should have answered, that they were statuaries. And what will they make of you? A statuary, of course. Well now, I said, you and I are going to Protagoras, and we are ready to pay him money on your behalf. If our own means are sufficient, and we can gain him with these, we shall be only too glad; but if not, then we are to spend the money of your friends as well. Now suppose, that while we are thus enthusiastically pursuing our object some one were to say to us: Tell me, Socrates, and you Hippocrates, what is Protagoras, and why are you going to pay him money,--how should we answer? I know that Pheidias is a sculptor, and that Homer is a poet; but what appellation is given to Protagoras? how is he designated? They call him a Sophist, Socrates, he replied. Then we are going to pay our money to him in the character of a Sophist? Certainly. But suppose a person were to ask this further question: And how about yourself? What will Protagoras make of you, if you go to see him? He answered, with a blush upon his face (for the day was just beginning to dawn, so that I could see him): Unless this differs in some way from the former instances, I suppose that he will make a Sophist of me. By the gods, I said, and are you not ashamed at having to appear before the Hellenes in the character of a Sophist? Indeed, Socrates, to confess the truth, I am. But you should not assume, Hippocrates, that the instruction of Protagoras is of this nature: may you not learn of him in the same way that you learned the arts of the grammarian, or musician, or trainer, not with the view of making any of them a profession, but only as a part of education, and because a private gentleman and freeman ought to know them? Just so, he said; and that, in my opinion, is a far truer account of the teaching of Protagoras. I said: I wonder whether you know what you are doing? And what am I doing? You are going to commit your soul to the care of a man whom you call a Sophist. And yet I hardly think that you know what a Sophist is; and if not, then you do not even know to whom you are committing your soul and whether the thing to which you commit yourself be good or evil. I certainly think that I do know, he replied. Then tell me, what do you imagine that he is? I take him to be one who knows wise things, he replied, as his name implies. And might you not, I said, affirm this of the painter and of the carpenter also: Do not they, too, know wise things? But suppose a person were to ask us: In what are the painters wise? We should answer: In what relates to the making of likenesses, and similarly of other things. And if he were further to ask: What is the wisdom of the Sophist, and what is the manufacture over which he presides?--how should we answer him? How should we answer him, Socrates? What other answer could there be but that he presides over the art which makes men eloquent? Yes, I replied, that is very likely true, but not enough; for in the answer a further question is involved: Of what does the Sophist make a man talk eloquently? The player on the lyre may be supposed to make a man talk eloquently about that which he makes him understand, that is about playing the lyre. Is not that true? Yes. Then about what does the Sophist make him eloquent? Must not he make him eloquent in that which he understands? Yes, that may be assumed. And what is that which the Sophist knows and makes his disciple know? Indeed, he said, I cannot tell. Then I proceeded to say: Well, but are you aware of the danger which you are incurring? If you were going to commit your body to some one, who might do good or harm to it, would you not carefully consider and ask the opinion of your friends and kindred, and deliberate many days as to whether you should give him the care of your body? But when the soul is in question, which you hold to be of far more value than the body, and upon the good or evil of which depends the well-being of your all,--about this you never consulted either with your father or with your brother or with any one of us who are your companions. But no sooner does this foreigner appear, than you instantly commit your soul to his keeping. In the evening, as you say, you hear of him, and in the morning you go to him, never deliberating or taking the opinion of any one as to whether you ought to intrust yourself to him or not;--you have quite made up your mind that you will at all hazards be a pupil of Protagoras, and are prepared to expend all the property of yourself and of your friends in carrying out at any price this determination, although, as you admit, you do not know him, and have never spoken with him: and you call him a Sophist, but are manifestly ignorant of what a Sophist is; and yet you are going to commit yourself to his keeping. When he heard me say this, he replied: No other inference, Socrates, can be drawn from your words. I proceeded: Is not a Sophist, Hippocrates, one who deals wholesale or retail in the food of the soul? To me that appears to be his nature. And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful: neither do their customers know, with the exception of any trainer or physician who may happen to buy of them. In like manner those who carry about the wares of knowledge, and make the round of the cities, and sell or retail them to any customer who is in want of them, praise them all alike; though I should not wonder, O my friend, if many of them were really ignorant of their effect upon the soul; and their customers equally ignorant, unless he who buys of them happens to be a physician of the soul. If, therefore, you have understanding of what is good and evil, you may safely buy knowledge of Protagoras or of any one; but if not, then, O my friend, pause, and do not hazard your dearest interests at a game of chance. For there is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink: the one you purchase of the wholesale or retail dealer, and carry them away in other vessels, and before you receive them into the body as food, you may deposit them at home and call in any experienced friend who knows what is good to be eaten or drunken, and what not, and how much, and when; and then the danger of purchasing them is not so great. But you cannot buy the wares of knowledge and carry them away in another vessel; when you have paid for them you must receive them into the soul and go your way, either greatly harmed or greatly benefited; and therefore we should deliberate and take counsel with our elders; for we are still young--too young to determine such a matter. And now let us go, as we were intending, and hear Protagoras; and when we have heard what he has to say, we may take counsel of others; for not only is Protagoras at the house of Callias, but there is Hippias of Elis, and, if I am not mistaken, Prodicus of Ceos, and several other wise men. To this we agreed, and proceeded on our way until we reached the vestibule of the house; and there we stopped in order to conclude a discussion which had arisen between us as we were going along; and we stood talking in the vestibule until we had finished and come to an understanding. And I think that the door-keeper, who was a eunuch, and who was probably annoyed at the great inroad of the Sophists, must have heard us talking. At any rate, when we knocked at the door, and he opened and saw us, he grumbled: They are Sophists--he is not at home; and instantly gave the door a hearty bang with both his hands. Again we knocked, and he answered without opening: Did you not hear me say that he is not at home, fellows? But, my friend, I said, you need not be alarmed; for we are not Sophists, and we are not come to see Callias, but we want to see Protagoras; and I must request you to announce us. At last, after a good deal of difficulty, the man was persuaded to open the door. When we entered, we found Protagoras taking a walk in the cloister; and next to him, on one side, were walking Callias, the son of Hipponicus, and Paralus, the son of Pericles, who, by the mother's side, is his half-brother, and Charmides, the son of Glaucon. On the other side of him were Xanthippus, the other son of Pericles, Philippides, the son of Philomelus; also Antimoerus of Mende, who of all the disciples of Protagoras is the most famous, and intends to make sophistry his profession. A train of listeners followed him; the greater part of them appeared to be foreigners, whom Protagoras had brought with him out of the various cities visited by him in his journeys, he, like Orpheus, attracting them his voice, and they following (Compare Rep.). I should mention also that there were some Athenians in the company. Nothing delighted me more than the precision of their movements: they never got into his way at all; but when he and those who were with him turned back, then the band of listeners parted regularly on either side; he was always in front, and they wheeled round and took their places behind him in perfect order. After him, as Homer says (Od.), 'I lifted up my eyes and saw' Hippias the Elean sitting in the opposite cloister on a chair of state, and around him were seated on benches Eryximachus, the son of Acumenus, and Phaedrus the Myrrhinusian, and Andron the son of Androtion, and there were strangers whom he had brought with him from his native city of Elis, and some others: they were putting to Hippias certain physical and astronomical questions, and he, ex cathedra, was determining their several questions to them, and discoursing of them. Also, 'my eyes beheld Tantalus (Od.);' for Prodicus the Cean was at Athens: he had been lodged in a room which, in the days of Hipponicus, was a storehouse; but, as the house was full, Callias had cleared this out and made the room into a guest-chamber. Now Prodicus was still in bed, wrapped up in sheepskins and bedclothes, of which there seemed to be a great heap; and there was sitting by him on the couches near, Pausanias of the deme of Cerameis, and with Pausanias was a youth quite young, who is certainly remarkable for his good looks, and, if I am not mistaken, is also of a fair and gentle nature. I thought that I heard him called Agathon, and my suspicion is that he is the beloved of Pausanias. There was this youth, and also there were the two Adeimantuses, one the son of Cepis, and the other of Leucolophides, and some others. I was very anxious to hear what Prodicus was saying, for he seems to me to be an all-wise and inspired man; but I was not able to get into the inner circle, and his fine deep voice made an echo in the room which rendered his words inaudible. No sooner had we entered than there followed us Alcibiades the beautiful, as you say, and I believe you; and also Critias the son of Callaeschrus. On entering we stopped a little, in order to look about us, and then walked up to Protagoras, and I said: Protagoras, my friend Hippocrates and I have come to see you. Do you wish, he said, to speak with me alone, or in the presence of the company? Whichever you please, I said; you shall determine when you have heard the purpose of our visit. And what is your purpose? he said. I must explain, I said, that my friend Hippocrates is a native Athenian; he is the son of Apollodorus, and of a great and prosperous house, and he is himself in natural ability quite a match for anybody of his own age. I believe that he aspires to political eminence; and this he thinks that conversation with you is most likely to procure for him. And now you can determine whether you would wish to speak to him of your teaching alone or in the presence of the company. Thank you, Socrates, for your consideration of me. For certainly a stranger finding his way into great cities, and persuading the flower of the youth in them to leave company of their kinsmen or any other acquaintances, old or young, and live with him, under the idea that they will be improved by his conversation, ought to be very cautious; great jealousies are aroused by his proceedings, and he is the subject of many enmities and conspiracies. Now the art of the Sophist is, as I believe, of great antiquity; but in ancient times those who practised it, fearing this odium, veiled and disguised themselves under various names, some under that of poets, as Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides, some, of hierophants and prophets, as Orpheus and Musaeus, and some, as I observe, even under the name of gymnastic-masters, like Iccus of Tarentum, or the more recently celebrated Herodicus, now of Selymbria and formerly of Megara, who is a first-rate Sophist. Your own Agathocles pretended to be a musician, but was really an eminent Sophist; also Pythocleides the Cean; and there were many others; and all of them, as I was saying, adopted these arts as veils or disguises because they were afraid of the odium which they would incur. But that is not my way, for I do not believe that they effected their purpose, which was to deceive the government, who were not blinded by them; and as to the people, they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them. Now to run away, and to be caught in running away, is the very height of folly, and also greatly increases the exasperation of mankind; for they regard him who runs away as a rogue, in addition to any other objections which they have to him; and therefore I take an entirely opposite course, and acknowledge myself to be a Sophist and instructor of mankind; such an open acknowledgement appears to me to be a better sort of caution than concealment. Nor do I neglect other precautions, and therefore I hope, as I may say, by the favour of heaven that no harm will come of the acknowledgment that I am a Sophist. And I have been now many years in the profession--for all my years when added up are many: there is no one here present of whom I might not be the father. Wherefore I should much prefer conversing with you, if you want to speak with me, in the presence of the company. As I suspected that he would like to have a little display and glorification in the presence of Prodicus and Hippias, and would gladly show us to them in the light of his admirers, I said: But why should we not summon Prodicus and Hippias and their friends to hear us? Very good, he said. Suppose, said Callias, that we hold a council in which you may sit and discuss.--This was agreed upon, and great delight was felt at the prospect of hearing wise men talk; we ourselves took the chairs and benches, and arranged them by Hippias, where the other benches had been already placed. Meanwhile Callias and Alcibiades got Prodicus out of bed and brought in him and his companions. When we were all seated, Protagoras said: Now that the company are assembled, Socrates, tell me about the young man of whom you were just now speaking. I replied: I will begin again at the same point, Protagoras, and tell you once more the purport of my visit: this is my friend Hippocrates, who is desirous of making your acquaintance; he would like to know what will happen to him if he associates with you. I have no more to say. Protagoras answered: Young man, if you associate with me, on the very first day you will return home a better man than you came, and better on the second day than on the first, and better every day than you were on the day before. When I heard this, I said: Protagoras, I do not at all wonder at hearing you say this; even at your age, and with all your wisdom, if any one were to teach you what you did not know before, you would become better no doubt: but please to answer in a different way--I will explain how by an example. Let me suppose that Hippocrates, instead of desiring your acquaintance, wished to become acquainted with the young man Zeuxippus of Heraclea, who has lately been in Athens, and he had come to him as he has come to you, and had heard him say, as he has heard you say, that every day he would grow and become better if he associated with him: and then suppose that he were to ask him, 'In what shall I become better, and in what shall I grow?'--Zeuxippus would answer, 'In painting.' And suppose that he went to Orthagoras the Theban, and heard him say the same thing, and asked him, 'In what shall I become better day by day?' he would reply, 'In flute-playing.' Now I want you to make the same sort of answer to this young man and to me, who am asking questions on his account. When you say that on the first day on which he associates with you he will return home a better man, and on every day will grow in like manner,--in what, Protagoras, will he be better? and about what? When Protagoras heard me say this, he replied: You ask questions fairly, and I like to answer a question which is fairly put. If Hippocrates comes to me he will not experience the sort of drudgery with which other Sophists are in the habit of insulting their pupils; who, when they have just escaped from the arts, are taken and driven back into them by these teachers, and made to learn calculation, and astronomy, and geometry, and music (he gave a look at Hippias as he said this); but if he comes to me, he will learn that which he comes to learn. And this is prudence in affairs private as well as public; he will learn to order his own house in the best manner, and he will be able to speak and act for the best in the affairs of the state. Do I understand you, I said; and is your meaning that you teach the art of politics, and that you promise to make men good citizens? That, Socrates, is exactly the profession which I make. Then, I said, you do indeed possess a noble art, if there is no mistake about this; for I will freely confess to you, Protagoras, that I have a doubt whether this art is capable of being taught, and yet I know not how to disbelieve your assertion. And I ought to tell you why I am of opinion that this art cannot be taught or communicated by man to man. I say that the Athenians are an understanding people, and indeed they are esteemed to be such by the other Hellenes. Now I observe that when we are met together in the assembly, and the matter in hand relates to building, the builders are summoned as advisers; when the question is one of ship-building, then the ship-wrights; and the like of other arts which they think capable of being taught and learned. And if some person offers to give them advice who is not supposed by them to have any skill in the art, even though he be good-looking, and rich, and noble, they will not listen to him, but laugh and hoot at him, until either he is clamoured down and retires of himself; or if he persist, he is dragged away or put out by the constables at the command of the prytanes. This is their way of behaving about professors of the arts. But when the question is an affair of state, then everybody is free to have a say--carpenter, tinker, cobbler, sailor, passenger; rich and poor, high and low--any one who likes gets up, and no one reproaches him, as in the former case, with not having learned, and having no teacher, and yet giving advice; evidently because they are under the impression that this sort of knowledge cannot be taught. And not only is this true of the state, but of individuals; the best and wisest of our citizens are unable to impart their political wisdom to others: as for example, Pericles, the father of these young men, who gave them excellent instruction in all that could be learned from masters, in his own department of politics neither taught them, nor gave them teachers; but they were allowed to wander at their own free will in a sort of hope that they would light upon virtue of their own accord. Or take another example: there was Cleinias the younger brother of our friend Alcibiades, of whom this very same Pericles was the guardian; and he being in fact under the apprehension that Cleinias would be corrupted by Alcibiades, took him away, and placed him in the house of Ariphron to be educated; but before six months had elapsed, Ariphron sent him back, not knowing what to do with him. And I could mention numberless other instances of persons who were good themselves, and never yet made any one else good, whether friend or stranger. Now I, Protagoras, having these examples before me, am inclined to think that virtue cannot be taught. But then again, when I listen to your words, I waver; and am disposed to think that there must be something in what you say, because I know that you have great experience, and learning, and invention. And I wish that you would, if possible, show me a little more clearly that virtue can be taught. Will you be so good? That I will, Socrates, and gladly. But what would you like? Shall I, as an elder, speak to you as younger men in an apologue or myth, or shall I argue out the question? To this several of the company answered that he should choose for himself. Well, then, he said, I think that the myth will be more interesting. Once upon a time there were gods only, and no mortal creatures. But when the time came that these also should be created, the gods fashioned them out of earth and fire and various mixtures of both elements in the interior of the earth; and when they were about to bring them into the light of day, they ordered Prometheus and Epimetheus to equip them, and to distribute to them severally their proper qualities. Epimetheus said to Prometheus: 'Let me distribute, and do you inspect.' This was agreed, and Epimetheus made the distribution. There were some to whom he gave strength without swiftness, while he equipped the weaker with swiftness; some he armed, and others he left unarmed; and devised for the latter some other means of preservation, making some large, and having their size as a protection, and others small, whose nature was to fly in the air or burrow in the ground; this was to be their way of escape. Thus did he compensate them with the view of preventing any race from becoming extinct. And when he had provided against their destruction by one another, he contrived also a means of protecting them against the seasons of heaven; clothing them with close hair and thick skins sufficient to defend them against the winter cold and able to resist the summer heat, so that they might have a natural bed of their own when they wanted to rest; also he furnished them with hoofs and hair and hard and callous skins under their feet. Then he gave them varieties of food,--herb of the soil to some, to others fruits of trees, and to others roots, and to some again he gave other animals as food. And some he made to have few young ones, while those who were their prey were very prolific; and in this manner the race was preserved. Thus did Epimetheus, who, not being very wise, forgot that he had distributed among the brute animals all the qualities which he had to give,--and when he came to man, who was still unprovided, he was terribly perplexed. Now while he was in this perplexity, Prometheus came to inspect the distribution, and he found that the other animals were suitably furnished, but that man alone was naked and shoeless, and had neither bed nor arms of defence. The appointed hour was approaching when man in his turn was to go forth into the light of day; and Prometheus, not knowing how he could devise his salvation, stole the mechanical arts of Hephaestus and Athene, and fire with them (they could neither have been acquired nor used without fire), and gave them to man. Thus man had the wisdom necessary to the support of life, but political wisdom he had not; for that was in the keeping of Zeus, and the power of Prometheus did not extend to entering into the citadel of heaven, where Zeus dwelt, who moreover had terrible sentinels; but he did enter by stealth into the common workshop of Athene and Hephaestus, in which they used to practise their favourite arts, and carried off Hephaestus' art of working by fire, and also the art of Athene, and gave them to man. And in this way man was supplied with the means of life. But Prometheus is said to have been afterwards prosecuted for theft, owing to the blunder of Epimetheus. Now man, having a share of the divine attributes, was at first the only one of the animals who had any gods, because he alone was of their kindred; and he would raise altars and images of them. He was not long in inventing articulate speech and names; and he also constructed houses and clothes and shoes and beds, and drew sustenance from the earth. Thus provided, mankind at first lived dispersed, and there were no cities. But the consequence was that they were destroyed by the wild beasts, for they were utterly weak in comparison of them, and their art was only sufficient to provide them with the means of life, and did not enable them to carry on war against the animals: food they had, but not as yet the art of government, of which the art of war is a part. After a while the desire of self-preservation gathered them into cities; but when they were gathered together, having no art of government, they evil intreated one another, and were again in process of dispersion and destruction. Zeus feared that the entire race would be exterminated, and so he sent Hermes to them, bearing reverence and justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of friendship and conciliation. Hermes asked Zeus how he should impart justice and reverence among men:--Should he distribute them as the arts are distributed; that is to say, to a favoured few only, one skilled individual having enough of medicine or of any other art for many unskilled ones? 'Shall this be the manner in which I am to distribute justice and reverence among men, or shall I give them to all?' 'To all,' said Zeus; 'I should like them all to have a share; for cities cannot exist, if a few only share in the virtues, as in the arts. And further, make a law by my order, that he who has no part in reverence and justice shall be put to death, for he is a plague of the state.' And this is the reason, Socrates, why the Athenians and mankind in general, when the question relates to carpentering or any other mechanical art, allow but a few to share in their deliberations; and when any one else interferes, then, as you say, they object, if he be not of the favoured few; which, as I reply, is very natural. But when they meet to deliberate about political virtue, which proceeds only by way of justice and wisdom, they are patient enough of any man who speaks of them, as is also natural, because they think that every man ought to share in this sort of virtue, and that states could not exist if this were otherwise. I have explained to you, Socrates, the reason of this phenomenon. And that you may not suppose yourself to be deceived in thinking that all men regard every man as having a share of justice or honesty and of every other political virtue, let me give you a further proof, which is this. In other cases, as you are aware, if a man says that he is a good flute-player, or skilful in any other art in which he has no skill, people either laugh at him or are angry with him, and his relations think that he is mad and go and admonish him; but when honesty is in question, or some other political virtue, even if they know that he is dishonest, yet, if the man comes publicly forward and tells the truth about his dishonesty, then, what in the other case was held by them to be good sense, they now deem to be madness. They say that all men ought to profess honesty whether they are honest or not, and that a man is out of his mind who says anything else. Their notion is, that a man must have some degree of honesty; and that if he has none at all he ought not to be in the world. I have been showing that they are right in admitting every man as a counsellor about this sort of virtue, as they are of opinion that every man is a partaker of it. And I will now endeavour to show further that they do not conceive this virtue to be given by nature, or to grow spontaneously, but to be a thing which may be taught; and which comes to a man by taking pains. No one would instruct, no one would rebuke, or be angry with those whose calamities they suppose to be due to nature or chance; they do not try to punish or to prevent them from being what they are; they do but pity them. Who is so foolish as to chastise or instruct the ugly, or the diminutive, or the feeble? And for this reason. Because he knows that good and evil of this kind is the work of nature and of chance; whereas if a man is wanting in those good qualities which are attained by study and exercise and teaching, and has only the contrary evil qualities, other men are angry with him, and punish and reprove him--of these evil qualities one is impiety, another injustice, and they may be described generally as the very opposite of political virtue. In such cases any man will be angry with another, and reprimand him,--clearly because he thinks that by study and learning, the virtue in which the other is deficient may be acquired. If you will think, Socrates, of the nature of punishment, you will see at once that in the opinion of mankind virtue may be acquired; no one punishes the evil-doer under the notion, or for the reason, that he has done wrong,--only the unreasonable fury of a beast acts in that manner. But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong which cannot be undone; he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again. He punishes for the sake of prevention, thereby clearly implying that virtue is capable of being taught. This is the notion of all who retaliate upon others either privately or publicly. And the Athenians, too, your own citizens, like other men, punish and take vengeance on all whom they regard as evil doers; and hence, we may infer them to be of the number of those who think that virtue may be acquired and taught. Thus far, Socrates, I have shown you clearly enough, if I am not mistaken, that your countrymen are right in admitting the tinker and the cobbler to advise about politics, and also that they deem virtue to be capable of being taught and acquired. There yet remains one difficulty which has been raised by you about the sons of good men. What is the reason why good men teach their sons the knowledge which is gained from teachers, and make them wise in that, but do nothing towards improving them in the virtues which distinguish themselves? And here, Socrates, I will leave the apologue and resume the argument. Please to consider: Is there or is there not some one quality of which all the citizens must be partakers, if there is to be a city at all? In the answer to this question is contained the only solution of your difficulty; there is no other. For if there be any such quality, and this quality or unity is not the art of the carpenter, or the smith, or the potter, but justice and temperance and holiness and, in a word, manly virtue--if this is the quality of which all men must be partakers, and which is the very condition of their learning or doing anything else, and if he who is wanting in this, whether he be a child only or a grown-up man or woman, must be taught and punished, until by punishment he becomes better, and he who rebels against instruction and punishment is either exiled or condemned to death under the idea that he is incurable--if what I am saying be true, good men have their sons taught other things and not this, do consider how extraordinary their conduct would appear to be. For we have shown that they think virtue capable of being taught and cultivated both in private and public; and, notwithstanding, they have their sons taught lesser matters, ignorance of which does not involve the punishment of death: but greater things, of which the ignorance may cause death and exile to those who have no training or knowledge of them--aye, and confiscation as well as death, and, in a word, may be the ruin of families--those things, I say, they are supposed not to teach them,--not to take the utmost care that they should learn. How improbable is this, Socrates! Education and admonition commence in the first years of childhood, and last to the very end of life. Mother and nurse and father and tutor are vying with one another about the improvement of the child as soon as ever he is able to understand what is being said to him: he cannot say or do anything without their setting forth to him that this is just and that is unjust; this is honourable, that is dishonourable; this is holy, that is unholy; do this and abstain from that. And if he obeys, well and good; if not, he is straightened by threats and blows, like a piece of bent or warped wood. At a later stage they send him to teachers, and enjoin them to see to his manners even more than to his reading and music; and the teachers do as they are desired. And when the boy has learned his letters and is beginning to understand what is written, as before he understood only what was spoken, they put into his hands the works of great poets, which he reads sitting on a bench at school; in these are contained many admonitions, and many tales, and praises, and encomia of ancient famous men, which he is required to learn by heart, in order that he may imitate or emulate them and desire to become like them. Then, again, the teachers of the lyre take similar care that their young disciple is temperate and gets into no mischief; and when they have taught him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the poems of other excellent poets, who are the lyric poets; and these they set to music, and make their harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to the children's souls, in order that they may learn to be more gentle, and harmonious, and rhythmical, and so more fitted for speech and action; for the life of man in every part has need of harmony and rhythm. Then they send them to the master of gymnastic, in order that their bodies may better minister to the virtuous mind, and that they may not be compelled through bodily weakness to play the coward in war or on any other occasion. This is what is done by those who have the means, and those who have the means are the rich; their children begin to go to school soonest and leave off latest. When they have done with masters, the state again compels them to learn the laws, and live after the pattern which they furnish, and not after their own fancies; and just as in learning to write, the writing-master first draws lines with a style for the use of the young beginner, and gives him the tablet and makes him follow the lines, so the city draws the laws, which were the invention of good lawgivers living in the olden time; these are given to the young man, in order to guide him in his conduct whether he is commanding or obeying; and he who transgresses them is to be corrected, or, in other words, called to account, which is a term used not only in your country, but also in many others, seeing that justice calls men to account. Now when there is all this care about virtue private and public, why, Socrates, do you still wonder and doubt whether virtue can be taught? Cease to wonder, for the opposite would be far more surprising. But why then do the sons of good fathers often turn out ill? There is nothing very wonderful in this; for, as I have been saying, the existence of a state implies that virtue is not any man's private possession. If so--and nothing can be truer--then I will further ask you to imagine, as an illustration, some other pursuit or branch of knowledge which may be assumed equally to be the condition of the existence of a state. Suppose that there could be no state unless we were all flute-players, as far as each had the capacity, and everybody was freely teaching everybody the art, both in private and public, and reproving the bad player as freely and openly as every man now teaches justice and the laws, not concealing them as he would conceal the other arts, but imparting them--for all of us have a mutual interest in the justice and virtue of one another, and this is the reason why every one is so ready to teach justice and the laws;--suppose, I say, that there were the same readiness and liberality among us in teaching one another flute-playing, do you imagine, Socrates, that the sons of good flute-players would be more likely to be good than the sons of bad ones? I think not. Would not their sons grow up to be distinguished or undistinguished according to their own natural capacities as flute-players, and the son of a good player would often turn out to be a bad one, and the son of a bad player to be a good one, all flute-players would be good enough in comparison of those who were ignorant and unacquainted with the art of flute-playing? In like manner I would have you consider that he who appears to you to be the worst of those who have been brought up in laws and humanities, would appear to be a just man and a master of justice if he were to be compared with men who had no education, or courts of justice, or laws, or any restraints upon them which compelled them to practise virtue--with the savages, for example, whom the poet Pherecrates exhibited on the stage at the last year's Lenaean festival. If you were living among men such as the man-haters in his Chorus, you would be only too glad to meet with Eurybates and Phrynondas, and you would sorrowfully long to revisit the rascality of this part of the world. You, Socrates, are discontented, and why? Because all men are teachers of virtue, each one according to his ability; and you say Where are the teachers? You might as well ask, Who teaches Greek? For of that too there will not be any teachers found. Or you might ask, Who is to teach the sons of our artisans this same art which they have learned of their fathers? He and his fellow-workmen have taught them to the best of their ability,--but who will carry them further in their arts? And you would certainly have a difficulty, Socrates, in finding a teacher of them; but there would be no difficulty in finding a teacher of those who are wholly ignorant. And this is true of virtue or of anything else; if a man is better able than we are to promote virtue ever so little, we must be content with the result. A teacher of this sort I believe myself to be, and above all other men to have the knowledge which makes a man noble and good; and I give my pupils their money's-worth, and even more, as they themselves confess. And therefore I have introduced the following mode of payment:--When a man has been my pupil, if he likes he pays my price, but there is no compulsion; and if he does not like, he has only to go into a temple and take an oath of the value of the instructions, and he pays no more than he declares to be their value. Such is my Apologue, Socrates, and such is the argument by which I endeavour to show that virtue may be taught, and that this is the opinion of the Athenians. And I have also attempted to show that you are not to wonder at good fathers having bad sons, or at good sons having bad fathers, of which the sons of Polycleitus afford an example, who are the companions of our friends here, Paralus and Xanthippus, but are nothing in comparison with their father; and this is true of the sons of many other artists. As yet I ought not to say the same of Paralus and Xanthippus themselves, for they are young and there is still hope of them. Protagoras ended, and in my ear 'So charming left his voice, that I the while Thought him still speaking; still stood fixed to hear (Borrowed by Milton, \"Paradise Lost\".).' At length, when the truth dawned upon me, that he had really finished, not without difficulty I began to collect myself, and looking at Hippocrates, I said to him: O son of Apollodorus, how deeply grateful I am to you for having brought me hither; I would not have missed the speech of Protagoras for a great deal. For I used to imagine that no human care could make men good; but I know better now. Yet I have still one very small difficulty which I am sure that Protagoras will easily explain, as he has already explained so much. If a man were to go and consult Pericles or any of our great speakers about these matters, he might perhaps hear as fine a discourse; but then when one has a question to ask of any of them, like books, they can neither answer nor ask; and if any one challenges the least particular of their speech, they go ringing on in a long harangue, like brazen pots, which when they are struck continue to sound unless some one puts his hand upon them; whereas our friend Protagoras can not only make a good speech, as he has already shown, but when he is asked a question he can answer briefly; and when he asks he will wait and hear the answer; and this is a very rare gift. Now I, Protagoras, want to ask of you a little question, which if you will only answer, I shall be quite satisfied. You were saying that virtue can be taught;--that I will take upon your authority, and there is no one to whom I am more ready to trust. But I marvel at one thing about which I should like to have my mind set at rest. You were speaking of Zeus sending justice and reverence to men; and several times while you were speaking, justice, and temperance, and holiness, and all these qualities, were described by you as if together they made up virtue. Now I want you to tell me truly whether virtue is one whole, of which justice and temperance and holiness are parts; or whether all these are only the names of one and the same thing: that is the doubt which still lingers in my mind. There is no difficulty, Socrates, in answering that the qualities of which you are speaking are the parts of virtue which is one. And are they parts, I said, in the same sense in which mouth, nose, and eyes, and ears, are the parts of a face; or are they like the parts of gold, which differ from the whole and from one another only in being larger or smaller? I should say that they differed, Socrates, in the first way; they are related to one another as the parts of a face are related to the whole face. And do men have some one part and some another part of virtue? Or if a man has one part, must he also have all the others? By no means, he said; for many a man is brave and not just, or just and not wise. You would not deny, then, that courage and wisdom are also parts of virtue? Most undoubtedly they are, he answered; and wisdom is the noblest of the parts. And they are all different from one another? I said. Yes. And has each of them a distinct function like the parts of the face;--the eye, for example, is not like the ear, and has not the same functions; and the other parts are none of them like one another, either in their functions, or in any other way? I want to know whether the comparison holds concerning the parts of virtue. Do they also differ from one another in themselves and in their functions? For that is clearly what the simile would imply. Yes, Socrates, you are right in supposing that they differ. Then, I said, no other part of virtue is like knowledge, or like justice, or like courage, or like temperance, or like holiness? No, he answered. Well then, I said, suppose that you and I enquire into their natures. And first, you would agree with me that justice is of the nature of a thing, would you not? That is my opinion: would it not be yours also? Mine also, he said. And suppose that some one were to ask us, saying, 'O Protagoras, and you, Socrates, what about this thing which you were calling justice, is it just or unjust?'--and I were to answer, just: would you vote with me or against me? With you, he said. Thereupon I should answer to him who asked me, that justice is of the nature of the just: would not you? Yes, he said. And suppose that he went on to say: 'Well now, is there also such a thing as holiness?'--we should answer, 'Yes,' if I am not mistaken? Yes, he said. Which you would also acknowledge to be a thing--should we not say so? He assented. 'And is this a sort of thing which is of the nature of the holy, or of the nature of the unholy?' I should be angry at his putting such a question, and should say, 'Peace, man; nothing can be holy if holiness is not holy.' What would you say? Would you not answer in the same way? Certainly, he said. And then after this suppose that he came and asked us, 'What were you saying just now? Perhaps I may not have heard you rightly, but you seemed to me to be saying that the parts of virtue were not the same as one another.' I should reply, 'You certainly heard that said, but not, as you imagine, by me; for I only asked the question; Protagoras gave the answer.' And suppose that he turned to you and said, 'Is this true, Protagoras? and do you maintain that one part of virtue is unlike another, and is this your position?'--how would you answer him? I could not help acknowledging the truth of what he said, Socrates. Well then, Protagoras, we will assume this; and now supposing that he proceeded to say further, 'Then holiness is not of the nature of justice, nor justice of the nature of holiness, but of the nature of unholiness; and holiness is of the nature of the not just, and therefore of the unjust, and the unjust is the unholy': how shall we answer him? I should certainly answer him on my own behalf that justice is holy, and that holiness is just; and I would say in like manner on your behalf also, if you would allow me, that justice is either the same with holiness, or very nearly the same; and above all I would assert that justice is like holiness and holiness is like justice; and I wish that you would tell me whether I may be permitted to give this answer on your behalf, and whether you would agree with me. He replied, I cannot simply agree, Socrates, to the proposition that justice is holy and that holiness is just, for there appears to me to be a difference between them. But what matter? if you please I please; and let us assume, if you will I, that justice is holy, and that holiness is just. Pardon me, I replied; I do not want this 'if you wish' or 'if you will' sort of conclusion to be proven, but I want you and me to be proven: I mean to say that the conclusion will be best proven if there be no 'if.' Well, he said, I admit that justice bears a resemblance to holiness, for there is always some point of view in which everything is like every other thing; white is in a certain way like black, and hard is like soft, and the most extreme opposites have some qualities in common; even the parts of the face which, as we were saying before, are distinct and have different functions, are still in a certain point of view similar, and one of them is like another of them. And you may prove that they are like one another on the same principle that all things are like one another; and yet things which are like in some particular ought not to be called alike, nor things which are unlike in some particular, however slight, unlike. And do you think, I said in a tone of surprise, that justice and holiness have but a small degree of likeness? Certainly not; any more than I agree with what I understand to be your view. Well, I said, as you appear to have a difficulty about this, let us take another of the examples which you mentioned instead. Do you admit the existence of folly? I do. And is not wisdom the very opposite of folly? That is true, he said. And when men act rightly and advantageously they seem to you to be temperate? Yes, he said. And temperance makes them temperate? Certainly. And they who do not act rightly act foolishly, and in acting thus are not temperate? I agree, he said. Then to act foolishly is the opposite of acting temperately? He assented. And foolish actions are done by folly, and temperate actions by temperance? He agreed. And that is done strongly which is done by strength, and that which is weakly done, by weakness? He assented. And that which is done with swiftness is done swiftly, and that which is done with slowness, slowly? He assented again. And that which is done in the same manner, is done by the same; and that which is done in an opposite manner by the opposite? He agreed. Once more, I said, is there anything beautiful? Yes. To which the only opposite is the ugly? There is no other. And is there anything good? There is. To which the only opposite is the evil? There is no other. And there is the acute in sound? True. To which the only opposite is the grave? There is no other, he said, but that. Then every opposite has one opposite only and no more? He assented. Then now, I said, let us recapitulate our admissions. First of all we admitted that everything has one opposite and not more than one? We did so. And we admitted also that what was done in opposite ways was done by opposites? Yes. And that which was done foolishly, as we further admitted, was done in the opposite way to that which was done temperately? Yes. And that which was done temperately was done by temperance, and that which was done foolishly by folly? He agreed. And that which is done in opposite ways is done by opposites? Yes. And one thing is done by temperance, and quite another thing by folly? Yes. And in opposite ways? Certainly. And therefore by opposites:--then folly is the opposite of temperance? Clearly. And do you remember that folly has already been acknowledged by us to be the opposite of wisdom? He assented. And we said that everything has only one opposite? Yes. Then, Protagoras, which of the two assertions shall we renounce? One says that everything has but one opposite; the other that wisdom is distinct from temperance, and that both of them are parts of virtue; and that they are not only distinct, but dissimilar, both in themselves and in their functions, like the parts of a face. Which of these two assertions shall we renounce? For both of them together are certainly not in harmony; they do not accord or agree: for how can they be said to agree if everything is assumed to have only one opposite and not more than one, and yet folly, which is one, has clearly the two opposites--wisdom and temperance? Is not that true, Protagoras? What else would you say? He assented, but with great reluctance. Then temperance and wisdom are the same, as before justice and holiness appeared to us to be nearly the same. And now, Protagoras, I said, we must finish the enquiry, and not faint. Do you think that an unjust man can be temperate in his injustice? I should be ashamed, Socrates, he said, to acknowledge this, which nevertheless many may be found to assert. And shall I argue with them or with you? I replied. I would rather, he said, that you should argue with the many first, if you will. Whichever you please, if you will only answer me and say whether you are of their opinion or not. My object is to test the validity of the argument; and yet the result may be that I who ask and you who answer may both be put on our trial. Protagoras at first made a show of refusing, as he said that the argument was not encouraging; at length, he consented to answer. Now then, I said, begin at the beginning and answer me. You think that some men are temperate, and yet unjust? Yes, he said; let that be admitted. And temperance is good sense? Yes. And good sense is good counsel in doing injustice? Granted. If they succeed, I said, or if they do not succeed? If they succeed. And you would admit the existence of goods? Yes. And is the good that which is expedient for man? Yes, indeed, he said: and there are some things which may be inexpedient, and yet I call them good. I thought that Protagoras was getting ruffled and excited; he seemed to be setting himself in an attitude of war. Seeing this, I minded my business, and gently said:-- When you say, Protagoras, that things inexpedient are good, do you mean inexpedient for man only, or inexpedient altogether? and do you call the latter good? Certainly not the last, he replied; for I know of many things--meats, drinks, medicines, and ten thousand other things, which are inexpedient for man, and some which are expedient; and some which are neither expedient nor inexpedient for man, but only for horses; and some for oxen only, and some for dogs; and some for no animals, but only for trees; and some for the roots of trees and not for their branches, as for example, manure, which is a good thing when laid about the roots of a tree, but utterly destructive if thrown upon the shoots and young branches; or I may instance olive oil, which is mischievous to all plants, and generally most injurious to the hair of every animal with the exception of man, but beneficial to human hair and to the human body generally; and even in this application (so various and changeable is the nature of the benefit), that which is the greatest good to the outward parts of a man, is a very great evil to his inward parts: and for this reason physicians always forbid their patients the use of oil in their food, except in very small quantities, just enough to extinguish the disagreeable sensation of smell in meats and sauces. When he had given this answer, the company cheered him. And I said: Protagoras, I have a wretched memory, and when any one makes a long speech to me I never remember what he is talking about. As then, if I had been deaf, and you were going to converse with me, you would have had to raise your voice; so now, having such a bad memory, I will ask you to cut your answers shorter, if you would take me with you. What do you mean? he said: how am I to shorten my answers? shall I make them too short? Certainly not, I said. But short enough? Yes, I said. Shall I answer what appears to me to be short enough, or what appears to you to be short enough? I have heard, I said, that you can speak and teach others to speak about the same things at such length that words never seemed to fail, or with such brevity that no one could use fewer of them. Please therefore, if you talk with me, to adopt the latter or more compendious method. Socrates, he replied, many a battle of words have I fought, and if I had followed the method of disputation which my adversaries desired, as you want me to do, I should have been no better than another, and the name of Protagoras would have been nowhere. I saw that he was not satisfied with his previous answers, and that he would not play the part of answerer any more if he could help; and I considered that there was no call upon me to continue the conversation; so I said: Protagoras, I do not wish to force the conversation upon you if you had rather not, but when you are willing to argue with me in such a way that I can follow you, then I will argue with you. Now you, as is said of you by others and as you say of yourself, are able to have discussions in shorter forms of speech as well as in longer, for you are a master of wisdom; but I cannot manage these long speeches: I only wish that I could. You, on the other hand, who are capable of either, ought to speak shorter as I beg you, and then we might converse. But I see that you are disinclined, and as I have an engagement which will prevent my staying to hear you at greater length (for I have to be in another place), I will depart; although I should have liked to have heard you. Thus I spoke, and was rising from my seat, when Callias seized me by the right hand, and in his left hand caught hold of this old cloak of mine. He said: We cannot let you go, Socrates, for if you leave us there will be an end of our discussions: I must therefore beg you to remain, as there is nothing in the world that I should like better than to hear you and Protagoras discourse. Do not deny the company this pleasure. Now I had got up, and was in the act of departure. Son of Hipponicus, I replied, I have always admired, and do now heartily applaud and love your philosophical spirit, and I would gladly comply with your request, if I could. But the truth is that I cannot. And what you ask is as great an impossibility to me, as if you bade me run a race with Crison of Himera, when in his prime, or with some one of the long or day course runners. To such a request I should reply that I would fain ask the same of my own legs; but they refuse to comply. And therefore if you want to see Crison and me in the same stadium, you must bid him slacken his speed to mine, for I cannot run quickly, and he can run slowly. And in like manner if you want to hear me and Protagoras discoursing, you must ask him to shorten his answers, and keep to the point, as he did at first; if not, how can there be any discussion? For discussion is one thing, and making an oration is quite another, in my humble opinion. But you see, Socrates, said Callias, that Protagoras may fairly claim to speak in his own way, just as you claim to speak in yours. Here Alcibiades interposed, and said: That, Callias, is not a true statement of the case. For our friend Socrates admits that he cannot make a speech--in this he yields the palm to Protagoras: but I should be greatly surprised if he yielded to any living man in the power of holding and apprehending an argument. Now if Protagoras will make a similar admission, and confess that he is inferior to Socrates in argumentative skill, that is enough for Socrates; but if he claims a superiority in argument as well, let him ask and answer--not, when a question is asked, slipping away from the point, and instead of answering, making a speech at such length that most of his hearers forget the question at issue (not that Socrates is likely to forget--I will be bound for that, although he may pretend in fun that he has a bad memory). And Socrates appears to me to be more in the right than Protagoras; that is my view, and every man ought to say what he thinks. When Alcibiades had done speaking, some one--Critias, I believe--went on to say: O Prodicus and Hippias, Callias appears to me to be a partisan of Protagoras: and this led Alcibiades, who loves opposition, to take the other side. But we should not be partisans either of Socrates or of Protagoras; let us rather unite in entreating both of them not to break up the discussion. Prodicus added: That, Critias, seems to me to be well said, for those who are present at such discussions ought to be impartial hearers of both the speakers; remembering, however, that impartiality is not the same as equality, for both sides should be impartially heard, and yet an equal meed should not be assigned to both of them; but to the wiser a higher meed should be given, and a lower to the less wise. And I as well as Critias would beg you, Protagoras and Socrates, to grant our request, which is, that you will argue with one another and not wrangle; for friends argue with friends out of good-will, but only adversaries and enemies wrangle. And then our meeting will be delightful; for in this way you, who are the speakers, will be most likely to win esteem, and not praise only, among us who are your audience; for esteem is a sincere conviction of the hearers' souls, but praise is often an insincere expression of men uttering falsehoods contrary to their conviction. And thus we who are the hearers will be gratified and not pleased; for gratification is of the mind when receiving wisdom and knowledge, but pleasure is of the body when eating or experiencing some other bodily delight. Thus spoke Prodicus, and many of the company applauded his words. Hippias the sage spoke next. He said: All of you who are here present I reckon to be kinsmen and friends and fellow-citizens, by nature and not by law; for by nature like is akin to like, whereas law is the tyrant of mankind, and often compels us to do many things which are against nature. How great would be the disgrace then, if we, who know the nature of things, and are the wisest of the Hellenes, and as such are met together in this city, which is the metropolis of wisdom, and in the greatest and most glorious house of this city, should have nothing to show worthy of this height of dignity, but should only quarrel with one another like the meanest of mankind! I do pray and advise you, Protagoras, and you, Socrates, to agree upon a compromise. Let us be your peacemakers. And do not you, Socrates, aim at this precise and extreme brevity in discourse, if Protagoras objects, but loosen and let go the reins of speech, that your words may be grander and more becoming to you. Neither do you, Protagoras, go forth on the gale with every sail set out of sight of land into an ocean of words, but let there be a mean observed by both of you. Do as I say. And let me also persuade you to choose an arbiter or overseer or president; he will keep watch over your words and will prescribe their proper length. This proposal was received by the company with universal approval; Callias said that he would not let me off, and they begged me to choose an arbiter. But I said that to choose an umpire of discourse would be unseemly; for if the person chosen was inferior, then the inferior or worse ought not to preside over the better; or if he was equal, neither would that be well; for he who is our equal will do as we do, and what will be the use of choosing him? And if you say, 'Let us have a better then,'--to that I answer that you cannot have any one who is wiser than Protagoras. And if you choose another who is not really better, and whom you only say is better, to put another over him as though he were an inferior person would be an unworthy reflection on him; not that, as far as I am concerned, any reflection is of much consequence to me. Let me tell you then what I will do in order that the conversation and discussion may go on as you desire. If Protagoras is not disposed to answer, let him ask and I will answer; and I will endeavour to show at the same time how, as I maintain, he ought to answer: and when I have answered as many questions as he likes to ask, let him in like manner answer me; and if he seems to be not very ready at answering the precise question asked of him, you and I will unite in entreating him, as you entreated me, not to spoil the discussion. And this will require no special arbiter--all of you shall be arbiters. This was generally approved, and Protagoras, though very much against his will, was obliged to agree that he would ask questions; and when he had put a sufficient number of them, that he would answer in his turn those which he was asked in short replies. He began to put his questions as follows:-- I am of opinion, Socrates, he said, that skill in poetry is the principal part of education; and this I conceive to be the power of knowing what compositions of the poets are correct, and what are not, and how they are to be distinguished, and of explaining when asked the reason of the difference. And I propose to transfer the question which you and I have been discussing to the domain of poetry; we will speak as before of virtue, but in reference to a passage of a poet. Now Simonides says to Scopas the son of Creon the Thessalian: 'Hardly on the one hand can a man become truly good, built four-square in hands and feet and mind, a work without a flaw.' Do you know the poem? or shall I repeat the whole? There is no need, I said; for I am perfectly well acquainted with the ode,--I have made a careful study of it. Very well, he said. And do you think that the ode is a good composition, and true? Yes, I said, both good and true. But if there is a contradiction, can the composition be good or true? No, not in that case, I replied. And is there not a contradiction? he asked. Reflect. Well, my friend, I have reflected. And does not the poet proceed to say, 'I do not agree with the word of Pittacus, albeit the utterance of a wise man: Hardly can a man be good'? Now you will observe that this is said by the same poet. I know it. And do you think, he said, that the two sayings are consistent? Yes, I said, I think so (at the same time I could not help fearing that there might be something in what he said). And you think otherwise? Why, he said, how can he be consistent in both? First of all, premising as his own thought, 'Hardly can a man become truly good'; and then a little further on in the poem, forgetting, and blaming Pittacus and refusing to agree with him, when he says, 'Hardly can a man be good,' which is the very same thing. And yet when he blames him who says the same with himself, he blames himself; so that he must be wrong either in his first or his second assertion. Many of the audience cheered and applauded this. And I felt at first giddy and faint, as if I had received a blow from the hand of an expert boxer, when I heard his words and the sound of the cheering; and to confess the truth, I wanted to get time to think what the meaning of the poet really was. So I turned to Prodicus and called him. Prodicus, I said, Simonides is a countryman of yours, and you ought to come to his aid. I must appeal to you, like the river Scamander in Homer, who, when beleaguered by Achilles, summons the Simois to aid him, saying: 'Brother dear, let us both together stay the force of the hero (Il.).' And I summon you, for I am afraid that Protagoras will make an end of Simonides. Now is the time to rehabilitate Simonides, by the application of your philosophy of synonyms, which enables you to distinguish 'will' and 'wish,' and make other charming distinctions like those which you drew just now. And I should like to know whether you would agree with me; for I am of opinion that there is no contradiction in the words of Simonides. And first of all I wish that you would say whether, in your opinion, Prodicus, 'being' is the same as 'becoming.' Not the same, certainly, replied Prodicus. Did not Simonides first set forth, as his own view, that 'Hardly can a man become truly good'? Quite right, said Prodicus. And then he blames Pittacus, not, as Protagoras imagines, for repeating that which he says himself, but for saying something different from himself. Pittacus does not say as Simonides says, that hardly can a man become good, but hardly can a man be good: and our friend Prodicus would maintain that being, Protagoras, is not the same as becoming; and if they are not the same, then Simonides is not inconsistent with himself. I dare say that Prodicus and many others would say, as Hesiod says, 'On the one hand, hardly can a man become good, For the gods have made virtue the reward of toil, But on the other hand, when you have climbed the height, Then, to retain virtue, however difficult the acquisition, is easy --(Works and Days).' Prodicus heard and approved; but Protagoras said: Your correction, Socrates, involves a greater error than is contained in the sentence which you are correcting. Alas! I said, Protagoras; then I am a sorry physician, and do but aggravate a disorder which I am seeking to cure. Such is the fact, he said. How so? I asked. The poet, he replied, could never have made such a mistake as to say that virtue, which in the opinion of all men is the hardest of all things, can be easily retained. Well, I said, and how fortunate are we in having Prodicus among us, at the right moment; for he has a wisdom, Protagoras, which, as I imagine, is more than human and of very ancient date, and may be as old as Simonides or even older. Learned as you are in many things, you appear to know nothing of this; but I know, for I am a disciple of his. And now, if I am not mistaken, you do not understand the word 'hard' (chalepon) in the sense which Simonides intended; and I must correct you, as Prodicus corrects me when I use the word 'awful' (deinon) as a term of praise. If I say that Protagoras or any one else is an 'awfully' wise man, he asks me if I am not ashamed of calling that which is good 'awful'; and then he explains to me that the term 'awful' is always taken in a bad sense, and that no one speaks of being 'awfully' healthy or wealthy, or of 'awful' peace, but of 'awful' disease, 'awful' war, 'awful' poverty, meaning by the term 'awful,' evil. And I think that Simonides and his countrymen the Ceans, when they spoke of 'hard' meant 'evil,' or something which you do not understand. Let us ask Prodicus, for he ought to be able to answer questions about the dialect of Simonides. What did he mean, Prodicus, by the term 'hard'? Evil, said Prodicus. And therefore, I said, Prodicus, he blames Pittacus for saying, 'Hard is the good,' just as if that were equivalent to saying, Evil is the good. Yes, he said, that was certainly his meaning; and he is twitting Pittacus with ignorance of the use of terms, which in a Lesbian, who has been accustomed to speak a barbarous language, is natural. Do you hear, Protagoras, I asked, what our friend Prodicus is saying? And have you an answer for him? You are entirely mistaken, Prodicus, said Protagoras; and I know very well that Simonides in using the word 'hard' meant what all of us mean, not evil, but that which is not easy--that which takes a great deal of trouble: of this I am positive. I said: I also incline to believe, Protagoras, that this was the meaning of Simonides, of which our friend Prodicus was very well aware, but he thought that he would make fun, and try if you could maintain your thesis; for that Simonides could never have meant the other is clearly proved by the context, in which he says that God only has this gift. Now he cannot surely mean to say that to be good is evil, when he afterwards proceeds to say that God only has this gift, and that this is the attribute of him and of no other. For if this be his meaning, Prodicus would impute to Simonides a character of recklessness which is very unlike his countrymen. And I should like to tell you, I said, what I imagine to be the real meaning of Simonides in this poem, if you will test what, in your way of speaking, would be called my skill in poetry; or if you would rather, I will be the listener. To this proposal Protagoras replied: As you please;--and Hippias, Prodicus, and the others told me by all means to do as I proposed. Then now, I said, I will endeavour to explain to you my opinion about this poem of Simonides. There is a very ancient philosophy which is more cultivated in Crete and Lacedaemon than in any other part of Hellas, and there are more philosophers in those countries than anywhere else in the world. This, however, is a secret which the Lacedaemonians deny; and they pretend to be ignorant, just because they do not wish to have it thought that they rule the world by wisdom, like the Sophists of whom Protagoras was speaking, and not by valour of arms; considering that if the reason of their superiority were disclosed, all men would be practising their wisdom. And this secret of theirs has never been discovered by the imitators of Lacedaemonian fashions in other cities, who go about with their ears bruised in imitation of them, and have the caestus bound on their arms, and are always in training, and wear short cloaks; for they imagine that these are the practices which have enabled the Lacedaemonians to conquer the other Hellenes. Now when the Lacedaemonians want to unbend and hold free conversation with their wise men, and are no longer satisfied with mere secret intercourse, they drive out all these laconizers, and any other foreigners who may happen to be in their country, and they hold a philosophical seance unknown to strangers; and they themselves forbid their young men to go out into other cities--in this they are like the Cretans--in order that they may not unlearn the lessons which they have taught them. And in Lacedaemon and Crete not only men but also women have a pride in their high cultivation. And hereby you may know that I am right in attributing to the Lacedaemonians this excellence in philosophy and speculation: If a man converses with the most ordinary Lacedaemonian, he will find him seldom good for much in general conversation, but at any point in the discourse he will be darting out some notable saying, terse and full of meaning, with unerring aim; and the person with whom he is talking seems to be like a child in his hands. And many of our own age and of former ages have noted that the true Lacedaemonian type of character has the love of philosophy even stronger than the love of gymnastics; they are conscious that only a perfectly educated man is capable of uttering such expressions. Such were Thales of Miletus, and Pittacus of Mitylene, and Bias of Priene, and our own Solon, and Cleobulus the Lindian, and Myson the Chenian; and seventh in the catalogue of wise men was the Lacedaemonian Chilo. All these were lovers and emulators and disciples of the culture of the Lacedaemonians, and any one may perceive that their wisdom was of this character; consisting of short memorable sentences, which they severally uttered. And they met together and dedicated in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, as the first-fruits of their wisdom, the far-famed inscriptions, which are in all men's mouths--'Know thyself,' and 'Nothing too much.' Why do I say all this? I am explaining that this Lacedaemonian brevity was the style of primitive philosophy. Now there was a saying of Pittacus which was privately circulated and received the approbation of the wise, 'Hard is it to be good.' And Simonides, who was ambitious of the fame of wisdom, was aware that if he could overthrow this saying, then, as if he had won a victory over some famous athlete, he would carry off the palm among his contemporaries. And if I am not mistaken, he composed the entire poem with the secret intention of damaging Pittacus and his saying. Let us all unite in examining his words, and see whether I am speaking the truth. Simonides must have been a lunatic, if, in the very first words of the poem, wanting to say only that to become good is hard, he inserted (Greek) 'on the one hand' ('on the one hand to become good is hard'); there would be no reason for the introduction of (Greek), unless you suppose him to speak with a hostile reference to the words of Pittacus. Pittacus is saying 'Hard is it to be good,' and he, in refutation of this thesis, rejoins that the truly hard thing, Pittacus, is to become good, not joining 'truly' with 'good,' but with 'hard.' Not, that the hard thing is to be truly good, as though there were some truly good men, and there were others who were good but not truly good (this would be a very simple observation, and quite unworthy of Simonides); but you must suppose him to make a trajection of the word 'truly' (Greek), construing the saying of Pittacus thus (and let us imagine Pittacus to be speaking and Simonides answering him): 'O my friends,' says Pittacus, 'hard is it to be good,' and Simonides answers, 'In that, Pittacus, you are mistaken; the difficulty is not to be good, but on the one hand, to become good, four-square in hands and feet and mind, without a flaw--that is hard truly.' This way of reading the passage accounts for the insertion of (Greek) 'on the one hand,' and for the position at the end of the clause of the word 'truly,' and all that follows shows this to be the meaning. A great deal might be said in praise of the details of the poem, which is a charming piece of workmanship, and very finished, but such minutiae would be tedious. I should like, however, to point out the general intention of the poem, which is certainly designed in every part to be a refutation of the saying of Pittacus. For he speaks in what follows a little further on as if he meant to argue that although there is a difficulty in becoming good, yet this is possible for a time, and only for a time. But having become good, to remain in a good state and be good, as you, Pittacus, affirm, is not possible, and is not granted to man; God only has this blessing; 'but man cannot help being bad when the force of circumstances overpowers him.' Now whom does the force of circumstance overpower in the command of a vessel?--not the private individual, for he is always overpowered; and as one who is already prostrate cannot be overthrown, and only he who is standing upright but not he who is prostrate can be laid prostrate, so the force of circumstances can only overpower him who, at some time or other, has resources, and not him who is at all times helpless. The descent of a great storm may make the pilot helpless, or the severity of the season the husbandman or the physician; for the good may become bad, as another poet witnesses:-- 'The good are sometimes good and sometimes bad.' But the bad does not become bad; he is always bad. So that when the force of circumstances overpowers the man of resources and skill and virtue, then he cannot help being bad. And you, Pittacus, are saying, 'Hard is it to be good.' Now there is a difficulty in becoming good; and yet this is possible: but to be good is an impossibility-- 'For he who does well is the good man, and he who does ill is the bad.' But what sort of doing is good in letters? and what sort of doing makes a man good in letters? Clearly the knowing of them. And what sort of well-doing makes a man a good physician? Clearly the knowledge of the art of healing the sick. 'But he who does ill is the bad.' Now who becomes a bad physician? Clearly he who is in the first place a physician, and in the second place a good physician; for he may become a bad one also: but none of us unskilled individuals can by any amount of doing ill become physicians, any more than we can become carpenters or anything of that sort; and he who by doing ill cannot become a physician at all, clearly cannot become a bad physician. In like manner the good may become deteriorated by time, or toil, or disease, or other accident (the only real doing ill is to be deprived of knowledge), but the bad man will never become bad, for he is always bad; and if he were to become bad, he must previously have been good. Thus the words of the poem tend to show that on the one hand a man cannot be continuously good, but that he may become good and may also become bad; and again that 'They are the best for the longest time whom the gods love.' All this relates to Pittacus, as is further proved by the sequel. For he adds:-- 'Therefore I will not throw away my span of life to no purpose in searching after the impossible, hoping in vain to find a perfectly faultless man among those who partake of the fruit of the broad-bosomed earth: if I find him, I will send you word.' (this is the vehement way in which he pursues his attack upon Pittacus throughout the whole poem): 'But him who does no evil, voluntarily I praise and love;--not even the gods war against necessity.' All this has a similar drift, for Simonides was not so ignorant as to say that he praised those who did no evil voluntarily, as though there were some who did evil voluntarily. For no wise man, as I believe, will allow that any human being errs voluntarily, or voluntarily does evil and dishonourable actions; but they are very well aware that all who do evil and dishonourable things do them against their will. And Simonides never says that he praises him who does no evil voluntarily; the word 'voluntarily' applies to himself. For he was under the impression that a good man might often compel himself to love and praise another, and to be the friend and approver of another; and that there might be an involuntary love, such as a man might feel to an unnatural father or mother, or country, or the like. Now bad men, when their parents or country have any defects, look on them with malignant joy, and find fault with them and expose and denounce them to others, under the idea that the rest of mankind will be less likely to take themselves to task and accuse them of neglect; and they blame their defects far more than they deserve, in order that the odium which is necessarily incurred by them may be increased: but the good man dissembles his feelings, and constrains himself to praise them; and if they have wronged him and he is angry, he pacifies his anger and is reconciled, and compels himself to love and praise his own flesh and blood. And Simonides, as is probable, considered that he himself had often had to praise and magnify a tyrant or the like, much against his will, and he also wishes to imply to Pittacus that he does not censure him because he is censorious. 'For I am satisfied' he says, 'when a man is neither bad nor very stupid; and when he knows justice (which is the health of states), and is of sound mind, I will find no fault with him, for I am not given to finding fault, and there are innumerable fools' (implying that if he delighted in censure he might have abundant opportunity of finding fault). 'All things are good with which evil is unmingled.' In these latter words he does not mean to say that all things are good which have no evil in them, as you might say 'All things are white which have no black in them,' for that would be ridiculous; but he means to say that he accepts and finds no fault with the moderate or intermediate state. ('I do not hope' he says, 'to find a perfectly blameless man among those who partake of the fruits of the broad-bosomed earth (if I find him, I will send you word); in this sense I praise no man. But he who is moderately good, and does no evil, is good enough for me, who love and approve every one') (and here observe that he uses a Lesbian word, epainemi (approve), because he is addressing Pittacus, 'Who love and APPROVE every one VOLUNTARILY, who does no evil:' and that the stop should be put after 'voluntarily'); 'but there are some whom I involuntarily praise and love. And you, Pittacus, I would never have blamed, if you had spoken what was moderately good and true; but I do blame you because, putting on the appearance of truth, you are speaking falsely about the highest matters.'--And this, I said, Prodicus and Protagoras, I take to be the meaning of Simonides in this poem. Hippias said: I think, Socrates, that you have given a very good explanation of the poem; but I have also an excellent interpretation of my own which I will propound to you, if you will allow me. Nay, Hippias, said Alcibiades; not now, but at some other time. At present we must abide by the compact which was made between Socrates and Protagoras, to the effect that as long as Protagoras is willing to ask, Socrates should answer; or that if he would rather answer, then that Socrates should ask. I said: I wish Protagoras either to ask or answer as he is inclined; but I would rather have done with poems and odes, if he does not object, and come back to the question about which I was asking you at first, Protagoras, and by your help make an end of that. The talk about the poets seems to me like a commonplace entertainment to which a vulgar company have recourse; who, because they are not able to converse or amuse one another, while they are drinking, with the sound of their own voices and conversation, by reason of their stupidity, raise the price of flute-girls in the market, hiring for a great sum the voice of a flute instead of their own breath, to be the medium of intercourse among them: but where the company are real gentlemen and men of education, you will see no flute-girls, nor dancing-girls, nor harp-girls; and they have no nonsense or games, but are contented with one another's conversation, of which their own voices are the medium, and which they carry on by turns and in an orderly manner, even though they are very liberal in their potations. And a company like this of ours, and men such as we profess to be, do not require the help of another's voice, or of the poets whom you cannot interrogate about the meaning of what they are saying; people who cite them declaring, some that the poet has one meaning, and others that he has another, and the point which is in dispute can never be decided. This sort of entertainment they decline, and prefer to talk with one another, and put one another to the proof in conversation. And these are the models which I desire that you and I should imitate. Leaving the poets, and keeping to ourselves, let us try the mettle of one another and make proof of the truth in conversation. If you have a mind to ask, I am ready to answer; or if you would rather, do you answer, and give me the opportunity of resuming and completing our unfinished argument. I made these and some similar observations; but Protagoras would not distinctly say which he would do. Thereupon Alcibiades turned to Callias, and said:--Do you think, Callias, that Protagoras is fair in refusing to say whether he will or will not answer? for I certainly think that he is unfair; he ought either to proceed with the argument, or distinctly refuse to proceed, that we may know his intention; and then Socrates will be able to discourse with some one else, and the rest of the company will be free to talk with one another. I think that Protagoras was really made ashamed by these words of Alcibiades, and when the prayers of Callias and the company were superadded, he was at last induced to argue, and said that I might ask and he would answer. So I said: Do not imagine, Protagoras, that I have any other interest in asking questions of you but that of clearing up my own difficulties. For I think that Homer was very right in saying that 'When two go together, one sees before the other (Il.),' for all men who have a companion are readier in deed, word, or thought; but if a man 'Sees a thing when he is alone,' he goes about straightway seeking until he finds some one to whom he may show his discoveries, and who may confirm him in them. And I would rather hold discourse with you than with any one, because I think that no man has a better understanding of most things which a good man may be expected to understand, and in particular of virtue. For who is there, but you?--who not only claim to be a good man and a gentleman, for many are this, and yet have not the power of making others good--whereas you are not only good yourself, but also the cause of goodness in others. Moreover such confidence have you in yourself, that although other Sophists conceal their profession, you proclaim in the face of Hellas that you are a Sophist or teacher of virtue and education, and are the first who demanded pay in return. How then can I do otherwise than invite you to the examination of these subjects, and ask questions and consult with you? I must, indeed. And I should like once more to have my memory refreshed by you about the questions which I was asking you at first, and also to have your help in considering them. If I am not mistaken the question was this: Are wisdom and temperance and courage and justice and holiness five names of the same thing? or has each of the names a separate underlying essence and corresponding thing having a peculiar function, no one of them being like any other of them? And you replied that the five names were not the names of the same thing, but that each of them had a separate object, and that all these objects were parts of virtue, not in the same way that the parts of gold are like each other and the whole of which they are parts, but as the parts of the face are unlike the whole of which they are parts and one another, and have each of them a distinct function. I should like to know whether this is still your opinion; or if not, I will ask you to define your meaning, and I shall not take you to task if you now make a different statement. For I dare say that you may have said what you did only in order to make trial of me. I answer, Socrates, he said, that all these qualities are parts of virtue, and that four out of the five are to some extent similar, and that the fifth of them, which is courage, is very different from the other four, as I prove in this way: You may observe that many men are utterly unrighteous, unholy, intemperate, ignorant, who are nevertheless remarkable for their courage. Stop, I said; I should like to think about that. When you speak of brave men, do you mean the confident, or another sort of nature? Yes, he said; I mean the impetuous, ready to go at that which others are afraid to approach. In the next place, you would affirm virtue to be a good thing, of which good thing you assert yourself to be a teacher. Yes, he said; I should say the best of all things, if I am in my right mind. And is it partly good and partly bad, I said, or wholly good? Wholly good, and in the highest degree. Tell me then; who are they who have confidence when diving into a well? I should say, the divers. And the reason of this is that they have knowledge? Yes, that is the reason. And who have confidence when fighting on horseback--the skilled horseman or the unskilled? The skilled. And who when fighting with light shields--the peltasts or the nonpeltasts? The peltasts. And that is true of all other things, he said, if that is your point: those who have knowledge are more confident than those who have no knowledge, and they are more confident after they have learned than before. And have you not seen persons utterly ignorant, I said, of these things, and yet confident about them? Yes, he said, I have seen such persons far too confident. And are not these confident persons also courageous? In that case, he replied, courage would be a base thing, for the men of whom we are speaking are surely madmen. Then who are the courageous? Are they not the confident? Yes, he said; to that statement I adhere. And those, I said, who are thus confident without knowledge are really not courageous, but mad; and in that case the wisest are also the most confident, and being the most confident are also the bravest, and upon that view again wisdom will be courage. Nay, Socrates, he replied, you are mistaken in your remembrance of what was said by me. When you asked me, I certainly did say that the courageous are the confident; but I was never asked whether the confident are the courageous; if you had asked me, I should have answered 'Not all of them': and what I did answer you have not proved to be false, although you proceeded to show that those who have knowledge are more courageous than they were before they had knowledge, and more courageous than others who have no knowledge, and were then led on to think that courage is the same as wisdom. But in this way of arguing you might come to imagine that strength is wisdom. You might begin by asking whether the strong are able, and I should say 'Yes'; and then whether those who know how to wrestle are not more able to wrestle than those who do not know how to wrestle, and more able after than before they had learned, and I should assent. And when I had admitted this, you might use my admissions in such a way as to prove that upon my view wisdom is strength; whereas in that case I should not have admitted, any more than in the other, that the able are strong, although I have admitted that the strong are able. For there is a difference between ability and strength; the former is given by knowledge as well as by madness or rage, but strength comes from nature and a healthy state of the body. And in like manner I say of confidence and courage, that they are not the same; and I argue that the courageous are confident, but not all the confident courageous. For confidence may be given to men by art, and also, like ability, by madness and rage; but courage comes to them from nature and the healthy state of the soul. I said: You would admit, Protagoras, that some men live well and others ill? He assented. And do you think that a man lives well who lives in pain and grief? He does not. But if he lives pleasantly to the end of his life, will he not in that case have lived well? He will. Then to live pleasantly is a good, and to live unpleasantly an evil? Yes, he said, if the pleasure be good and honourable. And do you, Protagoras, like the rest of the world, call some pleasant things evil and some painful things good?--for I am rather disposed to say that things are good in as far as they are pleasant, if they have no consequences of another sort, and in as far as they are painful they are bad. I do not know, Socrates, he said, whether I can venture to assert in that unqualified manner that the pleasant is the good and the painful the evil. Having regard not only to my present answer, but also to the whole of my life, I shall be safer, if I am not mistaken, in saying that there are some pleasant things which are not good, and that there are some painful things which are good, and some which are not good, and that there are some which are neither good nor evil. And you would call pleasant, I said, the things which participate in pleasure or create pleasure? Certainly, he said. Then my meaning is, that in as far as they are pleasant they are good; and my question would imply that pleasure is a good in itself. According to your favourite mode of speech, Socrates, 'Let us reflect about this,' he said; and if the reflection is to the point, and the result proves that pleasure and good are really the same, then we will agree; but if not, then we will argue. And would you wish to begin the enquiry? I said; or shall I begin? You ought to take the lead, he said; for you are the author of the discussion. May I employ an illustration? I said. Suppose some one who is enquiring into the health or some other bodily quality of another:--he looks at his face and at the tips of his fingers, and then he says, Uncover your chest and back to me that I may have a better view:--that is the sort of thing which I desire in this speculation. Having seen what your opinion is about good and pleasure, I am minded to say to you: Uncover your mind to me, Protagoras, and reveal your opinion about knowledge, that I may know whether you agree with the rest of the world. Now the rest of the world are of opinion that knowledge is a principle not of strength, or of rule, or of command: their notion is that a man may have knowledge, and yet that the knowledge which is in him may be overmastered by anger, or pleasure, or pain, or love, or perhaps by fear,--just as if knowledge were a slave, and might be dragged about anyhow. Now is that your view? or do you think that knowledge is a noble and commanding thing, which cannot be overcome, and will not allow a man, if he only knows the difference of good and evil, to do anything which is contrary to knowledge, but that wisdom will have strength to help him? I agree with you, Socrates, said Protagoras; and not only so, but I, above all other men, am bound to say that wisdom and knowledge are the highest of human things. Good, I said, and true. But are you aware that the majority of the world are of another mind; and that men are commonly supposed to know the things which are best, and not to do them when they might? And most persons whom I have asked the reason of this have said that when men act contrary to knowledge they are overcome by pain, or pleasure, or some of those affections which I was just now mentioning. Yes, Socrates, he replied; and that is not the only point about which mankind are in error. Suppose, then, that you and I endeavour to instruct and inform them what is the nature of this affection which they call 'being overcome by pleasure,' and which they affirm to be the reason why they do not always do what is best. When we say to them: Friends, you are mistaken, and are saying what is not true, they would probably reply: Socrates and Protagoras, if this affection of the soul is not to be called 'being overcome by pleasure,' pray, what is it, and by what name would you describe it? But why, Socrates, should we trouble ourselves about the opinion of the many, who just say anything that happens to occur to them? I believe, I said, that they may be of use in helping us to discover how courage is related to the other parts of virtue. If you are disposed to abide by our agreement, that I should show the way in which, as I think, our recent difficulty is most likely to be cleared up, do you follow; but if not, never mind. You are quite right, he said; and I would have you proceed as you have begun. Well then, I said, let me suppose that they repeat their question, What account do you give of that which, in our way of speaking, is termed being overcome by pleasure? I should answer thus: Listen, and Protagoras and I will endeavour to show you. When men are overcome by eating and drinking and other sensual desires which are pleasant, and they, knowing them to be evil, nevertheless indulge in them, would you not say that they were overcome by pleasure? They will not deny this. And suppose that you and I were to go on and ask them again: 'In what way do you say that they are evil,--in that they are pleasant and give pleasure at the moment, or because they cause disease and poverty and other like evils in the future? Would they still be evil, if they had no attendant evil consequences, simply because they give the consciousness of pleasure of whatever nature?'--Would they not answer that they are not evil on account of the pleasure which is immediately given by them, but on account of the after consequences--diseases and the like? I believe, said Protagoras, that the world in general would answer as you do. And in causing diseases do they not cause pain? and in causing poverty do they not cause pain;--they would agree to that also, if I am not mistaken? Protagoras assented. Then I should say to them, in my name and yours: Do you think them evil for any other reason, except because they end in pain and rob us of other pleasures:--there again they would agree? We both of us thought that they would. And then I should take the question from the opposite point of view, and say: 'Friends, when you speak of goods being painful, do you not mean remedial goods, such as gymnastic exercises, and military service, and the physician's use of burning, cutting, drugging, and starving? Are these the things which are good but painful?'--they would assent to me? He agreed. 'And do you call them good because they occasion the greatest immediate suffering and pain; or because, afterwards, they bring health and improvement of the bodily condition and the salvation of states and power over others and wealth?'--they would agree to the latter alternative, if I am not mistaken? He assented. 'Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?'--they would acknowledge that they were not? I think so, said Protagoras. 'And do you not pursue after pleasure as a good, and avoid pain as an evil?' He assented. 'Then you think that pain is an evil and pleasure is a good: and even pleasure you deem an evil, when it robs you of greater pleasures than it gives, or causes pains greater than the pleasure. If, however, you call pleasure an evil in relation to some other end or standard, you will be able to show us that standard. But you have none to show.' I do not think that they have, said Protagoras. 'And have you not a similar way of speaking about pain? You call pain a good when it takes away greater pains than those which it has, or gives pleasures greater than the pains: then if you have some standard other than pleasure and pain to which you refer when you call actual pain a good, you can show what that is. But you cannot.' True, said Protagoras. Suppose again, I said, that the world says to me: 'Why do you spend many words and speak in many ways on this subject?' Excuse me, friends, I should reply; but in the first place there is a difficulty in explaining the meaning of the expression 'overcome by pleasure'; and the whole argument turns upon this. And even now, if you see any possible way in which evil can be explained as other than pain, or good as other than pleasure, you may still retract. Are you satisfied, then, at having a life of pleasure which is without pain? If you are, and if you are unable to show any good or evil which does not end in pleasure and pain, hear the consequences:--If what you say is true, then the argument is absurd which affirms that a man often does evil knowingly, when he might abstain, because he is seduced and overpowered by pleasure; or again, when you say that a man knowingly refuses to do what is good because he is overcome at the moment by pleasure. And that this is ridiculous will be evident if only we give up the use of various names, such as pleasant and painful, and good and evil. As there are two things, let us call them by two names--first, good and evil, and then pleasant and painful. Assuming this, let us go on to say that a man does evil knowing that he does evil. But some one will ask, Why? Because he is overcome, is the first answer. And by what is he overcome? the enquirer will proceed to ask. And we shall not be able to reply 'By pleasure,' for the name of pleasure has been exchanged for that of good. In our answer, then, we shall only say that he is overcome. 'By what?' he will reiterate. By the good, we shall have to reply; indeed we shall. Nay, but our questioner will rejoin with a laugh, if he be one of the swaggering sort, 'That is too ridiculous, that a man should do what he knows to be evil when he ought not, because he is overcome by good. Is that, he will ask, because the good was worthy or not worthy of conquering the evil'? And in answer to that we shall clearly reply, Because it was not worthy; for if it had been worthy, then he who, as we say, was overcome by pleasure, would not have been wrong. 'But how,' he will reply, 'can the good be unworthy of the evil, or the evil of the good'? Is not the real explanation that they are out of proportion to one another, either as greater and smaller, or more and fewer? This we cannot deny. And when you speak of being overcome--'what do you mean,' he will say, 'but that you choose the greater evil in exchange for the lesser good?' Admitted. And now substitute the names of pleasure and pain for good and evil, and say, not as before, that a man does what is evil knowingly, but that he does what is painful knowingly, and because he is overcome by pleasure, which is unworthy to overcome. What measure is there of the relations of pleasure to pain other than excess and defect, which means that they become greater and smaller, and more and fewer, and differ in degree? For if any one says: 'Yes, Socrates, but immediate pleasure differs widely from future pleasure and pain'--To that I should reply: And do they differ in anything but in pleasure and pain? There can be no other measure of them. And do you, like a skilful weigher, put into the balance the pleasures and the pains, and their nearness and distance, and weigh them, and then say which outweighs the other. If you weigh pleasures against pleasures, you of course take the more and greater; or if you weigh pains against pains, you take the fewer and the less; or if pleasures against pains, then you choose that course of action in which the painful is exceeded by the pleasant, whether the distant by the near or the near by the distant; and you avoid that course of action in which the pleasant is exceeded by the painful. Would you not admit, my friends, that this is true? I am confident that they cannot deny this. He agreed with me. Well then, I shall say, if you agree so far, be so good as to answer me a question: Do not the same magnitudes appear larger to your sight when near, and smaller when at a distance? They will acknowledge that. And the same holds of thickness and number; also sounds, which are in themselves equal, are greater when near, and lesser when at a distance. They will grant that also. Now suppose happiness to consist in doing or choosing the greater, and in not doing or in avoiding the less, what would be the saving principle of human life? Would not the art of measuring be the saving principle; or would the power of appearance? Is not the latter that deceiving art which makes us wander up and down and take the things at one time of which we repent at another, both in our actions and in our choice of things great and small? But the art of measurement would do away with the effect of appearances, and, showing the truth, would fain teach the soul at last to find rest in the truth, and would thus save our life. Would not mankind generally acknowledge that the art which accomplishes this result is the art of measurement? Yes, he said, the art of measurement. Suppose, again, the salvation of human life to depend on the choice of odd and even, and on the knowledge of when a man ought to choose the greater or less, either in reference to themselves or to each other, and whether near or at a distance; what would be the saving principle of our lives? Would not knowledge?--a knowledge of measuring, when the question is one of excess and defect, and a knowledge of number, when the question is of odd and even? The world will assent, will they not? Protagoras himself thought that they would. Well then, my friends, I say to them; seeing that the salvation of human life has been found to consist in the right choice of pleasures and pains,--in the choice of the more and the fewer, and the greater and the less, and the nearer and remoter, must not this measuring be a consideration of their excess and defect and equality in relation to each other? This is undeniably true. And this, as possessing measure, must undeniably also be an art and science? They will agree, he said. The nature of that art or science will be a matter of future consideration; but the existence of such a science furnishes a demonstrative answer to the question which you asked of me and Protagoras. At the time when you asked the question, if you remember, both of us were agreeing that there was nothing mightier than knowledge, and that knowledge, in whatever existing, must have the advantage over pleasure and all other things; and then you said that pleasure often got the advantage even over a man who has knowledge; and we refused to allow this, and you rejoined: O Protagoras and Socrates, what is the meaning of being overcome by pleasure if not this?--tell us what you call such a state:--if we had immediately and at the time answered 'Ignorance,' you would have laughed at us. But now, in laughing at us, you will be laughing at yourselves: for you also admitted that men err in their choice of pleasures and pains; that is, in their choice of good and evil, from defect of knowledge; and you admitted further, that they err, not only from defect of knowledge in general, but of that particular knowledge which is called measuring. And you are also aware that the erring act which is done without knowledge is done in ignorance. This, therefore, is the meaning of being overcome by pleasure;--ignorance, and that the greatest. And our friends Protagoras and Prodicus and Hippias declare that they are the physicians of ignorance; but you, who are under the mistaken impression that ignorance is not the cause, and that the art of which I am speaking cannot be taught, neither go yourselves, nor send your children, to the Sophists, who are the teachers of these things--you take care of your money and give them none; and the result is, that you are the worse off both in public and private life:--Let us suppose this to be our answer to the world in general: And now I should like to ask you, Hippias, and you, Prodicus, as well as Protagoras (for the argument is to be yours as well as ours), whether you think that I am speaking the truth or not? They all thought that what I said was entirely true. Then you agree, I said, that the pleasant is the good, and the painful evil. And here I would beg my friend Prodicus not to introduce his distinction of names, whether he is disposed to say pleasurable, delightful, joyful. However, by whatever name he prefers to call them, I will ask you, most excellent Prodicus, to answer in my sense of the words. Prodicus laughed and assented, as did the others. Then, my friends, what do you say to this? Are not all actions honourable and useful, of which the tendency is to make life painless and pleasant? The honourable work is also useful and good? This was admitted. Then, I said, if the pleasant is the good, nobody does anything under the idea or conviction that some other thing would be better and is also attainable, when he might do the better. And this inferiority of a man to himself is merely ignorance, as the superiority of a man to himself is wisdom. They all assented. And is not ignorance the having a false opinion and being deceived about important matters? To this also they unanimously assented. Then, I said, no man voluntarily pursues evil, or that which he thinks to be evil. To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he may have the less. All of us agreed to every word of this. Well, I said, there is a certain thing called fear or terror; and here, Prodicus, I should particularly like to know whether you would agree with me in defining this fear or terror as expectation of evil. Protagoras and Hippias agreed, but Prodicus said that this was fear and not terror. Never mind, Prodicus, I said; but let me ask whether, if our former assertions are true, a man will pursue that which he fears when he is not compelled? Would not this be in flat contradiction to the admission which has been already made, that he thinks the things which he fears to be evil; and no one will pursue or voluntarily accept that which he thinks to be evil? That also was universally admitted. Then, I said, these, Hippias and Prodicus, are our premisses; and I would beg Protagoras to explain to us how he can be right in what he said at first. I do not mean in what he said quite at first, for his first statement, as you may remember, was that whereas there were five parts of virtue none of them was like any other of them; each of them had a separate function. To this, however, I am not referring, but to the assertion which he afterwards made that of the five virtues four were nearly akin to each other, but that the fifth, which was courage, differed greatly from the others. And of this he gave me the following proof. He said: You will find, Socrates, that some of the most impious, and unrighteous, and intemperate, and ignorant of men are among the most courageous; which proves that courage is very different from the other parts of virtue. I was surprised at his saying this at the time, and I am still more surprised now that I have discussed the matter with you. So I asked him whether by the brave he meant the confident. Yes, he replied, and the impetuous or goers. (You may remember, Protagoras, that this was your answer.) He assented. Well then, I said, tell us against what are the courageous ready to go--against the same dangers as the cowards? No, he answered. Then against something different? Yes, he said. Then do cowards go where there is safety, and the courageous where there is danger? Yes, Socrates, so men say. Very true, I said. But I want to know against what do you say that the courageous are ready to go--against dangers, believing them to be dangers, or not against dangers? No, said he; the former case has been proved by you in the previous argument to be impossible. That, again, I replied, is quite true. And if this has been rightly proven, then no one goes to meet what he thinks to be dangers, since the want of self-control, which makes men rush into dangers, has been shown to be ignorance. He assented. And yet the courageous man and the coward alike go to meet that about which they are confident; so that, in this point of view, the cowardly and the courageous go to meet the same things. And yet, Socrates, said Protagoras, that to which the coward goes is the opposite of that to which the courageous goes; the one, for example, is ready to go to battle, and the other is not ready. And is going to battle honourable or disgraceful? I said. Honourable, he replied. And if honourable, then already admitted by us to be good; for all honourable actions we have admitted to be good. That is true; and to that opinion I shall always adhere. True, I said. But which of the two are they who, as you say, are unwilling to go to war, which is a good and honourable thing? The cowards, he replied. And what is good and honourable, I said, is also pleasant? It has certainly been acknowledged to be so, he replied. And do the cowards knowingly refuse to go to the nobler, and pleasanter, and better? The admission of that, he replied, would belie our former admissions. But does not the courageous man also go to meet the better, and pleasanter, and nobler? That must be admitted. And the courageous man has no base fear or base confidence? True, he replied. And if not base, then honourable? He admitted this. And if honourable, then good? Yes. But the fear and confidence of the coward or foolhardy or madman, on the contrary, are base? He assented. And these base fears and confidences originate in ignorance and uninstructedness? True, he said. Then as to the motive from which the cowards act, do you call it cowardice or courage? I should say cowardice, he replied. And have they not been shown to be cowards through their ignorance of dangers? Assuredly, he said. And because of that ignorance they are cowards? He assented. And the reason why they are cowards is admitted by you to be cowardice? He again assented. Then the ignorance of what is and is not dangerous is cowardice? He nodded assent. But surely courage, I said, is opposed to cowardice? Yes. Then the wisdom which knows what are and are not dangers is opposed to the ignorance of them? To that again he nodded assent. And the ignorance of them is cowardice? To that he very reluctantly nodded assent. And the knowledge of that which is and is not dangerous is courage, and is opposed to the ignorance of these things? At this point he would no longer nod assent, but was silent. And why, I said, do you neither assent nor dissent, Protagoras? Finish the argument by yourself, he said. I only want to ask one more question, I said. I want to know whether you still think that there are men who are most ignorant and yet most courageous? You seem to have a great ambition to make me answer, Socrates, and therefore I will gratify you, and say, that this appears to me to be impossible consistently with the argument. My only object, I said, in continuing the discussion, has been the desire to ascertain the nature and relations of virtue; for if this were clear, I am very sure that the other controversy which has been carried on at great length by both of us--you affirming and I denying that virtue can be taught--would also become clear. The result of our discussion appears to me to be singular. For if the argument had a human voice, that voice would be heard laughing at us and saying: 'Protagoras and Socrates, you are strange beings; there are you, Socrates, who were saying that virtue cannot be taught, contradicting yourself now by your attempt to prove that all things are knowledge, including justice, and temperance, and courage,--which tends to show that virtue can certainly be taught; for if virtue were other than knowledge, as Protagoras attempted to prove, then clearly virtue cannot be taught; but if virtue is entirely knowledge, as you are seeking to show, then I cannot but suppose that virtue is capable of being taught. Protagoras, on the other hand, who started by saying that it might be taught, is now eager to prove it to be anything rather than knowledge; and if this is true, it must be quite incapable of being taught.' Now I, Protagoras, perceiving this terrible confusion of our ideas, have a great desire that they should be cleared up. And I should like to carry on the discussion until we ascertain what virtue is, whether capable of being taught or not, lest haply Epimetheus should trip us up and deceive us in the argument, as he forgot us in the story; I prefer your Prometheus to your Epimetheus, for of him I make use, whenever I am busy about these questions, in Promethean care of my own life. And if you have no objection, as I said at first, I should like to have your help in the enquiry. Protagoras replied: Socrates, I am not of a base nature, and I am the last man in the world to be envious. I cannot but applaud your energy and your conduct of an argument. As I have often said, I admire you above all men whom I know, and far above all men of your age; and I believe that you will become very eminent in philosophy. Let us come back to the subject at some future time; at present we had better turn to something else. By all means, I said, if that is your wish; for I too ought long since to have kept the engagement of which I spoke before, and only tarried because I could not refuse the request of the noble Callias. So the conversation ended, and we went our way. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROTAGORAS *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"EUDICUS","Dialogue":"Why are you silent, Socrates, after the magnificent display which Hippias has been making? Why do you not either refute his words, if he seems to you to have been wrong in any point, or join with us in commending him? There is the more reason why you should speak, because we are now alone, and the audience is confined to those who may fairly claim to take part in a philosophical discussion."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should greatly like, Eudicus, to ask Hippias the meaning of what he was saying just now about Homer. I have heard your father, Apemantus, declare that the Iliad of Homer is a finer poem than the Odyssey in the same degree that Achilles was a better man than Odysseus; Odysseus, he would say, is the central figure of the one poem and Achilles of the other. Now, I should like to know, if Hippias has no objection to tell me, what he thinks about these two heroes, and which of them he maintains to be the better; he has already told us in the course of his exhibition many things of various kinds about Homer and divers other poets."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"EUDICUS","Dialogue":"I am sure that Hippias will be delighted to answer anything which you would like to ask; tell me, Hippias, if Socrates asks you a question, will you answer him?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Indeed, Eudicus, I should be strangely inconsistent if I refused to answer Socrates, when at each Olympic festival, as I went up from my house at Elis to the temple of Olympia, where all the Hellenes were assembled, I continually professed my willingness to perform any of the exhibitions which I had prepared, and to answer any questions which any one had to ask."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Truly, Hippias, you are to be congratulated, if at every Olympic festival you have such an encouraging opinion of your own wisdom when you go up to the temple. I doubt whether any muscular hero would be so fearless and confident in offering his body to the combat at Olympia, as you are in offering your mind."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"And with good reason, Socrates; for since the day when I first entered the lists at Olympia I have never found any man who was my superior in anything. (Compare Gorgias.)"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What an ornament, Hippias, will the reputation of your wisdom be to the city of Elis and to your parents! But to return: what say you of Odysseus and Achilles? Which is the better of the two? and in what particular does either surpass the other? For when you were exhibiting and there was company in the room, though I could not follow you, I did not like to ask what you meant, because a crowd of people were present, and I was afraid that the question might interrupt your exhibition. But now that there are not so many of us, and my friend Eudicus bids me ask, I wish you would tell me what you were saying about these two heroes, so that I may clearly understand; how did you distinguish them?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"I shall have much pleasure, Socrates, in explaining to you more clearly than I could in public my views about these and also about other heroes. I say that Homer intended Achilles to be the bravest of the men who went to Troy, Nestor the wisest, and Odysseus the wiliest."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"O rare Hippias, will you be so good as not to laugh, if I find a difficulty in following you, and repeat my questions several times over? Please to answer me kindly and gently."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"I should be greatly ashamed of myself, Socrates, if I, who teach others and take money of them, could not, when I was asked by you, answer in a civil and agreeable manner."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Thank you: the fact is, that I seemed to understand what you meant when you said that the poet intended Achilles to be the bravest of men, and also that he intended Nestor to be the wisest; but when you said that he meant Odysseus to be the wiliest, I must confess that I could not understand what you were saying. Will you tell me, and then I shall perhaps understand you better; has not Homer made Achilles wily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not, Socrates; he is the most straight-forward of mankind, and when Homer introduces them talking with one another in the passage called the Prayers, Achilles is supposed by the poet to say to Odysseus:-- 'Son of Laertes, sprung from heaven, crafty Odysseus, I will speak out plainly the word which I intend to carry out in act, and which will, I believe, be accomplished. For I hate him like the gates of death who thinks one thing and says another. But I will speak that which shall be accomplished.' Now, in these verses he clearly indicates the character of the two men; he shows Achilles to be true and simple, and Odysseus to be wily and false; for he supposes Achilles to be addressing Odysseus in these lines."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now, Hippias, I think that I understand your meaning; when you say that Odysseus is wily, you clearly mean that he is false?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Exactly so, Socrates; it is the character of Odysseus, as he is represented by Homer in many passages both of the Iliad and Odyssey."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And Homer must be presumed to have meant that the true man is not the same as the false?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Of course, Socrates."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is that your own opinion, Hippias?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly; how can I have any other?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, as there is no possibility of asking Homer what he meant in these verses of his, let us leave him; but as you show a willingness to take up his cause, and your opinion agrees with what you declare to be his, will you answer on behalf of yourself and him?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"I will; ask shortly anything which you like."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you say that the false, like the sick, have no power to do things, or that they have the power to do things?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"I should say that they have power to do many things, and in particular to deceive mankind."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, according to you, they are both powerful and wily, are they not?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are they wily, and do they deceive by reason of their simplicity and folly, or by reason of their cunning and a certain sort of prudence?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"By reason of their cunning and prudence, most certainly."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then they are prudent, I suppose?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"So they are--very."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if they are prudent, do they know or do they not know what they do?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Of course, they know very well; and that is why they do mischief to others."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And having this knowledge, are they ignorant, or are they wise?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Wise, certainly; at least, in so far as they can deceive."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Stop, and let us recall to mind what you are saying; are you not saying that the false are powerful and prudent and knowing and wise in those things about which they are false?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the true differ from the false--the true and the false are the very opposite of each other?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"That is my view."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, according to your view, it would seem that the false are to be ranked in the class of the powerful and wise?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Assuredly."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when you say that the false are powerful and wise in so far as they are false, do you mean that they have or have not the power of uttering their falsehoods if they like?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"I mean to say that they have the power."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In a word, then, the false are they who are wise and have the power to speak falsely?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then a man who has not the power of speaking falsely and is ignorant cannot be false?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"You are right."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And every man has power who does that which he wishes at the time when he wishes. I am not speaking of any special case in which he is prevented by disease or something of that sort, but I am speaking generally, as I might say of you, that you are able to write my name when you like. Would you not call a man able who could do that?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And tell me, Hippias, are you not a skilful calculator and arithmetician?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, assuredly I am."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if some one were to ask you what is the sum of 3 multiplied by 700, you would tell him the true answer in a moment, if you pleased?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"certainly I should."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is not that because you are the wisest and ablest of men in these matters?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And being as you are the wisest and ablest of men in these matters of calculation, are you not also the best?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure, Socrates, I am the best."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And therefore you would be the most able to tell the truth about these matters, would you not?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, I should."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And could you speak falsehoods about them equally well? I must beg, Hippias, that you will answer me with the same frankness and magnanimity which has hitherto characterized you. If a person were to ask you what is the sum of 3 multiplied by 700, would not you be the best and most consistent teller of a falsehood, having always the power of speaking falsely as you have of speaking truly, about these same matters, if you wanted to tell a falsehood, and not to answer truly? Would the ignorant man be better able to tell a falsehood in matters of calculation than you would be, if you chose? Might he not sometimes stumble upon the truth, when he wanted to tell a lie, because he did not know, whereas you who are the wise man, if you wanted to tell a lie would always and consistently lie?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, there you are quite right."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Does the false man tell lies about other things, but not about number, or when he is making a calculation?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure; he would tell as many lies about number as about other things."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then may we further assume, Hippias, that there are men who are false about calculation and number?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Who can they be? For you have already admitted that he who is false must have the ability to be false: you said, as you will remember, that he who is unable to be false will not be false?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, I remember; it was so said."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And were you not yourself just now shown to be best able to speak falsely about calculation?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes; that was another thing which was said."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are you not likewise said to speak truly about calculation?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the same person is able to speak both falsely and truly about calculation? And that person is he who is good at calculation--the arithmetician?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Who, then, Hippias, is discovered to be false at calculation? Is he not the good man? For the good man is the able man, and he is the true man."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"That is evident."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you not see, then, that the same man is false and also true about the same matters? And the true man is not a whit better than the false; for indeed he is the same with him and not the very opposite, as you were just now imagining."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Not in that instance, clearly."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall we examine other instances?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly, if you are disposed."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are you not also skilled in geometry?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"I am."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and does not the same hold in that science also? Is not the same person best able to speak falsely or to speak truly about diagrams; and he is--the geometrician?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He and no one else is good at it?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, he and no one else."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the good and wise geometer has this double power in the highest degree; and if there be a man who is false about diagrams the good man will be he, for he is able to be false; whereas the bad is unable, and for this reason is not false, as has been admitted."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Once more--let us examine a third case; that of the astronomer, in whose art, again, you, Hippias, profess to be a still greater proficient than in the preceding--do you not?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, I am."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does not the same hold of astronomy?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"True, Socrates."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in astronomy, too, if any man be able to speak falsely he will be the good astronomer, but he who is not able will not speak falsely, for he has no knowledge."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly not."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then in astronomy also, the same man will be true and false?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"It would seem so."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, Hippias, consider the question at large about all the sciences, and see whether the same principle does not always hold. I know that in most arts you are the wisest of men, as I have heard you boasting in the agora at the tables of the money-changers, when you were setting forth the great and enviable stores of your wisdom; and you said that upon one occasion, when you went to the Olympic games, all that you had on your person was made by yourself. You began with your ring, which was of your own workmanship, and you said that you could engrave rings; and you had another seal which was also of your own workmanship, and a strigil and an oil flask, which you had made yourself; you said also that you had made the shoes which you had on your feet, and the cloak and the short tunic; but what appeared to us all most extraordinary and a proof of singular art, was the girdle of your tunic, which, you said, was as fine as the most costly Persian fabric, and of your own weaving; moreover, you told us that you had brought with you poems, epic, tragic, and dithyrambic, as well as prose writings of the most various kinds; and you said that your skill was also pre-eminent in the arts which I was just now mentioning, and in the true principles of rhythm and harmony and of orthography; and if I remember rightly, there were a great many other accomplishments in which you excelled. I have forgotten to mention your art of memory, which you regard as your special glory, and I dare say that I have forgotten many other things; but, as I was saying, only look to your own arts--and there are plenty of them--and to those of others; and tell me, having regard to the admissions which you and I have made, whether you discover any department of art or any description of wisdom or cunning, whichever name you use, in which the true and false are different and not the same: tell me, if you can, of any. But you cannot."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Not without consideration, Socrates."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor will consideration help you, Hippias, as I believe; but then if I am right, remember what the consequence will be."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"I do not know what you mean, Socrates."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I suppose that you are not using your art of memory, doubtless because you think that such an accomplishment is not needed on the present occasion. I will therefore remind you of what you were saying: were you not saying that Achilles was a true man, and Odysseus false and wily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"I was."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now do you perceive that the same person has turned out to be false as well as true? If Odysseus is false he is also true, and if Achilles is true he is also false, and so the two men are not opposed to one another, but they are alike."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"O Socrates, you are always weaving the meshes of an argument, selecting the most difficult point, and fastening upon details instead of grappling with the matter in hand as a whole. Come now, and I will demonstrate to you, if you will allow me, by many satisfactory proofs, that Homer has made Achilles a better man than Odysseus, and a truthful man too; and that he has made the other crafty, and a teller of many untruths, and inferior to Achilles. And then, if you please, you shall make a speech on the other side, in order to prove that Odysseus is the better man; and this may be compared to mine, and then the company will know which of us is the better speaker."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"O Hippias, I do not doubt that you are wiser than I am. But I have a way, when anybody else says anything, of giving close attention to him, especially if the speaker appears to me to be a wise man. Having a desire to understand, I question him, and I examine and analyse and put together what he says, in order that I may understand; but if the speaker appears to me to be a poor hand, I do not interrogate him, or trouble myself about him, and you may know by this who they are whom I deem to be wise men, for you will see that when I am talking with a wise man, I am very attentive to what he says; and I ask questions of him, in order that I may learn, and be improved by him. And I could not help remarking while you were speaking, that when you recited the verses in which Achilles, as you argued, attacks Odysseus as a deceiver, that you must be strangely mistaken, because Odysseus, the man of wiles, is never found to tell a lie; but Achilles is found to be wily on your own showing. At any rate he speaks falsely; for first he utters these words, which you just now repeated,-- 'He is hateful to me even as the gates of death who thinks one thing and says another:'-- And then he says, a little while afterwards, he will not be persuaded by Odysseus and Agamemnon, neither will he remain at Troy; but, says he,-- 'To-morrow, when I have offered sacrifices to Zeus and all the Gods, having loaded my ships well, I will drag them down into the deep; and then you shall see, if you have a mind, and if such things are a care to you, early in the morning my ships sailing over the fishy Hellespont, and my men eagerly plying the oar; and, if the illustrious shaker of the earth gives me a good voyage, on the third day I shall reach the fertile Phthia.' And before that, when he was reviling Agamemnon, he said,-- 'And now to Phthia I will go, since to return home in the beaked ships is far better, nor am I inclined to stay here in dishonour and amass wealth and riches for you.' But although on that occasion, in the presence of the whole army, he spoke after this fashion, and on the other occasion to his companions, he appears never to have made any preparation or attempt to draw down the ships, as if he had the least intention of sailing home; so nobly regardless was he of the truth. Now I, Hippias, originally asked you the question, because I was in doubt as to which of the two heroes was intended by the poet to be the best, and because I thought that both of them were the best, and that it would be difficult to decide which was the better of them, not only in respect of truth and falsehood, but of virtue generally, for even in this matter of speaking the truth they are much upon a par."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"There you are wrong, Socrates; for in so far as Achilles speaks falsely, the falsehood is obviously unintentional. He is compelled against his will to remain and rescue the army in their misfortune. But when Odysseus speaks falsely he is voluntarily and intentionally false."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You, sweet Hippias, like Odysseus, are a deceiver yourself."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not, Socrates; what makes you say so?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because you say that Achilles does not speak falsely from design, when he is not only a deceiver, but besides being a braggart, in Homer's description of him is so cunning, and so far superior to Odysseus in lying and pretending, that he dares to contradict himself, and Odysseus does not find him out; at any rate he does not appear to say anything to him which would imply that he perceived his falsehood."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Did you not observe that afterwards, when he is speaking to Odysseus, he says that he will sail away with the early dawn; but to Ajax he tells quite a different story?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Where is that?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Where he says,-- 'I will not think about bloody war until the son of warlike Priam, illustrious Hector, comes to the tents and ships of the Myrmidons, slaughtering the Argives, and burning the ships with fire; and about my tent and dark ship, I suspect that Hector, although eager for the battle, will nevertheless stay his hand.' Now, do you really think, Hippias, that the son of Thetis, who had been the pupil of the sage Cheiron, had such a bad memory, or would have carried the art of lying to such an extent (when he had been assailing liars in the most violent terms only the instant before) as to say to Odysseus that he would sail away, and to Ajax that he would remain, and that he was not rather practising upon the simplicity of Odysseus, whom he regarded as an ancient, and thinking that he would get the better of him by his own cunning and falsehood?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"No, I do not agree with you, Socrates; but I believe that Achilles is induced to say one thing to Ajax, and another to Odysseus in the innocence of his heart, whereas Odysseus, whether he speaks falsely or truly, speaks always with a purpose."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then Odysseus would appear after all to be better than Achilles?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not, Socrates."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, were not the voluntary liars only just now shown to be better than the involuntary?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"And how, Socrates, can those who intentionally err, and voluntarily and designedly commit iniquities, be better than those who err and do wrong involuntarily? Surely there is a great excuse to be made for a man telling a falsehood, or doing an injury or any sort of harm to another in ignorance. And the laws are obviously far more severe on those who lie or do evil, voluntarily, than on those who do evil involuntarily."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You see, Hippias, as I have already told you, how pertinacious I am in asking questions of wise men. And I think that this is the only good point about me, for I am full of defects, and always getting wrong in some way or other. My deficiency is proved to me by the fact that when I meet one of you who are famous for wisdom, and to whose wisdom all the Hellenes are witnesses, I am found out to know nothing. For speaking generally, I hardly ever have the same opinion about anything which you have, and what proof of ignorance can be greater than to differ from wise men? But I have one singular good quality, which is my salvation; I am not ashamed to learn, and I ask and enquire, and am very grateful to those who answer me, and never fail to give them my grateful thanks; and when I learn a thing I never deny my teacher, or pretend that the lesson is a discovery of my own; but I praise his wisdom, and proclaim what I have learned from him. And now I cannot agree in what you are saying, but I strongly disagree. Well, I know that this is my own fault, and is a defect in my character, but I will not pretend to be more than I am; and my opinion, Hippias, is the very contrary of what you are saying. For I maintain that those who hurt or injure mankind, and speak falsely and deceive, and err voluntarily, are better far than those who do wrong involuntarily. Sometimes, however, I am of the opposite opinion; for I am all abroad in my ideas about this matter, a condition obviously occasioned by ignorance. And just now I happen to be in a crisis of my disorder at which those who err voluntarily appear to me better than those who err involuntarily. My present state of mind is due to our previous argument, which inclines me to believe that in general those who do wrong involuntarily are worse than those who do wrong voluntarily, and therefore I hope that you will be good to me, and not refuse to heal me; for you will do me a much greater benefit if you cure my soul of ignorance, than you would if you were to cure my body of disease. I must, however, tell you beforehand, that if you make a long oration to me you will not cure me, for I shall not be able to follow you; but if you will answer me, as you did just now, you will do me a great deal of good, and I do not think that you will be any the worse yourself. And I have some claim upon you also, O son of Apemantus, for you incited me to converse with Hippias; and now, if Hippias will not answer me, you must entreat him on my behalf."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"EUDICUS","Dialogue":"But I do not think, Socrates, that Hippias will require any entreaty of mine; for he has already said that he will refuse to answer no man.--Did you not say so, Hippias?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, I did; but then, Eudicus, Socrates is always troublesome in an argument, and appears to be dishonest. (Compare Gorgias; Republic.)"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Excellent Hippias, I do not do so intentionally (if I did, it would show me to be a wise man and a master of wiles, as you would argue), but unintentionally, and therefore you must pardon me; for, as you say, he who is unintentionally dishonest should be pardoned."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"EUDICUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Hippias, do as he says; and for our sake, and also that you may not belie your profession, answer whatever Socrates asks you."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"I will answer, as you request me; and do you ask whatever you like."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am very desirous, Hippias, of examining this question, as to which are the better--those who err voluntarily or involuntarily? And if you will answer me, I think that I can put you in the way of approaching the subject: You would admit, would you not, that there are good runners?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there are bad runners?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who runs well is a good runner, and he who runs ill is a bad runner?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who runs slowly runs ill, and he who runs quickly runs well?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then in a race, and in running, swiftness is a good, and slowness is an evil quality?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Which of the two then is a better runner? He who runs slowly voluntarily, or he who runs slowly involuntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"He who runs slowly voluntarily."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not running a species of doing?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if a species of doing, a species of action?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who runs badly does a bad and dishonourable action in a race?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes; a bad action, certainly."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who runs slowly runs badly?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the good runner does this bad and disgraceful action voluntarily, and the bad involuntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"That is to be inferred."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who involuntarily does evil actions, is worse in a race than he who does them voluntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, in a race."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but at a wrestling match--which is the better wrestler, he who falls voluntarily or involuntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"He who falls voluntarily, doubtless."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is it worse or more dishonourable at a wrestling match, to fall, or to throw another?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"To fall."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, at a wrestling match, he who voluntarily does base and dishonourable actions is a better wrestler than he who does them involuntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"That appears to be the truth."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what would you say of any other bodily exercise--is not he who is better made able to do both that which is strong and that which is weak--that which is fair and that which is foul?--so that when he does bad actions with the body, he who is better made does them voluntarily, and he who is worse made does them involuntarily."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, that appears to be true about strength."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what do you say about grace, Hippias? Is not he who is better made able to assume evil and disgraceful figures and postures voluntarily, as he who is worse made assumes them involuntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then voluntary ungracefulness comes from excellence of the bodily frame, and involuntary from the defect of the bodily frame?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what would you say of an unmusical voice; would you prefer the voice which is voluntarily or involuntarily out of tune?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"That which is voluntarily out of tune."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The involuntary is the worse of the two?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you choose to possess goods or evils?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Goods."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you rather have feet which are voluntarily or involuntarily lame?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Feet which are voluntarily lame."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But is not lameness a defect or deformity?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not blinking a defect in the eyes?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you rather always have eyes with which you might voluntarily blink and not see, or with which you might involuntarily blink?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"I would rather have eyes which voluntarily blink."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then in your own case you deem that which voluntarily acts ill, better than that which involuntarily acts ill?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly, in cases such as you mention."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does not the same hold of ears, nostrils, mouth, and of all the senses--those which involuntarily act ill are not to be desired, as being defective; and those which voluntarily act ill are to be desired as being good?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what would you say of instruments;--which are the better sort of instruments to have to do with?--those with which a man acts ill voluntarily or involuntarily? For example, had a man better have a rudder with which he will steer ill, voluntarily or involuntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"He had better have a rudder with which he will steer ill voluntarily."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does not the same hold of the bow and the lyre, the flute and all other things?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you rather have a horse of such a temper that you may ride him ill voluntarily or involuntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"I would rather have a horse which I could ride ill voluntarily."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That would be the better horse?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then with a horse of better temper, vicious actions would be produced voluntarily; and with a horse of bad temper involuntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that would be true of a dog, or of any other animal?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is it better to possess the mind of an archer who voluntarily or involuntarily misses the mark?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Of him who voluntarily misses."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"This would be the better mind for the purposes of archery?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the mind which involuntarily errs is worse than the mind which errs voluntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly, in the use of the bow."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what would you say of the art of medicine;--has not the mind which voluntarily works harm to the body, more of the healing art?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then in the art of medicine the voluntary is better than the involuntary?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and in lute-playing and in flute-playing, and in all arts and sciences, is not that mind the better which voluntarily does what is evil and dishonourable, and goes wrong, and is not the worse that which does so involuntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"That is evident."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what would you say of the characters of slaves? Should we not prefer to have those who voluntarily do wrong and make mistakes, and are they not better in their mistakes than those who commit them involuntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And should we not desire to have our own minds in the best state possible?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will our minds be better if they do wrong and make mistakes voluntarily or involuntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"O, Socrates, it would be a monstrous thing to say that those who do wrong voluntarily are better than those who do wrong involuntarily!"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet that appears to be the only inference."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"I do not think so."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But I imagined, Hippias, that you did. Please to answer once more: Is not justice a power, or knowledge, or both? Must not justice, at all events, be one of these?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if justice is a power of the soul, then the soul which has the greater power is also the more just; for that which has the greater power, my good friend, has been proved by us to be the better."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, that has been proved."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if justice is knowledge, then the wiser will be the juster soul, and the more ignorant the more unjust?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if justice be power as well as knowledge--then will not the soul which has both knowledge and power be the more just, and that which is the more ignorant be the more unjust? Must it not be so?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not the soul which has the greater power and wisdom also better, and better able to do both good and evil in every action?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The soul, then, which acts ill, acts voluntarily by power and art--and these either one or both of them are elements of justice?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"That seems to be true."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And to do injustice is to do ill, and not to do injustice is to do well?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will not the better and abler soul when it does wrong, do wrong voluntarily, and the bad soul involuntarily?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the good man is he who has the good soul, and the bad man is he who has the bad?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the good man will voluntarily do wrong, and the bad man involuntarily, if the good man is he who has the good soul?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"Which he certainly has."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, Hippias, he who voluntarily does wrong and disgraceful things, if there be such a man, will be the good man?"}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"HIPPIAS","Dialogue":"There I cannot agree with you."}
{"Book":"lesser_hippias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor can I agree with myself, Hippias; and yet that seems to be the conclusion which, as far as we can see at present, must follow from our argument. As I was saying before, I am all abroad, and being in perplexity am always changing my opinion. Now, that I or any ordinary man should wander in perplexity is not surprising; but if you wise men also wander, and we cannot come to you and rest from our wandering, the matter begins to be serious both to us and to you. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lesser Hippias, by Plato *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LESSER HIPPIAS *** ***** This file should be named 1673.txt or 1673.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/1\/6\/7\/1673\/ Produced by Sue Asscher Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed. 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{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I have reason to thank you, Theodorus, for the acquaintance of Theaetetus and the Stranger."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"And you will have three times as much reason to thank me when they have delineated the Statesman and Philosopher, as well as the Sophist."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Does the great geometrician apply the same measure to all three? Are they not divided by an interval which no geometrical ratio can express?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"By the god Ammon, Socrates, you are right; and I am glad to see that you have not forgotten your geometry. But before I retaliate on you, I must request the Stranger to finish the argument... The Stranger suggests that Theaetetus shall be allowed to rest, and that Socrates the younger shall respond in his place; Theodorus agrees to the suggestion, and Socrates remarks that the name of the one and the face of the other give him a right to claim relationship with both of them. They propose to take the Statesman after the Sophist; his path they must determine, and part off all other ways, stamping upon them a single negative form (compare Soph.). The Stranger begins the enquiry by making a division of the arts and sciences into theoretical and practical--the one kind concerned with knowledge exclusively, and the other with action; arithmetic and the mathematical sciences are examples of the former, and carpentering and handicraft arts of the latter (compare Philebus). Under which of the two shall we place the Statesman? Or rather, shall we not first ask, whether the king, statesman, master, householder, practise one art or many? As the adviser of a physician may be said to have medical science and to be a physician, so the adviser of a king has royal science and is a king. And the master of a large household may be compared to the ruler of a small state. Hence we conclude that the science of the king, statesman, and householder is one and the same. And this science is akin to knowledge rather than to action. For a king rules with his mind, and not with his hands. But theoretical science may be a science either of judging, like arithmetic, or of ruling and superintending, like that of the architect or master-builder. And the science of the king is of the latter nature; but the power which he exercises is underived and uncontrolled,--a characteristic which distinguishes him from heralds, prophets, and other inferior officers. He is the wholesale dealer in command, and the herald, or other officer, retails his commands to others. Again, a ruler is concerned with the production of some object, and objects may be divided into living and lifeless, and rulers into the rulers of living and lifeless objects. And the king is not like the master-builder, concerned with lifeless matter, but has the task of managing living animals. And the tending of living animals may be either a tending of individuals, or a managing of herds. And the Statesman is not a groom, but a herdsman, and his art may be called either the art of managing a herd, or the art of collective management:--Which do you prefer? 'No matter.' Very good, Socrates, and if you are not too particular about words you will be all the richer some day in true wisdom. But how would you subdivide the herdsman's art? 'I should say, that there is one management of men, and another of beasts.' Very good, but you are in too great a hurry to get to man. All divisions which are rightly made should cut through the middle; if you attend to this rule, you will be more likely to arrive at classes. 'I do not understand the nature of my mistake.' Your division was like a division of the human race into Hellenes and Barbarians, or into Lydians or Phrygians and all other nations, instead of into male and female; or like a division of number into ten thousand and all other numbers, instead of into odd and even. And I should like you to observe further, that though I maintain a class to be a part, there is no similar necessity for a part to be a class. But to return to your division, you spoke of men and other animals as two classes--the second of which you comprehended under the general name of beasts. This is the sort of division which an intelligent crane would make: he would put cranes into a class by themselves for their special glory, and jumble together all others, including man, in the class of beasts. An error of this kind can only be avoided by a more regular subdivision. Just now we divided the whole class of animals into gregarious and non-gregarious, omitting the previous division into tame and wild. We forgot this in our hurry to arrive at man, and found by experience, as the proverb says, that 'the more haste the worse speed.' And now let us begin again at the art of managing herds. You have probably heard of the fish-preserves in the Nile and in the ponds of the Great King, and of the nurseries of geese and cranes in Thessaly. These suggest a new division into the rearing or management of land-herds and of water-herds:--I need not say with which the king is concerned. And land-herds may be divided into walking and flying; and every idiot knows that the political animal is a pedestrian. At this point we may take a longer or a shorter road, and as we are already near the end, I see no harm in taking the longer, which is the way of mesotomy, and accords with the principle which we were laying down. The tame, walking, herding animal, may be divided into two classes--the horned and the hornless, and the king is concerned with the hornless; and these again may be subdivided into animals having or not having cloven feet, or mixing or not mixing the breed; and the king or statesman has the care of animals which have not cloven feet, and which do not mix the breed. And now, if we omit dogs, who can hardly be said to herd, I think that we have only two species left which remain undivided: and how are we to distinguish them? To geometricians, like you and Theaetetus, I can have no difficulty in explaining that man is a diameter, having a power of two feet; and the power of four-legged creatures, being the double of two feet, is the diameter of our diameter. There is another excellent jest which I spy in the two remaining species. Men and birds are both bipeds, and human beings are running a race with the airiest and freest of creation, in which they are far behind their competitors;--this is a great joke, and there is a still better in the juxtaposition of the bird-taker and the king, who may be seen scampering after them. For, as we remarked in discussing the Sophist, the dialectical method is no respecter of persons. But we might have proceeded, as I was saying, by another and a shorter road. In that case we should have begun by dividing land animals into bipeds and quadrupeds, and bipeds into winged and wingless; we should than have taken the Statesman and set him over the 'bipes implume,' and put the reins of government into his hands. Here let us sum up:--The science of pure knowledge had a part which was the science of command, and this had a part which was a science of wholesale command; and this was divided into the management of animals, and was again parted off into the management of herds of animals, and again of land animals, and these into hornless, and these into bipeds; and so at last we arrived at man, and found the political and royal science. And yet we have not clearly distinguished the political shepherd from his rivals. No one would think of usurping the prerogatives of the ordinary shepherd, who on all hands is admitted to be the trainer, matchmaker, doctor, musician of his flock. But the royal shepherd has numberless competitors, from whom he must be distinguished; there are merchants, husbandmen, physicians, who will all dispute his right to manage the flock. I think that we can best distinguish him by having recourse to a famous old tradition, which may amuse as well as instruct us; the narrative is perfectly true, although the scepticism of mankind is prone to doubt the tales of old. You have heard what happened in the quarrel of Atreus and Thyestes? 'You mean about the golden lamb?' No, not that; but another part of the story, which tells how the sun and stars once arose in the west and set in the east, and that the god reversed their motion, as a witness to the right of Atreus. 'There is such a story.' And no doubt you have heard of the empire of Cronos, and of the earthborn men? The origin of these and the like stories is to be found in the tale which I am about to narrate. There was a time when God directed the revolutions of the world, but at the completion of a certain cycle he let go; and the world, by a necessity of its nature, turned back, and went round the other way. For divine things alone are unchangeable; but the earth and heavens, although endowed with many glories, have a body, and are therefore liable to perturbation. In the case of the world, the perturbation is very slight, and amounts only to a reversal of motion. For the lord of moving things is alone self-moved; neither can piety allow that he goes at one time in one direction and at another time in another; or that God has given the universe opposite motions; or that there are two gods, one turning it in one direction, another in another. But the truth is, that there are two cycles of the world, and in one of them it is governed by an immediate Providence, and receives life and immortality, and in the other is let go again, and has a reverse action during infinite ages. This new action is spontaneous, and is due to exquisite perfection of balance, to the vast size of the universe, and to the smallness of the pivot upon which it turns. All changes in the heaven affect the animal world, and this being the greatest of them, is most destructive to men and animals. At the beginning of the cycle before our own very few of them had survived; and on these a mighty change passed. For their life was reversed like the motion of the world, and first of all coming to a stand then quickly returned to youth and beauty. The white locks of the aged became black; the cheeks of the bearded man were restored to their youth and fineness; the young men grew softer and smaller, and, being reduced to the condition of children in mind as well as body, began to vanish away; and the bodies of those who had died by violence, in a few moments underwent a parallel change and disappeared. In that cycle of existence there was no such thing as the procreation of animals from one another, but they were born of the earth, and of this our ancestors, who came into being immediately after the end of the last cycle and at the beginning of this, have preserved the recollection. Such traditions are often now unduly discredited, and yet they may be proved by internal evidence. For observe how consistent the narrative is; as the old returned to youth, so the dead returned to life; the wheel of their existence having been reversed, they rose again from the earth: a few only were reserved by God for another destiny. Such was the origin of the earthborn men. 'And is this cycle, of which you are speaking, the reign of Cronos, or our present state of existence?' No, Socrates, that blessed and spontaneous life belongs not to this, but to the previous state, in which God was the governor of the whole world, and other gods subject to him ruled over parts of the world, as is still the case in certain places. They were shepherds of men and animals, each of them sufficing for those of whom he had the care. And there was no violence among them, or war, or devouring of one another. Their life was spontaneous, because in those days God ruled over man; and he was to man what man is now to the animals. Under his government there were no estates, or private possessions, or families; but the earth produced a sufficiency of all things, and men were born out of the earth, having no traditions of the past; and as the temperature of the seasons was mild, they took no thought for raiment, and had no beds, but lived and dwelt in the open air. Such was the age of Cronos, and the age of Zeus is our own. Tell me, which is the happier of the two? Or rather, shall I tell you that the happiness of these children of Cronos must have depended on how they used their time? If having boundless leisure, and the power of discoursing not only with one another but with the animals, they had employed these advantages with a view to philosophy, gathering from every nature some addition to their store of knowledge;--or again, if they had merely eaten and drunk, and told stories to one another, and to the beasts;--in either case, I say, there would be no difficulty in answering the question. But as nobody knows which they did, the question must remain unanswered. And here is the point of my tale. In the fulness of time, when the earthborn men had all passed away, the ruler of the universe let go the helm, and became a spectator; and destiny and natural impulse swayed the world. At the same instant all the inferior deities gave up their hold; the whole universe rebounded, and there was a great earthquake, and utter ruin of all manner of animals. After a while the tumult ceased, and the universal creature settled down in his accustomed course, having authority over all other creatures, and following the instructions of his God and Father, at first more precisely, afterwards with less exactness. The reason of the falling off was the disengagement of a former chaos; 'a muddy vesture of decay' was a part of his original nature, out of which he was brought by his Creator, under whose immediate guidance, while he remained in that former cycle, the evil was minimized and the good increased to the utmost. And in the beginning of the new cycle all was well enough, but as time went on, discord entered in; at length the good was minimized and the evil everywhere diffused, and there was a danger of universal ruin. Then the Creator, seeing the world in great straits, and fearing that chaos and infinity would come again, in his tender care again placed himself at the helm and restored order, and made the world immortal and imperishable. Once more the cycle of life and generation was reversed; the infants grew into young men, and the young men became greyheaded; no longer did the animals spring out of the earth; as the whole world was now lord of its own progress, so the parts were to be self-created and self-nourished. At first the case of men was very helpless and pitiable; for they were alone among the wild beasts, and had to carry on the struggle for existence without arts or knowledge, and had no food, and did not know how to get any. That was the time when Prometheus brought them fire, Hephaestus and Athene taught them arts, and other gods gave them seeds and plants. Out of these human life was framed; for mankind were left to themselves, and ordered their own ways, living, like the universe, in one cycle after one manner, and in another cycle after another manner. Enough of the myth, which may show us two errors of which we were guilty in our account of the king. The first and grand error was in choosing for our king a god, who belongs to the other cycle, instead of a man from our own; there was a lesser error also in our failure to define the nature of the royal functions. The myth gave us only the image of a divine shepherd, whereas the statesmen and kings of our own day very much resemble their subjects in education and breeding. On retracing our steps we find that we gave too narrow a designation to the art which was concerned with command-for-self over living creatures, when we called it the 'feeding' of animals in flocks. This would apply to all shepherds, with the exception of the Statesman; but if we say 'managing' or 'tending' animals, the term would include him as well. Having remodelled the name, we may subdivide as before, first separating the human from the divine shepherd or manager. Then we may subdivide the human art of governing into the government of willing and unwilling subjects--royalty and tyranny--which are the extreme opposites of one another, although we in our simplicity have hitherto confounded them. And yet the figure of the king is still defective. We have taken up a lump of fable, and have used more than we needed. Like statuaries, we have made some of the features out of proportion, and shall lose time in reducing them. Or our mythus may be compared to a picture, which is well drawn in outline, but is not yet enlivened by colour. And to intelligent persons language is, or ought to be, a better instrument of description than any picture. 'But what, Stranger, is the deficiency of which you speak?' No higher truth can be made clear without an example; every man seems to know all things in a dream, and to know nothing when he is awake. And the nature of example can only be illustrated by an example. Children are taught to read by being made to compare cases in which they do not know a certain letter with cases in which they know it, until they learn to recognize it in all its combinations. Example comes into use when we identify something unknown with that which is known, and form a common notion of both of them. Like the child who is learning his letters, the soul recognizes some of the first elements of things; and then again is at fault and unable to recognize them when they are translated into the difficult language of facts. Let us, then, take an example, which will illustrate the nature of example, and will also assist us in characterizing the political science, and in separating the true king from his rivals. I will select the example of weaving, or, more precisely, weaving of wool. In the first place, all possessions are either productive or preventive; of the preventive sort are spells and antidotes, divine and human, and also defences, and defences are either arms or screens, and screens are veils and also shields against heat and cold, and shields against heat and cold are shelters and coverings, and coverings are blankets or garments, and garments are in one piece or have many parts; and of these latter, some are stitched and others are fastened, and of these again some are made of fibres of plants and some of hair, and of these some are cemented with water and earth, and some are fastened with their own material; the latter are called clothes, and are made by the art of clothing, from which the art of weaving differs only in name, as the political differs from the royal science. Thus we have drawn several distinctions, but as yet have not distinguished the weaving of garments from the kindred and co-operative arts. For the first process to which the material is subjected is the opposite of weaving--I mean carding. And the art of carding, and the whole art of the fuller and the mender, are concerned with the treatment and production of clothes, as well as the art of weaving. Again, there are the arts which make the weaver's tools. And if we say that the weaver's art is the greatest and noblest of those which have to do with woollen garments,--this, although true, is not sufficiently distinct; because these other arts require to be first cleared away. Let us proceed, then, by regular steps:--There are causal or principal, and co-operative or subordinate arts. To the causal class belong the arts of washing and mending, of carding and spinning the threads, and the other arts of working in wool; these are chiefly of two kinds, falling under the two great categories of composition and division. Carding is of the latter sort. But our concern is chiefly with that part of the art of wool-working which composes, and of which one kind twists and the other interlaces the threads, whether the firmer texture of the warp or the looser texture of the woof. These are adapted to each other, and the orderly composition of them forms a woollen garment. And the art which presides over these operations is the art of weaving. But why did we go through this circuitous process, instead of saying at once that weaving is the art of entwining the warp and the woof? In order that our labour may not seem to be lost, I must explain the whole nature of excess and defect. There are two arts of measuring--one is concerned with relative size, and the other has reference to a mean or standard of what is meet. The difference between good and evil is the difference between a mean or measure and excess or defect. All things require to be compared, not only with one another, but with the mean, without which there would be no beauty and no art, whether the art of the statesman or the art of weaving or any other; for all the arts guard against excess or defect, which are real evils. This we must endeavour to show, if the arts are to exist; and the proof of this will be a harder piece of work than the demonstration of the existence of not-being which we proved in our discussion about the Sophist. At present I am content with the indirect proof that the existence of such a standard is necessary to the existence of the arts. The standard or measure, which we are now only applying to the arts, may be some day required with a view to the demonstration of absolute truth. We may now divide this art of measurement into two parts; placing in the one part all the arts which measure the relative size or number of objects, and in the other all those which depend upon a mean or standard. Many accomplished men say that the art of measurement has to do with all things, but these persons, although in this notion of theirs they may very likely be right, are apt to fail in seeing the differences of classes--they jumble together in one the 'more' and the 'too much,' which are very different things. Whereas the right way is to find the differences of classes, and to comprehend the things which have any affinity under the same class. I will make one more observation by the way. When a pupil at a school is asked the letters which make up a particular word, is he not asked with a view to his knowing the same letters in all words? And our enquiry about the Statesman in like manner is intended not only to improve our knowledge of politics, but our reasoning powers generally. Still less would any one analyze the nature of weaving for its own sake. There is no difficulty in exhibiting sensible images, but the greatest and noblest truths have no outward form adapted to the eye of sense, and are only revealed in thought. And all that we are now saying is said for the sake of them. I make these remarks, because I want you to get rid of any impression that our discussion about weaving and about the reversal of the universe, and the other discussion about the Sophist and not-being, were tedious and irrelevant. Please to observe that they can only be fairly judged when compared with what is meet; and yet not with what is meet for producing pleasure, nor even meet for making discoveries, but for the great end of developing the dialectical method and sharpening the wits of the auditors. He who censures us, should prove that, if our words had been fewer, they would have been better calculated to make men dialecticians. And now let us return to our king or statesman, and transfer to him the example of weaving. The royal art has been separated from that of other herdsmen, but not from the causal and co-operative arts which exist in states; these do not admit of dichotomy, and therefore they must be carved neatly, like the limbs of a victim, not into more parts than are necessary. And first (1) we have the large class of instruments, which includes almost everything in the world; from these may be parted off (2) vessels which are framed for the preservation of things, moist or dry, prepared in the fire or out of the fire. The royal or political art has nothing to do with either of these, any more than with the arts of making (3) vehicles, or (4) defences, whether dresses, or arms, or walls, or (5) with the art of making ornaments, whether pictures or other playthings, as they may be fitly called, for they have no serious use. Then (6) there are the arts which furnish gold, silver, wood, bark, and other materials, which should have been put first; these, again, have no concern with the kingly science; any more than the arts (7) which provide food and nourishment for the human body, and which furnish occupation to the husbandman, huntsman, doctor, cook, and the like, but not to the king or statesman. Further, there are small things, such as coins, seals, stamps, which may with a little violence be comprehended in one of the above-mentioned classes. Thus they will embrace every species of property with the exception of animals,--but these have been already included in the art of tending herds. There remains only the class of slaves or ministers, among whom I expect that the real rivals of the king will be discovered. I am not speaking of the veritable slave bought with money, nor of the hireling who lets himself out for service, nor of the trader or merchant, who at best can only lay claim to economical and not to royal science. Nor am I referring to government officials, such as heralds and scribes, for these are only the servants of the rulers, and not the rulers themselves. I admit that there may be something strange in any servants pretending to be masters, but I hardly think that I could have been wrong in supposing that the principal claimants to the throne will be of this class. Let us try once more: There are diviners and priests, who are full of pride and prerogative; these, as the law declares, know how to give acceptable gifts to the gods, and in many parts of Hellas the duty of performing solemn sacrifices is assigned to the chief magistrate, as at Athens to the King Archon. At last, then, we have found a trace of those whom we were seeking. But still they are only servants and ministers. And who are these who next come into view in various forms of men and animals and other monsters appearing--lions and centaurs and satyrs--who are these? I did not know them at first, for every one looks strange when he is unexpected. But now I recognize the politician and his troop, the chief of Sophists, the prince of charlatans, the most accomplished of wizards, who must be carefully distinguished from the true king or statesman. And here I will interpose a question: What are the true forms of government? Are they not three--monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy? and the distinctions of freedom and compulsion, law and no law, poverty and riches expand these three into six. Monarchy may be divided into royalty and tyranny; oligarchy into aristocracy and plutocracy; and democracy may observe the law or may not observe it. But are any of these governments worthy of the name? Is not government a science, and are we to suppose that scientific government is secured by the rulers being many or few, rich or poor, or by the rule being compulsory or voluntary? Can the many attain to science? In no Hellenic city are there fifty good draught players, and certainly there are not as many kings, for by kings we mean all those who are possessed of the political science. A true government must therefore be the government of one, or of a few. And they may govern us either with or without law, and whether they are poor or rich, and however they govern, provided they govern on some scientific principle,--it makes no difference. And as the physician may cure us with our will, or against our will, and by any mode of treatment, burning, bleeding, lowering, fattening, if he only proceeds scientifically: so the true governor may reduce or fatten or bleed the body corporate, while he acts according to the rules of his art, and with a view to the good of the state, whether according to law or without law. 'I do not like the notion, that there can be good government without law.' I must explain: Law-making certainly is the business of a king; and yet the best thing of all is, not that the law should rule, but that the king should rule, for the varieties of circumstances are endless, and no simple or universal rule can suit them all, or last for ever. The law is just an ignorant brute of a tyrant, who insists always on his commands being fulfilled under all circumstances. 'Then why have we laws at all?' I will answer that question by asking you whether the training master gives a different discipline to each of his pupils, or whether he has a general rule of diet and exercise which is suited to the constitutions of the majority? 'The latter.' The legislator, too, is obliged to lay down general laws, and cannot enact what is precisely suitable to each particular case. He cannot be sitting at every man's side all his life, and prescribe for him the minute particulars of his duty, and therefore he is compelled to impose on himself and others the restriction of a written law. Let me suppose now, that a physician or trainer, having left directions for his patients or pupils, goes into a far country, and comes back sooner than he intended; owing to some unexpected change in the weather, the patient or pupil seems to require a different mode of treatment: Would he persist in his old commands, under the idea that all others are noxious and heterodox? Viewed in the light of science, would not the continuance of such regulations be ridiculous? And if the legislator, or another like him, comes back from a far country, is he to be prohibited from altering his own laws? The common people say: Let a man persuade the city first, and then let him impose new laws. But is a physician only to cure his patients by persuasion, and not by force? Is he a worse physician who uses a little gentle violence in effecting the cure? Or shall we say, that the violence is just, if exercised by a rich man, and unjust, if by a poor man? May not any man, rich or poor, with or without law, and whether the citizens like or not, do what is for their good? The pilot saves the lives of the crew, not by laying down rules, but by making his art a law, and, like him, the true governor has a strength of art which is superior to the law. This is scientific government, and all others are imitations only. Yet no great number of persons can attain to this science. And hence follows an important result. The true political principle is to assert the inviolability of the law, which, though not the best thing possible, is best for the imperfect condition of man. I will explain my meaning by an illustration:--Suppose that mankind, indignant at the rogueries and caprices of physicians and pilots, call together an assembly, in which all who like may speak, the skilled as well as the unskilled, and that in their assembly they make decrees for regulating the practice of navigation and medicine which are to be binding on these professions for all time. Suppose that they elect annually by vote or lot those to whom authority in either department is to be delegated. And let us further imagine, that when the term of their magistracy has expired, the magistrates appointed by them are summoned before an ignorant and unprofessional court, and may be condemned and punished for breaking the regulations. They even go a step further, and enact, that he who is found enquiring into the truth of navigation and medicine, and is seeking to be wise above what is written, shall be called not an artist, but a dreamer, a prating Sophist and a corruptor of youth; and if he try to persuade others to investigate those sciences in a manner contrary to the law, he shall be punished with the utmost severity. And like rules might be extended to any art or science. But what would be the consequence? 'The arts would utterly perish, and human life, which is bad enough already, would become intolerable.' But suppose, once more, that we were to appoint some one as the guardian of the law, who was both ignorant and interested, and who perverted the law: would not this be a still worse evil than the other? 'Certainly.' For the laws are based on some experience and wisdom. Hence the wiser course is, that they should be observed, although this is not the best thing of all, but only the second best. And whoever, having skill, should try to improve them, would act in the spirit of the law-giver. But then, as we have seen, no great number of men, whether poor or rich, can be makers of laws. And so, the nearest approach to true government is, when men do nothing contrary to their own written laws and national customs. When the rich preserve their customs and maintain the law, this is called aristocracy, or if they neglect the law, oligarchy. When an individual rules according to law, whether by the help of science or opinion, this is called monarchy; and when he has royal science he is a king, whether he be so in fact or not; but when he rules in spite of law, and is blind with ignorance and passion, he is called a tyrant. These forms of government exist, because men despair of the true king ever appearing among them; if he were to appear, they would joyfully hand over to him the reins of government. But, as there is no natural ruler of the hive, they meet together and make laws. And do we wonder, when the foundation of politics is in the letter only, at the miseries of states? Ought we not rather to admire the strength of the political bond? For cities have endured the worst of evils time out of mind; many cities have been shipwrecked, and some are like ships foundering, because their pilots are absolutely ignorant of the science which they profess. Let us next ask, which of these untrue forms of government is the least bad, and which of them is the worst? I said at the beginning, that each of the three forms of government, royalty, aristocracy, and democracy, might be divided into two, so that the whole number of them, including the best, will be seven. Under monarchy we have already distinguished royalty and tyranny; of oligarchy there were two kinds, aristocracy and plutocracy; and democracy may also be divided, for there is a democracy which observes, and a democracy which neglects, the laws. The government of one is the best and the worst--the government of a few is less bad and less good--the government of the many is the least bad and least good of them all, being the best of all lawless governments, and the worst of all lawful ones. But the rulers of all these states, unless they have knowledge, are maintainers of idols, and themselves idols--wizards, and also Sophists; for, after many windings, the term 'Sophist' comes home to them. And now enough of centaurs and satyrs: the play is ended, and they may quit the political stage. Still there remain some other and better elements, which adhere to the royal science, and must be drawn off in the refiner's fire before the gold can become quite pure. The arts of the general, the judge, and the orator, will have to be separated from the royal art; when the separation has been made, the nature of the king will be unalloyed. Now there are inferior sciences, such as music and others; and there is a superior science, which determines whether music is to be learnt or not, and this is different from them, and the governor of them. The science which determines whether we are to use persuasion, or not, is higher than the art of persuasion; the science which determines whether we are to go to war, is higher than the art of the general. The science which makes the laws, is higher than that which only administers them. And the science which has this authority over the rest, is the science of the king or statesman. Once more we will endeavour to view this royal science by the light of our example. We may compare the state to a web, and I will show you how the different threads are drawn into one. You would admit--would you not?--that there are parts of virtue (although this position is sometimes assailed by Eristics), and one part of virtue is temperance, and another courage. These are two principles which are in a manner antagonistic to one another; and they pervade all nature; the whole class of the good and beautiful is included under them. The beautiful may be subdivided into two lesser classes: one of these is described by us in terms expressive of motion or energy, and the other in terms expressive of rest and quietness. We say, how manly! how vigorous! how ready! and we say also, how calm! how temperate! how dignified! This opposition of terms is extended by us to all actions, to the tones of the voice, the notes of music, the workings of the mind, the characters of men. The two classes both have their exaggerations; and the exaggerations of the one are termed 'hardness,' 'violence,' 'madness;' of the other 'cowardliness,' or 'sluggishness.' And if we pursue the enquiry, we find that these opposite characters are naturally at variance, and can hardly be reconciled. In lesser matters the antagonism between them is ludicrous, but in the State may be the occasion of grave disorders, and may disturb the whole course of human life. For the orderly class are always wanting to be at peace, and hence they pass imperceptibly into the condition of slaves; and the courageous sort are always wanting to go to war, even when the odds are against them, and are soon destroyed by their enemies. But the true art of government, first preparing the material by education, weaves the two elements into one, maintaining authority over the carders of the wool, and selecting the proper subsidiary arts which are necessary for making the web. The royal science is queen of educators, and begins by choosing the natures which she is to train, punishing with death and exterminating those who are violently carried away to atheism and injustice, and enslaving those who are wallowing in the mire of ignorance. The rest of the citizens she blends into one, combining the stronger element of courage, which we may call the warp, with the softer element of temperance, which we may imagine to be the woof. These she binds together, first taking the eternal elements of the honourable, the good, and the just, and fastening them with a divine cord in a heaven-born nature, and then fastening the animal elements with a human cord. The good legislator can implant by education the higher principles; and where they exist there is no difficulty in inserting the lesser human bonds, by which the State is held together; these are the laws of intermarriage, and of union for the sake of offspring. Most persons in their marriages seek after wealth or power; or they are clannish, and choose those who are like themselves,--the temperate marrying the temperate, and the courageous the courageous. The two classes thrive and flourish at first, but they soon degenerate; the one become mad, and the other feeble and useless. This would not have been the case, if they had both originally held the same notions about the honourable and the good; for then they never would have allowed the temperate natures to be separated from the courageous, but they would have bound them together by common honours and reputations, by intermarriages, and by the choice of rulers who combine both qualities. The temperate are careful and just, but are wanting in the power of action; the courageous fall short of them in justice, but in action are superior to them: and no state can prosper in which either of these qualities is wanting. The noblest and best of all webs or states is that which the royal science weaves, combining the two sorts of natures in a single texture, and in this enfolding freeman and slave and every other social element, and presiding over them all. 'Your picture, Stranger, of the king and statesman, no less than of the Sophist, is quite perfect.' ... The principal subjects in the Statesman may be conveniently embraced under six or seven heads:--(1) the myth; (2) the dialectical interest; (3) the political aspects of the dialogue; (4) the satirical and paradoxical vein; (5) the necessary imperfection of law; (6) the relation of the work to the other writings of Plato; lastly (7), we may briefly consider the genuineness of the Sophist and Statesman, which can hardly be assumed without proof, since the two dialogues have been questioned by three such eminent Platonic scholars as Socher, Schaarschmidt, and Ueberweg. I. The hand of the master is clearly visible in the myth. First in the connection with mythology;--he wins a kind of verisimilitude for this as for his other myths, by adopting received traditions, of which he pretends to find an explanation in his own larger conception (compare Introduction to Critias). The young Socrates has heard of the sun rising in the west and setting in the east, and of the earth-born men; but he has never heard the origin of these remarkable phenomena. Nor is Plato, here or elsewhere, wanting in denunciations of the incredulity of 'this latter age,' on which the lovers of the marvellous have always delighted to enlarge. And he is not without express testimony to the truth of his narrative;--such testimony as, in the Timaeus, the first men gave of the names of the gods ('They must surely have known their own ancestors'). For the first generation of the new cycle, who lived near the time, are supposed to have preserved a recollection of a previous one. He also appeals to internal evidence, viz. the perfect coherence of the tale, though he is very well aware, as he says in the Cratylus, that there may be consistency in error as well as in truth. The gravity and minuteness with which some particulars are related also lend an artful aid. The profound interest and ready assent of the young Socrates, who is not too old to be amused 'with a tale which a child would love to hear,' are a further assistance. To those who were naturally inclined to believe that the fortunes of mankind are influenced by the stars, or who maintained that some one principle, like the principle of the Same and the Other in the Timaeus, pervades all things in the world, the reversal of the motion of the heavens seemed necessarily to produce a reversal of the order of human life. The spheres of knowledge, which to us appear wide asunder as the poles, astronomy and medicine, were naturally connected in the minds of early thinkers, because there was little or nothing in the space between them. Thus there is a basis of philosophy, on which the improbabilities of the tale may be said to rest. These are some of the devices by which Plato, like a modern novelist, seeks to familiarize the marvellous. The myth, like that of the Timaeus and Critias, is rather historical than poetical, in this respect corresponding to the general change in the later writings of Plato, when compared with the earlier ones. It is hardly a myth in the sense in which the term might be applied to the myth of the Phaedrus, the Republic, the Phaedo, or the Gorgias, but may be more aptly compared with the didactic tale in which Protagoras describes the fortunes of primitive man, or with the description of the gradual rise of a new society in the Third Book of the Laws. Some discrepancies may be observed between the mythology of the Statesman and the Timaeus, and between the Timaeus and the Republic. But there is no reason to expect that all Plato's visions of a former, any more than of a future, state of existence, should conform exactly to the same pattern. We do not find perfect consistency in his philosophy; and still less have we any right to demand this of him in his use of mythology and figures of speech. And we observe that while employing all the resources of a writer of fiction to give credibility to his tales, he is not disposed to insist upon their literal truth. Rather, as in the Phaedo, he says, 'Something of the kind is true;' or, as in the Gorgias, 'This you will think to be an old wife's tale, but you can think of nothing truer;' or, as in the Statesman, he describes his work as a 'mass of mythology,' which was introduced in order to teach certain lessons; or, as in the Phaedrus, he secretly laughs at such stories while refusing to disturb the popular belief in them. The greater interest of the myth consists in the philosophical lessons which Plato presents to us in this veiled form. Here, as in the tale of Er, the son of Armenius, he touches upon the question of freedom and necessity, both in relation to God and nature. For at first the universe is governed by the immediate providence of God,--this is the golden age,--but after a while the wheel is reversed, and man is left to himself. Like other theologians and philosophers, Plato relegates his explanation of the problem to a transcendental world; he speaks of what in modern language might be termed 'impossibilities in the nature of things,' hindering God from continuing immanent in the world. But there is some inconsistency; for the 'letting go' is spoken of as a divine act, and is at the same time attributed to the necessary imperfection of matter; there is also a numerical necessity for the successive births of souls. At first, man and the world retain their divine instincts, but gradually degenerate. As in the Book of Genesis, the first fall of man is succeeded by a second; the misery and wickedness of the world increase continually. The reason of this further decline is supposed to be the disorganisation of matter: the latent seeds of a former chaos are disengaged, and envelope all things. The condition of man becomes more and more miserable; he is perpetually waging an unequal warfare with the beasts. At length he obtains such a measure of education and help as is necessary for his existence. Though deprived of God's help, he is not left wholly destitute; he has received from Athene and Hephaestus a knowledge of the arts; other gods give him seeds and plants; and out of these human life is reconstructed. He now eats bread in the sweat of his brow, and has dominion over the animals, subjected to the conditions of his nature, and yet able to cope with them by divine help. Thus Plato may be said to represent in a figure--(1) the state of innocence; (2) the fall of man; (3) the still deeper decline into barbarism; (4) the restoration of man by the partial interference of God, and the natural growth of the arts and of civilised society. Two lesser features of this description should not pass unnoticed:--(1) the primitive men are supposed to be created out of the earth, and not after the ordinary manner of human generation--half the causes of moral evil are in this way removed; (2) the arts are attributed to a divine revelation: and so the greatest difficulty in the history of pre-historic man is solved. Though no one knew better than Plato that the introduction of the gods is not a reason, but an excuse for not giving a reason (Cratylus), yet, considering that more than two thousand years later mankind are still discussing these problems, we may be satisfied to find in Plato a statement of the difficulties which arise in conceiving the relation of man to God and nature, without expecting to obtain from him a solution of them. In such a tale, as in the Phaedrus, various aspects of the Ideas were doubtless indicated to Plato's own mind, as the corresponding theological problems are to us. The immanence of things in the Ideas, or the partial separation of them, and the self-motion of the supreme Idea, are probably the forms in which he would have interpreted his own parable. He touches upon another question of great interest--the consciousness of evil--what in the Jewish Scriptures is called 'eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.' At the end of the narrative, the Eleatic asks his companion whether this life of innocence, or that which men live at present, is the better of the two. He wants to distinguish between the mere animal life of innocence, the 'city of pigs,' as it is comically termed by Glaucon in the Republic, and the higher life of reason and philosophy. But as no one can determine the state of man in the world before the Fall, 'the question must remain unanswered.' Similar questions have occupied the minds of theologians in later ages; but they can hardly be said to have found an answer. Professor Campbell well observes, that the general spirit of the myth may be summed up in the words of the Lysis: 'If evil were to perish, should we hunger any more, or thirst any more, or have any similar sensations? Yet perhaps the question what will or will not be is a foolish one, for who can tell?' As in the Theaetetus, evil is supposed to continue,--here, as the consequence of a former state of the world, a sort of mephitic vapour exhaling from some ancient chaos,--there, as involved in the possibility of good, and incident to the mixed state of man. Once more--and this is the point of connexion with the rest of the dialogue--the myth is intended to bring out the difference between the ideal and the actual state of man. In all ages of the world men have dreamed of a state of perfection, which has been, and is to be, but never is, and seems to disappear under the necessary conditions of human society. The uselessness, the danger, the true value of such political ideals have often been discussed; youth is too ready to believe in them; age to disparage them. Plato's 'prudens quaestio' respecting the comparative happiness of men in this and in a former cycle of existence is intended to elicit this contrast between the golden age and 'the life under Zeus' which is our own. To confuse the divine and human, or hastily apply one to the other, is a 'tremendous error.' Of the ideal or divine government of the world we can form no true or adequate conception; and this our mixed state of life, in which we are partly left to ourselves, but not wholly deserted by the gods, may contain some higher elements of good and knowledge than could have existed in the days of innocence under the rule of Cronos. So we may venture slightly to enlarge a Platonic thought which admits of a further application to Christian theology. Here are suggested also the distinctions between God causing and permitting evil, and between his more and less immediate government of the world. II. The dialectical interest of the Statesman seems to contend in Plato's mind with the political; the dialogue might have been designated by two equally descriptive titles--either the 'Statesman,' or 'Concerning Method.' Dialectic, which in the earlier writings of Plato is a revival of the Socratic question and answer applied to definition, is now occupied with classification; there is nothing in which he takes greater delight than in processes of division (compare Phaedr.); he pursues them to a length out of proportion to his main subject, and appears to value them as a dialectical exercise, and for their own sake. A poetical vision of some order or hierarchy of ideas or sciences has already been floating before us in the Symposium and the Republic. And in the Phaedrus this aspect of dialectic is further sketched out, and the art of rhetoric is based on the division of the characters of mankind into their several classes. The same love of divisions is apparent in the Gorgias. But in a well-known passage of the Philebus occurs the first criticism on the nature of classification. There we are exhorted not to fall into the common error of passing from unity to infinity, but to find the intermediate classes; and we are reminded that in any process of generalization, there may be more than one class to which individuals may be referred, and that we must carry on the process of division until we have arrived at the infima species. These precepts are not forgotten, either in the Sophist or in the Statesman. The Sophist contains four examples of division, carried on by regular steps, until in four different lines of descent we detect the Sophist. In the Statesman the king or statesman is discovered by a similar process; and we have a summary, probably made for the first time, of possessions appropriated by the labour of man, which are distributed into seven classes. We are warned against preferring the shorter to the longer method;--if we divide in the middle, we are most likely to light upon species; at the same time, the important remark is made, that 'a part is not to be confounded with a class.' Having discovered the genus under which the king falls, we proceed to distinguish him from the collateral species. To assist our imagination in making this separation, we require an example. The higher ideas, of which we have a dreamy knowledge, can only be represented by images taken from the external world. But, first of all, the nature of example is explained by an example. The child is taught to read by comparing the letters in words which he knows with the same letters in unknown combinations; and this is the sort of process which we are about to attempt. As a parallel to the king we select the worker in wool, and compare the art of weaving with the royal science, trying to separate either of them from the inferior classes to which they are akin. This has the incidental advantage, that weaving and the web furnish us with a figure of speech, which we can afterwards transfer to the State. There are two uses of examples or images--in the first place, they suggest thoughts--secondly, they give them a distinct form. In the infancy of philosophy, as in childhood, the language of pictures is natural to man: truth in the abstract is hardly won, and only by use familiarized to the mind. Examples are akin to analogies, and have a reflex influence on thought; they people the vacant mind, and may often originate new directions of enquiry. Plato seems to be conscious of the suggestiveness of imagery; the general analogy of the arts is constantly employed by him as well as the comparison of particular arts--weaving, the refining of gold, the learning to read, music, statuary, painting, medicine, the art of the pilot--all of which occur in this dialogue alone: though he is also aware that 'comparisons are slippery things,' and may often give a false clearness to ideas. We shall find, in the Philebus, a division of sciences into practical and speculative, and into more or less speculative: here we have the idea of master-arts, or sciences which control inferior ones. Besides the supreme science of dialectic, 'which will forget us, if we forget her,' another master-science for the first time appears in view--the science of government, which fixes the limits of all the rest. This conception of the political or royal science as, from another point of view, the science of sciences, which holds sway over the rest, is not originally found in Aristotle, but in Plato. The doctrine that virtue and art are in a mean, which is familiarized to us by the study of the Nicomachean Ethics, is also first distinctly asserted in the Statesman of Plato. The too much and the too little are in restless motion: they must be fixed by a mean, which is also a standard external to them. The art of measuring or finding a mean between excess and defect, like the principle of division in the Phaedrus, receives a particular application to the art of discourse. The excessive length of a discourse may be blamed; but who can say what is excess, unless he is furnished with a measure or standard? Measure is the life of the arts, and may some day be discovered to be the single ultimate principle in which all the sciences are contained. Other forms of thought may be noted--the distinction between causal and co-operative arts, which may be compared with the distinction between primary and co-operative causes in the Timaeus; or between cause and condition in the Phaedo; the passing mention of economical science; the opposition of rest and motion, which is found in all nature; the general conception of two great arts of composition and division, in which are contained weaving, politics, dialectic; and in connexion with the conception of a mean, the two arts of measuring. In the Theaetetus, Plato remarks that precision in the use of terms, though sometimes pedantic, is sometimes necessary. Here he makes the opposite reflection, that there may be a philosophical disregard of words. The evil of mere verbal oppositions, the requirement of an impossible accuracy in the use of terms, the error of supposing that philosophy was to be found in language, the danger of word-catching, have frequently been discussed by him in the previous dialogues, but nowhere has the spirit of modern inductive philosophy been more happily indicated than in the words of the Statesman:--'If you think more about things, and less about words, you will be richer in wisdom as you grow older.' A similar spirit is discernible in the remarkable expressions, 'the long and difficult language of facts;' and 'the interrogation of every nature, in order to obtain the particular contribution of each to the store of knowledge.' Who has described 'the feeble intelligence of all things; given by metaphysics better than the Eleatic Stranger in the words--'The higher ideas can hardly be set forth except through the medium of examples; every man seems to know all things in a kind of dream, and then again nothing when he is awake?' Or where is the value of metaphysical pursuits more truly expressed than in the words,--'The greatest and noblest things have no outward image of themselves visible to man: therefore we should learn to give a rational account of them?' III. The political aspects of the dialogue are closely connected with the dialectical. As in the Cratylus, the legislator has 'the dialectician standing on his right hand;' so in the Statesman, the king or statesman is the dialectician, who, although he may be in a private station, is still a king. Whether he has the power or not, is a mere accident; or rather he has the power, for what ought to be is ('Was ist vernunftig, das ist wirklich'); and he ought to be and is the true governor of mankind. There is a reflection in this idealism of the Socratic 'Virtue is knowledge;' and, without idealism, we may remark that knowledge is a great part of power. Plato does not trouble himself to construct a machinery by which 'philosophers shall be made kings,' as in the Republic: he merely holds up the ideal, and affirms that in some sense science is really supreme over human life. He is struck by the observation 'quam parva sapientia regitur mundus,' and is touched with a feeling of the ills which afflict states. The condition of Megara before and during the Peloponnesian War, of Athens under the Thirty and afterwards, of Syracuse and the other Sicilian cities in their alternations of democratic excess and tyranny, might naturally suggest such reflections. Some states he sees already shipwrecked, others foundering for want of a pilot; and he wonders not at their destruction, but at their endurance. For they ought to have perished long ago, if they had depended on the wisdom of their rulers. The mingled pathos and satire of this remark is characteristic of Plato's later style. The king is the personification of political science. And yet he is something more than this,--the perfectly good and wise tyrant of the Laws, whose will is better than any law. He is the special providence who is always interfering with and regulating all things. Such a conception has sometimes been entertained by modern theologians, and by Plato himself, of the Supreme Being. But whether applied to Divine or to human governors the conception is faulty for two reasons, neither of which are noticed by Plato:--first, because all good government supposes a degree of co-operation in the ruler and his subjects,--an 'education in politics' as well as in moral virtue; secondly, because government, whether Divine or human, implies that the subject has a previous knowledge of the rules under which he is living. There is a fallacy, too, in comparing unchangeable laws with a personal governor. For the law need not necessarily be an 'ignorant and brutal tyrant,' but gentle and humane, capable of being altered in the spirit of the legislator, and of being administered so as to meet the cases of individuals. Not only in fact, but in idea, both elements must remain--the fixed law and the living will; the written word and the spirit; the principles of obligation and of freedom; and their applications whether made by law or equity in particular cases. There are two sides from which positive laws may be attacked:--either from the side of nature, which rises up and rebels against them in the spirit of Callicles in the Gorgias; or from the side of idealism, which attempts to soar above them,--and this is the spirit of Plato in the Statesman. But he soon falls, like Icarus, and is content to walk instead of flying; that is, to accommodate himself to the actual state of human things. Mankind have long been in despair of finding the true ruler; and therefore are ready to acquiesce in any of the five or six received forms of government as better than none. And the best thing which they can do (though only the second best in reality), is to reduce the ideal state to the conditions of actual life. Thus in the Statesman, as in the Laws, we have three forms of government, which we may venture to term, (1) the ideal, (2) the practical, (3) the sophistical--what ought to be, what might be, what is. And thus Plato seems to stumble, almost by accident, on the notion of a constitutional monarchy, or of a monarchy ruling by laws. The divine foundations of a State are to be laid deep in education (Republic), and at the same time some little violence may be used in exterminating natures which are incapable of education (compare Laws). Plato is strongly of opinion that the legislator, like the physician, may do men good against their will (compare Gorgias). The human bonds of states are formed by the inter-marriage of dispositions adapted to supply the defects of each other. As in the Republic, Plato has observed that there are opposite natures in the world, the strong and the gentle, the courageous and the temperate, which, borrowing an expression derived from the image of weaving, he calls the warp and the woof of human society. To interlace these is the crowning achievement of political science. In the Protagoras, Socrates was maintaining that there was only one virtue, and not many: now Plato is inclined to think that there are not only parallel, but opposite virtues, and seems to see a similar opposition pervading all art and nature. But he is satisfied with laying down the principle, and does not inform us by what further steps the union of opposites is to be effected. In the loose framework of a single dialogue Plato has thus combined two distinct subjects--politics and method. Yet they are not so far apart as they appear: in his own mind there was a secret link of connexion between them. For the philosopher or dialectician is also the only true king or statesman. In the execution of his plan Plato has invented or distinguished several important forms of thought, and made incidentally many valuable remarks. Questions of interest both in ancient and modern politics also arise in the course of the dialogue, which may with advantage be further considered by us:-- a. The imaginary ruler, whether God or man, is above the law, and is a law to himself and to others. Among the Greeks as among the Jews, law was a sacred name, the gift of God, the bond of states. But in the Statesman of Plato, as in the New Testament, the word has also become the symbol of an imperfect good, which is almost an evil. The law sacrifices the individual to the universal, and is the tyranny of the many over the few (compare Republic). It has fixed rules which are the props of order, and will not swerve or bend in extreme cases. It is the beginning of political society, but there is something higher--an intelligent ruler, whether God or man, who is able to adapt himself to the endless varieties of circumstances. Plato is fond of picturing the advantages which would result from the union of the tyrant who has power with the legislator who has wisdom: he regards this as the best and speediest way of reforming mankind. But institutions cannot thus be artificially created, nor can the external authority of a ruler impose laws for which a nation is unprepared. The greatest power, the highest wisdom, can only proceed one or two steps in advance of public opinion. In all stages of civilization human nature, after all our efforts, remains intractable,--not like clay in the hands of the potter, or marble under the chisel of the sculptor. Great changes occur in the history of nations, but they are brought about slowly, like the changes in the frame of nature, upon which the puny arm of man hardly makes an impression. And, speaking generally, the slowest growths, both in nature and in politics, are the most permanent. b. Whether the best form of the ideal is a person or a law may fairly be doubted. The former is more akin to us: it clothes itself in poetry and art, and appeals to reason more in the form of feeling: in the latter there is less danger of allowing ourselves to be deluded by a figure of speech. The ideal of the Greek state found an expression in the deification of law: the ancient Stoic spoke of a wise man perfect in virtue, who was fancifully said to be a king; but neither they nor Plato had arrived at the conception of a person who was also a law. Nor is it easy for the Christian to think of God as wisdom, truth, holiness, and also as the wise, true, and holy one. He is always wanting to break through the abstraction and interrupt the law, in order that he may present to himself the more familiar image of a divine friend. While the impersonal has too slender a hold upon the affections to be made the basis of religion, the conception of a person on the other hand tends to degenerate into a new kind of idolatry. Neither criticism nor experience allows us to suppose that there are interferences with the laws of nature; the idea is inconceivable to us and at variance with facts. The philosopher or theologian who could realize to mankind that a person is a law, that the higher rule has no exception, that goodness, like knowledge, is also power, would breathe a new religious life into the world. c. Besides the imaginary rule of a philosopher or a God, the actual forms of government have to be considered. In the infancy of political science, men naturally ask whether the rule of the many or of the few is to be preferred. If by 'the few' we mean 'the good' and by 'the many,' 'the bad,' there can be but one reply: 'The rule of one good man is better than the rule of all the rest, if they are bad.' For, as Heracleitus says, 'One is ten thousand if he be the best.' If, however, we mean by the rule of the few the rule of a class neither better nor worse than other classes, not devoid of a feeling of right, but guided mostly by a sense of their own interests, and by the rule of the many the rule of all classes, similarly under the influence of mixed motives, no one would hesitate to answer--'The rule of all rather than one, because all classes are more likely to take care of all than one of another; and the government has greater power and stability when resting on a wider basis.' Both in ancient and modern times the best balanced form of government has been held to be the best; and yet it should not be so nicely balanced as to make action and movement impossible. The statesman who builds his hope upon the aristocracy, upon the middle classes, upon the people, will probably, if he have sufficient experience of them, conclude that all classes are much alike, and that one is as good as another, and that the liberties of no class are safe in the hands of the rest. The higher ranks have the advantage in education and manners, the middle and lower in industry and self-denial; in every class, to a certain extent, a natural sense of right prevails, sometimes communicated from the lower to the higher, sometimes from the higher to the lower, which is too strong for class interests. There have been crises in the history of nations, as at the time of the Crusades or the Reformation, or the French Revolution, when the same inspiration has taken hold of whole peoples, and permanently raised the sense of freedom and justice among mankind. But even supposing the different classes of a nation, when viewed impartially, to be on a level with each other in moral virtue, there remain two considerations of opposite kinds which enter into the problem of government. Admitting of course that the upper and lower classes are equal in the eye of God and of the law, yet the one may be by nature fitted to govern and the other to be governed. A ruling caste does not soon altogether lose the governing qualities, nor a subject class easily acquire them. Hence the phenomenon so often observed in the old Greek revolutions, and not without parallel in modern times, that the leaders of the democracy have been themselves of aristocratic origin. The people are expecting to be governed by representatives of their own, but the true man of the people either never appears, or is quickly altered by circumstances. Their real wishes hardly make themselves felt, although their lower interests and prejudices may sometimes be flattered and yielded to for the sake of ulterior objects by those who have political power. They will often learn by experience that the democracy has become a plutocracy. The influence of wealth, though not the enjoyment of it, has become diffused among the poor as well as among the rich; and society, instead of being safer, is more at the mercy of the tyrant, who, when things are at the worst, obtains a guard--that is, an army--and announces himself as the saviour. The other consideration is of an opposite kind. Admitting that a few wise men are likely to be better governors than the unwise many, yet it is not in their power to fashion an entire people according to their behest. When with the best intentions the benevolent despot begins his regime, he finds the world hard to move. A succession of good kings has at the end of a century left the people an inert and unchanged mass. The Roman world was not permanently improved by the hundred years of Hadrian and the Antonines. The kings of Spain during the last century were at least equal to any contemporary sovereigns in virtue and ability. In certain states of the world the means are wanting to render a benevolent power effectual. These means are not a mere external organisation of posts or telegraphs, hardly the introduction of new laws or modes of industry. A change must be made in the spirit of a people as well as in their externals. The ancient legislator did not really take a blank tablet and inscribe upon it the rules which reflection and experience had taught him to be for a nation's interest; no one would have obeyed him if he had. But he took the customs which he found already existing in a half-civilised state of society: these he reduced to form and inscribed on pillars; he defined what had before been undefined, and gave certainty to what was uncertain. No legislation ever sprang, like Athene, in full power out of the head either of God or man. Plato and Aristotle are sensible of the difficulty of combining the wisdom of the few with the power of the many. According to Plato, he is a physician who has the knowledge of a physician, and he is a king who has the knowledge of a king. But how the king, one or more, is to obtain the required power, is hardly at all considered by him. He presents the idea of a perfect government, but except the regulation for mixing different tempers in marriage, he never makes any provision for the attainment of it. Aristotle, casting aside ideals, would place the government in a middle class of citizens, sufficiently numerous for stability, without admitting the populace; and such appears to have been the constitution which actually prevailed for a short time at Athens--the rule of the Five Thousand--characterized by Thucydides as the best government of Athens which he had known. It may however be doubted how far, either in a Greek or modern state, such a limitation is practicable or desirable; for those who are left outside the pale will always be dangerous to those who are within, while on the other hand the leaven of the mob can hardly affect the representation of a great country. There is reason for the argument in favour of a property qualification; there is reason also in the arguments of those who would include all and so exhaust the political situation. The true answer to the question is relative to the circumstances of nations. How can we get the greatest intelligence combined with the greatest power? The ancient legislator would have found this question more easy than we do. For he would have required that all persons who had a share of government should have received their education from the state and have borne her burdens, and should have served in her fleets and armies. But though we sometimes hear the cry that we must 'educate the masses, for they are our masters,' who would listen to a proposal that the franchise should be confined to the educated or to those who fulfil political duties? Then again, we know that the masses are not our masters, and that they are more likely to become so if we educate them. In modern politics so many interests have to be consulted that we are compelled to do, not what is best, but what is possible. d. Law is the first principle of society, but it cannot supply all the wants of society, and may easily cause more evils than it cures. Plato is aware of the imperfection of law in failing to meet the varieties of circumstances: he is also aware that human life would be intolerable if every detail of it were placed under legal regulation. It may be a great evil that physicians should kill their patients or captains cast away their ships, but it would be a far greater evil if each particular in the practice of medicine or seamanship were regulated by law. Much has been said in modern times about the duty of leaving men to themselves, which is supposed to be the best way of taking care of them. The question is often asked, What are the limits of legislation in relation to morals? And the answer is to the same effect, that morals must take care of themselves. There is a one-sided truth in these answers, if they are regarded as condemnations of the interference with commerce in the last century or of clerical persecution in the Middle Ages. But 'laissez-faire' is not the best but only the second best. What the best is, Plato does not attempt to determine; he only contrasts the imperfection of law with the wisdom of the perfect ruler. Laws should be just, but they must also be certain, and we are obliged to sacrifice something of their justice to their certainty. Suppose a wise and good judge, who paying little or no regard to the law, attempted to decide with perfect justice the cases that were brought before him. To the uneducated person he would appear to be the ideal of a judge. Such justice has been often exercised in primitive times, or at the present day among eastern rulers. But in the first place it depends entirely on the personal character of the judge. He may be honest, but there is no check upon his dishonesty, and his opinion can only be overruled, not by any principle of law, but by the opinion of another judging like himself without law. In the second place, even if he be ever so honest, his mode of deciding questions would introduce an element of uncertainty into human life; no one would know beforehand what would happen to him, or would seek to conform in his conduct to any rule of law. For the compact which the law makes with men, that they shall be protected if they observe the law in their dealings with one another, would have to be substituted another principle of a more general character, that they shall be protected by the law if they act rightly in their dealings with one another. The complexity of human actions and also the uncertainty of their effects would be increased tenfold. For one of the principal advantages of law is not merely that it enforces honesty, but that it makes men act in the same way, and requires them to produce the same evidence of their acts. Too many laws may be the sign of a corrupt and overcivilized state of society, too few are the sign of an uncivilized one; as soon as commerce begins to grow, men make themselves customs which have the validity of laws. Even equity, which is the exception to the law, conforms to fixed rules and lies for the most part within the limits of previous decisions. IV. The bitterness of the Statesman is characteristic of Plato's later style, in which the thoughts of youth and love have fled away, and we are no longer tended by the Muses or the Graces. We do not venture to say that Plato was soured by old age, but certainly the kindliness and courtesy of the earlier dialogues have disappeared. He sees the world under a harder and grimmer aspect: he is dealing with the reality of things, not with visions or pictures of them: he is seeking by the aid of dialectic only, to arrive at truth. He is deeply impressed with the importance of classification: in this alone he finds the true measure of human things; and very often in the process of division curious results are obtained. For the dialectical art is no respecter of persons: king and vermin-taker are all alike to the philosopher. There may have been a time when the king was a god, but he now is pretty much on a level with his subjects in breeding and education. Man should be well advised that he is only one of the animals, and the Hellene in particular should be aware that he himself was the author of the distinction between Hellene and Barbarian, and that the Phrygian would equally divide mankind into Phrygians and Barbarians, and that some intelligent animal, like a crane, might go a step further, and divide the animal world into cranes and all other animals. Plato cannot help laughing (compare Theaet.) when he thinks of the king running after his subjects, like the pig-driver or the bird-taker. He would seriously have him consider how many competitors there are to his throne, chiefly among the class of serving-men. A good deal of meaning is lurking in the expression--'There is no art of feeding mankind worthy the name.' There is a similar depth in the remark,--'The wonder about states is not that they are short-lived, but that they last so long in spite of the badness of their rulers.' V. There is also a paradoxical element in the Statesman which delights in reversing the accustomed use of words. The law which to the Greek was the highest object of reverence is an ignorant and brutal tyrant--the tyrant is converted into a beneficent king. The sophist too is no longer, as in the earlier dialogues, the rival of the statesman, but assumes his form. Plato sees that the ideal of the state in his own day is more and more severed from the actual. From such ideals as he had once formed, he turns away to contemplate the decline of the Greek cities which were far worse now in his old age than they had been in his youth, and were to become worse and worse in the ages which followed. He cannot contain his disgust at the contemporary statesmen, sophists who had turned politicians, in various forms of men and animals, appearing, some like lions and centaurs, others like satyrs and monkeys. In this new disguise the Sophists make their last appearance on the scene: in the Laws Plato appears to have forgotten them, or at any rate makes only a slight allusion to them in a single passage (Laws). VI. The Statesman is naturally connected with the Sophist. At first sight we are surprised to find that the Eleatic Stranger discourses to us, not only concerning the nature of Being and Not-being, but concerning the king and statesman. We perceive, however, that there is no inappropriateness in his maintaining the character of chief speaker, when we remember the close connexion which is assumed by Plato to exist between politics and dialectic. In both dialogues the Proteus Sophist is exhibited, first, in the disguise of an Eristic, secondly, of a false statesman. There are several lesser features which the two dialogues have in common. The styles and the situations of the speakers are very similar; there is the same love of division, and in both of them the mind of the writer is greatly occupied about method, to which he had probably intended to return in the projected 'Philosopher.' The Statesman stands midway between the Republic and the Laws, and is also related to the Timaeus. The mythical or cosmical element reminds us of the Timaeus, the ideal of the Republic. A previous chaos in which the elements as yet were not, is hinted at both in the Timaeus and Statesman. The same ingenious arts of giving verisimilitude to a fiction are practised in both dialogues, and in both, as well as in the myth at the end of the Republic, Plato touches on the subject of necessity and free-will. The words in which he describes the miseries of states seem to be an amplification of the 'Cities will never cease from ill' of the Republic. The point of view in both is the same; and the differences not really important, e.g. in the myth, or in the account of the different kinds of states. But the treatment of the subject in the Statesman is fragmentary, and the shorter and later work, as might be expected, is less finished, and less worked out in detail. The idea of measure and the arrangement of the sciences supply connecting links both with the Republic and the Philebus. More than any of the preceding dialogues, the Statesman seems to approximate in thought and language to the Laws. There is the same decline and tendency to monotony in style, the same self-consciousness, awkwardness, and over-civility; and in the Laws is contained the pattern of that second best form of government, which, after all, is admitted to be the only attainable one in this world. The 'gentle violence,' the marriage of dissimilar natures, the figure of the warp and the woof, are also found in the Laws. Both expressly recognize the conception of a first or ideal state, which has receded into an invisible heaven. Nor does the account of the origin and growth of society really differ in them, if we make allowance for the mythic character of the narrative in the Statesman. The virtuous tyrant is common to both of them; and the Eleatic Stranger takes up a position similar to that of the Athenian Stranger in the Laws. VII. There would have been little disposition to doubt the genuineness of the Sophist and Statesman, if they had been compared with the Laws rather than with the Republic, and the Laws had been received, as they ought to be, on the authority of Aristotle and on the ground of their intrinsic excellence, as an undoubted work of Plato. The detailed consideration of the genuineness and order of the Platonic dialogues has been reserved for another place: a few of the reasons for defending the Sophist and Statesman may be given here. 1. The excellence, importance, and metaphysical originality of the two dialogues: no works at once so good and of such length are known to have proceeded from the hands of a forger. 2. The resemblances in them to other dialogues of Plato are such as might be expected to be found in works of the same author, and not in those of an imitator, being too subtle and minute to have been invented by another. The similar passages and turns of thought are generally inferior to the parallel passages in his earlier writings; and we might a priori have expected that, if altered, they would have been improved. But the comparison of the Laws proves that this repetition of his own thoughts and words in an inferior form is characteristic of Plato's later style. 3. The close connexion of them with the Theaetetus, Parmenides, and Philebus, involves the fate of these dialogues, as well as of the two suspected ones. 4. The suspicion of them seems mainly to rest on a presumption that in Plato's writings we may expect to find an uniform type of doctrine and opinion. But however we arrange the order, or narrow the circle of the dialogues, we must admit that they exhibit a growth and progress in the mind of Plato. And the appearance of change or progress is not to be regarded as impugning the genuineness of any particular writings, but may be even an argument in their favour. If we suppose the Sophist and Politicus to stand halfway between the Republic and the Laws, and in near connexion with the Theaetetus, the Parmenides, the Philebus, the arguments against them derived from differences of thought and style disappear or may be said without paradox in some degree to confirm their genuineness. There is no such interval between the Republic or Phaedrus and the two suspected dialogues, as that which separates all the earlier writings of Plato from the Laws. And the Theaetetus, Parmenides, and Philebus, supply links, by which, however different from them, they may be reunited with the great body of the Platonic writings. STATESMAN PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Theodorus, Socrates, The Eleatic Stranger, The Younger Socrates."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I owe you many thanks, indeed, Theodorus, for the acquaintance both of Theaetetus and of the Stranger."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"And in a little while, Socrates, you will owe me three times as many, when they have completed for you the delineation of the Statesman and of the Philosopher, as well as of the Sophist."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Sophist, statesman, philosopher! O my dear Theodorus, do my ears truly witness that this is the estimate formed of them by the great calculator and geometrician?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean that you rate them all at the same value, whereas they are really separated by an interval, which no geometrical ratio can express."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"By Ammon, the god of Cyrene, Socrates, that is a very fair hit; and shows that you have not forgotten your geometry. I will retaliate on you at some other time, but I must now ask the Stranger, who will not, I hope, tire of his goodness to us, to proceed either with the Statesman or with the Philosopher, whichever he prefers."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That is my duty, Theodorus; having begun I must go on, and not leave the work unfinished. But what shall be done with Theaetetus?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"In what respect?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Shall we relieve him, and take his companion, the Young Socrates, instead of him? What do you advise?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Yes, give the other a turn, as you propose. The young always do better when they have intervals of rest."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think, Stranger, that both of them may be said to be in some way related to me; for the one, as you affirm, has the cut of my ugly face (compare Theaet.), the other is called by my name. And we should always be on the look-out to recognize a kinsman by the style of his conversation. I myself was discoursing with Theaetetus yesterday, and I have just been listening to his answers; my namesake I have not yet examined, but I must. Another time will do for me; to-day let him answer you."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Very good. Young Socrates, do you hear what the elder Socrates is proposing? YOUNG SOCRATES: I do."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do you agree to his proposal? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"As you do not object, still less can I. After the Sophist, then, I think that the Statesman naturally follows next in the order of enquiry. And please to say, whether he, too, should be ranked among those who have science. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then the sciences must be divided as before? YOUNG SOCRATES: I dare say."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But yet the division will not be the same? YOUNG SOCRATES: How then?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"They will be divided at some other point. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Where shall we discover the path of the Statesman? We must find and separate off, and set our seal upon this, and we will set the mark of another class upon all diverging paths. Thus the soul will conceive of all kinds of knowledge under two classes. YOUNG SOCRATES: To find the path is your business, Stranger, and not mine."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, but the discovery, when once made, must be yours as well as mine. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Well, and are not arithmetic and certain other kindred arts, merely abstract knowledge, wholly separated from action? YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But in the art of carpentering and all other handicrafts, the knowledge of the workman is merged in his work; he not only knows, but he also makes things which previously did not exist. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then let us divide sciences in general into those which are practical and those which are purely intellectual. YOUNG SOCRATES: Let us assume these two divisions of science, which is one whole."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And are 'statesman,' 'king,' 'master,' or 'householder,' one and the same; or is there a science or art answering to each of these names? Or rather, allow me to put the matter in another way. YOUNG SOCRATES: Let me hear."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"If any one who is in a private station has the skill to advise one of the public physicians, must not he also be called a physician? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And if any one who is in a private station is able to advise the ruler of a country, may not he be said to have the knowledge which the ruler himself ought to have? YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But surely the science of a true king is royal science? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And will not he who possesses this knowledge, whether he happens to be a ruler or a private man, when regarded only in reference to his art, be truly called 'royal'? YOUNG SOCRATES: He certainly ought to be."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the householder and master are the same? YOUNG SOCRATES: Of course."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Again, a large household may be compared to a small state:--will they differ at all, as far as government is concerned? YOUNG SOCRATES: They will not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, returning to the point which we were just now discussing, do we not clearly see that there is one science of all of them; and this science may be called either royal or political or economical; we will not quarrel with any one about the name. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"This too, is evident, that the king cannot do much with his hands, or with his whole body, towards the maintenance of his empire, compared with what he does by the intelligence and strength of his mind. YOUNG SOCRATES: Clearly not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, shall we say that the king has a greater affinity to knowledge than to manual arts and to practical life in general? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly he has."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we may put all together as one and the same--statesmanship and the statesman--the kingly science and the king. YOUNG SOCRATES: Clearly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now we shall only be proceeding in due order if we go on to divide the sphere of knowledge? YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Think whether you can find any joint or parting in knowledge. YOUNG SOCRATES: Tell me of what sort."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Such as this: You may remember that we made an art of calculation? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Which was, unmistakeably, one of the arts of knowledge? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And to this art of calculation which discerns the differences of numbers shall we assign any other function except to pass judgment on their differences? YOUNG SOCRATES: How could we?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You know that the master-builder does not work himself, but is the ruler of workmen? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"He contributes knowledge, not manual labour? YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And may therefore be justly said to share in theoretical science? YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But he ought not, like the calculator, to regard his functions as at an end when he has formed a judgment;--he must assign to the individual workmen their appropriate task until they have completed the work. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Are not all such sciences, no less than arithmetic and the like, subjects of pure knowledge; and is not the difference between the two classes, that the one sort has the power of judging only, and the other of ruling as well? YOUNG SOCRATES: That is evident."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"May we not very properly say, that of all knowledge, there are two divisions--one which rules, and the other which judges? YOUNG SOCRATES: I should think so."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And when men have anything to do in common, that they should be of one mind is surely a desirable thing? YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then while we are at unity among ourselves, we need not mind about the fancies of others? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now, in which of these divisions shall we place the king?--Is he a judge and a kind of spectator? Or shall we assign to him the art of command--for he is a ruler? YOUNG SOCRATES: The latter, clearly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we must see whether there is any mark of division in the art of command too. I am inclined to think that there is a distinction similar to that of manufacturer and retail dealer, which parts off the king from the herald. YOUNG SOCRATES: How is this?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Why, does not the retailer receive and sell over again the productions of others, which have been sold before? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly he does."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And is not the herald under command, and does he not receive orders, and in his turn give them to others? YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then shall we mingle the kingly art in the same class with the art of the herald, the interpreter, the boatswain, the prophet, and the numerous kindred arts which exercise command; or, as in the preceding comparison we spoke of manufacturers, or sellers for themselves, and of retailers,--seeing, too, that the class of supreme rulers, or rulers for themselves, is almost nameless--shall we make a word following the same analogy, and refer kings to a supreme or ruling-for-self science, leaving the rest to receive a name from some one else? For we are seeking the ruler; and our enquiry is not concerned with him who is not a ruler. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Thus a very fair distinction has been attained between the man who gives his own commands, and him who gives another's. And now let us see if the supreme power allows of any further division. YOUNG SOCRATES: By all means."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I think that it does; and please to assist me in making the division. YOUNG SOCRATES: At what point?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"May not all rulers be supposed to command for the sake of producing something? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Nor is there any difficulty in dividing the things produced into two classes. YOUNG SOCRATES: How would you divide them?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Of the whole class, some have life and some are without life. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And by the help of this distinction we may make, if we please, a subdivision of the section of knowledge which commands. YOUNG SOCRATES: At what point?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"One part may be set over the production of lifeless, the other of living objects; and in this way the whole will be divided. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That division, then, is complete; and now we may leave one half, and take up the other; which may also be divided into two. YOUNG SOCRATES: Which of the two halves do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Of course that which exercises command about animals. For, surely, the royal science is not like that of a master-workman, a science presiding over lifeless objects;--the king has a nobler function, which is the management and control of living beings. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the breeding and tending of living beings may be observed to be sometimes a tending of the individual; in other cases, a common care of creatures in flocks? YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But the statesman is not a tender of individuals--not like the driver or groom of a single ox or horse; he is rather to be compared with the keeper of a drove of horses or oxen. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes, I see, thanks to you."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Shall we call this art of tending many animals together, the art of managing a herd, or the art of collective management? YOUNG SOCRATES: No matter;--whichever suggests itself to us in the course of conversation."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Very good, Socrates; and, if you continue to be not too particular about names, you will be all the richer in wisdom when you are an old man. And now, as you say, leaving the discussion of the name,--can you see a way in which a person, by showing the art of herding to be of two kinds, may cause that which is now sought amongst twice the number of things, to be then sought amongst half that number? YOUNG SOCRATES: I will try;--there appears to me to be one management of men and another of beasts."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You have certainly divided them in a most straightforward and manly style; but you have fallen into an error which hereafter I think that we had better avoid. YOUNG SOCRATES: What is the error?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I think that we had better not cut off a single small portion which is not a species, from many larger portions; the part should be a species. To separate off at once the subject of investigation, is a most excellent plan, if only the separation be rightly made; and you were under the impression that you were right, because you saw that you would come to man; and this led you to hasten the steps. But you should not chip off too small a piece, my friend; the safer way is to cut through the middle; which is also the more likely way of finding classes. Attention to this principle makes all the difference in a process of enquiry. YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean, Stranger?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I will endeavour to speak more plainly out of love to your good parts, Socrates; and, although I cannot at present entirely explain myself, I will try, as we proceed, to make my meaning a little clearer. YOUNG SOCRATES: What was the error of which, as you say, we were guilty in our recent division?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The error was just as if some one who wanted to divide the human race, were to divide them after the fashion which prevails in this part of the world; here they cut off the Hellenes as one species, and all the other species of mankind, which are innumerable, and have no ties or common language, they include under the single name of 'barbarians,' and because they have one name they are supposed to be of one species also. Or suppose that in dividing numbers you were to cut off ten thousand from all the rest, and make of it one species, comprehending the rest under another separate name, you might say that here too was a single class, because you had given it a single name. Whereas you would make a much better and more equal and logical classification of numbers, if you divided them into odd and even; or of the human species, if you divided them into male and female; and only separated off Lydians or Phrygians, or any other tribe, and arrayed them against the rest of the world, when you could no longer make a division into parts which were also classes. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true; but I wish that this distinction between a part and a class could still be made somewhat plainer."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"O Socrates, best of men, you are imposing upon me a very difficult task. We have already digressed further from our original intention than we ought, and you would have us wander still further away. But we must now return to our subject; and hereafter, when there is a leisure hour, we will follow up the other track; at the same time, I wish you to guard against imagining that you ever heard me declare-- YOUNG SOCRATES: What?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That a class and a part are distinct. YOUNG SOCRATES: What did I hear, then?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That a class is necessarily a part, but there is no similar necessity that a part should be a class; that is the view which I should always wish you to attribute to me, Socrates. YOUNG SOCRATES: So be it."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is another thing which I should like to know. YOUNG SOCRATES: What is it?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The point at which we digressed; for, if I am not mistaken, the exact place was at the question, Where you would divide the management of herds. To this you appeared rather too ready to answer that there were two species of animals; man being one, and all brutes making up the other. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I thought that in taking away a part, you imagined that the remainder formed a class, because you were able to call them by the common name of brutes. YOUNG SOCRATES: That again is true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Suppose now, O most courageous of dialecticians, that some wise and understanding creature, such as a crane is reputed to be, were, in imitation of you, to make a similar division, and set up cranes against all other animals to their own special glorification, at the same time jumbling together all the others, including man, under the appellation of brutes,--here would be the sort of error which we must try to avoid. YOUNG SOCRATES: How can we be safe?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"If we do not divide the whole class of animals, we shall be less likely to fall into that error. YOUNG SOCRATES: We had better not take the whole?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, there lay the source of error in our former division. YOUNG SOCRATES: How?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You remember how that part of the art of knowledge which was concerned with command, had to do with the rearing of living creatures,--I mean, with animals in herds? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In that case, there was already implied a division of all animals into tame and wild; those whose nature can be tamed are called tame, and those which cannot be tamed are called wild. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the political science of which we are in search, is and ever was concerned with tame animals, and is also confined to gregarious animals. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But then we ought not to divide, as we did, taking the whole class at once. Neither let us be in too great haste to arrive quickly at the political science; for this mistake has already brought upon us the misfortune of which the proverb speaks. YOUNG SOCRATES: What misfortune?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The misfortune of too much haste, which is too little speed. YOUNG SOCRATES: And all the better, Stranger;--we got what we deserved."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Very well: Let us then begin again, and endeavour to divide the collective rearing of animals; for probably the completion of the argument will best show what you are so anxious to know. Tell me, then-- YOUNG SOCRATES: What?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Have you ever heard, as you very likely may--for I do not suppose that you ever actually visited them--of the preserves of fishes in the Nile, and in the ponds of the Great King; or you may have seen similar preserves in wells at home? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes, to be sure, I have seen them, and I have often heard the others described."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And you may have heard also, and may have been assured by report, although you have not travelled in those regions, of nurseries of geese and cranes in the plains of Thessaly? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I asked you, because here is a new division of the management of herds, into the management of land and of water herds. YOUNG SOCRATES: There is."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do you agree that we ought to divide the collective rearing of herds into two corresponding parts, the one the rearing of water, and the other the rearing of land herds? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is surely no need to ask which of these two contains the royal art, for it is evident to everybody. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Any one can divide the herds which feed on dry land? YOUNG SOCRATES: How would you divide them?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I should distinguish between those which fly and those which walk. YOUNG SOCRATES: Most true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And where shall we look for the political animal? Might not an idiot, so to speak, know that he is a pedestrian? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The art of managing the walking animal has to be further divided, just as you might halve an even number. YOUNG SOCRATES: Clearly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let me note that here appear in view two ways to that part or class which the argument aims at reaching,--the one a speedier way, which cuts off a small portion and leaves a large; the other agrees better with the principle which we were laying down, that as far as we can we should divide in the middle; but it is longer. We can take either of them, whichever we please. YOUNG SOCRATES: Cannot we have both ways?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Together? What a thing to ask! but, if you take them in turn, you clearly may. YOUNG SOCRATES: Then I should like to have them in turn."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There will be no difficulty, as we are near the end; if we had been at the beginning, or in the middle, I should have demurred to your request; but now, in accordance with your desire, let us begin with the longer way; while we are fresh, we shall get on better. And now attend to the division. YOUNG SOCRATES: Let me hear."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The tame walking herding animals are distributed by nature into two classes. YOUNG SOCRATES: Upon what principle?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The one grows horns; and the other is without horns. YOUNG SOCRATES: Clearly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Suppose that you divide the science which manages pedestrian animals into two corresponding parts, and define them; for if you try to invent names for them, you will find the intricacy too great. YOUNG SOCRATES: How must I speak of them, then?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In this way: let the science of managing pedestrian animals be divided into two parts, and one part assigned to the horned herd, and the other to the herd that has no horns. YOUNG SOCRATES: All that you say has been abundantly proved, and may therefore be assumed."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The king is clearly the shepherd of a polled herd, who have no horns. YOUNG SOCRATES: That is evident."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Shall we break up this hornless herd into sections, and endeavour to assign to him what is his? YOUNG SOCRATES: By all means."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Shall we distinguish them by their having or not having cloven feet, or by their mixing or not mixing the breed? You know what I mean. YOUNG SOCRATES: What?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I mean that horses and asses naturally breed from one another. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But the remainder of the hornless herd of tame animals will not mix the breed. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And of which has the Statesman charge,--of the mixed or of the unmixed race? YOUNG SOCRATES: Clearly of the unmixed."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I suppose that we must divide this again as before. YOUNG SOCRATES: We must."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Every tame and herding animal has now been split up, with the exception of two species; for I hardly think that dogs should be reckoned among gregarious animals. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly not; but how shall we divide the two remaining species?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is a measure of difference which may be appropriately employed by you and Theaetetus, who are students of geometry. YOUNG SOCRATES: What is that?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The diameter; and, again, the diameter of a diameter. (Compare Meno.) YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"How does man walk, but as a diameter whose power is two feet? YOUNG SOCRATES: Just so."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the power of the remaining kind, being the power of twice two feet, may be said to be the diameter of our diameter. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly; and now I think that I pretty nearly understand you."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In these divisions, Socrates, I descry what would make another famous jest. YOUNG SOCRATES: What is it?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Human beings have come out in the same class with the freest and airiest of creation, and have been running a race with them. YOUNG SOCRATES: I remark that very singular coincidence."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And would you not expect the slowest to arrive last? YOUNG SOCRATES: Indeed I should."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And there is a still more ridiculous consequence, that the king is found running about with the herd and in close competition with the bird-catcher, who of all mankind is most of an adept at the airy life. (Plato is here introducing a new subdivision, i.e. that of bipeds into men and birds. Others however refer the passage to the division into quadrupeds and bipeds, making pigs compete with human beings and the pig-driver with the king. According to this explanation we must translate the words above, 'freest and airiest of creation,' 'worthiest and laziest of creation.') YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then here, Socrates, is still clearer evidence of the truth of what was said in the enquiry about the Sophist? (Compare Sophist.) YOUNG SOCRATES: What?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That the dialectical method is no respecter of persons, and does not set the great above the small, but always arrives in her own way at the truest result. YOUNG SOCRATES: Clearly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now, I will not wait for you to ask, but will of my own accord take you by the shorter road to the definition of a king. YOUNG SOCRATES: By all means."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I say that we should have begun at first by dividing land animals into biped and quadruped; and since the winged herd, and that alone, comes out in the same class with man, we should divide bipeds into those which have feathers and those which have not, and when they have been divided, and the art of the management of mankind is brought to light, the time will have come to produce our Statesman and ruler, and set him like a charioteer in his place, and hand over to him the reins of state, for that too is a vocation which belongs to him. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good; you have paid me the debt,--I mean, that you have completed the argument, and I suppose that you added the digression by way of interest. (Compare Republic.)"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then now, let us go back to the beginning, and join the links, which together make the definition of the name of the Statesman's art. YOUNG SOCRATES: By all means."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The science of pure knowledge had, as we said originally, a part which was the science of rule or command, and from this was derived another part, which was called command-for-self, on the analogy of selling-for-self; an important section of this was the management of living animals, and this again was further limited to the management of them in herds; and again in herds of pedestrian animals. The chief division of the latter was the art of managing pedestrian animals which are without horns; this again has a part which can only be comprehended under one term by joining together three names--shepherding pure-bred animals. The only further subdivision is the art of man-herding,--this has to do with bipeds, and is what we were seeking after, and have now found, being at once the royal and political. YOUNG SOCRATES: To be sure."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do you think, Socrates, that we really have done as you say? YOUNG SOCRATES: What?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Do you think, I mean, that we have really fulfilled our intention?--There has been a sort of discussion, and yet the investigation seems to me not to be perfectly worked out: this is where the enquiry fails. YOUNG SOCRATES: I do not understand."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I will try to make the thought, which is at this moment present in my mind, clearer to us both. YOUNG SOCRATES: Let me hear."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There were many arts of shepherding, and one of them was the political, which had the charge of one particular herd? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And this the argument defined to be the art of rearing, not horses or other brutes, but the art of rearing man collectively? YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Note, however, a difference which distinguishes the king from all other shepherds. YOUNG SOCRATES: To what do you refer?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I want to ask, whether any one of the other herdsmen has a rival who professes and claims to share with him in the management of the herd? YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I mean to say that merchants, husbandmen, providers of food, and also training-masters and physicians, will all contend with the herdsmen of humanity, whom we call Statesmen, declaring that they themselves have the care of rearing or managing mankind, and that they rear not only the common herd, but also the rulers themselves. YOUNG SOCRATES: Are they not right in saying so?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Very likely they may be, and we will consider their claim. But we are certain of this,--that no one will raise a similar claim as against the herdsman, who is allowed on all hands to be the sole and only feeder and physician of his herd; he is also their match-maker and accoucheur; no one else knows that department of science. And he is their merry-maker and musician, as far as their nature is susceptible of such influences, and no one can console and soothe his own herd better than he can, either with the natural tones of his voice or with instruments. And the same may be said of tenders of animals in general. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But if this is as you say, can our argument about the king be true and unimpeachable? Were we right in selecting him out of ten thousand other claimants to be the shepherd and rearer of the human flock? YOUNG SOCRATES: Surely not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Had we not reason just to now to apprehend, that although we may have described a sort of royal form, we have not as yet accurately worked out the true image of the Statesman? and that we cannot reveal him as he truly is in his own nature, until we have disengaged and separated him from those who hang about him and claim to share in his prerogatives? YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And that, Socrates, is what we must do, if we do not mean to bring disgrace upon the argument at its close. YOUNG SOCRATES: We must certainly avoid that."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then let us make a new beginning, and travel by a different road. YOUNG SOCRATES: What road?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I think that we may have a little amusement; there is a famous tale, of which a good portion may with advantage be interwoven, and then we may resume our series of divisions, and proceed in the old path until we arrive at the desired summit. Shall we do as I say? YOUNG SOCRATES: By all means."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Listen, then, to a tale which a child would love to hear; and you are not too old for childish amusement. YOUNG SOCRATES: Let me hear."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There did really happen, and will again happen, like many other events of which ancient tradition has preserved the record, the portent which is traditionally said to have occurred in the quarrel of Atreus and Thyestes. You have heard, no doubt, and remember what they say happened at that time? YOUNG SOCRATES: I suppose you to mean the token of the birth of the golden lamb."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"No, not that; but another part of the story, which tells how the sun and the stars once rose in the west, and set in the east, and that the god reversed their motion, and gave them that which they now have as a testimony to the right of Atreus. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes; there is that legend also."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Again, we have been often told of the reign of Cronos. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes, very often."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Did you ever hear that the men of former times were earth-born, and not begotten of one another? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes, that is another old tradition."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"All these stories, and ten thousand others which are still more wonderful, have a common origin; many of them have been lost in the lapse of ages, or are repeated only in a disconnected form; but the origin of them is what no one has told, and may as well be told now; for the tale is suited to throw light on the nature of the king. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good; and I hope that you will give the whole story, and leave out nothing."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Listen, then. There is a time when God himself guides and helps to roll the world in its course; and there is a time, on the completion of a certain cycle, when he lets go, and the world being a living creature, and having originally received intelligence from its author and creator, turns about and by an inherent necessity revolves in the opposite direction. YOUNG SOCRATES: Why is that?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Why, because only the most divine things of all remain ever unchanged and the same, and body is not included in this class. Heaven and the universe, as we have termed them, although they have been endowed by the Creator with many glories, partake of a bodily nature, and therefore cannot be entirely free from perturbation. But their motion is, as far as possible, single and in the same place, and of the same kind; and is therefore only subject to a reversal, which is the least alteration possible. For the lord of all moving things is alone able to move of himself; and to think that he moves them at one time in one direction and at another time in another is blasphemy. Hence we must not say that the world is either self-moved always, or all made to go round by God in two opposite courses; or that two Gods, having opposite purposes, make it move round. But as I have already said (and this is the only remaining alternative) the world is guided at one time by an external power which is divine and receives fresh life and immortality from the renewing hand of the Creator, and again, when let go, moves spontaneously, being set free at such a time as to have, during infinite cycles of years, a reverse movement: this is due to its perfect balance, to its vast size, and to the fact that it turns on the smallest pivot. YOUNG SOCRATES: Your account of the world seems to be very reasonable indeed."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us now reflect and try to gather from what has been said the nature of the phenomenon which we affirmed to be the cause of all these wonders. It is this. YOUNG SOCRATES: What?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The reversal which takes place from time to time of the motion of the universe. YOUNG SOCRATES: How is that the cause?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Of all changes of the heavenly motions, we may consider this to be the greatest and most complete. YOUNG SOCRATES: I should imagine so."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And it may be supposed to result in the greatest changes to the human beings who are the inhabitants of the world at the time. YOUNG SOCRATES: Such changes would naturally occur."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And animals, as we know, survive with difficulty great and serious changes of many different kinds when they come upon them at once. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Hence there necessarily occurs a great destruction of them, which extends also to the life of man; few survivors of the race are left, and those who remain become the subjects of several novel and remarkable phenomena, and of one in particular, which takes place at the time when the transition is made to the cycle opposite to that in which we are now living. YOUNG SOCRATES: What is it?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The life of all animals first came to a standstill, and the mortal nature ceased to be or look older, and was then reversed and grew young and delicate; the white locks of the aged darkened again, and the cheeks the bearded man became smooth, and recovered their former bloom; the bodies of youths in their prime grew softer and smaller, continually by day and night returning and becoming assimilated to the nature of a newly-born child in mind as well as body; in the succeeding stage they wasted away and wholly disappeared. And the bodies of those who died by violence at that time quickly passed through the like changes, and in a few days were no more seen. YOUNG SOCRATES: Then how, Stranger, were the animals created in those days; and in what way were they begotten of one another?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"It is evident, Socrates, that there was no such thing in the then order of nature as the procreation of animals from one another; the earth-born race, of which we hear in story, was the one which existed in those days--they rose again from the ground; and of this tradition, which is now-a-days often unduly discredited, our ancestors, who were nearest in point of time to the end of the last period and came into being at the beginning of this, are to us the heralds. And mark how consistent the sequel of the tale is; after the return of age to youth, follows the return of the dead, who are lying in the earth, to life; simultaneously with the reversal of the world the wheel of their generation has been turned back, and they are put together and rise and live in the opposite order, unless God has carried any of them away to some other lot. According to this tradition they of necessity sprang from the earth and have the name of earth-born, and so the above legend clings to them. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly that is quite consistent with what has preceded; but tell me, was the life which you said existed in the reign of Cronos in that cycle of the world, or in this? For the change in the course of the stars and the sun must have occurred in both."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I see that you enter into my meaning;--no, that blessed and spontaneous life does not belong to the present cycle of the world, but to the previous one, in which God superintended the whole revolution of the universe; and the several parts the universe were distributed under the rule of certain inferior deities, as is the way in some places still. There were demigods, who were the shepherds of the various species and herds of animals, and each one was in all respects sufficient for those of whom he was the shepherd; neither was there any violence, or devouring of one another, or war or quarrel among them; and I might tell of ten thousand other blessings, which belonged to that dispensation. The reason why the life of man was, as tradition says, spontaneous, is as follows: In those days God himself was their shepherd, and ruled over them, just as man, who is by comparison a divine being, still rules over the lower animals. Under him there were no forms of government or separate possession of women and children; for all men rose again from the earth, having no memory of the past. And although they had nothing of this sort, the earth gave them fruits in abundance, which grew on trees and shrubs unbidden, and were not planted by the hand of man. And they dwelt naked, and mostly in the open air, for the temperature of their seasons was mild; and they had no beds, but lay on soft couches of grass, which grew plentifully out of the earth. Such was the life of man in the days of Cronos, Socrates; the character of our present life, which is said to be under Zeus, you know from your own experience. Can you, and will you, determine which of them you deem the happier? YOUNG SOCRATES: Impossible."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then shall I determine for you as well as I can? YOUNG SOCRATES: By all means."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Suppose that the nurslings of Cronos, having this boundless leisure, and the power of holding intercourse, not only with men, but with the brute creation, had used all these advantages with a view to philosophy, conversing with the brutes as well as with one another, and learning of every nature which was gifted with any special power, and was able to contribute some special experience to the store of wisdom, there would be no difficulty in deciding that they would be a thousand times happier than the men of our own day. Or, again, if they had merely eaten and drunk until they were full, and told stories to one another and to the animals--such stories as are now attributed to them--in this case also, as I should imagine, the answer would be easy. But until some satisfactory witness can be found of the love of that age for knowledge and discussion, we had better let the matter drop, and give the reason why we have unearthed this tale, and then we shall be able to get on. In the fulness of time, when the change was to take place, and the earth-born race had all perished, and every soul had completed its proper cycle of births and been sown in the earth her appointed number of times, the pilot of the universe let the helm go, and retired to his place of view; and then Fate and innate desire reversed the motion of the world. Then also all the inferior deities who share the rule of the supreme power, being informed of what was happening, let go the parts of the world which were under their control. And the world turning round with a sudden shock, being impelled in an opposite direction from beginning to end, was shaken by a mighty earthquake, which wrought a new destruction of all manner of animals. Afterwards, when sufficient time had elapsed, the tumult and confusion and earthquake ceased, and the universal creature, once more at peace, attained to a calm, and settled down into his own orderly and accustomed course, having the charge and rule of himself and of all the creatures which are contained in him, and executing, as far as he remembered them, the instructions of his Father and Creator, more precisely at first, but afterwords with less exactness. The reason of the falling off was the admixture of matter in him; this was inherent in the primal nature, which was full of disorder, until attaining to the present order. From God, the constructor, the world received all that is good in him, but from a previous state came elements of evil and unrighteousness, which, thence derived, first of all passed into the world, and were then transmitted to the animals. While the world was aided by the pilot in nurturing the animals, the evil was small, and great the good which he produced, but after the separation, when the world was let go, at first all proceeded well enough; but, as time went on, there was more and more forgetting, and the old discord again held sway and burst forth in full glory; and at last small was the good, and great was the admixture of evil, and there was a danger of universal ruin to the world, and to the things contained in him. Wherefore God, the orderer of all, in his tender care, seeing that the world was in great straits, and fearing that all might be dissolved in the storm and disappear in infinite chaos, again seated himself at the helm; and bringing back the elements which had fallen into dissolution and disorder to the motion which had prevailed under his dispensation, he set them in order and restored them, and made the world imperishable and immortal. And this is the whole tale, of which the first part will suffice to illustrate the nature of the king. For when the world turned towards the present cycle of generation, the age of man again stood still, and a change opposite to the previous one was the result. The small creatures which had almost disappeared grew in and stature, and the newly-born children of the earth became grey and died and sank into the earth again. All things changed, imitating and following the condition of the universe, and of necessity agreeing with that in their mode of conception and generation and nurture; for no animal was any longer allowed to come into being in the earth through the agency of other creative beings, but as the world was ordained to be the lord of his own progress, in like manner the parts were ordained to grow and generate and give nourishment, as far as they could, of themselves, impelled by a similar movement. And so we have arrived at the real end of this discourse; for although there might be much to tell of the lower animals, and of the condition out of which they changed and of the causes of the change, about men there is not much, and that little is more to the purpose. Deprived of the care of God, who had possessed and tended them, they were left helpless and defenceless, and were torn in pieces by the beasts, who were naturally fierce and had now grown wild. And in the first ages they were still without skill or resource; the food which once grew spontaneously had failed, and as yet they knew not how to procure it, because they had never felt the pressure of necessity. For all these reasons they were in a great strait; wherefore also the gifts spoken of in the old tradition were imparted to man by the gods, together with so much teaching and education as was indispensable; fire was given to them by Prometheus, the arts by Hephaestus and his fellow-worker, Athene, seeds and plants by others. From these is derived all that has helped to frame human life; since the care of the Gods, as I was saying, had now failed men, and they had to order their course of life for themselves, and were their own masters, just like the universal creature whom they imitate and follow, ever changing, as he changes, and ever living and growing, at one time in one manner, and at another time in another. Enough of the story, which may be of use in showing us how greatly we erred in the delineation of the king and the statesman in our previous discourse. YOUNG SOCRATES: What was this great error of which you speak?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There were two; the first a lesser one, the other was an error on a much larger and grander scale. YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I mean to say that when we were asked about a king and statesman of the present cycle and generation, we told of a shepherd of a human flock who belonged to the other cycle, and of one who was a god when he ought to have been a man; and this a great error. Again, we declared him to be the ruler of the entire State, without explaining how: this was not the whole truth, nor very intelligible; but still it was true, and therefore the second error was not so great as the first. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Before we can expect to have a perfect description of the statesman we must define the nature of his office. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the myth was introduced in order to show, not only that all others are rivals of the true shepherd who is the object of our search, but in order that we might have a clearer view of him who is alone worthy to receive this appellation, because he alone of shepherds and herdsmen, according to the image which we have employed, has the care of human beings. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And I cannot help thinking, Socrates, that the form of the divine shepherd is even higher than that of a king; whereas the statesmen who are now on earth seem to be much more like their subjects in character, and much more nearly to partake of their breeding and education. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Still they must be investigated all the same, to see whether, like the divine shepherd, they are above their subjects or on a level with them. YOUNG SOCRATES: Of course."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"To resume:--Do you remember that we spoke of a command-for-self exercised over animals, not singly but collectively, which we called the art of rearing a herd? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes, I remember."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There, somewhere, lay our error; for we never included or mentioned the Statesman; and we did not observe that he had no place in our nomenclature. YOUNG SOCRATES: How was that?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"All other herdsmen 'rear' their herds, but this is not a suitable term to apply to the Statesman; we should use a name which is common to them all. YOUNG SOCRATES: True, if there be such a name."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Why, is not 'care' of herds applicable to all? For this implies no feeding, or any special duty; if we say either 'tending' the herds, or 'managing' the herds, or 'having the care' of them, the same word will include all, and then we may wrap up the Statesman with the rest, as the argument seems to require. YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite right; but how shall we take the next step in the division?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"As before we divided the art of 'rearing' herds accordingly as they were land or water herds, winged and wingless, mixing or not mixing the breed, horned and hornless, so we may divide by these same differences the 'tending' of herds, comprehending in our definition the kingship of to-day and the rule of Cronos. YOUNG SOCRATES: That is clear; but I still ask, what is to follow."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"If the word had been 'managing' herds, instead of feeding or rearing them, no one would have argued that there was no care of men in the case of the politician, although it was justly contended, that there was no human art of feeding them which was worthy of the name, or at least, if there were, many a man had a prior and greater right to share in such an art than any king. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But no other art or science will have a prior or better right than the royal science to care for human society and to rule over men in general. YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In the next place, Socrates, we must surely notice that a great error was committed at the end of our analysis. YOUNG SOCRATES: What was it?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Why, supposing we were ever so sure that there is such an art as the art of rearing or feeding bipeds, there was no reason why we should call this the royal or political art, as though there were no more to be said. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Our first duty, as we were saying, was to remodel the name, so as to have the notion of care rather than of feeding, and then to divide, for there may be still considerable divisions. YOUNG SOCRATES: How can they be made?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"First, by separating the divine shepherd from the human guardian or manager. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the art of management which is assigned to man would again have to be subdivided. YOUNG SOCRATES: On what principle?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"On the principle of voluntary and compulsory. YOUNG SOCRATES: Why?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Because, if I am not mistaken, there has been an error here; for our simplicity led us to rank king and tyrant together, whereas they are utterly distinct, like their modes of government. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, now, as I said, let us make the correction and divide human care into two parts, on the principle of voluntary and compulsory. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And if we call the management of violent rulers tyranny, and the voluntary management of herds of voluntary bipeds politics, may we not further assert that he who has this latter art of management is the true king and statesman? YOUNG SOCRATES: I think, Stranger, that we have now completed the account of the Statesman."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Would that we had, Socrates, but I have to satisfy myself as well as you; and in my judgment the figure of the king is not yet perfected; like statuaries who, in their too great haste, having overdone the several parts of their work, lose time in cutting them down, so too we, partly out of haste, partly out of a magnanimous desire to expose our former error, and also because we imagined that a king required grand illustrations, have taken up a marvellous lump of fable, and have been obliged to use more than was necessary. This made us discourse at large, and, nevertheless, the story never came to an end. And our discussion might be compared to a picture of some living being which had been fairly drawn in outline, but had not yet attained the life and clearness which is given by the blending of colours. Now to intelligent persons a living being had better be delineated by language and discourse than by any painting or work of art: to the duller sort by works of art. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true; but what is the imperfection which still remains? I wish that you would tell me."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The higher ideas, my dear friend, can hardly be set forth except through the medium of examples; every man seems to know all things in a dreamy sort of way, and then again to wake up and to know nothing. YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I fear that I have been unfortunate in raising a question about our experience of knowledge. YOUNG SOCRATES: Why so?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Why, because my 'example' requires the assistance of another example. YOUNG SOCRATES: Proceed; you need not fear that I shall tire."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I will proceed, finding, as I do, such a ready listener in you: when children are beginning to know their letters-- YOUNG SOCRATES: What are you going to say?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That they distinguish the several letters well enough in very short and easy syllables, and are able to tell them correctly. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Whereas in other syllables they do not recognize them, and think and speak falsely of them. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Will not the best and easiest way of bringing them to a knowledge of what they do not as yet know be-- YOUNG SOCRATES: Be what?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"To refer them first of all to cases in which they judge correctly about the letters in question, and then to compare these with the cases in which they do not as yet know, and to show them that the letters are the same, and have the same character in both combinations, until all cases in which they are right have been placed side by side with all cases in which they are wrong. In this way they have examples, and are made to learn that each letter in every combination is always the same and not another, and is always called by the same name. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Are not examples formed in this manner? We take a thing and compare it with another distinct instance of the same thing, of which we have a right conception, and out of the comparison there arises one true notion, which includes both of them. YOUNG SOCRATES: Exactly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Can we wonder, then, that the soul has the same uncertainty about the alphabet of things, and sometimes and in some cases is firmly fixed by the truth in each particular, and then, again, in other cases is altogether at sea; having somehow or other a correct notion of combinations; but when the elements are transferred into the long and difficult language (syllables) of facts, is again ignorant of them? YOUNG SOCRATES: There is nothing wonderful in that."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Could any one, my friend, who began with false opinion ever expect to arrive even at a small portion of truth and to attain wisdom? YOUNG SOCRATES: Hardly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then you and I will not be far wrong in trying to see the nature of example in general in a small and particular instance; afterwards from lesser things we intend to pass to the royal class, which is the highest form of the same nature, and endeavour to discover by rules of art what the management of cities is; and then the dream will become a reality to us. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, once more, let us resume the previous argument, and as there were innumerable rivals of the royal race who claim to have the care of states, let us part them all off, and leave him alone; and, as I was saying, a model or example of this process has first to be framed. YOUNG SOCRATES: Exactly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"What model is there which is small, and yet has any analogy with the political occupation? Suppose, Socrates, that if we have no other example at hand, we choose weaving, or, more precisely, weaving of wool--this will be quite enough, without taking the whole of weaving, to illustrate our meaning? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Why should we not apply to weaving the same processes of division and subdivision which we have already applied to other classes; going once more as rapidly as we can through all the steps until we come to that which is needed for our purpose? YOUNG SOCRATES: How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I shall reply by actually performing the process. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"All things which we make or acquire are either creative or preventive; of the preventive class are antidotes, divine and human, and also defences; and defences are either military weapons or protections; and protections are veils, and also shields against heat and cold, and shields against heat and cold are shelters and coverings; and coverings are blankets and garments; and garments are some of them in one piece, and others of them are made in several parts; and of these latter some are stitched, others are fastened and not stitched; and of the not stitched, some are made of the sinews of plants, and some of hair; and of these, again, some are cemented with water and earth, and others are fastened together by themselves. And these last defences and coverings which are fastened together by themselves are called clothes, and the art which superintends them we may call, from the nature of the operation, the art of clothing, just as before the art of the Statesman was derived from the State; and may we not say that the art of weaving, at least that largest portion of it which was concerned with the making of clothes, differs only in name from this art of clothing, in the same way that, in the previous case, the royal science differed from the political? YOUNG SOCRATES: Most true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In the next place, let us make the reflection, that the art of weaving clothes, which an incompetent person might fancy to have been sufficiently described, has been separated off from several others which are of the same family, but not from the co-operative arts. YOUNG SOCRATES: And which are the kindred arts?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I see that I have not taken you with me. So I think that we had better go backwards, starting from the end. We just now parted off from the weaving of clothes, the making of blankets, which differ from each other in that one is put under and the other is put around: and these are what I termed kindred arts. YOUNG SOCRATES: I understand."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And we have subtracted the manufacture of all articles made of flax and cords, and all that we just now metaphorically termed the sinews of plants, and we have also separated off the process of felting and the putting together of materials by stitching and sewing, of which the most important part is the cobbler's art. YOUNG SOCRATES: Precisely."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we separated off the currier's art, which prepared coverings in entire pieces, and the art of sheltering, and subtracted the various arts of making water-tight which are employed in building, and in general in carpentering, and in other crafts, and all such arts as furnish impediments to thieving and acts of violence, and are concerned with making the lids of boxes and the fixing of doors, being divisions of the art of joining; and we also cut off the manufacture of arms, which is a section of the great and manifold art of making defences; and we originally began by parting off the whole of the magic art which is concerned with antidotes, and have left, as would appear, the very art of which we were in search, the art of protection against winter cold, which fabricates woollen defences, and has the name of weaving. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, my boy, but that is not all; for the first process to which the material is subjected is the opposite of weaving. YOUNG SOCRATES: How so?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Weaving is a sort of uniting? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But the first process is a separation of the clotted and matted fibres? YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I mean the work of the carder's art; for we cannot say that carding is weaving, or that the carder is a weaver. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Again, if a person were to say that the art of making the warp and the woof was the art of weaving, he would say what was paradoxical and false. YOUNG SOCRATES: To be sure."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Shall we say that the whole art of the fuller or of the mender has nothing to do with the care and treatment of clothes, or are we to regard all these as arts of weaving? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And yet surely all these arts will maintain that they are concerned with the treatment and production of clothes; they will dispute the exclusive prerogative of weaving, and though assigning a larger sphere to that, will still reserve a considerable field for themselves. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Besides these, there are the arts which make tools and instruments of weaving, and which will claim at least to be co-operative causes in every work of the weaver. YOUNG SOCRATES: Most true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Well, then, suppose that we define weaving, or rather that part of it which has been selected by us, to be the greatest and noblest of arts which are concerned with woollen garments--shall we be right? Is not the definition, although true, wanting in clearness and completeness; for do not all those other arts require to be first cleared away? YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then the next thing will be to separate them, in order that the argument may proceed in a regular manner? YOUNG SOCRATES: By all means."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us consider, in the first place, that there are two kinds of arts entering into everything which we do. YOUNG SOCRATES: What are they?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The one kind is the conditional or co-operative, the other the principal cause. YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The arts which do not manufacture the actual thing, but which furnish the necessary tools for the manufacture, without which the several arts could not fulfil their appointed work, are co-operative; but those which make the things themselves are causal. YOUNG SOCRATES: A very reasonable distinction."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Thus the arts which make spindles, combs, and other instruments of the production of clothes, may be called co-operative, and those which treat and fabricate the things themselves, causal. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The arts of washing and mending, and the other preparatory arts which belong to the causal class, and form a division of the great art of adornment, may be all comprehended under what we call the fuller's art. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Carding and spinning threads and all the parts of the process which are concerned with the actual manufacture of a woollen garment form a single art, which is one of those universally acknowledged,--the art of working in wool. YOUNG SOCRATES: To be sure."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Of working in wool, again, there are two divisions, and both these are parts of two arts at once. YOUNG SOCRATES: How is that?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Carding and one half of the use of the comb, and the other processes of wool-working which separate the composite, may be classed together as belonging both to the art of wool-working, and also to one of the two great arts which are of universal application--the art of composition and the art of division. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"To the latter belong carding and the other processes of which I was just now speaking; the art of discernment or division in wool and yarn, which is effected in one manner with the comb and in another with the hands, is variously described under all the names which I just now mentioned. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Again, let us take some process of wool-working which is also a portion of the art of composition, and, dismissing the elements of division which we found there, make two halves, one on the principle of composition, and the other on the principle of division. YOUNG SOCRATES: Let that be done."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And once more, Socrates, we must divide the part which belongs at once both to wool-working and composition, if we are ever to discover satisfactorily the aforesaid art of weaving. YOUNG SOCRATES: We must."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly, and let us call one part of the art the art of twisting threads, the other the art of combining them. YOUNG SOCRATES: Do I understand you, in speaking of twisting, to be referring to manufacture of the warp?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, and of the woof too; how, if not by twisting, is the woof made? YOUNG SOCRATES: There is no other way."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then suppose that you define the warp and the woof, for I think that the definition will be of use to you. YOUNG SOCRATES: How shall I define them?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"As thus: A piece of carded wool which is drawn out lengthwise and breadthwise is said to be pulled out. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the wool thus prepared, when twisted by the spindle, and made into a firm thread, is called the warp, and the art which regulates these operations the art of spinning the warp. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the threads which are more loosely spun, having a softness proportioned to the intertexture of the warp and to the degree of force used in dressing the cloth,--the threads which are thus spun are called the woof, and the art which is set over them may be called the art of spinning the woof. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And, now, there can be no mistake about the nature of the part of weaving which we have undertaken to define. For when that part of the art of composition which is employed in the working of wool forms a web by the regular intertexture of warp and woof, the entire woven substance is called by us a woollen garment, and the art which presides over this is the art of weaving. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But why did we not say at once that weaving is the art of entwining warp and woof, instead of making a long and useless circuit? YOUNG SOCRATES: I thought, Stranger, that there was nothing useless in what was said."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Very likely, but you may not always think so, my sweet friend; and in case any feeling of dissatisfaction should hereafter arise in your mind, as it very well may, let me lay down a principle which will apply to arguments in general. YOUNG SOCRATES: Proceed."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us begin by considering the whole nature of excess and defect, and then we shall have a rational ground on which we may praise or blame too much length or too much shortness in discussions of this kind. YOUNG SOCRATES: Let us do so."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The points on which I think that we ought to dwell are the following:-- YOUNG SOCRATES: What?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Length and shortness, excess and defect; with all of these the art of measurement is conversant. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the art of measurement has to be divided into two parts, with a view to our present purpose. YOUNG SOCRATES: Where would you make the division?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"As thus: I would make two parts, one having regard to the relativity of greatness and smallness to each other; and there is another, without which the existence of production would be impossible. YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Do you not think that it is only natural for the greater to be called greater with reference to the less alone, and the less less with reference to the greater alone? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Well, but is there not also something exceeding and exceeded by the principle of the mean, both in speech and action, and is not this a reality, and the chief mark of difference between good and bad men? YOUNG SOCRATES: Plainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we must suppose that the great and small exist and are discerned in both these ways, and not, as we were saying before, only relatively to one another, but there must also be another comparison of them with the mean or ideal standard; would you like to hear the reason why? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"If we assume the greater to exist only in relation to the less, there will never be any comparison of either with the mean. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And would not this doctrine be the ruin of all the arts and their creations; would not the art of the Statesman and the aforesaid art of weaving disappear? For all these arts are on the watch against excess and defect, not as unrealities, but as real evils, which occasion a difficulty in action; and the excellence or beauty of every work of art is due to this observance of measure. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But if the science of the Statesman disappears, the search for the royal science will be impossible. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Well, then, as in the case of the Sophist we extorted the inference that not-being had an existence, because here was the point at which the argument eluded our grasp, so in this we must endeavour to show that the greater and less are not only to be measured with one another, but also have to do with the production of the mean; for if this is not admitted, neither a statesman nor any other man of action can be an undisputed master of his science. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes, we must certainly do again what we did then."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But this, Socrates, is a greater work than the other, of which we only too well remember the length. I think, however, that we may fairly assume something of this sort-- YOUNG SOCRATES: What?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That we shall some day require this notion of a mean with a view to the demonstration of absolute truth; meanwhile, the argument that the very existence of the arts must be held to depend on the possibility of measuring more or less, not only with one another, but also with a view to the attainment of the mean, seems to afford a grand support and satisfactory proof of the doctrine which we are maintaining; for if there are arts, there is a standard of measure, and if there is a standard of measure, there are arts; but if either is wanting, there is neither. YOUNG SOCRATES: True; and what is the next step?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The next step clearly is to divide the art of measurement into two parts, as we have said already, and to place in the one part all the arts which measure number, length, depth, breadth, swiftness with their opposites; and to have another part in which they are measured with the mean, and the fit, and the opportune, and the due, and with all those words, in short, which denote a mean or standard removed from the extremes. YOUNG SOCRATES: Here are two vast divisions, embracing two very different spheres."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There are many accomplished men, Socrates, who say, believing themselves to speak wisely, that the art of measurement is universal, and has to do with all things. And this means what we are now saying; for all things which come within the province of art do certainly in some sense partake of measure. But these persons, because they are not accustomed to distinguish classes according to real forms, jumble together two widely different things, relation to one another, and to a standard, under the idea that they are the same, and also fall into the converse error of dividing other things not according to their real parts. Whereas the right way is, if a man has first seen the unity of things, to go on with the enquiry and not desist until he has found all the differences contained in it which form distinct classes; nor again should he be able to rest contented with the manifold diversities which are seen in a multitude of things until he has comprehended all of them that have any affinity within the bounds of one similarity and embraced them within the reality of a single kind. But we have said enough on this head, and also of excess and defect; we have only to bear in mind that two divisions of the art of measurement have been discovered which are concerned with them, and not forget what they are. YOUNG SOCRATES: We will not forget."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now that this discussion is completed, let us go on to consider another question, which concerns not this argument only but the conduct of such arguments in general. YOUNG SOCRATES: What is this new question?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Take the case of a child who is engaged in learning his letters: when he is asked what letters make up a word, should we say that the question is intended to improve his grammatical knowledge of that particular word, or of all words? YOUNG SOCRATES: Clearly, in order that he may have a better knowledge of all words."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And is our enquiry about the Statesman intended only to improve our knowledge of politics, or our power of reasoning generally? YOUNG SOCRATES: Clearly, as in the former example, the purpose is general."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Still less would any rational man seek to analyse the notion of weaving for its own sake. But people seem to forget that some things have sensible images, which are readily known, and can be easily pointed out when any one desires to answer an enquirer without any trouble or argument; whereas the greatest and highest truths have no outward image of themselves visible to man, which he who wishes to satisfy the soul of the enquirer can adapt to the eye of sense (compare Phaedr.), and therefore we ought to train ourselves to give and accept a rational account of them; for immaterial things, which are the noblest and greatest, are shown only in thought and idea, and in no other way, and all that we are now saying is said for the sake of them. Moreover, there is always less difficulty in fixing the mind on small matters than on great. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us call to mind the bearing of all this. YOUNG SOCRATES: What is it?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I wanted to get rid of any impression of tediousness which we may have experienced in the discussion about weaving, and the reversal of the universe, and in the discussion concerning the Sophist and the being of not-being. I know that they were felt to be too long, and I reproached myself with this, fearing that they might be not only tedious but irrelevant; and all that I have now said is only designed to prevent the recurrence of any such disagreeables for the future. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good. Will you proceed?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then I would like to observe that you and I, remembering what has been said, should praise or blame the length or shortness of discussions, not by comparing them with one another, but with what is fitting, having regard to the part of measurement, which, as we said, was to be borne in mind. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And yet, not everything is to be judged even with a view to what is fitting; for we should only want such a length as is suited to give pleasure, if at all, as a secondary matter; and reason tells us, that we should be contented to make the ease or rapidity of an enquiry, not our first, but our second object; the first and highest of all being to assert the great method of division according to species--whether the discourse be shorter or longer is not to the point. No offence should be taken at length, but the longer and shorter are to be employed indifferently, according as either of them is better calculated to sharpen the wits of the auditors. Reason would also say to him who censures the length of discourses on such occasions and cannot away with their circumlocution, that he should not be in such a hurry to have done with them, when he can only complain that they are tedious, but he should prove that if they had been shorter they would have made those who took part in them better dialecticians, and more capable of expressing the truth of things; about any other praise and blame, he need not trouble himself--he should pretend not to hear them. But we have had enough of this, as you will probably agree with me in thinking. Let us return to our Statesman, and apply to his case the aforesaid example of weaving. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good;--let us do as you say."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The art of the king has been separated from the similar arts of shepherds, and, indeed, from all those which have to do with herds at all. There still remain, however, of the causal and co-operative arts those which are immediately concerned with States, and which must first be distinguished from one another. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You know that these arts cannot easily be divided into two halves; the reason will be very evident as we proceed. YOUNG SOCRATES: Then we had better do so."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We must carve them like a victim into members or limbs, since we cannot bisect them. (Compare Phaedr.) For we certainly should divide everything into as few parts as possible. YOUNG SOCRATES: What is to be done in this case?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"What we did in the example of weaving--all those arts which furnish the tools were regarded by us as co-operative. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"So now, and with still more reason, all arts which make any implement in a State, whether great or small, may be regarded by us as co-operative, for without them neither State nor Statesmanship would be possible; and yet we are not inclined to say that any of them is a product of the kingly art. YOUNG SOCRATES: No, indeed."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The task of separating this class from others is not an easy one; for there is plausibility in saying that anything in the world is the instrument of doing something. But there is another class of possessions in a city, of which I have a word to say. YOUNG SOCRATES: What class do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"A class which may be described as not having this power; that is to say, not like an instrument, framed for production, but designed for the preservation of that which is produced. YOUNG SOCRATES: To what do you refer?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"To the class of vessels, as they are comprehensively termed, which are constructed for the preservation of things moist and dry, of things prepared in the fire or out of the fire; this is a very large class, and has, if I am not mistaken, literally nothing to do with the royal art of which we are in search. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is also a third class of possessions to be noted, different from these and very extensive, moving or resting on land or water, honourable and also dishonourable. The whole of this class has one name, because it is intended to be sat upon, being always a seat for something. YOUNG SOCRATES: What is it?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"A vehicle, which is certainly not the work of the Statesman, but of the carpenter, potter, and coppersmith. YOUNG SOCRATES: I understand."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And is there not a fourth class which is again different, and in which most of the things formerly mentioned are contained,--every kind of dress, most sorts of arms, walls and enclosures, whether of earth or stone, and ten thousand other things? all of which being made for the sake of defence, may be truly called defences, and are for the most part to be regarded as the work of the builder or of the weaver, rather than of the Statesman. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Shall we add a fifth class, of ornamentation and drawing, and of the imitations produced by drawing and music, which are designed for amusement only, and may be fairly comprehended under one name? YOUNG SOCRATES: What is it?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Plaything is the name. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That one name may be fitly predicated of all of them, for none of these things have a serious purpose--amusement is their sole aim. YOUNG SOCRATES: That again I understand."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then there is a class which provides materials for all these, out of which and in which the arts already mentioned fabricate their works;--this manifold class, I say, which is the creation and offspring of many other arts, may I not rank sixth? YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I am referring to gold, silver, and other metals, and all that wood-cutting and shearing of every sort provides for the art of carpentry and plaiting; and there is the process of barking and stripping the cuticle of plants, and the currier's art, which strips off the skins of animals, and other similar arts which manufacture corks and papyri and cords, and provide for the manufacture of composite species out of simple kinds--the whole class may be termed the primitive and simple possession of man, and with this the kingly science has no concern at all. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The provision of food and of all other things which mingle their particles with the particles of the human body, and minister to the body, will form a seventh class, which may be called by the general term of nourishment, unless you have any better name to offer. This, however, appertains rather to the husbandman, huntsman, trainer, doctor, cook, and is not to be assigned to the Statesman's art. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"These seven classes include nearly every description of property, with the exception of tame animals. Consider;--there was the original material, which ought to have been placed first; next come instruments, vessels, vehicles, defences, playthings, nourishment; small things, which may be included under one of these--as for example, coins, seals and stamps, are omitted, for they have not in them the character of any larger kind which includes them; but some of them may, with a little forcing, be placed among ornaments, and others may be made to harmonize with the class of implements. The art of herding, which has been already divided into parts, will include all property in tame animals, except slaves. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The class of slaves and ministers only remains, and I suspect that in this the real aspirants for the throne, who are the rivals of the king in the formation of the political web, will be discovered; just as spinners, carders, and the rest of them, were the rivals of the weaver. All the others, who were termed co-operators, have been got rid of among the occupations already mentioned, and separated from the royal and political science. YOUNG SOCRATES: I agree."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us go a little nearer, in order that we may be more certain of the complexion of this remaining class. YOUNG SOCRATES: Let us do so."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We shall find from our present point of view that the greatest servants are in a case and condition which is the reverse of what we anticipated. YOUNG SOCRATES: Who are they?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Those who have been purchased, and have so become possessions; these are unmistakably slaves, and certainly do not claim royal science. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Again, freemen who of their own accord become the servants of the other classes in a State, and who exchange and equalise the products of husbandry and the other arts, some sitting in the market-place, others going from city to city by land or sea, and giving money in exchange for money or for other productions--the money-changer, the merchant, the ship-owner, the retailer, will not put in any claim to statecraft or politics? YOUNG SOCRATES: No; unless, indeed, to the politics of commerce."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But surely men whom we see acting as hirelings and serfs, and too happy to turn their hand to anything, will not profess to share in royal science? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But what would you say of some other serviceable officials? YOUNG SOCRATES: Who are they, and what services do they perform?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There are heralds, and scribes perfected by practice, and divers others who have great skill in various sorts of business connected with the government of states--what shall we call them? YOUNG SOCRATES: They are the officials, and servants of the rulers, as you just now called them, but not themselves rulers."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There may be something strange in any servant pretending to be a ruler, and yet I do not think that I could have been dreaming when I imagined that the principal claimants to political science would be found somewhere in this neighbourhood. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Well, let us draw nearer, and try the claims of some who have not yet been tested: in the first place, there are diviners, who have a portion of servile or ministerial science, and are thought to be the interpreters of the gods to men. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is also the priestly class, who, as the law declares, know how to give the gods gifts from men in the form of sacrifices which are acceptable to them, and to ask on our behalf blessings in return from them. Now both these are branches of the servile or ministerial art. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes, clearly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And here I think that we seem to be getting on the right track; for the priest and the diviner are swollen with pride and prerogative, and they create an awful impression of themselves by the magnitude of their enterprises; in Egypt, the king himself is not allowed to reign, unless he have priestly powers, and if he should be of another class and has thrust himself in, he must get enrolled in the priesthood. In many parts of Hellas, the duty of offering the most solemn propitiatory sacrifices is assigned to the highest magistracies, and here, at Athens, the most solemn and national of the ancient sacrifices are supposed to be celebrated by him who has been chosen by lot to be the King Archon. YOUNG SOCRATES: Precisely."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But who are these other kings and priests elected by lot who now come into view followed by their retainers and a vast throng, as the former class disappears and the scene changes? YOUNG SOCRATES: Whom can you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"They are a strange crew. YOUNG SOCRATES: Why strange?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"A minute ago I thought that they were animals of every tribe; for many of them are like lions and centaurs, and many more like satyrs and such weak and shifty creatures;--Protean shapes quickly changing into one another's forms and natures; and now, Socrates, I begin to see who they are. YOUNG SOCRATES: Who are they? You seem to be gazing on some strange vision."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes; every one looks strange when you do not know him; and just now I myself fell into this mistake--at first sight, coming suddenly upon him, I did not recognize the politician and his troop. YOUNG SOCRATES: Who is he?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The chief of Sophists and most accomplished of wizards, who must at any cost be separated from the true king or Statesman, if we are ever to see daylight in the present enquiry. YOUNG SOCRATES: That is a hope not lightly to be renounced."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Never, if I can help it; and, first, let me ask you a question. YOUNG SOCRATES: What?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Is not monarchy a recognized form of government? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And, after monarchy, next in order comes the government of the few? YOUNG SOCRATES: Of course."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Is not the third form of government the rule of the multitude, which is called by the name of democracy? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do not these three expand in a manner into five, producing out of themselves two other names? YOUNG SOCRATES: What are they? YOUNG SOCRATES: What are they?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is a criterion of voluntary and involuntary, poverty and riches, law and the absence of law, which men now-a-days apply to them; the two first they subdivide accordingly, and ascribe to monarchy two forms and two corresponding names, royalty and tyranny. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the government of the few they distinguish by the names of aristocracy and oligarchy. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Democracy alone, whether rigidly observing the laws or not, and whether the multitude rule over the men of property with their consent or against their consent, always in ordinary language has the same name. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But do you suppose that any form of government which is defined by these characteristics of the one, the few, or the many, of poverty or wealth, of voluntary or compulsory submission, of written law or the absence of law, can be a right one? YOUNG SOCRATES: Why not?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Reflect; and follow me. YOUNG SOCRATES: In what direction?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Shall we abide by what we said at first, or shall we retract our words? YOUNG SOCRATES: To what do you refer?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"If I am not mistaken, we said that royal power was a science? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And a science of a peculiar kind, which was selected out of the rest as having a character which is at once judicial and authoritative? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And there was one kind of authority over lifeless things and another other living animals; and so we proceeded in the division step by step up to this point, not losing the idea of science, but unable as yet to determine the nature of the particular science? YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Hence we are led to observe that the distinguishing principle of the State cannot be the few or many, the voluntary or involuntary, poverty or riches; but some notion of science must enter into it, if we are to be consistent with what has preceded. YOUNG SOCRATES: And we must be consistent."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Well, then, in which of these various forms of States may the science of government, which is among the greatest of all sciences and most difficult to acquire, be supposed to reside? That we must discover, and then we shall see who are the false politicians who pretend to be politicians but are not, although they persuade many, and shall separate them from the wise king. YOUNG SOCRATES: That, as the argument has already intimated, will be our duty."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Do you think that the multitude in a State can attain political science? YOUNG SOCRATES: Impossible."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But, perhaps, in a city of a thousand men, there would be a hundred, or say fifty, who could? YOUNG SOCRATES: In that case political science would certainly be the easiest of all sciences; there could not be found in a city of that number as many really first-rate draught-players, if judged by the standard of the rest of Hellas, and there would certainly not be as many kings. For kings we may truly call those who possess royal science, whether they rule or not, as was shown in the previous argument."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Thank you for reminding me; and the consequence is that any true form of government can only be supposed to be the government of one, two, or, at any rate, of a few. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And these, whether they rule with the will, or against the will, of their subjects, with written laws or without written laws, and whether they are poor or rich, and whatever be the nature of their rule, must be supposed, according to our present view, to rule on some scientific principle; just as the physician, whether he cures us against our will or with our will, and whatever be his mode of treatment,--incision, burning, or the infliction of some other pain,--whether he practises out of a book or not out of a book, and whether he be rich or poor, whether he purges or reduces in some other way, or even fattens his patients, is a physician all the same, so long as he exercises authority over them according to rules of art, if he only does them good and heals and saves them. And this we lay down to be the only proper test of the art of medicine, or of any other art of command. YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then that can be the only true form of government in which the governors are really found to possess science, and are not mere pretenders, whether they rule according to law or without law, over willing or unwilling subjects, and are rich or poor themselves--none of these things can with any propriety be included in the notion of the ruler. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And whether with a view to the public good they purge the State by killing some, or exiling some; whether they reduce the size of the body corporate by sending out from the hive swarms of citizens, or, by introducing persons from without, increase it; while they act according to the rules of wisdom and justice, and use their power with a view to the general security and improvement, the city over which they rule, and which has these characteristics, may be described as the only true State. All other governments are not genuine or real; but only imitations of this, and some of them are better and some of them are worse; the better are said to be well governed, but they are mere imitations like the others. YOUNG SOCRATES: I agree, Stranger, in the greater part of what you say; but as to their ruling without laws--the expression has a harsh sound."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You have been too quick for me, Socrates; I was just going to ask you whether you objected to any of my statements. And now I see that we shall have to consider this notion of there being good government without laws. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There can be no doubt that legislation is in a manner the business of a king, and yet the best thing of all is not that the law should rule, but that a man should rule supposing him to have wisdom and royal power. Do you see why this is? YOUNG SOCRATES: Why?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Because the law does not perfectly comprehend what is noblest and most just for all and therefore cannot enforce what is best. The differences of men and actions, and the endless irregular movements of human things, do not admit of any universal and simple rule. And no art whatsoever can lay down a rule which will last for all time. YOUNG SOCRATES: Of course not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But the law is always striving to make one;--like an obstinate and ignorant tyrant, who will not allow anything to be done contrary to his appointment, or any question to be asked--not even in sudden changes of circumstances, when something happens to be better than what he commanded for some one. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly; the law treats us all precisely in the manner which you describe."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"A perfectly simple principle can never be applied to a state of things which is the reverse of simple. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then if the law is not the perfection of right, why are we compelled to make laws at all? The reason of this has next to be investigated. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let me ask, whether you have not meetings for gymnastic contests in your city, such as there are in other cities, at which men compete in running, wrestling, and the like? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes; they are very common among us."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And what are the rules which are enforced on their pupils by professional trainers or by others having similar authority? Can you remember? YOUNG SOCRATES: To what do you refer?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The training-masters do not issue minute rules for individuals, or give every individual what is exactly suited to his constitution; they think that they ought to go more roughly to work, and to prescribe generally the regimen which will benefit the majority. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And therefore they assign equal amounts of exercise to them all; they send them forth together, and let them rest together from their running, wrestling, or whatever the form of bodily exercise may be. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now observe that the legislator who has to preside over the herd, and to enforce justice in their dealings with one another, will not be able, in enacting for the general good, to provide exactly what is suitable for each particular case. YOUNG SOCRATES: He cannot be expected to do so."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"He will lay down laws in a general form for the majority, roughly meeting the cases of individuals; and some of them he will deliver in writing, and others will be unwritten; and these last will be traditional customs of the country. YOUNG SOCRATES: He will be right."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, quite right; for how can he sit at every man's side all through his life, prescribing for him the exact particulars of his duty? Who, Socrates, would be equal to such a task? No one who really had the royal science, if he had been able to do this, would have imposed upon himself the restriction of a written law. YOUNG SOCRATES: So I should infer from what has now been said."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Or rather, my good friend, from what is going to be said. YOUNG SOCRATES: And what is that?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us put to ourselves the case of a physician, or trainer, who is about to go into a far country, and is expecting to be a long time away from his patients--thinking that his instructions will not be remembered unless they are written down, he will leave notes of them for the use of his pupils or patients. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But what would you say, if he came back sooner than he had intended, and, owing to an unexpected change of the winds or other celestial influences, something else happened to be better for them,--would he not venture to suggest this new remedy, although not contemplated in his former prescription? Would he persist in observing the original law, neither himself giving any new commandments, nor the patient daring to do otherwise than was prescribed, under the idea that this course only was healthy and medicinal, all others noxious and heterodox? Viewed in the light of science and true art, would not all such enactments be utterly ridiculous? YOUNG SOCRATES: Utterly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And if he who gave laws, written or unwritten, determining what was good or bad, honourable or dishonourable, just or unjust, to the tribes of men who flock together in their several cities, and are governed in accordance with them; if, I say, the wise legislator were suddenly to come again, or another like to him, is he to be prohibited from changing them?--would not this prohibition be in reality quite as ridiculous as the other? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Do you know a plausible saying of the common people which is in point? YOUNG SOCRATES: I do not recall what you mean at the moment."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"They say that if any one knows how the ancient laws may be improved, he must first persuade his own State of the improvement, and then he may legislate, but not otherwise. YOUNG SOCRATES: And are they not right?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I dare say. But supposing that he does use some gentle violence for their good, what is this violence to be called? Or rather, before you answer, let me ask the same question in reference to our previous instances. YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Suppose that a skilful physician has a patient, of whatever sex or age, whom he compels against his will to do something for his good which is contrary to the written rules; what is this compulsion to be called? Would you ever dream of calling it a violation of the art, or a breach of the laws of health? Nothing could be more unjust than for the patient to whom such violence is applied, to charge the physician who practises the violence with wanting skill or aggravating his disease. YOUNG SOCRATES: Most true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In the political art error is not called disease, but evil, or disgrace, or injustice. YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And when the citizen, contrary to law and custom, is compelled to do what is juster and better and nobler than he did before, the last and most absurd thing which he could say about such violence is that he has incurred disgrace or evil or injustice at the hands of those who compelled him. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And shall we say that the violence, if exercised by a rich man, is just, and if by a poor man, unjust? May not any man, rich or poor, with or without laws, with the will of the citizens or against the will of the citizens, do what is for their interest? Is not this the true principle of government, according to which the wise and good man will order the affairs of his subjects? As the pilot, by watching continually over the interests of the ship and of the crew,--not by laying down rules, but by making his art a law,--preserves the lives of his fellow-sailors, even so, and in the self-same way, may there not be a true form of polity created by those who are able to govern in a similar spirit, and who show a strength of art which is superior to the law? Nor can wise rulers ever err while they observing the one great rule of distributing justice to the citizens with intelligence and skill, are able to preserve them, and, as far as may be, to make them better from being worse. YOUNG SOCRATES: No one can deny what has been now said."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Neither, if you consider, can any one deny the other statement. YOUNG SOCRATES: What was it?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We said that no great number of persons, whoever they may be, can attain political knowledge, or order a State wisely, but that the true government is to be found in a small body, or in an individual, and that other States are but imitations of this, as we said a little while ago, some for the better and some for the worse. YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean? I cannot have understood your previous remark about imitations."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And yet the mere suggestion which I hastily threw out is highly important, even if we leave the question where it is, and do not seek by the discussion of it to expose the error which prevails in this matter. YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The idea which has to be grasped by us is not easy or familiar; but we may attempt to express it thus:--Supposing the government of which I have been speaking to be the only true model, then the others must use the written laws of this--in no other way can they be saved; they will have to do what is now generally approved, although not the best thing in the world. YOUNG SOCRATES: What is this?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"No citizen should do anything contrary to the laws, and any infringement of them should be punished with death and the most extreme penalties; and this is very right and good when regarded as the second best thing, if you set aside the first, of which I was just now speaking. Shall I explain the nature of what I call the second best? YOUNG SOCRATES: By all means."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I must again have recourse to my favourite images; through them, and them alone, can I describe kings and rulers. YOUNG SOCRATES: What images?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The noble pilot and the wise physician, who 'is worth many another man'--in the similitude of these let us endeavour to discover some image of the king. YOUNG SOCRATES: What sort of an image?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Well, such as this:--Every man will reflect that he suffers strange things at the hands of both of them; the physician saves any whom he wishes to save, and any whom he wishes to maltreat he maltreats--cutting or burning them; and at the same time requiring them to bring him payments, which are a sort of tribute, of which little or nothing is spent upon the sick man, and the greater part is consumed by him and his domestics; and the finale is that he receives money from the relations of the sick man or from some enemy of his, and puts him out of the way. And the pilots of ships are guilty of numberless evil deeds of the same kind; they intentionally play false and leave you ashore when the hour of sailing arrives; or they cause mishaps at sea and cast away their freight; and are guilty of other rogueries. Now suppose that we, bearing all this in mind, were to determine, after consideration, that neither of these arts shall any longer be allowed to exercise absolute control either over freemen or over slaves, but that we will summon an assembly either of all the people, or of the rich only, that anybody who likes, whatever may be his calling, or even if he have no calling, may offer an opinion either about seamanship or about diseases--whether as to the manner in which physic or surgical instruments are to be applied to the patient, or again about the vessels and the nautical implements which are required in navigation, and how to meet the dangers of winds and waves which are incidental to the voyage, how to behave when encountering pirates, and what is to be done with the old-fashioned galleys, if they have to fight with others of a similar build--and that, whatever shall be decreed by the multitude on these points, upon the advice of persons skilled or unskilled, shall be written down on triangular tablets and columns, or enacted although unwritten to be national customs; and that in all future time vessels shall be navigated and remedies administered to the patient after this fashion. YOUNG SOCRATES: What a strange notion!"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Suppose further, that the pilots and physicians are appointed annually, either out of the rich, or out of the whole people, and that they are elected by lot; and that after their election they navigate vessels and heal the sick according to the written rules. YOUNG SOCRATES: Worse and worse."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But hear what follows:--When the year of office has expired, the pilot or physician has to come before a court of review, in which the judges are either selected from the wealthy classes or chosen by lot out of the whole people; and anybody who pleases may be their accuser, and may lay to their charge, that during the past year they have not navigated their vessels or healed their patients according to the letter of the law and the ancient customs of their ancestors; and if either of them is condemned, some of the judges must fix what he is to suffer or pay. YOUNG SOCRATES: He who is willing to take a command under such conditions, deserves to suffer any penalty."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yet once more, we shall have to enact that if any one is detected enquiring into piloting and navigation, or into health and the true nature of medicine, or about the winds, or other conditions of the atmosphere, contrary to the written rules, and has any ingenious notions about such matters, he is not to be called a pilot or physician, but a cloudy prating sophist;--further, on the ground that he is a corrupter of the young, who would persuade them to follow the art of medicine or piloting in an unlawful manner, and to exercise an arbitrary rule over their patients or ships, any one who is qualified by law may inform against him, and indict him in some court, and then if he is found to be persuading any, whether young or old, to act contrary to the written law, he is to be punished with the utmost rigour; for no one should presume to be wiser than the laws; and as touching healing and health and piloting and navigation, the nature of them is known to all, for anybody may learn the written laws and the national customs. If such were the mode of procedure, Socrates, about these sciences and about generalship, and any branch of hunting, or about painting or imitation in general, or carpentry, or any sort of handicraft, or husbandry, or planting, or if we were to see an art of rearing horses, or tending herds, or divination, or any ministerial service, or draught-playing, or any science conversant with number, whether simple or square or cube, or comprising motion,--I say, if all these things were done in this way according to written regulations, and not according to art, what would be the result? YOUNG SOCRATES: All the arts would utterly perish, and could never be recovered, because enquiry would be unlawful. And human life, which is bad enough already, would then become utterly unendurable."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But what, if while compelling all these operations to be regulated by written law, we were to appoint as the guardian of the laws some one elected by a show of hands, or by lot, and he caring nothing about the laws, were to act contrary to them from motives of interest or favour, and without knowledge,--would not this be a still worse evil than the former? YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"To go against the laws, which are based upon long experience, and the wisdom of counsellors who have graciously recommended them and persuaded the multitude to pass them, would be a far greater and more ruinous error than any adherence to written law? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Therefore, as there is a danger of this, the next best thing in legislating is not to allow either the individual or the multitude to break the law in any respect whatever. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The laws would be copies of the true particulars of action as far as they admit of being written down from the lips of those who have knowledge? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly they would."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And, as we were saying, he who has knowledge and is a true Statesman, will do many things within his own sphere of action by his art without regard to the laws, when he is of opinion that something other than that which he has written down and enjoined to be observed during his absence would be better. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes, we said so."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And any individual or any number of men, having fixed laws, in acting contrary to them with a view to something better, would only be acting, as far as they are able, like the true Statesman? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"If they had no knowledge of what they were doing, they would imitate the truth, and they would always imitate ill; but if they had knowledge, the imitation would be the perfect truth, and an imitation no longer. YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the principle that no great number of men are able to acquire a knowledge of any art has been already admitted by us. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes, it has."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then the royal or political art, if there be such an art, will never be attained either by the wealthy or by the other mob. YOUNG SOCRATES: Impossible."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then the nearest approach which these lower forms of government can ever make to the true government of the one scientific ruler, is to do nothing contrary to their own written laws and national customs. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When the rich imitate the true form, such a government is called aristocracy; and when they are regardless of the laws, oligarchy. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Or again, when an individual rules according to law in imitation of him who knows, we call him a king; and if he rules according to law, we give him the same name, whether he rules with opinion or with knowledge. YOUNG SOCRATES: To be sure."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And when an individual truly possessing knowledge rules, his name will surely be the same--he will be called a king; and thus the five names of governments, as they are now reckoned, become one. YOUNG SOCRATES: That is true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And when an individual ruler governs neither by law nor by custom, but following in the steps of the true man of science pretends that he can only act for the best by violating the laws, while in reality appetite and ignorance are the motives of the imitation, may not such an one be called a tyrant? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And this we believe to be the origin of the tyrant and the king, of oligarchies, and aristocracies, and democracies,--because men are offended at the one monarch, and can never be made to believe that any one can be worthy of such authority, or is able and willing in the spirit of virtue and knowledge to act justly and holily to all; they fancy that he will be a despot who will wrong and harm and slay whom he pleases of us; for if there could be such a despot as we describe, they would acknowledge that we ought to be too glad to have him, and that he alone would be the happy ruler of a true and perfect State. YOUNG SOCRATES: To be sure."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But then, as the State is not like a beehive, and has no natural head who is at once recognized to be the superior both in body and in mind, mankind are obliged to meet and make laws, and endeavour to approach as nearly as they can to the true form of government. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And when the foundation of politics is in the letter only and in custom, and knowledge is divorced from action, can we wonder, Socrates, at the miseries which there are, and always will be, in States? Any other art, built on such a foundation and thus conducted, would ruin all that it touched. Ought we not rather to wonder at the natural strength of the political bond? For States have endured all this, time out of mind, and yet some of them still remain and are not overthrown, though many of them, like ships at sea, founder from time to time, and perish and have perished and will hereafter perish, through the badness of their pilots and crews, who have the worst sort of ignorance of the highest truths--I mean to say, that they are wholly unaquainted with politics, of which, above all other sciences, they believe themselves to have acquired the most perfect knowledge. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then the question arises:--which of these untrue forms of government is the least oppressive to their subjects, though they are all oppressive; and which is the worst of them? Here is a consideration which is beside our present purpose, and yet having regard to the whole it seems to influence all our actions: we must examine it. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes, we must."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You may say that of the three forms, the same is at once the hardest and the easiest. YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I am speaking of the three forms of government, which I mentioned at the beginning of this discussion--monarchy, the rule of the few, and the rule of the many. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"If we divide each of these we shall have six, from which the true one may be distinguished as a seventh. YOUNG SOCRATES: How would you make the division?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Monarchy divides into royalty and tyranny; the rule of the few into aristocracy, which has an auspicious name, and oligarchy; and democracy or the rule of the many, which before was one, must now be divided. YOUNG SOCRATES: On what principle of division?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"On the same principle as before, although the name is now discovered to have a twofold meaning. For the distinction of ruling with law or without law, applies to this as well as to the rest. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The division made no difference when we were looking for the perfect State, as we showed before. But now that this has been separated off, and, as we said, the others alone are left for us, the principle of law and the absence of law will bisect them all. YOUNG SOCRATES: That would seem to follow, from what has been said."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then monarchy, when bound by good prescriptions or laws, is the best of all the six, and when lawless is the most bitter and oppressive to the subject. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The government of the few, which is intermediate between that of the one and many, is also intermediate in good and evil; but the government of the many is in every respect weak and unable to do either any great good or any great evil, when compared with the others, because the offices are too minutely subdivided and too many hold them. And this therefore is the worst of all lawful governments, and the best of all lawless ones. If they are all without the restraints of law, democracy is the form in which to live is best; if they are well ordered, then this is the last which you should choose, as royalty, the first form, is the best, with the exception of the seventh, for that excels them all, and is among States what God is among men. YOUNG SOCRATES: You are quite right, and we should choose that above all."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The members of all these States, with the exception of the one which has knowledge, may be set aside as being not Statesmen but partisans,--upholders of the most monstrous idols, and themselves idols; and, being the greatest imitators and magicians, they are also the greatest of Sophists. YOUNG SOCRATES: The name of Sophist after many windings in the argument appears to have been most justly fixed upon the politicians, as they are termed."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And so our satyric drama has been played out; and the troop of Centaurs and Satyrs, however unwilling to leave the stage, have at last been separated from the political science. YOUNG SOCRATES: So I perceive."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There remain, however, natures still more troublesome, because they are more nearly akin to the king, and more difficult to discern; the examination of them may be compared to the process of refining gold. YOUNG SOCRATES: What is your meaning?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The workmen begin by sifting away the earth and stones and the like; there remain in a confused mass the valuable elements akin to gold, which can only be separated by fire,--copper, silver, and other precious metal; these are at last refined away by the use of tests, until the gold is left quite pure. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes, that is the way in which these things are said to be done."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In like manner, all alien and uncongenial matter has been separated from political science, and what is precious and of a kindred nature has been left; there remain the nobler arts of the general and the judge, and the higher sort of oratory which is an ally of the royal art, and persuades men to do justice, and assists in guiding the helm of States:--How can we best clear away all these, leaving him whom we seek alone and unalloyed? YOUNG SOCRATES: That is obviously what has in some way to be attempted."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"If the attempt is all that is wanting, he shall certainly be brought to light; and I think that the illustration of music may assist in exhibiting him. Please to answer me a question. YOUNG SOCRATES: What question?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is such a thing as learning music or handicraft arts in general? YOUNG SOCRATES: There is."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And is there any higher art or science, having power to decide which of these arts are and are not to be learned;--what do you say? YOUNG SOCRATES: I should answer that there is."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do we acknowledge this science to be different from the others? YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And ought the other sciences to be superior to this, or no single science to any other? Or ought this science to be the overseer and governor of all the others? YOUNG SOCRATES: The latter."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You mean to say that the science which judges whether we ought to learn or not, must be superior to the science which is learned or which teaches? YOUNG SOCRATES: Far superior."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the science which determines whether we ought to persuade or not, must be superior to the science which is able to persuade? YOUNG SOCRATES: Of course."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Very good; and to what science do we assign the power of persuading a multitude by a pleasing tale and not by teaching? YOUNG SOCRATES: That power, I think, must clearly be assigned to rhetoric."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And to what science do we give the power of determining whether we are to employ persuasion or force towards any one, or to refrain altogether? YOUNG SOCRATES: To that science which governs the arts of speech and persuasion."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Which, if I am not mistaken, will be politics? YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Rhetoric seems to be quickly distinguished from politics, being a different species, yet ministering to it. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But what would you think of another sort of power or science? YOUNG SOCRATES: What science?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The science which has to do with military operations against our enemies--is that to be regarded as a science or not? YOUNG SOCRATES: How can generalship and military tactics be regarded as other than a science?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And is the art which is able and knows how to advise when we are to go to war, or to make peace, the same as this or different? YOUNG SOCRATES: If we are to be consistent, we must say different."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And we must also suppose that this rules the other, if we are not to give up our former notion? YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And, considering how great and terrible the whole art of war is, can we imagine any which is superior to it but the truly royal? YOUNG SOCRATES: No other."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The art of the general is only ministerial, and therefore not political? YOUNG SOCRATES: Exactly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Once more let us consider the nature of the righteous judge. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Does he do anything but decide the dealings of men with one another to be just or unjust in accordance with the standard which he receives from the king and legislator,--showing his own peculiar virtue only in this, that he is not perverted by gifts, or fears, or pity, or by any sort of favour or enmity, into deciding the suits of men with one another contrary to the appointment of the legislator? YOUNG SOCRATES: No; his office is such as you describe."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then the inference is that the power of the judge is not royal, but only the power of a guardian of the law which ministers to the royal power? YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The review of all these sciences shows that none of them is political or royal. For the truly royal ought not itself to act, but to rule over those who are able to act; the king ought to know what is and what is not a fitting opportunity for taking the initiative in matters of the greatest importance, whilst others should execute his orders. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And, therefore, the arts which we have described, as they have no authority over themselves or one another, but are each of them concerned with some special action of their own, have, as they ought to have, special names corresponding to their several actions. YOUNG SOCRATES: I agree."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the science which is over them all, and has charge of the laws, and of all matters affecting the State, and truly weaves them all into one, if we would describe under a name characteristic of their common nature, most truly we may call politics. YOUNG SOCRATES: Exactly so."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, now that we have discovered the various classes in a State, shall I analyse politics after the pattern which weaving supplied? YOUNG SOCRATES: I greatly wish that you would."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then I must describe the nature of the royal web, and show how the various threads are woven into one piece. YOUNG SOCRATES: Clearly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"A task has to be accomplished, which, although difficult, appears to be necessary. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly the attempt must be made."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"To assume that one part of virtue differs in kind from another, is a position easily assailable by contentious disputants, who appeal to popular opinion. YOUNG SOCRATES: I do not understand."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let me put the matter in another way: I suppose that you would consider courage to be a part of virtue? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly I should."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And you would think temperance to be different from courage; and likewise to be a part of virtue? YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I shall venture to put forward a strange theory about them. YOUNG SOCRATES: What is it?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That they are two principles which thoroughly hate one another and are antagonistic throughout a great part of nature. YOUNG SOCRATES: How singular!"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, very--for all the parts of virtue are commonly said to be friendly to one another. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then let us carefully investigate whether this is universally true, or whether there are not parts of virtue which are at war with their kindred in some respect. YOUNG SOCRATES: Tell me how we shall consider that question."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We must extend our enquiry to all those things which we consider beautiful and at the same time place in two opposite classes. YOUNG SOCRATES: Explain; what are they?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Acuteness and quickness, whether in body or soul or in the movement of sound, and the imitations of them which painting and music supply, you must have praised yourself before now, or been present when others praised them. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do you remember the terms in which they are praised? YOUNG SOCRATES: I do not."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I wonder whether I can explain to you in words the thought which is passing in my mind. YOUNG SOCRATES: Why not?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You fancy that this is all so easy: Well, let us consider these notions with reference to the opposite classes of action under which they fall. When we praise quickness and energy and acuteness, whether of mind or body or sound, we express our praise of the quality which we admire by one word, and that one word is manliness or courage. YOUNG SOCRATES: How?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We speak of an action as energetic and brave, quick and manly, and vigorous too; and when we apply the name of which I speak as the common attribute of all these natures, we certainly praise them. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do we not often praise the quiet strain of action also? YOUNG SOCRATES: To be sure."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do we not then say the opposite of what we said of the other? YOUNG SOCRATES: How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We exclaim How calm! How temperate! in admiration of the slow and quiet working of the intellect, and of steadiness and gentleness in action, of smoothness and depth of voice, and of all rhythmical movement and of music in general, when these have a proper solemnity. Of all such actions we predicate not courage, but a name indicative of order. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But when, on the other hand, either of these is out of place, the names of either are changed into terms of censure. YOUNG SOCRATES: How so?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Too great sharpness or quickness or hardness is termed violence or madness; too great slowness or gentleness is called cowardice or sluggishness; and we may observe, that for the most part these qualities, and the temperance and manliness of the opposite characters, are arrayed as enemies on opposite sides, and do not mingle with one another in their respective actions; and if we pursue the enquiry, we shall find that men who have these different qualities of mind differ from one another. YOUNG SOCRATES: In what respect?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In respect of all the qualities which I mentioned, and very likely of many others. According to their respective affinities to either class of actions they distribute praise and blame,--praise to the actions which are akin to their own, blame to those of the opposite party--and out of this many quarrels and occasions of quarrel arise among them. YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The difference between the two classes is often a trivial concern; but in a state, and when affecting really important matters, becomes of all disorders the most hateful. YOUNG SOCRATES: To what do you refer?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"To nothing short of the whole regulation of human life. For the orderly class are always ready to lead a peaceful life, quietly doing their own business; this is their manner of behaving with all men at home, and they are equally ready to find some way of keeping the peace with foreign States. And on account of this fondness of theirs for peace, which is often out of season where their influence prevails, they become by degrees unwarlike, and bring up their young men to be like themselves; they are at the mercy of their enemies; whence in a few years they and their children and the whole city often pass imperceptibly from the condition of freemen into that of slaves. YOUNG SOCRATES: What a cruel fate!"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now think of what happens with the more courageous natures. Are they not always inciting their country to go to war, owing to their excessive love of the military life? they raise up enemies against themselves many and mighty, and either utterly ruin their native-land or enslave and subject it to its foes? YOUNG SOCRATES: That, again, is true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Must we not admit, then, that where these two classes exist, they always feel the greatest antipathy and antagonism towards one another? YOUNG SOCRATES: We cannot deny it."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And returning to the enquiry with which we began, have we not found that considerable portions of virtue are at variance with one another, and give rise to a similar opposition in the characters who are endowed with them? YOUNG SOCRATES: True."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us consider a further point. YOUNG SOCRATES: What is it?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I want to know, whether any constructive art will make any, even the most trivial thing, out of bad and good materials indifferently, if this can be helped? does not all art rather reject the bad as far as possible, and accept the good and fit materials, and from these elements, whether like or unlike, gathering them all into one, work out some nature or idea? YOUNG SOCRATES: To, be sure."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then the true and natural art of statesmanship will never allow any State to be formed by a combination of good and bad men, if this can be avoided; but will begin by testing human natures in play, and after testing them, will entrust them to proper teachers who are the ministers of her purposes--she will herself give orders, and maintain authority; just as the art of weaving continually gives orders and maintains authority over the carders and all the others who prepare the material for the work, commanding the subsidiary arts to execute the works which she deems necessary for making the web. YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In like manner, the royal science appears to me to be the mistress of all lawful educators and instructors, and having this queenly power, will not permit them to train men in what will produce characters unsuited to the political constitution which she desires to create, but only in what will produce such as are suitable. Those which have no share of manliness and temperance, or any other virtuous inclination, and, from the necessity of an evil nature, are violently carried away to godlessness and insolence and injustice, she gets rid of by death and exile, and punishes them with the greatest of disgraces. YOUNG SOCRATES: That is commonly said."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But those who are wallowing in ignorance and baseness she bows under the yoke of slavery. YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite right."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The rest of the citizens, out of whom, if they have education, something noble may be made, and who are capable of being united by the statesman, the kingly art blends and weaves together; taking on the one hand those whose natures tend rather to courage, which is the stronger element and may be regarded as the warp, and on the other hand those which incline to order and gentleness, and which are represented in the figure as spun thick and soft, after the manner of the woof--these, which are naturally opposed, she seeks to bind and weave together in the following manner: YOUNG SOCRATES: In what manner?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"First of all, she takes the eternal element of the soul and binds it with a divine cord, to which it is akin, and then the animal nature, and binds that with human cords. YOUNG SOCRATES: I do not understand what you mean."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The meaning is, that the opinion about the honourable and the just and good and their opposites, which is true and confirmed by reason, is a divine principle, and when implanted in the soul, is implanted, as I maintain, in a nature of heavenly birth. YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes; what else should it be?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Only the Statesman and the good legislator, having the inspiration of the royal muse, can implant this opinion, and he, only in the rightly educated, whom we were just now describing. YOUNG SOCRATES: Likely enough."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But him who cannot, we will not designate by any of the names which are the subject of the present enquiry. YOUNG SOCRATES: Very right."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The courageous soul when attaining this truth becomes civilized, and rendered more capable of partaking of justice; but when not partaking, is inclined to brutality. Is not that true? YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And again, the peaceful and orderly nature, if sharing in these opinions, becomes temperate and wise, as far as this may be in a State, but if not, deservedly obtains the ignominious name of silliness. YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Can we say that such a connexion as this will lastingly unite the evil with one another or with the good, or that any science would seriously think of using a bond of this kind to join such materials? YOUNG SOCRATES: Impossible."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But in those who were originally of a noble nature, and who have been nurtured in noble ways, and in those only, may we not say that union is implanted by law, and that this is the medicine which art prescribes for them, and of all the bonds which unite the dissimilar and contrary parts of virtue is not this, as I was saying, the divinest? YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Where this divine bond exists there is no difficulty in imagining, or when you have imagined, in creating the other bonds, which are human only. YOUNG SOCRATES: How is that, and what bonds do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Rights of intermarriage, and ties which are formed between States by giving and taking children in marriage, or between individuals by private betrothals and espousals. For most persons form marriage connexions without due regard to what is best for the procreation of children. YOUNG SOCRATES: In what way?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"They seek after wealth and power, which in matrimony are objects not worthy even of a serious censure. YOUNG SOCRATES: There is no need to consider them at all."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"More reason is there to consider the practice of those who make family their chief aim, and to indicate their error. YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"They act on no true principle at all; they seek their ease and receive with open arms those who are like themselves, and hate those who are unlike them, being too much influenced by feelings of dislike. YOUNG SOCRATES: How so?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The quiet orderly class seek for natures like their own, and as far as they can they marry and give in marriage exclusively in this class, and the courageous do the same; they seek natures like their own, whereas they should both do precisely the opposite. YOUNG SOCRATES: How and why is that?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Because courage, when untempered by the gentler nature during many generations, may at first bloom and strengthen, but at last bursts forth into downright madness. YOUNG SOCRATES: Like enough."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And then, again, the soul which is over-full of modesty and has no element of courage in many successive generations, is apt to grow too indolent, and at last to become utterly paralyzed and useless. YOUNG SOCRATES: That, again, is quite likely."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"It was of these bonds I said that there would be no difficulty in creating them, if only both classes originally held the same opinion about the honourable and good;--indeed, in this single work, the whole process of royal weaving is comprised--never to allow temperate natures to be separated from the brave, but to weave them together, like the warp and the woof, by common sentiments and honours and reputation, and by the giving of pledges to one another; and out of them forming one smooth and even web, to entrust to them the offices of State. YOUNG SOCRATES: How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Where one officer only is needed, you must choose a ruler who has both these qualities--when many, you must mingle some of each, for the temperate ruler is very careful and just and safe, but is wanting in thoroughness and go. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly, that is very true."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The character of the courageous, on the other hand, falls short of the former in justice and caution, but has the power of action in a remarkable degree, and where either of these two qualities is wanting, there cities cannot altogether prosper either in their public or private life. YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly they cannot."}
{"Book":"statesman","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"This then we declare to be the completion of the web of political action, which is created by a direct intertexture of the brave and temperate natures, whenever the royal science has drawn the two minds into communion with one another by unanimity and friendship, and having perfected the noblest and best of all the webs which political life admits, and enfolding therein all other inhabitants of cities, whether slaves or freemen, binds them in one fabric and governs and presides over them, and, in so far as to be happy is vouchsafed to a city, in no particular fails to secure their happiness. YOUNG SOCRATES: Your picture, Stranger, of the king and statesman, no less than of the Sophist, is quite perfect. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STATESMAN *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Observe, Protarchus, the nature of the position which you are now going to take from Philebus, and what the other position is which I maintain, and which, if you do not approve of it, is to be controverted by you. Shall you and I sum up the two sides?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure for all who are able to partake of them, and that to all such who are or ever will be they are the most advantageous of all things. Have I not given, Philebus, a fair statement of the two sides of the argument?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"Nothing could be fairer, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you, Protarchus, accept the position which is assigned to you?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I cannot do otherwise, since our excellent Philebus has left the field."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Surely the truth about these matters ought, by all means, to be ascertained."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall we further agree--"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"To what?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That you and I must now try to indicate some state and disposition of the soul, which has the property of making all men happy."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, by all means."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you say that pleasure, and I say that wisdom, is such a state?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what if there be a third state, which is better than either? Then both of us are vanquished--are we not? But if this life, which really has the power of making men happy, turn out to be more akin to pleasure than to wisdom, the life of pleasure may still have the advantage over the life of wisdom."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or suppose that the better life is more nearly allied to wisdom, then wisdom conquers, and pleasure is defeated;--do you agree?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what do you say, Philebus?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"I say, and shall always say, that pleasure is easily the conqueror; but you must decide for yourself, Protarchus."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"You, Philebus, have handed over the argument to me, and have no longer a voice in the matter?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"True enough. Nevertheless I would clear myself and deliver my soul of you; and I call the goddess herself to witness that I now do so."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"You may appeal to us; we too will be the witnesses of your words. And now, Socrates, whether Philebus is pleased or displeased, we will proceed with the argument."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let us begin with the goddess herself, of whom Philebus says that she is called Aphrodite, but that her real name is Pleasure."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The awe which I always feel, Protarchus, about the names of the gods is more than human--it exceeds all other fears. And now I would not sin against Aphrodite by naming her amiss; let her be called what she pleases. But Pleasure I know to be manifold, and with her, as I was just now saying, we must begin, and consider what her nature is. She has one name, and therefore you would imagine that she is one; and yet surely she takes the most varied and even unlike forms. For do we not say that the intemperate has pleasure, and that the temperate has pleasure in his very temperance,--that the fool is pleased when he is full of foolish fancies and hopes, and that the wise man has pleasure in his wisdom? and how foolish would any one be who affirmed that all these opposite pleasures are severally alike!"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Why, Socrates, they are opposed in so far as they spring from opposite sources, but they are not in themselves opposite. For must not pleasure be of all things most absolutely like pleasure,--that is, like itself?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my good friend, just as colour is like colour;--in so far as colours are colours, there is no difference between them; and yet we all know that black is not only unlike, but even absolutely opposed to white: or again, as figure is like figure, for all figures are comprehended under one class; and yet particular figures may be absolutely opposed to one another, and there is an infinite diversity of them. And we might find similar examples in many other things; therefore do not rely upon this argument, which would go to prove the unity of the most extreme opposites. And I suspect that we shall find a similar opposition among pleasures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very likely; but how will this invalidate the argument?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, I shall reply, that dissimilar as they are, you apply to them a new predicate, for you say that all pleasant things are good; now although no one can argue that pleasure is not pleasure, he may argue, as we are doing, that pleasures are oftener bad than good; but you call them all good, and at the same time are compelled, if you are pressed, to acknowledge that they are unlike. And so you must tell us what is the identical quality existing alike in good and bad pleasures, which makes you designate all of them as good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Socrates? Do you think that any one who asserts pleasure to be the good, will tolerate the notion that some pleasures are good and others bad?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet you will acknowledge that they are different from one another, and sometimes opposed?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Not in so far as they are pleasures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is a return to the old position, Protarchus, and so we are to say (are we?) that there is no difference in pleasures, but that they are all alike; and the examples which have just been cited do not pierce our dull minds, but we go on arguing all the same, like the weakest and most inexperienced reasoners? (Probably corrupt.)"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, I mean to say, that in self-defence I may, if I like, follow your example, and assert boldly that the two things most unlike are most absolutely alike; and the result will be that you and I will prove ourselves to be very tyros in the art of disputing; and the argument will be blown away and lost. Suppose that we put back, and return to the old position; then perhaps we may come to an understanding with one another."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall I, Protarchus, have my own question asked of me by you?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What question?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Ask me whether wisdom and science and mind, and those other qualities which I, when asked by you at first what is the nature of the good, affirmed to be good, are not in the same case with the pleasures of which you spoke."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The sciences are a numerous class, and will be found to present great differences. But even admitting that, like the pleasures, they are opposite as well as different, should I be worthy of the name of dialectician if, in order to avoid this difficulty, I were to say (as you are saying of pleasure) that there is no difference between one science and another;--would not the argument founder and disappear like an idle tale, although we might ourselves escape drowning by clinging to a fallacy?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"May none of this befal us, except the deliverance! Yet I like the even-handed justice which is applied to both our arguments. Let us assume, then, that there are many and diverse pleasures, and many and different sciences."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And let us have no concealment, Protarchus, of the differences between my good and yours; but let us bring them to the light in the hope that, in the process of testing them, they may show whether pleasure is to be called the good, or wisdom, or some third quality; for surely we are not now simply contending in order that my view or that yours may prevail, but I presume that we ought both of us to be fighting for the truth."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly we ought."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let us have a more definite understanding and establish the principle on which the argument rests."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What principle?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A principle about which all men are always in a difficulty, and some men sometimes against their will."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Speak plainer."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The principle which has just turned up, which is a marvel of nature; for that one should be many or many one, are wonderful propositions; and he who affirms either is very open to attack."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Do you mean, when a person says that I, Protarchus, am by nature one and also many, dividing the single 'me' into many 'me's,' and even opposing them as great and small, light and heavy, and in ten thousand other ways?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Those, Protarchus, are the common and acknowledged paradoxes about the one and many, which I may say that everybody has by this time agreed to dismiss as childish and obvious and detrimental to the true course of thought; and no more favour is shown to that other puzzle, in which a person proves the members and parts of anything to be divided, and then confessing that they are all one, says laughingly in disproof of his own words: Why, here is a miracle, the one is many and infinite, and the many are only one."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"But what, Socrates, are those other marvels connected with this subject which, as you imply, have not yet become common and acknowledged?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When, my boy, the one does not belong to the class of things that are born and perish, as in the instances which we were giving, for in those cases, and when unity is of this concrete nature, there is, as I was saying, a universal consent that no refutation is needed; but when the assertion is made that man is one, or ox is one, or beauty one, or the good one, then the interest which attaches to these and similar unities and the attempt which is made to divide them gives birth to a controversy."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Of what nature?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the first place, as to whether these unities have a real existence; and then how each individual unity, being always the same, and incapable either of generation or of destruction, but retaining a permanent individuality, can be conceived either as dispersed and multiplied in the infinity of the world of generation, or as still entire and yet divided from itself, which latter would seem to be the greatest impossibility of all, for how can one and the same thing be at the same time in one and in many things? These, Protarchus, are the real difficulties, and this is the one and many to which they relate; they are the source of great perplexity if ill decided, and the right determination of them is very helpful."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Then, Socrates, let us begin by clearing up these questions."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is what I should wish."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"And I am sure that all my other friends will be glad to hear them discussed; Philebus, fortunately for us, is not disposed to move, and we had better not stir him up with questions."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Good; and where shall we begin this great and multifarious battle, in which such various points are at issue? Shall we begin thus?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We say that the one and many become identified by thought, and that now, as in time past, they run about together, in and out of every word which is uttered, and that this union of them will never cease, and is not now beginning, but is, as I believe, an everlasting quality of thought itself, which never grows old. Any young man, when he first tastes these subtleties, is delighted, and fancies that he has found a treasure of wisdom; in the first enthusiasm of his joy he leaves no stone, or rather no thought unturned, now rolling up the many into the one, and kneading them together, now unfolding and dividing them; he puzzles himself first and above all, and then he proceeds to puzzle his neighbours, whether they are older or younger, or of his own age--that makes no difference; neither father nor mother does he spare; no human being who has ears is safe from him, hardly even his dog, and a barbarian would have no chance of escaping him, if an interpreter could only be found."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Considering, Socrates, how many we are, and that all of us are young men, is there not a danger that we and Philebus may all set upon you, if you abuse us? We understand what you mean; but is there no charm by which we may dispel all this confusion, no more excellent way of arriving at the truth? If there is, we hope that you will guide us into that way, and we will do our best to follow, for the enquiry in which we are engaged, Socrates, is not unimportant."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The reverse of unimportant, my boys, as Philebus calls you, and there neither is nor ever will be a better than my own favourite way, which has nevertheless already often deserted me and left me helpless in the hour of need."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Tell us what that is."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"One which may be easily pointed out, but is by no means easy of application; it is the parent of all the discoveries in the arts."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Tell us what it is."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A gift of heaven, which, as I conceive, the gods tossed among men by the hands of a new Prometheus, and therewith a blaze of light; and the ancients, who were our betters and nearer the gods than we are, handed down the tradition, that whatever things are said to be are composed of one and many, and have the finite and infinite implanted in them: seeing, then, that such is the order of the world, we too ought in every enquiry to begin by laying down one idea of that which is the subject of enquiry; this unity we shall find in everything. Having found it, we may next proceed to look for two, if there be two, or, if not, then for three or some other number, subdividing each of these units, until at last the unity with which we began is seen not only to be one and many and infinite, but also a definite number; the infinite must not be suffered to approach the many until the entire number of the species intermediate between unity and infinity has been discovered,--then, and not till then, we may rest from division, and without further troubling ourselves about the endless individuals may allow them to drop into infinity. This, as I was saying, is the way of considering and learning and teaching one another, which the gods have handed down to us. But the wise men of our time are either too quick or too slow in conceiving plurality in unity. Having no method, they make their one and many anyhow, and from unity pass at once to infinity; the intermediate steps never occur to them. And this, I repeat, is what makes the difference between the mere art of disputation and true dialectic."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I think that I partly understand you Socrates, but I should like to have a clearer notion of what you are saying."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I may illustrate my meaning by the letters of the alphabet, Protarchus, which you were made to learn as a child."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How do they afford an illustration?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The sound which passes through the lips whether of an individual or of all men is one and yet infinite."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet not by knowing either that sound is one or that sound is infinite are we perfect in the art of speech, but the knowledge of the number and nature of sounds is what makes a man a grammarian."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the knowledge which makes a man a musician is of the same kind."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Sound is one in music as well as in grammar?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there is a higher note and a lower note, and a note of equal pitch:--may we affirm so much?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But you would not be a real musician if this was all that you knew; though if you did not know this you would know almost nothing of music."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Nothing."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But when you have learned what sounds are high and what low, and the number and nature of the intervals and their limits or proportions, and the systems compounded out of them, which our fathers discovered, and have handed down to us who are their descendants under the name of harmonies; and the affections corresponding to them in the movements of the human body, which when measured by numbers ought, as they say, to be called rhythms and measures; and they tell us that the same principle should be applied to every one and many;--when, I say, you have learned all this, then, my dear friend, you are perfect; and you may be said to understand any other subject, when you have a similar grasp of it. But the infinity of kinds and the infinity of individuals which there is in each of them, when not classified, creates in every one of us a state of infinite ignorance; and he who never looks for number in anything, will not himself be looked for in the number of famous men."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I think that what Socrates is now saying is excellent, Philebus."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"I think so too, but how do his words bear upon us and upon the argument?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Philebus is right in asking that question of us, Protarchus."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Indeed he is, and you must answer him."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will; but you must let me make one little remark first about these matters; I was saying, that he who begins with any individual unity, should proceed from that, not to infinity, but to a definite number, and now I say conversely, that he who has to begin with infinity should not jump to unity, but he should look about for some number representing a certain quantity, and thus out of all end in one. And now let us return for an illustration of our principle to the case of letters."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Some god or divine man, who in the Egyptian legend is said to have been Theuth, observing that the human voice was infinite, first distinguished in this infinity a certain number of vowels, and then other letters which had sound, but were not pure vowels (i.e., the semivowels); these too exist in a definite number; and lastly, he distinguished a third class of letters which we now call mutes, without voice and without sound, and divided these, and likewise the two other classes of vowels and semivowels, into the individual sounds, and told the number of them, and gave to each and all of them the name of letters; and observing that none of us could learn any one of them and not learn them all, and in consideration of this common bond which in a manner united them, he assigned to them all a single art, and this he called the art of grammar or letters."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"The illustration, Protarchus, has assisted me in understanding the original statement, but I still feel the defect of which I just now complained."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are you going to ask, Philebus, what this has to do with the argument?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is a question which Protarchus and I have been long asking."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Assuredly you have already arrived at the answer to the question which, as you say, you have been so long asking?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Did we not begin by enquiring into the comparative eligibility of pleasure and wisdom?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And we maintain that they are each of them one?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the precise question to which the previous discussion desires an answer is, how they are one and also many (i.e., how they have one genus and many species), and are not at once infinite, and what number of species is to be assigned to either of them before they pass into infinity (i.e. into the infinite number of individuals)."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That is a very serious question, Philebus, to which Socrates has ingeniously brought us round, and please to consider which of us shall answer him; there may be something ridiculous in my being unable to answer, and therefore imposing the task upon you, when I have undertaken the whole charge of the argument, but if neither of us were able to answer, the result methinks would be still more ridiculous. Let us consider, then, what we are to do:--Socrates, if I understood him rightly, is asking whether there are not kinds of pleasure, and what is the number and nature of them, and the same of wisdom."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Most true, O son of Callias; and the previous argument showed that if we are not able to tell the kinds of everything that has unity, likeness, sameness, or their opposites, none of us will be of the smallest use in any enquiry."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That seems to be very near the truth, Socrates. Happy would the wise man be if he knew all things, and the next best thing for him is that he should know himself. Why do I say so at this moment? I will tell you. You, Socrates, have granted us this opportunity of conversing with you, and are ready to assist us in determining what is the best of human goods. For when Philebus said that pleasure and delight and enjoyment and the like were the chief good, you answered--No, not those, but another class of goods; and we are constantly reminding ourselves of what you said, and very properly, in order that we may not forget to examine and compare the two. And these goods, which in your opinion are to be designated as superior to pleasure, and are the true objects of pursuit, are mind and knowledge and understanding and art, and the like. There was a dispute about which were the best, and we playfully threatened that you should not be allowed to go home until the question was settled; and you agreed, and placed yourself at our disposal. And now, as children say, what has been fairly given cannot be taken back; cease then to fight against us in this way."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In what way?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"Do not perplex us, and keep asking questions of us to which we have not as yet any sufficient answer to give; let us not imagine that a general puzzling of us all is to be the end of our discussion, but if we are unable to answer, do you answer, as you have promised. Consider, then, whether you will divide pleasure and knowledge according to their kinds; or you may let the matter drop, if you are able and willing to find some other mode of clearing up our controversy."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If you say that, I have nothing to apprehend, for the words 'if you are willing' dispel all my fear; and, moreover, a god seems to have recalled something to my mind."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"What is that?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I remember to have heard long ago certain discussions about pleasure and wisdom, whether awake or in a dream I cannot tell; they were to the effect that neither the one nor the other of them was the good, but some third thing, which was different from them, and better than either. If this be clearly established, then pleasure will lose the victory, for the good will cease to be identified with her:--Am I not right?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there will cease to be any need of distinguishing the kinds of pleasures, as I am inclined to think, but this will appear more clearly as we proceed."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Capital, Socrates; pray go on as you propose."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But, let us first agree on some little points."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is the good perfect or imperfect?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"The most perfect, Socrates, of all things."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is the good sufficient?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly, and in a degree surpassing all other things."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And no one can deny that all percipient beings desire and hunt after good, and are eager to catch and have the good about them, and care not for the attainment of anything which is not accompanied by good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That is undeniable."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now let us part off the life of pleasure from the life of wisdom, and pass them in review."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let there be no wisdom in the life of pleasure, nor any pleasure in the life of wisdom, for if either of them is the chief good, it cannot be supposed to want anything, but if either is shown to want anything, then it cannot really be the chief good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will you help us to test these two lives?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then answer."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Ask."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Would you choose, Protarchus, to live all your life long in the enjoyment of the greatest pleasures?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly I should."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Would you consider that there was still anything wanting to you if you had perfect pleasure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Reflect; would you not want wisdom and intelligence and forethought, and similar qualities? would you not at any rate want sight?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Why should I? Having pleasure I should have all things."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Living thus, you would always throughout your life enjoy the greatest pleasures?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if you had neither mind, nor memory, nor knowledge, nor true opinion, you would in the first place be utterly ignorant of whether you were pleased or not, because you would be entirely devoid of intelligence."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And similarly, if you had no memory you would not recollect that you had ever been pleased, nor would the slightest recollection of the pleasure which you feel at any moment remain with you; and if you had no true opinion you would not think that you were pleased when you were; and if you had no power of calculation you would not be able to calculate on future pleasure, and your life would be the life, not of a man, but of an oyster or 'pulmo marinus.' Could this be otherwise?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But is such a life eligible?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I cannot answer you, Socrates; the argument has taken away from me the power of speech."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We must keep up our spirits;--let us now take the life of mind and examine it in turn."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"And what is this life of mind?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I want to know whether any one of us would consent to live, having wisdom and mind and knowledge and memory of all things, but having no sense of pleasure or pain, and wholly unaffected by these and the like feelings?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Neither life, Socrates, appears eligible to me, nor is likely, as I should imagine, to be chosen by any one else."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What would you say, Protarchus, to both of these in one, or to one that was made out of the union of the two?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Out of the union, that is, of pleasure with mind and wisdom?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, that is the life which I mean."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"There can be no difference of opinion; not some but all would surely choose this third rather than either of the other two, and in addition to them."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But do you see the consequence?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"To be sure I do. The consequence is, that two out of the three lives which have been proposed are neither sufficient nor eligible for man or for animal."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now there can be no doubt that neither of them has the good, for the one which had would certainly have been sufficient and perfect and eligible for every living creature or thing that was able to live such a life; and if any of us had chosen any other, he would have chosen contrary to the nature of the truly eligible, and not of his own free will, but either through ignorance or from some unhappy necessity."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly that seems to be true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now have I not sufficiently shown that Philebus' goddess is not to be regarded as identical with the good?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"Neither is your 'mind' the good, Socrates, for that will be open to the same objections."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Perhaps, Philebus, you may be right in saying so of my 'mind'; but of the true, which is also the divine mind, far otherwise. However, I will not at present claim the first place for mind as against the mixed life; but we must come to some understanding about the second place. For you might affirm pleasure and I mind to be the cause of the mixed life; and in that case although neither of them would be the good, one of them might be imagined to be the cause of the good. And I might proceed further to argue in opposition to Philebus, that the element which makes this mixed life eligible and good, is more akin and more similar to mind than to pleasure. And if this is true, pleasure cannot be truly said to share either in the first or second place, and does not, if I may trust my own mind, attain even to the third."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Truly, Socrates, pleasure appears to me to have had a fall; in fighting for the palm, she has been smitten by the argument, and is laid low. I must say that mind would have fallen too, and may therefore be thought to show discretion in not putting forward a similar claim. And if pleasure were deprived not only of the first but of the second place, she would be terribly damaged in the eyes of her admirers, for not even to them would she still appear as fair as before."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but had we not better leave her now, and not pain her by applying the crucial test, and finally detecting her?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Nonsense, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why? because I said that we had better not pain pleasure, which is an impossibility?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, and more than that, because you do not seem to be aware that none of us will let you go home until you have finished the argument."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Heavens! Protarchus, that will be a tedious business, and just at present not at all an easy one. For in going to war in the cause of mind, who is aspiring to the second prize, I ought to have weapons of another make from those which I used before; some, however, of the old ones may do again. And must I then finish the argument?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Of course you must."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us be very careful in laying the foundation."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us divide all existing things into two, or rather, if you do not object, into three classes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Upon what principle would you make the division?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us take some of our newly-found notions."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Which of them?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Were we not saying that God revealed a finite element of existence, and also an infinite?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us assume these two principles, and also a third, which is compounded out of them; but I fear that I am ridiculously clumsy at these processes of division and enumeration."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, my good friend?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I say that a fourth class is still wanted."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What will that be?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Find the cause of the third or compound, and add this as a fourth class to the three others."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"And would you like to have a fifth class or cause of resolution as well as a cause of composition?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Not, I think, at present; but if I want a fifth at some future time you shall allow me to have it."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us begin with the first three; and as we find two out of the three greatly divided and dispersed, let us endeavour to reunite them, and see how in each of them there is a one and many."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"If you would explain to me a little more about them, perhaps I might be able to follow you."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, the two classes are the same which I mentioned before, one the finite, and the other the infinite; I will first show that the infinite is in a certain sense many, and the finite may be hereafter discussed."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now consider well; for the question to which I invite your attention is difficult and controverted. When you speak of hotter and colder, can you conceive any limit in those qualities? Does not the more and less, which dwells in their very nature, prevent their having any end? for if they had an end, the more and less would themselves have an end."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That is most true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Ever, as we say, into the hotter and the colder there enters a more and a less."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, says the argument, there is never any end of them, and being endless they must also be infinite."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, that is exceedingly true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my dear Protarchus, and your answer reminds me that such an expression as 'exceedingly,' which you have just uttered, and also the term 'gently,' have the same significance as more or less; for whenever they occur they do not allow of the existence of quantity--they are always introducing degrees into actions, instituting a comparison of a more or a less excessive or a more or a less gentle, and at each creation of more or less, quantity disappears. For, as I was just now saying, if quantity and measure did not disappear, but were allowed to intrude in the sphere of more and less and the other comparatives, these last would be driven out of their own domain. When definite quantity is once admitted, there can be no longer a 'hotter' or a 'colder' (for these are always progressing, and are never in one stay); but definite quantity is at rest, and has ceased to progress. Which proves that comparatives, such as the hotter and the colder, are to be ranked in the class of the infinite."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Your remark certainly has the look of truth, Socrates; but these subjects, as you were saying, are difficult to follow at first. I think however, that if I could hear the argument repeated by you once or twice, there would be a substantial agreement between us."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, and I will try to meet your wish; but, as I would rather not waste time in the enumeration of endless particulars, let me know whether I may not assume as a note of the infinite--"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I want to know whether such things as appear to us to admit of more or less, or are denoted by the words 'exceedingly,' 'gently,' 'extremely,' and the like, may not be referred to the class of the infinite, which is their unity, for, as was asserted in the previous argument, all things that were divided and dispersed should be brought together, and have the mark or seal of some one nature, if possible, set upon them--do you remember?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And all things which do not admit of more or less, but admit their opposites, that is to say, first of all, equality, and the equal, or again, the double, or any other ratio of number and measure--all these may, I think, be rightly reckoned by us in the class of the limited or finite; what do you say?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Excellent, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now what nature shall we ascribe to the third or compound kind?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"You, I think, will have to tell me that."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Rather God will tell you, if there be any God who will listen to my prayers."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Offer up a prayer, then, and think."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am thinking, Protarchus, and I believe that some God has befriended us."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, and what proof have you to offer of what you are saying?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will tell you, and do you listen to my words."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Were we not speaking just now of hotter and colder?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Add to them drier, wetter, more, less, swifter, slower, greater, smaller, and all that in the preceding argument we placed under the unity of more and less."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"In the class of the infinite, you mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes; and now mingle this with the other."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What is the other."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The class of the finite which we ought to have brought together as we did the infinite; but, perhaps, it will come to the same thing if we do so now;--when the two are combined, a third will appear."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean by the class of the finite?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The class of the equal and the double, and any class which puts an end to difference and opposition, and by introducing number creates harmony and proportion among the different elements."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I understand; you seem to me to mean that the various opposites, when you mingle with them the class of the finite, takes certain forms."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, that is my meaning."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Does not the right participation in the finite give health--in disease, for instance?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And whereas the high and low, the swift and the slow are infinite or unlimited, does not the addition of the principles aforesaid introduce a limit, and perfect the whole frame of music?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or, again, when cold and heat prevail, does not the introduction of them take away excess and indefiniteness, and infuse moderation and harmony?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And from a like admixture of the finite and infinite come the seasons, and all the delights of life?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I omit ten thousand other things, such as beauty and health and strength, and the many beauties and high perfections of the soul: O my beautiful Philebus, the goddess, methinks, seeing the universal wantonness and wickedness of all things, and that there was in them no limit to pleasures and self-indulgence, devised the limit of law and order, whereby, as you say, Philebus, she torments, or as I maintain, delivers the soul.--What think you, Protarchus?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Her ways are much to my mind, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You will observe that I have spoken of three classes?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I think that I understand you: you mean to say that the infinite is one class, and that the finite is a second class of existences; but what you would make the third I am not so certain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is because the amazing variety of the third class is too much for you, my dear friend; but there was not this difficulty with the infinite, which also comprehended many classes, for all of them were sealed with the note of more and less, and therefore appeared one."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the finite or limit had not many divisions, and we readily acknowledged it to be by nature one?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed; and when I speak of the third class, understand me to mean any offspring of these, being a birth into true being, effected by the measure which the limit introduces."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I understand."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Still there was, as we said, a fourth class to be investigated, and you must assist in the investigation; for does not everything which comes into being, of necessity come into being through a cause?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly; for how can there be anything which has no cause?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not the agent the same as the cause in all except name; the agent and the cause may be rightly called one?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same may be said of the patient, or effect; we shall find that they too differ, as I was saying, only in name--shall we not?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"We shall."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The agent or cause always naturally leads, and the patient or effect naturally follows it?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the cause and what is subordinate to it in generation are not the same, but different?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Did not the things which were generated, and the things out of which they were generated, furnish all the three classes?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the creator or cause of them has been satisfactorily proven to be distinct from them,--and may therefore be called a fourth principle?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"So let us call it."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Quite right; but now, having distinguished the four, I think that we had better refresh our memories by recapitulating each of them in order."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the first I will call the infinite or unlimited, and the second the finite or limited; then follows the third, an essence compound and generated; and I do not think that I shall be far wrong in speaking of the cause of mixture and generation as the fourth."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now what is the next question, and how came we hither? Were we not enquiring whether the second place belonged to pleasure or wisdom?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"We were."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, having determined these points, shall we not be better able to decide about the first and second place, which was the original subject of dispute?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I dare say."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We said, if you remember, that the mixed life of pleasure and wisdom was the conqueror--did we not?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And we see what is the place and nature of this life and to what class it is to be assigned?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Beyond a doubt."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"This is evidently comprehended in the third or mixed class; which is not composed of any two particular ingredients, but of all the elements of infinity, bound down by the finite, and may therefore be truly said to comprehend the conqueror life."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what shall we say, Philebus, of your life which is all sweetness; and in which of the aforesaid classes is that to be placed? Perhaps you will allow me to ask you a question before you answer?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"Let me hear."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Have pleasure and pain a limit, or do they belong to the class which admits of more and less?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"They belong to the class which admits of more, Socrates; for pleasure would not be perfectly good if she were not infinite in quantity and degree."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor would pain, Philebus, be perfectly evil. And therefore the infinite cannot be that element which imparts to pleasure some degree of good. But now--admitting, if you like, that pleasure is of the nature of the infinite--in which of the aforesaid classes, O Protarchus and Philebus, can we without irreverence place wisdom and knowledge and mind? And let us be careful, for I think that the danger will be very serious if we err on this point."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"You magnify, Socrates, the importance of your favourite god."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you, my friend, are also magnifying your favourite goddess; but still I must beg you to answer the question."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Socrates is quite right, Philebus, and we must submit to him."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"And did not you, Protarchus, propose to answer in my place?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly I did; but I am now in a great strait, and I must entreat you, Socrates, to be our spokesman, and then we shall not say anything wrong or disrespectful of your favourite."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I must obey you, Protarchus; nor is the task which you impose a difficult one; but did I really, as Philebus implies, disconcert you with my playful solemnity, when I asked the question to what class mind and knowledge belong?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"You did, indeed, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yet the answer is easy, since all philosophers assert with one voice that mind is the king of heaven and earth--in reality they are magnifying themselves. And perhaps they are right. But still I should like to consider the class of mind, if you do not object, a little more fully."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PHILEBUS","Dialogue":"Take your own course, Socrates, and never mind length; we shall not tire of you."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good; let us begin then, Protarchus, by asking a question."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What question?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Whether all this which they call the universe is left to the guidance of unreason and chance medley, or, on the contrary, as our fathers have declared, ordered and governed by a marvellous intelligence and wisdom."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Wide asunder are the two assertions, illustrious Socrates, for that which you were just now saying to me appears to be blasphemy; but the other assertion, that mind orders all things, is worthy of the aspect of the world, and of the sun, and of the moon, and of the stars and of the whole circle of the heavens; and never will I say or think otherwise."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall we then agree with them of old time in maintaining this doctrine,--not merely reasserting the notions of others, without risk to ourselves,--but shall we share in the danger, and take our part of the reproach which will await us, when an ingenious individual declares that all is disorder?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That would certainly be my wish."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now please to consider the next stage of the argument."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Let me hear."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We see that the elements which enter into the nature of the bodies of all animals, fire, water, air, and, as the storm-tossed sailor cries, 'land' (i.e., earth), reappear in the constitution of the world."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"The proverb may be applied to us; for truly the storm gathers over us, and we are at our wit's end."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is something to be remarked about each of these elements."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Only a small fraction of any one of them exists in us, and that of a mean sort, and not in any way pure, or having any power worthy of its nature. One instance will prove this of all of them; there is fire within us, and in the universe."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not our fire small and weak and mean? But the fire in the universe is wonderful in quantity and beauty, and in every power that fire has."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is the fire in the universe nourished and generated and ruled by the fire in us, or is the fire in you and me, and in other animals, dependent on the universal fire?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That is a question which does not deserve an answer."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Right; and you would say the same, if I am not mistaken, of the earth which is in animals and the earth which is in the universe, and you would give a similar reply about all the other elements?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Why, how could any man who gave any other be deemed in his senses?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I do not think that he could--but now go on to the next step. When we saw those elements of which we have been speaking gathered up in one, did we not call them a body?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"We did."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same may be said of the cosmos, which for the same reason may be considered to be a body, because made up of the same elements."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But is our body nourished wholly by this body, or is this body nourished by our body, thence deriving and having the qualities of which we were just now speaking?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That again, Socrates, is a question which does not deserve to be asked."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, tell me, is this question worth asking?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What question?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"May our body be said to have a soul?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And whence comes that soul, my dear Protarchus, unless the body of the universe, which contains elements like those in our bodies but in every way fairer, had also a soul? Can there be another source?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Clearly, Socrates, that is the only source."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, yes, Protarchus; for surely we cannot imagine that of the four classes, the finite, the infinite, the composition of the two, and the cause, the fourth, which enters into all things, giving to our bodies souls, and the art of self-management, and of healing disease, and operating in other ways to heal and organize, having too all the attributes of wisdom;--we cannot, I say, imagine that whereas the self-same elements exist, both in the entire heaven and in great provinces of the heaven, only fairer and purer, this last should not also in that higher sphere have designed the noblest and fairest things?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Such a supposition is quite unreasonable."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then if this be denied, should we not be wise in adopting the other view and maintaining that there is in the universe a mighty infinite and an adequate limit, of which we have often spoken, as well as a presiding cause of no mean power, which orders and arranges years and seasons and months, and may be justly called wisdom and mind?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most justly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And wisdom and mind cannot exist without soul?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in the divine nature of Zeus would you not say that there is the soul and mind of a king, because there is in him the power of the cause? And other gods have other attributes, by which they are pleased to be called."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do not then suppose that these words are rashly spoken by us, O Protarchus, for they are in harmony with the testimony of those who said of old time that mind rules the universe."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And they furnish an answer to my enquiry; for they imply that mind is the parent of that class of the four which we called the cause of all; and I think that you now have my answer."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I have indeed, and yet I did not observe that you had answered."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A jest is sometimes refreshing, Protarchus, when it interrupts earnest."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think, friend, that we have now pretty clearly set forth the class to which mind belongs and what is the power of mind."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the class to which pleasure belongs has also been long ago discovered?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And let us remember, too, of both of them, (1) that mind was akin to the cause and of this family; and (2) that pleasure is infinite and belongs to the class which neither has, nor ever will have in itself, a beginning, middle, or end of its own."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I shall be sure to remember."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We must next examine what is their place and under what conditions they are generated. And we will begin with pleasure, since her class was first examined; and yet pleasure cannot be rightly tested apart from pain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"If this is the road, let us take it."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I wonder whether you would agree with me about the origin of pleasure and pain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean to say that their natural seat is in the mixed class."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"And would you tell me again, sweet Socrates, which of the aforesaid classes is the mixed one?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will, my fine fellow, to the best of my ability."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us then understand the mixed class to be that which we placed third in the list of four."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That which followed the infinite and the finite; and in which you ranked health, and, if I am not mistaken, harmony."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Capital; and now will you please to give me your best attention?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Proceed; I am attending."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I say that when the harmony in animals is dissolved, there is also a dissolution of nature and a generation of pain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That is very probable."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the restoration of harmony and return to nature is the source of pleasure, if I may be allowed to speak in the fewest and shortest words about matters of the greatest moment."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I believe that you are right, Socrates; but will you try to be a little plainer?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do not obvious and every-day phenomena furnish the simplest illustration?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What phenomena do you mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Hunger, for example, is a dissolution and a pain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Whereas eating is a replenishment and a pleasure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Thirst again is a destruction and a pain, but the effect of moisture replenishing the dry place is a pleasure: once more, the unnatural separation and dissolution caused by heat is painful, and the natural restoration and refrigeration is pleasant."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the unnatural freezing of the moisture in an animal is pain, and the natural process of resolution and return of the elements to their original state is pleasure. And would not the general proposition seem to you to hold, that the destroying of the natural union of the finite and infinite, which, as I was observing before, make up the class of living beings, is pain, and that the process of return of all things to their own nature is pleasure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Granted; what you say has a general truth."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Here then is one kind of pleasures and pains originating severally in the two processes which we have described?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us next assume that in the soul herself there is an antecedent hope of pleasure which is sweet and refreshing, and an expectation of pain, fearful and anxious."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes; this is another class of pleasures and pains, which is of the soul only, apart from the body, and is produced by expectation."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Right; for in the analysis of these, pure, as I suppose them to be, the pleasures being unalloyed with pain and the pains with pleasure, methinks that we shall see clearly whether the whole class of pleasure is to be desired, or whether this quality of entire desirableness is not rather to be attributed to another of the classes which have been mentioned; and whether pleasure and pain, like heat and cold, and other things of the same kind, are not sometimes to be desired and sometimes not to be desired, as being not in themselves good, but only sometimes and in some instances admitting of the nature of good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"You say most truly that this is the track which the investigation should pursue."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, assuming that pain ensues on the dissolution, and pleasure on the restoration of the harmony, let us now ask what will be the condition of animated beings who are neither in process of restoration nor of dissolution. And mind what you say: I ask whether any animal who is in that condition can possibly have any feeling of pleasure or pain, great or small?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then here we have a third state, over and above that of pleasure and of pain?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do not forget that there is such a state; it will make a great difference in our judgment of pleasure, whether we remember this or not. And I should like to say a few words about it."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What have you to say?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, you know that if a man chooses the life of wisdom, there is no reason why he should not live in this neutral state."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"You mean that he may live neither rejoicing nor sorrowing?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes; and if I remember rightly, when the lives were compared, no degree of pleasure, whether great or small, was thought to be necessary to him who chose the life of thought and wisdom."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly, we said so."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he will live without pleasure; and who knows whether this may not be the most divine of all lives?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"If so, the gods, at any rate, cannot be supposed to have either joy or sorrow."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Certainly not--there would be a great impropriety in the assumption of either alternative. But whether the gods are or are not indifferent to pleasure is a point which may be considered hereafter if in any way relevant to the argument, and whatever is the conclusion we will place it to the account of mind in her contest for the second place, should she have to resign the first."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Just so."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The other class of pleasures, which as we were saying is purely mental, is entirely derived from memory."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I must first of all analyze memory, or rather perception which is prior to memory, if the subject of our discussion is ever to be properly cleared up."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How will you proceed?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us imagine affections of the body which are extinguished before they reach the soul, and leave her unaffected; and again, other affections which vibrate through both soul and body, and impart a shock to both and to each of them."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Granted."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the soul may be truly said to be oblivious of the first but not of the second?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When I say oblivious, do not suppose that I mean forgetfulness in a literal sense; for forgetfulness is the exit of memory, which in this case has not yet entered; and to speak of the loss of that which is not yet in existence, and never has been, is a contradiction; do you see?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then just be so good as to change the terms."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How shall I change them?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Instead of the oblivion of the soul, when you are describing the state in which she is unaffected by the shocks of the body, say unconsciousness."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I see."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the union or communion of soul and body in one feeling and motion would be properly called consciousness?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now we know the meaning of the word?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And memory may, I think, be rightly described as the preservation of consciousness?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Right."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But do we not distinguish memory from recollection?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I think so."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do we not mean by recollection the power which the soul has of recovering, when by herself, some feeling which she experienced when in company with the body?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when she recovers of herself the lost recollection of some consciousness or knowledge, the recovery is termed recollection and reminiscence?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is a reason why I say all this."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I want to attain the plainest possible notion of pleasure and desire, as they exist in the mind only, apart from the body; and the previous analysis helps to show the nature of both."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Then now, Socrates, let us proceed to the next point."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There are certainly many things to be considered in discussing the generation and whole complexion of pleasure. At the outset we must determine the nature and seat of desire."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Ay; let us enquire into that, for we shall lose nothing."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nay, Protarchus, we shall surely lose the puzzle if we find the answer."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"A fair retort; but let us proceed."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Did we not place hunger, thirst, and the like, in the class of desires?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet they are very different; what common nature have we in view when we call them by a single name?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"By heavens, Socrates, that is a question which is not easily answered; but it must be answered."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let us go back to our examples."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Where shall we begin?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do we mean anything when we say 'a man thirsts'?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We mean to say that he 'is empty'?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not thirst desire?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, of drink."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Would you say of drink, or of replenishment with drink?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I should say, of replenishment with drink."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who is empty desires, as would appear, the opposite of what he experiences; for he is empty and desires to be full?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Clearly so."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But how can a man who is empty for the first time, attain either by perception or memory to any apprehension of replenishment, of which he has no present or past experience?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet he who desires, surely desires something?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He does not desire that which he experiences, for he experiences thirst, and thirst is emptiness; but he desires replenishment?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then there must be something in the thirsty man which in some way apprehends replenishment?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"There must."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that cannot be the body, for the body is supposed to be emptied?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The only remaining alternative is that the soul apprehends the replenishment by the help of memory; as is obvious, for what other way can there be?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I cannot imagine any other."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But do you see the consequence?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That there is no such thing as desire of the body."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Why so?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, because the argument shows that the endeavour of every animal is to the reverse of his bodily state."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the impulse which leads him to the opposite of what he is experiencing proves that he has a memory of the opposite state."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the argument, having proved that memory attracts us towards the objects of desire, proves also that the impulses and the desires and the moving principle in every living being have their origin in the soul."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The argument will not allow that our body either hungers or thirsts or has any similar experience."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite right."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me make a further observation; the argument appears to me to imply that there is a kind of life which consists in these affections."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Of what affections, and of what kind of life, are you speaking?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am speaking of being emptied and replenished, and of all that relates to the preservation and destruction of living beings, as well as of the pain which is felt in one of these states and of the pleasure which succeeds to it."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what would you say of the intermediate state?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean by 'intermediate'?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean when a person is in actual suffering and yet remembers past pleasures which, if they would only return, would relieve him; but as yet he has them not. May we not say of him, that he is in an intermediate state?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Would you say that he was wholly pained or wholly pleased?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Nay, I should say that he has two pains; in his body there is the actual experience of pain, and in his soul longing and expectation."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Protarchus, by the two pains? May not a man who is empty have at one time a sure hope of being filled, and at other times be quite in despair?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And has he not the pleasure of memory when he is hoping to be filled, and yet in that he is empty is he not at the same time in pain?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then man and the other animals have at the same time both pleasure and pain?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I suppose so."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But when a man is empty and has no hope of being filled, there will be the double experience of pain. You observed this and inferred that the double experience was the single case possible."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall the enquiry into these states of feeling be made the occasion of raising a question?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What question?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Whether we ought to say that the pleasures and pains of which we are speaking are true or false? or some true and some false?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"But how, Socrates, can there be false pleasures and pains?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how, Protarchus, can there be true and false fears, or true and false expectations, or true and false opinions?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I grant that opinions may be true or false, but not pleasures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What do you mean? I am afraid that we are raising a very serious enquiry."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"There I agree."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet, my boy, for you are one of Philebus' boys, the point to be considered, is, whether the enquiry is relevant to the argument."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Surely."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No tedious and irrelevant discussion can be allowed; what is said should be pertinent."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Right."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am always wondering at the question which has now been raised."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you deny that some pleasures are false, and others true?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"To be sure I do."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Would you say that no one ever seemed to rejoice and yet did not rejoice, or seemed to feel pain and yet did not feel pain, sleeping or waking, mad or lunatic?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"So we have always held, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But were you right? Shall we enquire into the truth of your opinion?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I think that we should."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us then put into more precise terms the question which has arisen about pleasure and opinion. Is there such a thing as opinion?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And such a thing as pleasure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And an opinion must be of something?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And a man must be pleased by something?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite correct."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And whether the opinion be right or wrong, makes no difference; it will still be an opinion?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who is pleased, whether he is rightly pleased or not, will always have a real feeling of pleasure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes; that is also quite true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, how can opinion be both true and false, and pleasure true only, although pleasure and opinion are both equally real?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes; that is the question."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You mean that opinion admits of truth and falsehood, and hence becomes not merely opinion, but opinion of a certain quality; and this is what you think should be examined?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And further, even if we admit the existence of qualities in other objects, may not pleasure and pain be simple and devoid of quality?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But there is no difficulty in seeing that pleasure and pain as well as opinion have qualities, for they are great or small, and have various degrees of intensity; as was indeed said long ago by us."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if badness attaches to any of them, Protarchus, then we should speak of a bad opinion or of a bad pleasure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if rightness attaches to any of them, should we not speak of a right opinion or right pleasure; and in like manner of the reverse of rightness?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if the thing opined be erroneous, might we not say that the opinion, being erroneous, is not right or rightly opined?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if we see a pleasure or pain which errs in respect of its object, shall we call that right or good, or by any honourable name?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Not if the pleasure is mistaken; how could we?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And surely pleasure often appears to accompany an opinion which is not true, but false?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly it does; and in that case, Socrates, as we were saying, the opinion is false, but no one could call the actual pleasure false."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How eagerly, Protarchus, do you rush to the defence of pleasure!"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Nay, Socrates, I only repeat what I hear."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is there no difference, my friend, between that pleasure which is associated with right opinion and knowledge, and that which is often found in all of us associated with falsehood and ignorance?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"There must be a very great difference, between them."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, now let us proceed to contemplate this difference."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Lead, and I will follow."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, my view is--"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We agree--do we not?--that there is such a thing as false, and also such a thing as true opinion?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And pleasure and pain, as I was just now saying, are often consequent upon these--upon true and false opinion, I mean."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do not opinion and the endeavour to form an opinion always spring from memory and perception?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Might we imagine the process to be something of this nature?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Of what nature?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"An object may be often seen at a distance not very clearly, and the seer may want to determine what it is which he sees."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very likely."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Soon he begins to interrogate himself."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"In what manner?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He asks himself--'What is that which appears to be standing by the rock under the tree?' This is the question which he may be supposed to put to himself when he sees such an appearance."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"To which he may guess the right answer, saying as if in a whisper to himself--'It is a man.'"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or again, he may be misled, and then he will say--'No, it is a figure made by the shepherds.'"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he has a companion, he repeats his thought to him in articulate sounds, and what was before an opinion, has now become a proposition."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if he be walking alone when these thoughts occur to him, he may not unfrequently keep them in his mind for a considerable time."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, now, I wonder whether you would agree in my explanation of this phenomenon."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What is your explanation?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think that the soul at such times is like a book."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Memory and perception meet, and they and their attendant feelings seem to almost to write down words in the soul, and when the inscribing feeling writes truly, then true opinion and true propositions which are the expressions of opinion come into our souls--but when the scribe within us writes falsely, the result is false."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I quite assent and agree to your statement."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I must bespeak your favour also for another artist, who is busy at the same time in the chambers of the soul."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Who is he?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The painter, who, after the scribe has done his work, draws images in the soul of the things which he has described."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"But when and how does he do this?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When a man, besides receiving from sight or some other sense certain opinions or statements, sees in his mind the images of the subjects of them;--is not this a very common mental phenomenon?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the images answering to true opinions and words are true, and to false opinions and words false; are they not?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"They are."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If we are right so far, there arises a further question."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Whether we experience the feeling of which I am speaking only in relation to the present and the past, or in relation to the future also?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I should say in relation to all times alike."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Have not purely mental pleasures and pains been described already as in some cases anticipations of the bodily ones; from which we may infer that anticipatory pleasures and pains have to do with the future?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do all those writings and paintings which, as we were saying a little while ago, are produced in us, relate to the past and present only, and not to the future?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"To the future, very much."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When you say, 'Very much,' you mean to imply that all these representations are hopes about the future, and that mankind are filled with hopes in every stage of existence?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Answer me another question."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What question?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A just and pious and good man is the friend of the gods; is he not?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly he is."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the unjust and utterly bad man is the reverse?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And all men, as we were saying just now, are always filled with hopes?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And these hopes, as they are termed, are propositions which exist in the minds of each of us?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the fancies of hope are also pictured in us; a man may often have a vision of a heap of gold, and pleasures ensuing, and in the picture there may be a likeness of himself mightily rejoicing over his good fortune."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And may we not say that the good, being friends of the gods, have generally true pictures presented to them, and the bad false pictures?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The bad, too, have pleasures painted in their fancy as well as the good; but I presume that they are false pleasures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"They are."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The bad then commonly delight in false pleasures, and the good in true pleasures?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Doubtless."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then upon this view there are false pleasures in the souls of men which are a ludicrous imitation of the true, and there are pains of a similar character?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"There are."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And did we not allow that a man who had an opinion at all had a real opinion, but often about things which had no existence either in the past, present, or future?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this was the source of false opinion and opining; am I not right?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And must we not attribute to pleasure and pain a similar real but illusory character?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean to say that a man must be admitted to have real pleasure who is pleased with anything or anyhow; and he may be pleased about things which neither have nor have ever had any real existence, and, more often than not, are never likely to exist."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, that again is undeniable."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And may not the same be said about fear and anger and the like; are they not often false?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite so."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can opinions be good or bad except in as far as they are true or false?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"In no other way."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor can pleasures be conceived to be bad except in so far as they are false."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Nay, Socrates, that is the very opposite of truth; for no one would call pleasures and pains bad because they are false, but by reason of some other great corruption to which they are liable."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, of pleasures which are corrupt and caused by corruption we will hereafter speak, if we care to continue the enquiry; for the present I would rather show by another argument that there are many false pleasures existing or coming into existence in us, because this may assist our final decision."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true; that is to say, if there are such pleasures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think that there are, Protarchus; but this is an opinion which should be well assured, and not rest upon a mere assertion."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now, like wrestlers, let us approach and grasp this new argument."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We were maintaining a little while since, that when desires, as they are termed, exist in us, then the body has separate feelings apart from the soul--do you remember?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I remember that you said so."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the soul was supposed to desire the opposite of the bodily state, while the body was the source of any pleasure or pain which was experienced."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now you may infer what happens in such cases."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What am I to infer?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That in such cases pleasures and pains come simultaneously; and there is a juxtaposition of the opposite sensations which correspond to them, as has been already shown."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there is another point to which we have agreed."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That pleasure and pain both admit of more and less, and that they are of the class of infinites."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly, we said so."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But how can we rightly judge of them?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How can we?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is it our intention to judge of their comparative importance and intensity, measuring pleasure against pain, and pain against pain, and pleasure against pleasure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, such is our intention, and we shall judge of them accordingly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, take the case of sight. Does not the nearness or distance of magnitudes obscure their true proportions, and make us opine falsely; and do we not find the same illusion happening in the case of pleasures and pains?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, and in a degree far greater."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then what we are now saying is the opposite of what we were saying before."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What was that?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the opinions were true and false, and infected the pleasures and pains with their own falsity."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But now it is the pleasures which are said to be true and false because they are seen at various distances, and subjected to comparison; the pleasures appear to be greater and more vehement when placed side by side with the pains, and the pains when placed side by side with the pleasures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly, and for the reason which you mention."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And suppose you part off from pleasures and pains the element which makes them appear to be greater or less than they really are: you will acknowledge that this element is illusory, and you will never say that the corresponding excess or defect of pleasure or pain is real or true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Next let us see whether in another direction we may not find pleasures and pains existing and appearing in living beings, which are still more false than these."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What are they, and how shall we find them?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If I am not mistaken, I have often repeated that pains and aches and suffering and uneasiness of all sorts arise out of a corruption of nature caused by concretions, and dissolutions, and repletions, and evacuations, and also by growth and decay?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that has been often said."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And we have also agreed that the restoration of the natural state is pleasure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Right."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But now let us suppose an interval of time at which the body experiences none of these changes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"When can that be, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Your question, Protarchus, does not help the argument."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Why not, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because it does not prevent me from repeating mine."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"And what was that?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, Protarchus, admitting that there is no such interval, I may ask what would be the necessary consequence if there were?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"You mean, what would happen if the body were not changed either for good or bad?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Why then, Socrates, I should suppose that there would be neither pleasure nor pain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good; but still, if I am not mistaken, you do assert that we must always be experiencing one of them; that is what the wise tell us; for, say they, all things are ever flowing up and down."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, and their words are of no mean authority."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Of course, for they are no mean authorities themselves; and I should like to avoid the brunt of their argument. Shall I tell you how I mean to escape from them? And you shall be the partner of my flight."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"To them we will say: 'Good; but are we, or living things in general, always conscious of what happens to us--for example, of our growth, or the like? Are we not, on the contrary, almost wholly unconscious of this and similar phenomena?' You must answer for them."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"The latter alternative is the true one."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we were not right in saying, just now, that motions going up and down cause pleasures and pains?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A better and more unexceptionable way of speaking will be--"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If we say that the great changes produce pleasures and pains, but that the moderate and lesser ones do neither."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That, Socrates, is the more correct mode of speaking."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if this be true, the life to which I was just now referring again appears."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What life?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The life which we affirmed to be devoid either of pain or of joy."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We may assume then that there are three lives, one pleasant, one painful, and the third which is neither; what say you?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I should say as you do that there are three of them."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if so, the negation of pain will not be the same with pleasure."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then when you hear a person saying, that always to live without pain is the pleasantest of all things, what would you understand him to mean by that statement?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I think that by pleasure he must mean the negative of pain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us take any three things; or suppose that we embellish a little and call the first gold, the second silver, and there shall be a third which is neither."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now, can that which is neither be either gold or silver?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No more can that neutral or middle life be rightly or reasonably spoken or thought of as pleasant or painful."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet, my friend, there are, as we know, persons who say and think so."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do they think that they have pleasure when they are free from pain?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"They say so."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And they must think or they would not say that they have pleasure."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I suppose not."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet if pleasure and the negation of pain are of distinct natures, they are wrong."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"But they are undoubtedly of distinct natures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then shall we take the view that they are three, as we were just now saying, or that they are two only--the one being a state of pain, which is an evil, and the other a cessation of pain, which is of itself a good, and is called pleasant?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"But why, Socrates, do we ask the question at all? I do not see the reason."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You, Protarchus, have clearly never heard of certain enemies of our friend Philebus."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"And who may they be?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Certain persons who are reputed to be masters in natural philosophy, who deny the very existence of pleasure."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Indeed!"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"They say that what the school of Philebus calls pleasures are all of them only avoidances of pain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"And would you, Socrates, have us agree with them?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, no, I would rather use them as a sort of diviners, who divine the truth, not by rules of art, but by an instinctive repugnance and extreme detestation which a noble nature has of the power of pleasure, in which they think that there is nothing sound, and her seductive influence is declared by them to be witchcraft, and not pleasure. This is the use which you may make of them. And when you have considered the various grounds of their dislike, you shall hear from me what I deem to be true pleasures. Having thus examined the nature of pleasure from both points of view, we will bring her up for judgment."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Well said."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let us enter into an alliance with these philosophers and follow in the track of their dislike. I imagine that they would say something of this sort; they would begin at the beginning, and ask whether, if we wanted to know the nature of any quality, such as hardness, we should be more likely to discover it by looking at the hardest things, rather than at the least hard? You, Protarchus, shall answer these severe gentlemen as you answer me."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"By all means, and I reply to them, that you should look at the greatest instances."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then if we want to see the true nature of pleasures as a class, we should not look at the most diluted pleasures, but at the most extreme and most vehement?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"In that every one will agree."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the obvious instances of the greatest pleasures, as we have often said, are the pleasures of the body?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are they felt by us to be or become greater, when we are sick or when we are in health? And here we must be careful in our answer, or we shall come to grief."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How will that be?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, because we might be tempted to answer, 'When we are in health.'"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is the natural answer."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but are not those pleasures the greatest of which mankind have the greatest desires?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do not people who are in a fever, or any similar illness, feel cold or thirst or other bodily affections more intensely? Am I not right in saying that they have a deeper want and greater pleasure in the satisfaction of their want?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That is obvious as soon as it is said."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, shall we not be right in saying, that if a person would wish to see the greatest pleasures he ought to go and look, not at health, but at disease? And here you must distinguish:--do not imagine that I mean to ask whether those who are very ill have more pleasures than those who are well, but understand that I am speaking of the magnitude of pleasure; I want to know where pleasures are found to be most intense. For, as I say, we have to discover what is pleasure, and what they mean by pleasure who deny her very existence."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I think I follow you."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You will soon have a better opportunity of showing whether you do or not, Protarchus. Answer now, and tell me whether you see, I will not say more, but more intense and excessive pleasures in wantonness than in temperance? Reflect before you speak."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I understand you, and see that there is a great difference between them; the temperate are restrained by the wise man's aphorism of 'Never too much,' which is their rule, but excess of pleasure possessing the minds of fools and wantons becomes madness and makes them shout with delight."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good, and if this be true, then the greatest pleasures and pains will clearly be found in some vicious state of soul and body, and not in a virtuous state."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And ought we not to select some of these for examination, and see what makes them the greatest?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"To be sure we ought."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Take the case of the pleasures which arise out of certain disorders."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What disorders?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The pleasures of unseemly disorders, which our severe friends utterly detest."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What pleasures?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Such, for example, as the relief of itching and other ailments by scratching, which is the only remedy required. For what in Heaven's name is the feeling to be called which is thus produced in us?--Pleasure or pain?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"A villainous mixture of some kind, Socrates, I should say."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I did not introduce the argument, O Protarchus, with any personal reference to Philebus, but because, without the consideration of these and similar pleasures, we shall not be able to determine the point at issue."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Then we had better proceed to analyze this family of pleasures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You mean the pleasures which are mingled with pain?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There are some mixtures which are of the body, and only in the body, and others which are of the soul, and only in the soul; while there are other mixtures of pleasures with pains, common both to soul and body, which in their composite state are called sometimes pleasures and sometimes pains."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How is that?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Whenever, in the restoration or in the derangement of nature, a man experiences two opposite feelings; for example, when he is cold and is growing warm, or again, when he is hot and is becoming cool, and he wants to have the one and be rid of the other;--the sweet has a bitter, as the common saying is, and both together fasten upon him and create irritation and in time drive him to distraction."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That description is very true to nature."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in these sorts of mixtures the pleasures and pains are sometimes equal, and sometimes one or other of them predominates?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Of cases in which the pain exceeds the pleasure, an example is afforded by itching, of which we were just now speaking, and by the tingling which we feel when the boiling and fiery element is within, and the rubbing and motion only relieves the surface, and does not reach the parts affected; then if you put them to the fire, and as a last resort apply cold to them, you may often produce the most intense pleasure or pain in the inner parts, which contrasts and mingles with the pain or pleasure, as the case may be, of the outer parts; and this is due to the forcible separation of what is united, or to the union of what is separated, and to the juxtaposition of pleasure and pain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite so."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Sometimes the element of pleasure prevails in a man, and the slight undercurrent of pain makes him tingle, and causes a gentle irritation; or again, the excessive infusion of pleasure creates an excitement in him,--he even leaps for joy, he assumes all sorts of attitudes, he changes all manner of colours, he gasps for breath, and is quite amazed, and utters the most irrational exclamations."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He will say of himself, and others will say of him, that he is dying with these delights; and the more dissipated and good-for-nothing he is, the more vehemently he pursues them in every way; of all pleasures he declares them to be the greatest; and he reckons him who lives in the most constant enjoyment of them to be the happiest of mankind."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That, Socrates, is a very true description of the opinions of the majority about pleasures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Protarchus, quite true of the mixed pleasures, which arise out of the communion of external and internal sensations in the body; there are also cases in which the mind contributes an opposite element to the body, whether of pleasure or pain, and the two unite and form one mixture. Concerning these I have already remarked, that when a man is empty he desires to be full, and has pleasure in hope and pain in vacuity. But now I must further add what I omitted before, that in all these and similar emotions in which body and mind are opposed (and they are innumerable), pleasure and pain coalesce in one."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I believe that to be quite true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There still remains one other sort of admixture of pleasures and pains."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What is that?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The union which, as we were saying, the mind often experiences of purely mental feelings."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, do we not speak of anger, fear, desire, sorrow, love, emulation, envy, and the like, as pains which belong to the soul only?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And shall we not find them also full of the most wonderful pleasures? need I remind you of the anger 'Which stirs even a wise man to violence, And is sweeter than honey and the honeycomb?' And you remember how pleasures mingle with pains in lamentation and bereavement?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, there is a natural connexion between them."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you remember also how at the sight of tragedies the spectators smile through their tears?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly I do."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are you aware that even at a comedy the soul experiences a mixed feeling of pain and pleasure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I do not quite understand you."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I admit, Protarchus, that there is some difficulty in recognizing this mixture of feelings at a comedy."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"There is, I think."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the greater the obscurity of the case the more desirable is the examination of it, because the difficulty in detecting other cases of mixed pleasures and pains will be less."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I have just mentioned envy; would you not call that a pain of the soul?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet the envious man finds something in the misfortunes of his neighbours at which he is pleased?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And ignorance, and what is termed clownishness, are surely an evil?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"From these considerations learn to know the nature of the ridiculous."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Explain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The ridiculous is in short the specific name which is used to describe the vicious form of a certain habit; and of vice in general it is that kind which is most at variance with the inscription at Delphi."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"You mean, Socrates, 'Know thyself.'"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I do; and the opposite would be, 'Know not thyself.'"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, O Protarchus, try to divide this into three."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Indeed I am afraid that I cannot."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you mean to say that I must make the division for you?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, and what is more, I beg that you will."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are there not three ways in which ignorance of self may be shown?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the first place, about money; the ignorant may fancy himself richer than he is."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is a very common error."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And still more often he will fancy that he is taller or fairer than he is, or that he has some other advantage of person which he really has not."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet surely by far the greatest number err about the goods of the mind; they imagine themselves to be much better men than they are."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is by far the commonest delusion."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And of all the virtues, is not wisdom the one which the mass of mankind are always claiming, and which most arouses in them a spirit of contention and lying conceit of wisdom?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And may not all this be truly called an evil condition?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very evil."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But we must pursue the division a step further, Protarchus, if we would see in envy of the childish sort a singular mixture of pleasure and pain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How can we make the further division which you suggest?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"All who are silly enough to entertain this lying conceit of themselves may of course be divided, like the rest of mankind, into two classes--one having power and might; and the other the reverse."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let this, then, be the principle of division; those of them who are weak and unable to revenge themselves, when they are laughed at, may be truly called ridiculous, but those who can defend themselves may be more truly described as strong and formidable; for ignorance in the powerful is hateful and horrible, because hurtful to others both in reality and in fiction, but powerless ignorance may be reckoned, and in truth is, ridiculous."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That is very true, but I do not as yet see where is the admixture of pleasures and pains."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, let us examine the nature of envy."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is not envy an unrighteous pleasure, and also an unrighteous pain?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is nothing envious or wrong in rejoicing at the misfortunes of enemies?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But to feel joy instead of sorrow at the sight of our friends' misfortunes--is not that wrong?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Undoubtedly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Did we not say that ignorance was always an evil?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the three kinds of vain conceit in our friends which we enumerated--the vain conceit of beauty, of wisdom, and of wealth, are ridiculous if they are weak, and detestable when they are powerful: May we not say, as I was saying before, that our friends who are in this state of mind, when harmless to others, are simply ridiculous?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"They are ridiculous."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do we not acknowledge this ignorance of theirs to be a misfortune?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do we feel pain or pleasure in laughing at it?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Clearly we feel pleasure."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And was not envy the source of this pleasure which we feel at the misfortunes of friends?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the argument shows that when we laugh at the folly of our friends, pleasure, in mingling with envy, mingles with pain, for envy has been acknowledged by us to be mental pain, and laughter is pleasant; and so we envy and laugh at the same instant."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the argument implies that there are combinations of pleasure and pain in lamentations, and in tragedy and comedy, not only on the stage, but on the greater stage of human life; and so in endless other cases."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I do not see how any one can deny what you say, Socrates, however eager he may be to assert the opposite opinion."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mentioned anger, desire, sorrow, fear, love, emulation, envy, and similar emotions, as examples in which we should find a mixture of the two elements so often named; did I not?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We may observe that our conclusions hitherto have had reference only to sorrow and envy and anger."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I see."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then many other cases still remain?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And why do you suppose me to have pointed out to you the admixture which takes place in comedy? Why but to convince you that there was no difficulty in showing the mixed nature of fear and love and similar affections; and I thought that when I had given you the illustration, you would have let me off, and have acknowledged as a general truth that the body without the soul, and the soul without the body, as well as the two united, are susceptible of all sorts of admixtures of pleasures and pains; and so further discussion would have been unnecessary. And now I want to know whether I may depart; or will you keep me here until midnight? I fancy that I may obtain my release without many words;--if I promise that to-morrow I will give you an account of all these cases. But at present I would rather sail in another direction, and go to other matters which remain to be settled, before the judgment can be given which Philebus demands."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very good, Socrates; in what remains take your own course."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then after the mixed pleasures the unmixed should have their turn; this is the natural and necessary order."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Excellent."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"These, in turn, then, I will now endeavour to indicate; for with the maintainers of the opinion that all pleasures are a cessation of pain, I do not agree, but, as I was saying, I use them as witnesses, that there are pleasures which seem only and are not, and there are others again which have great power and appear in many forms, yet are intermingled with pains, and are partly alleviations of agony and distress, both of body and mind."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Then what pleasures, Socrates, should we be right in conceiving to be true?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"True pleasures are those which are given by beauty of colour and form, and most of those which arise from smells; those of sound, again, and in general those of which the want is painless and unconscious, and of which the fruition is palpable to sense and pleasant and unalloyed with pain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Once more, Socrates, I must ask what you mean."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"My meaning is certainly not obvious, and I will endeavour to be plainer. I do not mean by beauty of form such beauty as that of animals or pictures, which the many would suppose to be my meaning; but, says the argument, understand me to mean straight lines and circles, and the plane or solid figures which are formed out of them by turning-lathes and rulers and measurers of angles; for these I affirm to be not only relatively beautiful, like other things, but they are eternally and absolutely beautiful, and they have peculiar pleasures, quite unlike the pleasures of scratching. And there are colours which are of the same character, and have similar pleasures; now do you understand my meaning?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I am trying to understand, Socrates, and I hope that you will try to make your meaning clearer."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When sounds are smooth and clear, and have a single pure tone, then I mean to say that they are not relatively but absolutely beautiful, and have natural pleasures associated with them."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, there are such pleasures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The pleasures of smell are of a less ethereal sort, but they have no necessary admixture of pain; and all pleasures, however and wherever experienced, which are unattended by pains, I assign to an analogous class. Here then are two kinds of pleasures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I understand."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"To these may be added the pleasures of knowledge, if no hunger of knowledge and no pain caused by such hunger precede them."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"And this is the case."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but if a man who is full of knowledge loses his knowledge, are there not pains of forgetting?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Not necessarily, but there may be times of reflection, when he feels grief at the loss of his knowledge."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my friend, but at present we are enumerating only the natural perceptions, and have nothing to do with reflection."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"In that case you are right in saying that the loss of knowledge is not attended with pain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"These pleasures of knowledge, then, are unmixed with pain; and they are not the pleasures of the many but of a very few."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, having fairly separated the pure pleasures and those which may be rightly termed impure, let us further add to our description of them, that the pleasures which are in excess have no measure, but that those which are not in excess have measure; the great, the excessive, whether more or less frequent, we shall be right in referring to the class of the infinite, and of the more and less, which pours through body and soul alike; and the others we shall refer to the class which has measure."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite right, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Still there is something more to be considered about pleasures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When you speak of purity and clearness, or of excess, abundance, greatness and sufficiency, in what relation do these terms stand to truth?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Why do you ask, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because, Protarchus, I should wish to test pleasure and knowledge in every possible way, in order that if there be a pure and impure element in either of them, I may present the pure element for judgment, and then they will be more easily judged of by you and by me and by all of us."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us investigate all the pure kinds; first selecting for consideration a single instance."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What instance shall we select?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Suppose that we first of all take whiteness."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How can there be purity in whiteness, and what purity? Is that purest which is greatest or most in quantity, or that which is most unadulterated and freest from any admixture of other colours?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Clearly that which is most unadulterated."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"True, Protarchus; and so the purest white, and not the greatest or largest in quantity, is to be deemed truest and most beautiful?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Right."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And we shall be quite right in saying that a little pure white is whiter and fairer and truer than a great deal that is mixed."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Perfectly right."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is no need of adducing many similar examples in illustration of the argument about pleasure; one such is sufficient to prove to us that a small pleasure or a small amount of pleasure, if pure or unalloyed with pain, is always pleasanter and truer and fairer than a great pleasure or a great amount of pleasure of another kind."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Assuredly; and the instance you have given is quite sufficient."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But what do you say of another question:--have we not heard that pleasure is always a generation, and has no true being? Do not certain ingenious philosophers teach this doctrine, and ought not we to be grateful to them?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do they mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will explain to you, my dear Protarchus, what they mean, by putting a question."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Ask, and I will answer."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I assume that there are two natures, one self-existent, and the other ever in want of something."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What manner of natures are they?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The one majestic ever, the other inferior."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"You speak riddles."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You have seen loves good and fair, and also brave lovers of them."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I should think so."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Search the universe for two terms which are like these two and are present everywhere."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yet a third time I must say, Be a little plainer, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is no difficulty, Protarchus; the argument is only in play, and insinuates that some things are for the sake of something else (relatives), and that other things are the ends to which the former class subserve (absolutes)."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Your many repetitions make me slow to understand."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"As the argument proceeds, my boy, I dare say that the meaning will become clearer."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very likely."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Here are two new principles."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"One is the generation of all things, and the other is essence."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I readily accept from you both generation and essence."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very right; and would you say that generation is for the sake of essence, or essence for the sake of generation?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"You want to know whether that which is called essence is, properly speaking, for the sake of generation?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"By the gods, I wish that you would repeat your question."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean, O my Protarchus, to ask whether you would tell me that ship-building is for the sake of ships, or ships for the sake of ship-building? and in all similar cases I should ask the same question."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Why do you not answer yourself, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I have no objection, but you must take your part."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"My answer is, that all things instrumental, remedial, material, are given to us with a view to generation, and that each generation is relative to, or for the sake of, some being or essence, and that the whole of generation is relative to the whole of essence."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Assuredly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then pleasure, being a generation, must surely be for the sake of some essence?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that for the sake of which something else is done must be placed in the class of good, and that which is done for the sake of something else, in some other class, my good friend."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then pleasure, being a generation, will be rightly placed in some other class than that of good?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite right."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, as I said at first, we ought to be very grateful to him who first pointed out that pleasure was a generation only, and had no true being at all; for he is clearly one who laughs at the notion of pleasure being a good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Assuredly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he would surely laugh also at those who make generation their highest end."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Of whom are you speaking, and what do they mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am speaking of those who when they are cured of hunger or thirst or any other defect by some process of generation are delighted at the process as if it were pleasure; and they say that they would not wish to live without these and other feelings of a like kind which might be mentioned."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That is certainly what they appear to think."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not destruction universally admitted to be the opposite of generation?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who chooses thus, would choose generation and destruction rather than that third sort of life, in which, as we were saying, was neither pleasure nor pain, but only the purest possible thought."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"He who would make us believe pleasure to be a good is involved in great absurdities, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Great, indeed; and there is yet another of them."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is there not an absurdity in arguing that there is nothing good or noble in the body, or in anything else, but that good is in the soul only, and that the only good of the soul is pleasure; and that courage or temperance or understanding, or any other good of the soul, is not really a good?--and is there not yet a further absurdity in our being compelled to say that he who has a feeling of pain and not of pleasure is bad at the time when he is suffering pain, even though he be the best of men; and again, that he who has a feeling of pleasure, in so far as he is pleased at the time when he is pleased, in that degree excels in virtue?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Nothing, Socrates, can be more irrational than all this."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, having subjected pleasure to every sort of test, let us not appear to be too sparing of mind and knowledge: let us ring their metal bravely, and see if there be unsoundness in any part, until we have found out what in them is of the purest nature; and then the truest elements both of pleasure and knowledge may be brought up for judgment."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Right."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Knowledge has two parts,--the one productive, and the other educational?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in the productive or handicraft arts, is not one part more akin to knowledge, and the other less; and may not the one part be regarded as the pure, and the other as the impure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us separate the superior or dominant elements in each of them."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What are they, and how do you separate them?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean to say, that if arithmetic, mensuration, and weighing be taken away from any art, that which remains will not be much."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Not much, certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The rest will be only conjecture, and the better use of the senses which is given by experience and practice, in addition to a certain power of guessing, which is commonly called art, and is perfected by attention and pains."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Nothing more, assuredly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Music, for instance, is full of this empiricism; for sounds are harmonized, not by measure, but by skilful conjecture; the music of the flute is always trying to guess the pitch of each vibrating note, and is therefore mixed up with much that is doubtful and has little which is certain."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same will be found to hold good of medicine and husbandry and piloting and generalship."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The art of the builder, on the other hand, which uses a number of measures and instruments, attains by their help to a greater degree of accuracy than the other arts."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How is that?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In ship-building and house-building, and in other branches of the art of carpentering, the builder has his rule, lathe, compass, line, and a most ingenious machine for straightening wood."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now let us divide the arts of which we were speaking into two kinds,--the arts which, like music, are less exact in their results, and those which, like carpentering, are more exact."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Let us make that division."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Of the latter class, the most exact of all are those which we just now spoke of as primary."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I see that you mean arithmetic, and the kindred arts of weighing and measuring."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Certainly, Protarchus; but are not these also distinguishable into two kinds?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What are the two kinds?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the first place, arithmetic is of two kinds, one of which is popular, and the other philosophical."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How would you distinguish them?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is a wide difference between them, Protarchus; some arithmeticians reckon unequal units; as for example, two armies, two oxen, two very large things or two very small things. The party who are opposed to them insist that every unit in ten thousand must be the same as every other unit."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Undoubtedly there is, as you say, a great difference among the votaries of the science; and there may be reasonably supposed to be two sorts of arithmetic."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when we compare the art of mensuration which is used in building with philosophical geometry, or the art of computation which is used in trading with exact calculation, shall we say of either of the pairs that it is one or two?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"On the analogy of what has preceded, I should be of opinion that they were severally two."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Right; but do you understand why I have discussed the subject?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I think so, but I should like to be told by you."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The argument has all along been seeking a parallel to pleasure, and true to that original design, has gone on to ask whether one sort of knowledge is purer than another, as one pleasure is purer than another."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Clearly; that was the intention."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And has not the argument in what has preceded, already shown that the arts have different provinces, and vary in their degrees of certainty?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And just now did not the argument first designate a particular art by a common term, thus making us believe in the unity of that art; and then again, as if speaking of two different things, proceed to enquire whether the art as pursed by philosophers, or as pursued by non-philosophers, has more of certainty and purity?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That is the very question which the argument is asking."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how, Protarchus, shall we answer the enquiry?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"O Socrates, we have reached a point at which the difference of clearness in different kinds of knowledge is enormous."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the answer will be the easier."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly; and let us say in reply, that those arts into which arithmetic and mensuration enter, far surpass all others; and that of these the arts or sciences which are animated by the pure philosophic impulse are infinitely superior in accuracy and truth."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then this is your judgment; and this is the answer which, upon your authority, we will give to all masters of the art of misinterpretation?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What answer?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That there are two arts of arithmetic, and two of mensuration; and also several other arts which in like manner have this double nature, and yet only one name."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Let us boldly return this answer to the masters of whom you speak, Socrates, and hope for good luck."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We have explained what we term the most exact arts or sciences."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet, Protarchus, dialectic will refuse to acknowledge us, if we do not award to her the first place."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"And pray, what is dialectic?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Clearly the science which has to do with all that knowledge of which we are now speaking; for I am sure that all men who have a grain of intelligence will admit that the knowledge which has to do with being and reality, and sameness and unchangeableness, is by far the truest of all. But how would you decide this question, Protarchus?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I have often heard Gorgias maintain, Socrates, that the art of persuasion far surpassed every other; this, as he says, is by far the best of them all, for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their own free will. Now, I should not like to quarrel either with you or with him."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You mean to say that you would like to desert, if you were not ashamed?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"As you please."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"May I not have led you into a misapprehension?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Dear Protarchus, I never asked which was the greatest or best or usefullest of arts or sciences, but which had clearness and accuracy, and the greatest amount of truth, however humble and little useful an art. And as for Gorgias, if you do not deny that his art has the advantage in usefulness to mankind, he will not quarrel with you for saying that the study of which I am speaking is superior in this particular of essential truth; as in the comparison of white colours, a little whiteness, if that little be only pure, was said to be superior in truth to a great mass which is impure. And now let us give our best attention and consider well, not the comparative use or reputation of the sciences, but the power or faculty, if there be such, which the soul has of loving the truth, and of doing all things for the sake of it; let us search into the pure element of mind and intelligence, and then we shall be able to say whether the science of which I have been speaking is most likely to possess the faculty, or whether there be some other which has higher claims."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Well, I have been considering, and I can hardly think that any other science or art has a firmer grasp of the truth than this."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you say so because you observe that the arts in general and those engaged in them make use of opinion, and are resolutely engaged in the investigation of matters of opinion? Even he who supposes himself to be occupied with nature is really occupied with the things of this world, how created, how acting or acted upon. Is not this the sort of enquiry in which his life is spent?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He is labouring, not after eternal being, but about things which are becoming, or which will or have become."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can we say that any of these things which neither are nor have been nor will be unchangeable, when judged by the strict rule of truth ever become certain?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How can anything fixed be concerned with that which has no fixedness?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How indeed?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then mind and science when employed about such changing things do not attain the highest truth?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I should imagine not."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now let us bid farewell, a long farewell, to you or me or Philebus or Gorgias, and urge on behalf of the argument a single point."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What point?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us say that the stable and pure and true and unalloyed has to do with the things which are eternal and unchangeable and unmixed, or if not, at any rate what is most akin to them has; and that all other things are to be placed in a second or inferior class."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And of the names expressing cognition, ought not the fairest to be given to the fairest things?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"That is natural."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are not mind and wisdom the names which are to be honoured most?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And these names may be said to have their truest and most exact application when the mind is engaged in the contemplation of true being?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And these were the names which I adduced of the rivals of pleasure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the next place, as to the mixture, here are the ingredients, pleasure and wisdom, and we may be compared to artists who have their materials ready to their hands."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now we must begin to mix them?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But had we not better have a preliminary word and refresh our memories?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Of what?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Of that which I have already mentioned. Well says the proverb, that we ought to repeat twice and even thrice that which is good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well then, by Zeus, let us proceed, and I will make what I believe to be a fair summary of the argument."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Let me hear."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Philebus says that pleasure is the true end of all living beings, at which all ought to aim, and moreover that it is the chief good of all, and that the two names 'good' and 'pleasant' are correctly given to one thing and one nature; Socrates, on the other hand, begins by denying this, and further says, that in nature as in name they are two, and that wisdom partakes more than pleasure of the good. Is not and was not this what we were saying, Protarchus?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is there not and was there not a further point which was conceded between us?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What was it?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That the good differs from all other things."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"In what respect?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In that the being who possesses good always everywhere and in all things has the most perfect sufficiency, and is never in need of anything else."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And did we not endeavour to make an imaginary separation of wisdom and pleasure, assigning to each a distinct life, so that pleasure was wholly excluded from wisdom, and wisdom in like manner had no part whatever in pleasure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"We did."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And did we think that either of them alone would be sufficient?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if we erred in any point, then let any one who will, take up the enquiry again and set us right; and assuming memory and wisdom and knowledge and true opinion to belong to the same class, let him consider whether he would desire to possess or acquire,--I will not say pleasure, however abundant or intense, if he has no real perception that he is pleased, nor any consciousness of what he feels, nor any recollection, however momentary, of the feeling,--but would he desire to have anything at all, if these faculties were wanting to him? And about wisdom I ask the same question; can you conceive that any one would choose to have all wisdom absolutely devoid of pleasure, rather than with a certain degree of pleasure, or all pleasure devoid of wisdom, rather than with a certain degree of wisdom?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not, Socrates; but why repeat such questions any more?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the perfect and universally eligible and entirely good cannot possibly be either of them?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now we must ascertain the nature of the good more or less accurately, in order, as we were saying, that the second place may be duly assigned."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Right."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Have we not found a road which leads towards the good?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What road?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Supposing that a man had to be found, and you could discover in what house he lived, would not that be a great step towards the discovery of the man himself?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now reason intimates to us, as at our first beginning, that we should seek the good, not in the unmixed life but in the mixed."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is greater hope of finding that which we are seeking in the life which is well mixed than in that which is not?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Far greater."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now let us mingle, Protarchus, at the same time offering up a prayer to Dionysus or Hephaestus, or whoever is the god who presides over the ceremony of mingling."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are not we the cup-bearers? and here are two fountains which are flowing at our side: one, which is pleasure, may be likened to a fountain of honey; the other, wisdom, a sober draught in which no wine mingles, is of water unpleasant but healthful; out of these we must seek to make the fairest of all possible mixtures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Tell me first;--should we be most likely to succeed if we mingled every sort of pleasure with every sort of wisdom?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Perhaps we might."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But I should be afraid of the risk, and I think that I can show a safer plan."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"One pleasure was supposed by us to be truer than another, and one art to be more exact than another."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There was also supposed to be a difference in sciences; some of them regarding only the transient and perishing, and others the permanent and imperishable and everlasting and immutable; and when judged by the standard of truth, the latter, as we thought, were truer than the former."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very good and right."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If, then, we were to begin by mingling the sections of each class which have the most of truth, will not the union suffice to give us the loveliest of lives, or shall we still want some elements of another kind?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I think that we ought to do what you suggest."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us suppose a man who understands justice, and has reason as well as understanding about the true nature of this and of all other things."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"We will suppose such a man."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Will he have enough of knowledge if he is acquainted only with the divine circle and sphere, and knows nothing of our human spheres and circles, but uses only divine circles and measures in the building of a house?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"The knowledge which is only superhuman, Socrates, is ridiculous in man."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What do you mean? Do you mean that you are to throw into the cup and mingle the impure and uncertain art which uses the false measure and the false circle?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, we must, if any of us is ever to find his way home."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And am I to include music, which, as I was saying just now, is full of guesswork and imitation, and is wanting in purity?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I think that you must, if human life is to be a life at all."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, suppose that I give way, and, like a doorkeeper who is pushed and overborne by the mob, I open the door wide, and let knowledge of every sort stream in, and the pure mingle with the impure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I do not know, Socrates, that any great harm would come of having them all, if only you have the first sort."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, shall I let them all flow into what Homer poetically terms 'a meeting of the waters'?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There--I have let them in, and now I must return to the fountain of pleasure. For we were not permitted to begin by mingling in a single stream the true portions of both according to our original intention; but the love of all knowledge constrained us to let all the sciences flow in together before the pleasures."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now the time has come for us to consider about the pleasures also, whether we shall in like manner let them go all at once, or at first only the true ones."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"It will be by far the safer course to let flow the true ones first."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let them flow, then; and now, if there are any necessary pleasures, as there were arts and sciences necessary, must we not mingle them?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes; the necessary pleasures should certainly be allowed to mingle."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The knowledge of the arts has been admitted to be innocent and useful always; and if we say of pleasures in like manner that all of them are good and innocent for all of us at all times, we must let them all mingle?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What shall we say about them, and what course shall we take?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do not ask me, Protarchus; but ask the daughters of pleasure and wisdom to answer for themselves."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Tell us, O beloved--shall we call you pleasures or by some other name?--would you rather live with or without wisdom? I am of opinion that they would certainly answer as follows:"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"They would answer, as we said before, that for any single class to be left by itself pure and isolated is not good, nor altogether possible; and that if we are to make comparisons of one class with another and choose, there is no better companion than knowledge of things in general, and likewise the perfect knowledge, if that may be, of ourselves in every respect."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"And our answer will be:--In that ye have spoken well."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very true. And now let us go back and interrogate wisdom and mind: Would you like to have any pleasures in the mixture? And they will reply:--'What pleasures do you mean?'"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Likely enough."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And we shall take up our parable and say: Do you wish to have the greatest and most vehement pleasures for your companions in addition to the true ones? 'Why, Socrates,' they will say, 'how can we? seeing that they are the source of ten thousand hindrances to us; they trouble the souls of men, which are our habitation, with their madness; they prevent us from coming to the birth, and are commonly the ruin of the children which are born to us, causing them to be forgotten and unheeded; but the true and pure pleasures, of which you spoke, know to be of our family, and also those pleasures which accompany health and temperance, and which every Virtue, like a goddess, has in her train to follow her about wherever she goes,--mingle these and not the others; there would be great want of sense in any one who desires to see a fair and perfect mixture, and to find in it what is the highest good in man and in the universe, and to divine what is the true form of good--there would be great want of sense in his allowing the pleasures, which are always in the company of folly and vice, to mingle with mind in the cup.'--Is not this a very rational and suitable reply, which mind has made, both on her own behalf, as well as on the behalf of memory and true opinion?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And still there must be something more added, which is a necessary ingredient in every mixture."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What is that?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Unless truth enter into the composition, nothing can truly be created or subsist."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Quite impossible; and now you and Philebus must tell me whether anything is still wanting in the mixture, for to my way of thinking the argument is now completed, and may be compared to an incorporeal law, which is going to hold fair rule over a living body."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I agree with you, Socrates."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And may we not say with reason that we are now at the vestibule of the habitation of the good?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I think that we are."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What, then, is there in the mixture which is most precious, and which is the principal cause why such a state is universally beloved by all? When we have discovered it, we will proceed to ask whether this omnipresent nature is more akin to pleasure or to mind."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite right; in that way we shall be better able to judge."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there is no difficulty in seeing the cause which renders any mixture either of the highest value or of none at all."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Every man knows it."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He knows that any want of measure and symmetry in any mixture whatever must always of necessity be fatal, both to the elements and to the mixture, which is then not a mixture, but only a confused medley which brings confusion on the possessor of it."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now the power of the good has retired into the region of the beautiful; for measure and symmetry are beauty and virtue all the world over."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Also we said that truth was to form an element in the mixture."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, if we are not able to hunt the good with one idea only, with three we may catch our prey; Beauty, Symmetry, Truth are the three, and these taken together we may regard as the single cause of the mixture, and the mixture as being good by reason of the infusion of them."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Quite right."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, Protarchus, any man could decide well enough whether pleasure or wisdom is more akin to the highest good, and more honourable among gods and men."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Clearly, and yet perhaps the argument had better be pursued to the end."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We must take each of them separately in their relation to pleasure and mind, and pronounce upon them; for we ought to see to which of the two they are severally most akin."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"You are speaking of beauty, truth, and measure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Protarchus, take truth first, and, after passing in review mind, truth, pleasure, pause awhile and make answer to yourself--as to whether pleasure or mind is more akin to truth."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"There is no need to pause, for the difference between them is palpable; pleasure is the veriest impostor in the world; and it is said that in the pleasures of love, which appear to be the greatest, perjury is excused by the gods; for pleasures, like children, have not the least particle of reason in them; whereas mind is either the same as truth, or the most like truth, and the truest."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall we next consider measure, in like manner, and ask whether pleasure has more of this than wisdom, or wisdom than pleasure?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Here is another question which may be easily answered; for I imagine that nothing can ever be more immoderate than the transports of pleasure, or more in conformity with measure than mind and knowledge."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good; but there still remains the third test: Has mind a greater share of beauty than pleasure, and is mind or pleasure the fairer of the two?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"No one, Socrates, either awake or dreaming, ever saw or imagined mind or wisdom to be in aught unseemly, at any time, past, present, or future."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Right."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"But when we see some one indulging in pleasures, perhaps in the greatest of pleasures, the ridiculous or disgraceful nature of the action makes us ashamed; and so we put them out of sight, and consign them to darkness, under the idea that they ought not to meet the eye of day."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, Protarchus, you will proclaim everywhere, by word of mouth to this company, and by messengers bearing the tidings far and wide, that pleasure is not the first of possessions, nor yet the second, but that in measure, and the mean, and the suitable, and the like, the eternal nature has been found."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that seems to be the result of what has been now said."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the second class is contained the symmetrical and beautiful and perfect or sufficient, and all which are of that family."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if you reckon in the third class mind and wisdom, you will not be far wrong, if I divine aright."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I dare say."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you not put in the fourth class the goods which we were affirming to appertain specially to the soul--sciences and arts and true opinions as we called them? These come after the third class, and form the fourth, as they are certainly more akin to good than pleasure is."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Surely."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The fifth class are the pleasures which were defined by us as painless, being the pure pleasures of the soul herself, as we termed them, which accompany, some the sciences, and some the senses."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Perhaps."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, as Orpheus says, 'With the sixth generation cease the glory of my song.' Here, at the sixth award, let us make an end; all that remains is to set the crown on our discourse."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let us sum up and reassert what has been said, thus offering the third libation to the saviour Zeus."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Philebus affirmed that pleasure was always and absolutely the good."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"I understand; this third libation, Socrates, of which you spoke, meant a recapitulation."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, but listen to the sequel; convinced of what I have just been saying, and feeling indignant at the doctrine, which is maintained, not by Philebus only, but by thousands of others, I affirmed that mind was far better and far more excellent, as an element of human life, than pleasure."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But, suspecting that there were other things which were also better, I went on to say that if there was anything better than either, then I would claim the second place for mind over pleasure, and pleasure would lose the second place as well as the first."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"You did."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nothing could be more satisfactorily shown than the unsatisfactory nature of both of them."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The claims both of pleasure and mind to be the absolute good have been entirely disproven in this argument, because they are both wanting in self-sufficiency and also in adequacy and perfection."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But, though they must both resign in favour of another, mind is ten thousand times nearer and more akin to the nature of the conqueror than pleasure."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And, according to the judgment which has now been given, pleasure will rank fifth."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But not first; no, not even if all the oxen and horses and animals in the world by their pursuit of enjoyment proclaim her to be so;--although the many trusting in them, as diviners trust in birds, determine that pleasures make up the good of life, and deem the lusts of animals to be better witnesses than the inspirations of divine philosophy."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"And now, Socrates, we tell you that the truth of what you have been saying is approved by the judgment of all of us."}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will you let me go?"}
{"Book":"philebus","Speaker":"PROTARCHUS","Dialogue":"There is a little which yet remains, and I will remind you of it, for I am sure that you will not be the first to go away from an argument. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PHILEBUS *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Whence come you, Menexenus? Are you from the Agora?"}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; I have been at the Council."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what might you be doing at the Council? And yet I need hardly ask, for I see that you, believing yourself to have arrived at the end of education and of philosophy, and to have had enough of them, are mounting upwards to things higher still, and, though rather young for the post, are intending to govern us elder men, like the rest of your family, which has always provided some one who kindly took care of us."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, I shall be ready to hold office, if you allow and advise that I should, but not if you think otherwise. I went to the council chamber because I heard that the Council was about to choose some one who was to speak over the dead. For you know that there is to be a public funeral?"}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, I know. And whom did they choose?"}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"No one; they delayed the election until tomorrow, but I believe that either Archinus or Dion will be chosen."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"O Menexenus! Death in battle is certainly in many respects a noble thing. The dead man gets a fine and costly funeral, although he may have been poor, and an elaborate speech is made over him by a wise man who has long ago prepared what he has to say, although he who is praised may not have been good for much. The speakers praise him for what he has done and for what he has not done--that is the beauty of them--and they steal away our souls with their embellished words; in every conceivable form they praise the city; and they praise those who died in war, and all our ancestors who went before us; and they praise ourselves also who are still alive, until I feel quite elevated by their laudations, and I stand listening to their words, Menexenus, and become enchanted by them, and all in a moment I imagine myself to have become a greater and nobler and finer man than I was before. And if, as often happens, there are any foreigners who accompany me to the speech, I become suddenly conscious of having a sort of triumph over them, and they seem to experience a corresponding feeling of admiration at me, and at the greatness of the city, which appears to them, when they are under the influence of the speaker, more wonderful than ever. This consciousness of dignity lasts me more than three days, and not until the fourth or fifth day do I come to my senses and know where I am; in the meantime I have been living in the Islands of the Blest. Such is the art of our rhetoricians, and in such manner does the sound of their words keep ringing in my ears."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"You are always making fun of the rhetoricians, Socrates; this time, however, I am inclined to think that the speaker who is chosen will not have much to say, for he has been called upon to speak at a moment's notice, and he will be compelled almost to improvise."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But why, my friend, should he not have plenty to say? Every rhetorician has speeches ready made; nor is there any difficulty in improvising that sort of stuff. Had the orator to praise Athenians among Peloponnesians, or Peloponnesians among Athenians, he must be a good rhetorician who could succeed and gain credit. But there is no difficulty in a man's winning applause when he is contending for fame among the persons whom he is praising."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"Do you think not, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Certainly 'not.'"}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"Do you think that you could speak yourself if there should be a necessity, and if the Council were to choose you?"}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That I should be able to speak is no great wonder, Menexenus, considering that I have an excellent mistress in the art of rhetoric,--she who has made so many good speakers, and one who was the best among all the Hellenes--Pericles, the son of Xanthippus."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"And who is she? I suppose that you mean Aspasia."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, I do; and besides her I had Connus, the son of Metrobius, as a master, and he was my master in music, as she was in rhetoric. No wonder that a man who has received such an education should be a finished speaker; even the pupil of very inferior masters, say, for example, one who had learned music of Lamprus, and rhetoric of Antiphon the Rhamnusian, might make a figure if he were to praise the Athenians among the Athenians."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"And what would you be able to say if you had to speak?"}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Of my own wit, most likely nothing; but yesterday I heard Aspasia composing a funeral oration about these very dead. For she had been told, as you were saying, that the Athenians were going to choose a speaker, and she repeated to me the sort of speech which he should deliver, partly improvising and partly from previous thought, putting together fragments of the funeral oration which Pericles spoke, but which, as I believe, she composed."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"And can you remember what Aspasia said?"}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I ought to be able, for she taught me, and she was ready to strike me because I was always forgetting."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"Then why will you not rehearse what she said?"}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because I am afraid that my mistress may be angry with me if I publish her speech."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"Nay, Socrates, let us have the speech, whether Aspasia's or any one else's, no matter. I hope that you will oblige me."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But I am afraid that you will laugh at me if I continue the games of youth in old age."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"Far otherwise, Socrates; let us by all means have the speech."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Truly I have such a disposition to oblige you, that if you bid me dance naked I should not like to refuse, since we are alone. Listen then: If I remember rightly, she began as follows, with the mention of the dead:--(Thucyd.) There is a tribute of deeds and of words. The departed have already had the first, when going forth on their destined journey they were attended on their way by the state and by their friends; the tribute of words remains to be given to them, as is meet and by law ordained. For noble words are a memorial and a crown of noble actions, which are given to the doers of them by the hearers. A word is needed which will duly praise the dead and gently admonish the living, exhorting the brethren and descendants of the departed to imitate their virtue, and consoling their fathers and mothers and the survivors, if any, who may chance to be alive of the previous generation. What sort of a word will this be, and how shall we rightly begin the praises of these brave men? In their life they rejoiced their own friends with their valour, and their death they gave in exchange for the salvation of the living. And I think that we should praise them in the order in which nature made them good, for they were good because they were sprung from good fathers. Wherefore let us first of all praise the goodness of their birth; secondly, their nurture and education; and then let us set forth how noble their actions were, and how worthy of the education which they had received. And first as to their birth. Their ancestors were not strangers, nor are these their descendants sojourners only, whose fathers have come from another country; but they are the children of the soil, dwelling and living in their own land. And the country which brought them up is not like other countries, a stepmother to her children, but their own true mother; she bore them and nourished them and received them, and in her bosom they now repose. It is meet and right, therefore, that we should begin by praising the land which is their mother, and that will be a way of praising their noble birth. The country is worthy to be praised, not only by us, but by all mankind; first, and above all, as being dear to the Gods. This is proved by the strife and contention of the Gods respecting her. And ought not the country which the Gods praise to be praised by all mankind? The second praise which may be fairly claimed by her, is that at the time when the whole earth was sending forth and creating diverse animals, tame and wild, she our mother was free and pure from savage monsters, and out of all animals selected and brought forth man, who is superior to the rest in understanding, and alone has justice and religion. And a great proof that she brought forth the common ancestors of us and of the departed, is that she provided the means of support for her offspring. For as a woman proves her motherhood by giving milk to her young ones (and she who has no fountain of milk is not a mother), so did this our land prove that she was the mother of men, for in those days she alone and first of all brought forth wheat and barley for human food, which is the best and noblest sustenance for man, whom she regarded as her true offspring. And these are truer proofs of motherhood in a country than in a woman, for the woman in her conception and generation is but the imitation of the earth, and not the earth of the woman. And of the fruit of the earth she gave a plenteous supply, not only to her own, but to others also; and afterwards she made the olive to spring up to be a boon to her children, and to help them in their toils. And when she had herself nursed them and brought them up to manhood, she gave them Gods to be their rulers and teachers, whose names are well known, and need not now be repeated. They are the Gods who first ordered our lives, and instructed us in the arts for the supply of our daily needs, and taught us the acquisition and use of arms for the defence of the country. Thus born into the world and thus educated, the ancestors of the departed lived and made themselves a government, which I ought briefly to commemorate. For government is the nurture of man, and the government of good men is good, and of bad men bad. And I must show that our ancestors were trained under a good government, and for this reason they were good, and our contemporaries are also good, among whom our departed friends are to be reckoned. Then as now, and indeed always, from that time to this, speaking generally, our government was an aristocracy--a form of government which receives various names, according to the fancies of men, and is sometimes called democracy, but is really an aristocracy or government of the best which has the approval of the many. For kings we have always had, first hereditary and then elected, and authority is mostly in the hands of the people, who dispense offices and power to those who appear to be most deserving of them. Neither is a man rejected from weakness or poverty or obscurity of origin, nor honoured by reason of the opposite, as in other states, but there is one principle--he who appears to be wise and good is a governor and ruler. The basis of this our government is equality of birth; for other states are made up of all sorts and unequal conditions of men, and therefore their governments are unequal; there are tyrannies and there are oligarchies, in which the one party are slaves and the others masters. But we and our citizens are brethren, the children all of one mother, and we do not think it right to be one another's masters or servants; but the natural equality of birth compels us to seek for legal equality, and to recognize no superiority except in the reputation of virtue and wisdom. And so their and our fathers, and these, too, our brethren, being nobly born and having been brought up in all freedom, did both in their public and private capacity many noble deeds famous over the whole world. They were the deeds of men who thought that they ought to fight both against Hellenes for the sake of Hellenes on behalf of freedom, and against barbarians in the common interest of Hellas. Time would fail me to tell of their defence of their country against the invasion of Eumolpus and the Amazons, or of their defence of the Argives against the Cadmeians, or of the Heracleids against the Argives; besides, the poets have already declared in song to all mankind their glory, and therefore any commemoration of their deeds in prose which we might attempt would hold a second place. They already have their reward, and I say no more of them; but there are other worthy deeds of which no poet has worthily sung, and which are still wooing the poet's muse. Of these I am bound to make honourable mention, and shall invoke others to sing of them also in lyric and other strains, in a manner becoming the actors. And first I will tell how the Persians, lords of Asia, were enslaving Europe, and how the children of this land, who were our fathers, held them back. Of these I will speak first, and praise their valour, as is meet and fitting. He who would rightly estimate them should place himself in thought at that time, when the whole of Asia was subject to the third king of Persia. The first king, Cyrus, by his valour freed the Persians, who were his countrymen, and subjected the Medes, who were their lords, and he ruled over the rest of Asia, as far as Egypt; and after him came his son, who ruled all the accessible part of Egypt and Libya; the third king was Darius, who extended the land boundaries of the empire to Scythia, and with his fleet held the sea and the islands. None presumed to be his equal; the minds of all men were enthralled by him--so many and mighty and warlike nations had the power of Persia subdued. Now Darius had a quarrel against us and the Eretrians, because, as he said, we had conspired against Sardis, and he sent 500,000 men in transports and vessels of war, and 300 ships, and Datis as commander, telling him to bring the Eretrians and Athenians to the king, if he wished to keep his head on his shoulders. He sailed against the Eretrians, who were reputed to be amongst the noblest and most warlike of the Hellenes of that day, and they were numerous, but he conquered them all in three days; and when he had conquered them, in order that no one might escape, he searched the whole country after this manner: his soldiers, coming to the borders of Eretria and spreading from sea to sea, joined hands and passed through the whole country, in order that they might be able to tell the king that no one had escaped them. And from Eretria they went to Marathon with a like intention, expecting to bind the Athenians in the same yoke of necessity in which they had bound the Eretrians. Having effected one-half of their purpose, they were in the act of attempting the other, and none of the Hellenes dared to assist either the Eretrians or the Athenians, except the Lacedaemonians, and they arrived a day too late for the battle; but the rest were panic-stricken and kept quiet, too happy in having escaped for a time. He who has present to his mind that conflict will know what manner of men they were who received the onset of the barbarians at Marathon, and chastened the pride of the whole of Asia, and by the victory which they gained over the barbarians first taught other men that the power of the Persians was not invincible, but that hosts of men and the multitude of riches alike yield to valour. And I assert that those men are the fathers not only of ourselves, but of our liberties and of the liberties of all who are on the continent, for that was the action to which the Hellenes looked back when they ventured to fight for their own safety in the battles which ensued: they became disciples of the men of Marathon. To them, therefore, I assign in my speech the first place, and the second to those who fought and conquered in the sea fights at Salamis and Artemisium; for of them, too, one might have many things to say--of the assaults which they endured by sea and land, and how they repelled them. I will mention only that act of theirs which appears to me to be the noblest, and which followed that of Marathon and came nearest to it; for the men of Marathon only showed the Hellenes that it was possible to ward off the barbarians by land, the many by the few; but there was no proof that they could be defeated by ships, and at sea the Persians retained the reputation of being invincible in numbers and wealth and skill and strength. This is the glory of the men who fought at sea, that they dispelled the second terror which had hitherto possessed the Hellenes, and so made the fear of numbers, whether of ships or men, to cease among them. And so the soldiers of Marathon and the sailors of Salamis became the schoolmasters of Hellas; the one teaching and habituating the Hellenes not to fear the barbarians at sea, and the others not to fear them by land. Third in order, for the number and valour of the combatants, and third in the salvation of Hellas, I place the battle of Plataea. And now the Lacedaemonians as well as the Athenians took part in the struggle; they were all united in this greatest and most terrible conflict of all; wherefore their virtues will be celebrated in times to come, as they are now celebrated by us. But at a later period many Hellenic tribes were still on the side of the barbarians, and there was a report that the great king was going to make a new attempt upon the Hellenes, and therefore justice requires that we should also make mention of those who crowned the previous work of our salvation, and drove and purged away all barbarians from the sea. These were the men who fought by sea at the river Eurymedon, and who went on the expedition to Cyprus, and who sailed to Egypt and divers other places; and they should be gratefully remembered by us, because they compelled the king in fear for himself to look to his own safety instead of plotting the destruction of Hellas. And so the war against the barbarians was fought out to the end by the whole city on their own behalf, and on behalf of their countrymen. There was peace, and our city was held in honour; and then, as prosperity makes men jealous, there succeeded a jealousy of her, and jealousy begat envy, and so she became engaged against her will in a war with the Hellenes. On the breaking out of war, our citizens met the Lacedaemonians at Tanagra, and fought for the freedom of the Boeotians; the issue was doubtful, and was decided by the engagement which followed. For when the Lacedaemonians had gone on their way, leaving the Boeotians, whom they were aiding, on the third day after the battle of Tanagra, our countrymen conquered at Oenophyta, and righteously restored those who had been unrighteously exiled. And they were the first after the Persian war who fought on behalf of liberty in aid of Hellenes against Hellenes; they were brave men, and freed those whom they aided, and were the first too who were honourably interred in this sepulchre by the state. Afterwards there was a mighty war, in which all the Hellenes joined, and devastated our country, which was very ungrateful of them; and our countrymen, after defeating them in a naval engagement and taking their leaders, the Spartans, at Sphagia, when they might have destroyed them, spared their lives, and gave them back, and made peace, considering that they should war with the fellow-countrymen only until they gained a victory over them, and not because of the private anger of the state destroy the common interest of Hellas; but that with barbarians they should war to the death. Worthy of praise are they also who waged this war, and are here interred; for they proved, if any one doubted the superior prowess of the Athenians in the former war with the barbarians, that their doubts had no foundation--showing by their victory in the civil war with Hellas, in which they subdued the other chief state of the Hellenes, that they could conquer single-handed those with whom they had been allied in the war against the barbarians. After the peace there followed a third war, which was of a terrible and desperate nature, and in this many brave men who are here interred lost their lives--many of them had won victories in Sicily, whither they had gone over the seas to fight for the liberties of the Leontines, to whom they were bound by oaths; but, owing to the distance, the city was unable to help them, and they lost heart and came to misfortune, their very enemies and opponents winning more renown for valour and temperance than the friends of others. Many also fell in naval engagements at the Hellespont, after having in one day taken all the ships of the enemy, and defeated them in other naval engagements. And what I call the terrible and desperate nature of the war, is that the other Hellenes, in their extreme animosity towards the city, should have entered into negotiations with their bitterest enemy, the king of Persia, whom they, together with us, had expelled;--him, without us, they again brought back, barbarian against Hellenes, and all the hosts, both of Hellenes and barbarians, were united against Athens. And then shone forth the power and valour of our city. Her enemies had supposed that she was exhausted by the war, and our ships were blockaded at Mitylene. But the citizens themselves embarked, and came to the rescue with sixty other ships, and their valour was confessed of all men, for they conquered their enemies and delivered their friends. And yet by some evil fortune they were left to perish at sea, and therefore are not interred here. Ever to be remembered and honoured are they, for by their valour not only that sea-fight was won for us, but the entire war was decided by them, and through them the city gained the reputation of being invincible, even though attacked by all mankind. And that reputation was a true one, for the defeat which came upon us was our own doing. We were never conquered by others, and to this day we are still unconquered by them; but we were our own conquerors, and received defeat at our own hands. Afterwards there was quiet and peace abroad, but there sprang up war at home; and, if men are destined to have civil war, no one could have desired that his city should take the disorder in a milder form. How joyful and natural was the reconciliation of those who came from the Piraeus and those who came from the city; with what moderation did they order the war against the tyrants in Eleusis, and in a manner how unlike what the other Hellenes expected! And the reason of this gentleness was the veritable tie of blood, which created among them a friendship as of kinsmen, faithful not in word only, but in deed. And we ought also to remember those who then fell by one another's hands, and on such occasions as these to reconcile them with sacrifices and prayers, praying to those who have power over them, that they may be reconciled even as we are reconciled. For they did not attack one another out of malice or enmity, but they were unfortunate. And that such was the fact we ourselves are witnesses, who are of the same race with them, and have mutually received and granted forgiveness of what we have done and suffered. After this there was perfect peace, and the city had rest; and her feeling was that she forgave the barbarians, who had severely suffered at her hands and severely retaliated, but that she was indignant at the ingratitude of the Hellenes, when she remembered how they had received good from her and returned evil, having made common cause with the barbarians, depriving her of the ships which had once been their salvation, and dismantling our walls, which had preserved their own from falling. She thought that she would no longer defend the Hellenes, when enslaved either by one another or by the barbarians, and did accordingly. This was our feeling, while the Lacedaemonians were thinking that we who were the champions of liberty had fallen, and that their business was to subject the remaining Hellenes. And why should I say more? for the events of which I am speaking happened not long ago and we can all of us remember how the chief peoples of Hellas, Argives and Boeotians and Corinthians, came to feel the need of us, and, what is the greatest miracle of all, the Persian king himself was driven to such extremity as to come round to the opinion, that from this city, of which he was the destroyer, and from no other, his salvation would proceed. And if a person desired to bring a deserved accusation against our city, he would find only one charge which he could justly urge--that she was too compassionate and too favourable to the weaker side. And in this instance she was not able to hold out or keep her resolution of refusing aid to her injurers when they were being enslaved, but she was softened, and did in fact send out aid, and delivered the Hellenes from slavery, and they were free until they afterwards enslaved themselves. Whereas, to the great king she refused to give the assistance of the state, for she could not forget the trophies of Marathon and Salamis and Plataea; but she allowed exiles and volunteers to assist him, and they were his salvation. And she herself, when she was compelled, entered into the war, and built walls and ships, and fought with the Lacedaemonians on behalf of the Parians. Now the king fearing this city and wanting to stand aloof, when he saw the Lacedaemonians growing weary of the war at sea, asked of us, as the price of his alliance with us and the other allies, to give up the Hellenes in Asia, whom the Lacedaemonians had previously handed over to him, he thinking that we should refuse, and that then he might have a pretence for withdrawing from us. About the other allies he was mistaken, for the Corinthians and Argives and Boeotians, and the other states, were quite willing to let them go, and swore and covenanted, that, if he would pay them money, they would make over to him the Hellenes of the continent, and we alone refused to give them up and swear. Such was the natural nobility of this city, so sound and healthy was the spirit of freedom among us, and the instinctive dislike of the barbarian, because we are pure Hellenes, having no admixture of barbarism in us. For we are not like many others, descendants of Pelops or Cadmus or Egyptus or Danaus, who are by nature barbarians, and yet pass for Hellenes, and dwell in the midst of us; but we are pure Hellenes, uncontaminated by any foreign element, and therefore the hatred of the foreigner has passed unadulterated into the life-blood of the city. And so, notwithstanding our noble sentiments, we were again isolated, because we were unwilling to be guilty of the base and unholy act of giving up Hellenes to barbarians. And we were in the same case as when we were subdued before; but, by the favour of Heaven, we managed better, for we ended the war without the loss of our ships or walls or colonies; the enemy was only too glad to be quit of us. Yet in this war we lost many brave men, such as were those who fell owing to the ruggedness of the ground at the battle of Corinth, or by treason at Lechaeum. Brave men, too, were those who delivered the Persian king, and drove the Lacedaemonians from the sea. I remind you of them, and you must celebrate them together with me, and do honour to their memories. Such were the actions of the men who are here interred, and of others who have died on behalf of their country; many and glorious things I have spoken of them, and there are yet many more and more glorious things remaining to be told--many days and nights would not suffice to tell of them. Let them not be forgotten, and let every man remind their descendants that they also are soldiers who must not desert the ranks of their ancestors, or from cowardice fall behind. Even as I exhort you this day, and in all future time, whenever I meet with any of you, shall continue to remind and exhort you, O ye sons of heroes, that you strive to be the bravest of men. And I think that I ought now to repeat what your fathers desired to have said to you who are their survivors, when they went out to battle, in case anything happened to them. I will tell you what I heard them say, and what, if they had only speech, they would fain be saying, judging from what they then said. And you must imagine that you hear them saying what I now repeat to you:-- 'Sons, the event proves that your fathers were brave men; for we might have lived dishonourably, but have preferred to die honourably rather than bring you and your children into disgrace, and rather than dishonour our own fathers and forefathers; considering that life is not life to one who is a dishonour to his race, and that to such a one neither men nor Gods are friendly, either while he is on the earth or after death in the world below. Remember our words, then, and whatever is your aim let virtue be the condition of the attainment of your aim, and know that without this all possessions and pursuits are dishonourable and evil. For neither does wealth bring honour to the owner, if he be a coward; of such a one the wealth belongs to another, and not to himself. Nor does beauty and strength of body, when dwelling in a base and cowardly man, appear comely, but the reverse of comely, making the possessor more conspicuous, and manifesting forth his cowardice. And all knowledge, when separated from justice and virtue, is seen to be cunning and not wisdom; wherefore make this your first and last and constant and all-absorbing aim, to exceed, if possible, not only us but all your ancestors in virtue; and know that to excel you in virtue only brings us shame, but that to be excelled by you is a source of happiness to us. And we shall most likely be defeated, and you will most likely be victors in the contest, if you learn so to order your lives as not to abuse or waste the reputation of your ancestors, knowing that to a man who has any self-respect, nothing is more dishonourable than to be honoured, not for his own sake, but on account of the reputation of his ancestors. The honour of parents is a fair and noble treasure to their posterity, but to have the use of a treasure of wealth and honour, and to leave none to your successors, because you have neither money nor reputation of your own, is alike base and dishonourable. And if you follow our precepts you will be received by us as friends, when the hour of destiny brings you hither; but if you neglect our words and are disgraced in your lives, no one will welcome or receive you. This is the message which is to be delivered to our children. 'Some of us have fathers and mothers still living, and we would urge them, if, as is likely, we shall die, to bear the calamity as lightly as possible, and not to condole with one another; for they have sorrows enough, and will not need any one to stir them up. While we gently heal their wounds, let us remind them that the Gods have heard the chief part of their prayers; for they prayed, not that their children might live for ever, but that they might be brave and renowned. And this, which is the greatest good, they have attained. A mortal man cannot expect to have everything in his own life turning out according to his will; and they, if they bear their misfortunes bravely, will be truly deemed brave fathers of the brave. But if they give way to their sorrows, either they will be suspected of not being our parents, or we of not being such as our panegyrists declare. Let not either of the two alternatives happen, but rather let them be our chief and true panegyrists, who show in their lives that they are true men, and had men for their sons. Of old the saying, \"Nothing too much,\" appeared to be, and really was, well said. For he whose happiness rests with himself, if possible, wholly, and if not, as far as is possible,--who is not hanging in suspense on other men, or changing with the vicissitude of their fortune,--has his life ordered for the best. He is the temperate and valiant and wise; and when his riches come and go, when his children are given and taken away, he will remember the proverb--\"Neither rejoicing overmuch nor grieving overmuch,\" for he relies upon himself. And such we would have our parents to be--that is our word and wish, and as such we now offer ourselves, neither lamenting overmuch, nor fearing overmuch, if we are to die at this time. And we entreat our fathers and mothers to retain these feelings throughout their future life, and to be assured that they will not please us by sorrowing and lamenting over us. But, if the dead have any knowledge of the living, they will displease us most by making themselves miserable and by taking their misfortunes too much to heart, and they will please us best if they bear their loss lightly and temperately. For our life will have the noblest end which is vouchsafed to man, and should be glorified rather than lamented. And if they will direct their minds to the care and nurture of our wives and children, they will soonest forget their misfortunes, and live in a better and nobler way, and be dearer to us. 'This is all that we have to say to our families: and to the state we would say--Take care of our parents and of our sons: let her worthily cherish the old age of our parents, and bring up our sons in the right way. But we know that she will of her own accord take care of them, and does not need any exhortation of ours.' This, O ye children and parents of the dead, is the message which they bid us deliver to you, and which I do deliver with the utmost seriousness. And in their name I beseech you, the children, to imitate your fathers, and you, parents, to be of good cheer about yourselves; for we will nourish your age, and take care of you both publicly and privately in any place in which one of us may meet one of you who are the parents of the dead. And the care of you which the city shows, you know yourselves; for she has made provision by law concerning the parents and children of those who die in war; the highest authority is specially entrusted with the duty of watching over them above all other citizens, and they will see that your fathers and mothers have no wrong done to them. The city herself shares in the education of the children, desiring as far as it is possible that their orphanhood may not be felt by them; while they are children she is a parent to them, and when they have arrived at man's estate she sends them to their several duties, in full armour clad; and bringing freshly to their minds the ways of their fathers, she places in their hands the instruments of their fathers' virtues; for the sake of the omen, she would have them from the first begin to rule over their own houses arrayed in the strength and arms of their fathers. And as for the dead, she never ceases honouring them, celebrating in common for all rites which become the property of each; and in addition to this, holding gymnastic and equestrian contests, and musical festivals of every sort. She is to the dead in the place of a son and heir, and to their sons in the place of a father, and to their parents and elder kindred in the place of a guardian--ever and always caring for them. Considering this, you ought to bear your calamity the more gently; for thus you will be most endeared to the dead and to the living, and your sorrows will heal and be healed. And now do you and all, having lamented the dead in common according to the law, go your ways. You have heard, Menexenus, the oration of Aspasia the Milesian."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"Truly, Socrates, I marvel that Aspasia, who is only a woman, should be able to compose such a speech; she must be a rare one."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, if you are incredulous, you may come with me and hear her."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"I have often met Aspasia, Socrates, and know what she is like."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and do you not admire her, and are you not grateful for her speech?"}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, I am very grateful to her or to him who told you, and still more to you who have told me."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good. But you must take care not to tell of me, and then at some future time I will repeat to you many other excellent political speeches of hers."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"MENEXENUS","Dialogue":"Fear not, only let me hear them, and I will keep the secret."}
{"Book":"menexenus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I will keep my promise. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MENEXENUS *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Put the question to him, Chaerephon."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"What question?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Who is he?\u2014such a question as would elicit from a man the answer, \u201cI am a cobbler.\u201d Polus suggests that Gorgias may be tired, and desires to answer for him. \u201cWho is Gorgias?\u201d asks Chaerephon, imitating the manner of his master Socrates. \u201cOne of the best of men, and a proficient in the best and noblest of experimental arts,\u201d etc., replies Polus, in rhetorical and balanced phrases. Socrates is dissatisfied at the length and unmeaningness of the answer; he tells the disconcerted volunteer that he has mistaken the quality for the nature of the art, and remarks to Gorgias, that Polus has learnt how to make a speech, but not how to answer a question. He wishes that Gorgias would answer him. Gorgias is willing enough, and replies to the question asked by Chaerephon,\u2014that he is a rhetorician, and in Homeric language, \u201cboasts himself to be a good one.\u201d At the request of Socrates he promises to be brief; for \u201che can be as long as he pleases, and as short as he pleases.\u201d Socrates would have him bestow his length on others, and proceeds to ask him a number of questions, which are answered by him to his own great satisfaction, and with a brevity which excites the admiration of Socrates. The result of the discussion may be summed up as follows:\u2014 Rhetoric treats of discourse; but music and medicine, and other particular arts, are also concerned with discourse; in what way then does rhetoric differ from them? Gorgias draws a distinction between the arts which deal with words, and the arts which have to do with external actions. Socrates extends this distinction further, and divides all productive arts into two classes: (1) arts which may be carried on in silence; and (2) arts which have to do with words, or in which words are coextensive with action, such as arithmetic, geometry, rhetoric. But still Gorgias could hardly have meant to say that arithmetic was the same as rhetoric. Even in the arts which are concerned with words there are differences. What then distinguishes rhetoric from the other arts which have to do with words? \u201cThe words which rhetoric uses relate to the best and greatest of human things.\u201d But tell me, Gorgias, what are the best? \u201cHealth first, beauty next, wealth third,\u201d in the words of the old song, or how would you rank them? The arts will come to you in a body, each claiming precedence and saying that her own good is superior to that of the rest\u2014How will you choose between them? \u201cI should say, Socrates, that the art of persuasion, which gives freedom to all men, and to individuals power in the state, is the greatest good.\u201d But what is the exact nature of this persuasion?\u2014is the persevering retort: You could not describe Zeuxis as a painter, or even as a painter of figures, if there were other painters of figures; neither can you define rhetoric simply as an art of persuasion, because there are other arts which persuade, such as arithmetic, which is an art of persuasion about odd and even numbers. Gorgias is made to see the necessity of a further limitation, and he now defines rhetoric as the art of persuading in the law courts, and in the assembly, about the just and unjust. But still there are two sorts of persuasion: one which gives knowledge, and another which gives belief without knowledge; and knowledge is always true, but belief may be either true or false,\u2014there is therefore a further question: which of the two sorts of persuasion does rhetoric effect in courts of law and assemblies? Plainly that which gives belief and not that which gives knowledge; for no one can impart a real knowledge of such matters to a crowd of persons in a few minutes. And there is another point to be considered:\u2014when the assembly meets to advise about walls or docks or military expeditions, the rhetorician is not taken into counsel, but the architect, or the general. How would Gorgias explain this phenomenon? All who intend to become disciples, of whom there are several in the company, and not Socrates only, are eagerly asking:\u2014About what then will rhetoric teach us to persuade or advise the state? Gorgias illustrates the nature of rhetoric by adducing the example of Themistocles, who persuaded the Athenians to build their docks and walls, and of Pericles, whom Socrates himself has heard speaking about the middle wall of the Piraeus. He adds that he has exercised a similar power over the patients of his brother Herodicus. He could be chosen a physician by the assembly if he pleased, for no physician could compete with a rhetorician in popularity and influence. He could persuade the multitude of anything by the power of his rhetoric; not that the rhetorician ought to abuse this power any more than a boxer should abuse the art of self-defence. Rhetoric is a good thing, but, like all good things, may be unlawfully used. Neither is the teacher of the art to be deemed unjust because his pupils are unjust and make a bad use of the lessons which they have learned from him. Socrates would like to know before he replies, whether Gorgias will quarrel with him if he points out a slight inconsistency into which he has fallen, or whether he, like himself, is one who loves to be refuted. Gorgias declares that he is quite one of his sort, but fears that the argument may be tedious to the company. The company cheer, and Chaerephon and Callicles exhort them to proceed. Socrates gently points out the supposed inconsistency into which Gorgias appears to have fallen, and which he is inclined to think may arise out of a misapprehension of his own. The rhetorician has been declared by Gorgias to be more persuasive to the ignorant than the physician, or any other expert. And he is said to be ignorant, and this ignorance of his is regarded by Gorgias as a happy condition, for he has escaped the trouble of learning. But is he as ignorant of just and unjust as he is of medicine or building? Gorgias is compelled to admit that if he did not know them previously he must learn them from his teacher as a part of the art of rhetoric. But he who has learned carpentry is a carpenter, and he who has learned music is a musician, and he who has learned justice is just. The rhetorician then must be a just man, and rhetoric is a just thing. But Gorgias has already admitted the opposite of this, viz. that rhetoric may be abused, and that the rhetorician may act unjustly. How is the inconsistency to be explained? The fallacy of this argument is twofold; for in the first place, a man may know justice and not be just\u2014here is the old confusion of the arts and the virtues;\u2014nor can any teacher be expected to counteract wholly the bent of natural character; and secondly, a man may have a degree of justice, but not sufficient to prevent him from ever doing wrong. Polus is naturally exasperated at the sophism, which he is unable to detect; of course, he says, the rhetorician, like every one else, will admit that he knows justice (how can he do otherwise when pressed by the interrogations of Socrates?), but he thinks that great want of manners is shown in bringing the argument to such a pass. Socrates ironically replies, that when old men trip, the young set them on their legs again; and he is quite willing to retract, if he can be shown to be in error, but upon one condition, which is that Polus studies brevity. Polus is in great indignation at not being allowed to use as many words as he pleases in the free state of Athens. Socrates retorts, that yet harder will be his own case, if he is compelled to stay and listen to them. After some altercation they agree (compare Protag.), that Polus shall ask and Socrates answer. \u201cWhat is the art of Rhetoric?\u201d says Polus. Not an art at all, replies Socrates, but a thing which in your book you affirm to have created art. Polus asks, \u201cWhat thing?\u201d and Socrates answers, An experience or routine of making a sort of delight or gratification. \u201cBut is not rhetoric a fine thing?\u201d I have not yet told you what rhetoric is. Will you ask me another question\u2014What is cookery? \u201cWhat is cookery?\u201d An experience or routine of making a sort of delight or gratification. Then they are the same, or rather fall under the same class, and rhetoric has still to be distinguished from cookery. \u201cWhat is rhetoric?\u201d asks Polus once more. A part of a not very creditable whole, which may be termed flattery, is the reply. \u201cBut what part?\u201d A shadow of a part of politics. This, as might be expected, is wholly unintelligible, both to Gorgias and Polus; and, in order to explain his meaning to them, Socrates draws a distinction between shadows or appearances and realities; e.g. there is real health of body or soul, and the appearance of them; real arts and sciences, and the simulations of them. Now the soul and body have two arts waiting upon them, first the art of politics, which attends on the soul, having a legislative part and a judicial part; and another art attending on the body, which has no generic name, but may also be described as having two divisions, one of which is medicine and the other gymnastic. Corresponding with these four arts or sciences there are four shams or simulations of them, mere experiences, as they may be termed, because they give no reason of their own existence. The art of dressing up is the sham or simulation of gymnastic, the art of cookery, of medicine; rhetoric is the simulation of justice, and sophistic of legislation. They may be summed up in an arithmetical formula:\u2014 Tiring: gymnastic:: cookery: medicine:: sophistic: legislation. And, Cookery: medicine:: rhetoric: the art of justice. And this is the true scheme of them, but when measured only by the gratification which they procure, they become jumbled together and return to their aboriginal chaos. Socrates apologizes for the length of his speech, which was necessary to the explanation of the subject, and begs Polus not unnecessarily to retaliate on him. \u201cDo you mean to say that the rhetoricians are esteemed flatterers?\u201d They are not esteemed at all. \u201cWhy, have they not great power, and can they not do whatever they desire?\u201d They have no power, and they only do what they think best, and never what they desire; for they never attain the true object of desire, which is the good. \u201cAs if you, Socrates, would not envy the possessor of despotic power, who can imprison, exile, kill any one whom he pleases.\u201d But Socrates replies that he has no wish to put any one to death; he who kills another, even justly, is not to be envied, and he who kills him unjustly is to be pitied; it is better to suffer than to do injustice. He does not consider that going about with a dagger and putting men out of the way, or setting a house on fire, is real power. To this Polus assents, on the ground that such acts would be punished, but he is still of opinion that evil-doers, if they are unpunished, may be happy enough. He instances Archelaus, son of Perdiccas, the usurper of Macedonia. Does not Socrates think him happy?\u2014Socrates would like to know more about him; he cannot pronounce even the great king to be happy, unless he knows his mental and moral condition. Polus explains that Archelaus was a slave, being the son of a woman who was the slave of Alcetas, brother of Perdiccas king of Macedon\u2014and he, by every species of crime, first murdering his uncle and then his cousin and half-brother, obtained the kingdom. This was very wicked, and yet all the world, including Socrates, would like to have his place. Socrates dismisses the appeal to numbers; Polus, if he will, may summon all the rich men of Athens, Nicias and his brothers, Aristocrates, the house of Pericles, or any other great family\u2014this is the kind of evidence which is adduced in courts of justice, where truth depends upon numbers. But Socrates employs proof of another sort; his appeal is to one witness only,\u2014that is to say, the person with whom he is speaking; him he will convict out of his own mouth. And he is prepared to show, after his manner, that Archelaus cannot be a wicked man and yet happy. The evil-doer is deemed happy if he escapes, and miserable if he suffers punishment; but Socrates thinks him less miserable if he suffers than if he escapes. Polus is of opinion that such a paradox as this hardly deserves refutation, and is at any rate sufficiently refuted by the fact. Socrates has only to compare the lot of the successful tyrant who is the envy of the world, and of the wretch who, having been detected in a criminal attempt against the state, is crucified or burnt to death. Socrates replies, that if they are both criminal they are both miserable, but that the unpunished is the more miserable of the two. At this Polus laughs outright, which leads Socrates to remark that laughter is a new species of refutation. Polus replies, that he is already refuted; for if he will take the votes of the company, he will find that no one agrees with him. To this Socrates rejoins, that he is not a public man, and (referring to his own conduct at the trial of the generals after the battle of Arginusae) is unable to take the suffrages of any company, as he had shown on a recent occasion; he can only deal with one witness at a time, and that is the person with whom he is arguing. But he is certain that in the opinion of any man to do is worse than to suffer evil. Polus, though he will not admit this, is ready to acknowledge that to do evil is considered the more foul or dishonourable of the two. But what is fair and what is foul; whether the terms are applied to bodies, colours, figures, laws, habits, studies, must they not be defined with reference to pleasure and utility? Polus assents to this latter doctrine, and is easily persuaded that the fouler of two things must exceed either in pain or in hurt. But the doing cannot exceed the suffering of evil in pain, and therefore must exceed in hurt. Thus doing is proved by the testimony of Polus himself to be worse or more hurtful than suffering. There remains the other question: Is a guilty man better off when he is punished or when he is unpunished? Socrates replies, that what is done justly is suffered justly: if the act is just, the effect is just; if to punish is just, to be punished is just, and therefore fair, and therefore beneficent; and the benefit is that the soul is improved. There are three evils from which a man may suffer, and which affect him in estate, body, and soul;\u2014these are, poverty, disease, injustice; and the foulest of these is injustice, the evil of the soul, because that brings the greatest hurt. And there are three arts which heal these evils\u2014trading, medicine, justice\u2014and the fairest of these is justice. Happy is he who has never committed injustice, and happy in the second degree he who has been healed by punishment. And therefore the criminal should himself go to the judge as he would to the physician, and purge away his crime. Rhetoric will enable him to display his guilt in proper colours, and to sustain himself and others in enduring the necessary penalty. And similarly if a man has an enemy, he will desire not to punish him, but that he shall go unpunished and become worse and worse, taking care only that he does no injury to himself. These are at least conceivable uses of the art, and no others have been discovered by us. Here Callicles, who has been listening in silent amazement, asks Chaerephon whether Socrates is in earnest, and on receiving the assurance that he is, proceeds to ask the same question of Socrates himself. For if such doctrines are true, life must have been turned upside down, and all of us are doing the opposite of what we ought to be doing. Socrates replies in a style of playful irony, that before men can understand one another they must have some common feeling. And such a community of feeling exists between himself and Callicles, for both of them are lovers, and they have both a pair of loves; the beloved of Callicles are the Athenian Demos and Demos the son of Pyrilampes; the beloved of Socrates are Alcibiades and philosophy. The peculiarity of Callicles is that he can never contradict his loves; he changes as his Demos changes in all his opinions; he watches the countenance of both his loves, and repeats their sentiments, and if any one is surprised at his sayings and doings, the explanation of them is, that he is not a free agent, but must always be imitating his two loves. And this is the explanation of Socrates\u2019 peculiarities also. He is always repeating what his mistress, Philosophy, is saying to him, who unlike his other love, Alcibiades, is ever the same, ever true. Callicles must refute her, or he will never be at unity with himself; and discord in life is far worse than the discord of musical sounds. Callicles answers, that Gorgias was overthrown because, as Polus said, in compliance with popular prejudice he had admitted that if his pupil did not know justice the rhetorician must teach him; and Polus has been similarly entangled, because his modesty led him to admit that to suffer is more honourable than to do injustice. By custom \u201cyes,\u201d but not by nature, says Callicles. And Socrates is always playing between the two points of view, and putting one in the place of the other. In this very argument, what Polus only meant in a conventional sense has been affirmed by him to be a law of nature. For convention says that \u201cinjustice is dishonourable,\u201d but nature says that \u201cmight is right.\u201d And we are always taming down the nobler spirits among us to the conventional level. But sometimes a great man will rise up and reassert his original rights, trampling under foot all our formularies, and then the light of natural justice shines forth. Pindar says, \u201cLaw, the king of all, does violence with high hand;\u201d as is indeed proved by the example of Heracles, who drove off the oxen of Geryon and never paid for them. This is the truth, Socrates, as you will be convinced, if you leave philosophy and pass on to the real business of life. A little philosophy is an excellent thing; too much is the ruin of a man. He who has not \u201cpassed his metaphysics\u201d before he has grown up to manhood will never know the world. Philosophers are ridiculous when they take to politics, and I dare say that politicians are equally ridiculous when they take to philosophy: \u201cEvery man,\u201d as Euripides says, \u201cis fondest of that in which he is best.\u201d Philosophy is graceful in youth, like the lisp of infancy, and should be cultivated as a part of education; but when a grown-up man lisps or studies philosophy, I should like to beat him. None of those over-refined natures ever come to any good; they avoid the busy haunts of men, and skulk in corners, whispering to a few admiring youths, and never giving utterance to any noble sentiments. For you, Socrates, I have a regard, and therefore I say to you, as Zethus says to Amphion in the play, that you have \u201ca noble soul disguised in a puerile exterior.\u201d And I would have you consider the danger which you and other philosophers incur. For you would not know how to defend yourself if any one accused you in a law-court,\u2014there you would stand, with gaping mouth and dizzy brain, and might be murdered, robbed, boxed on the ears with impunity. Take my advice, then, and get a little common sense; leave to others these frivolities; walk in the ways of the wealthy and be wise. Socrates professes to have found in Callicles the philosopher\u2019s touchstone; and he is certain that any opinion in which they both agree must be the very truth. Callicles has all the three qualities which are needed in a critic\u2014knowledge, good-will, frankness; Gorgias and Polus, although learned men, were too modest, and their modesty made them contradict themselves. But Callicles is well-educated; and he is not too modest to speak out (of this he has already given proof), and his good-will is shown both by his own profession and by his giving the same caution against philosophy to Socrates, which Socrates remembers hearing him give long ago to his own clique of friends. He will pledge himself to retract any error into which he may have fallen, and which Callicles may point out. But he would like to know first of all what he and Pindar mean by natural justice. Do they suppose that the rule of justice is the rule of the stronger or of the better?\u201d \u201cThere is no difference.\u201d Then are not the many superior to the one, and the opinions of the many better? And their opinion is that justice is equality, and that to do is more dishonourable than to suffer wrong. And as they are the superior or stronger, this opinion of theirs must be in accordance with natural as well as conventional justice. \u201cWhy will you continue splitting words? Have I not told you that the superior is the better?\u201d But what do you mean by the better? Tell me that, and please to be a little milder in your language, if you do not wish to drive me away. \u201cI mean the worthier, the wiser.\u201d You mean to say that one man of sense ought to rule over ten thousand fools? \u201cYes, that is my meaning.\u201d Ought the physician then to have a larger share of meats and drinks? or the weaver to have more coats, or the cobbler larger shoes, or the farmer more seed? \u201cYou are always saying the same things, Socrates.\u201d Yes, and on the same subjects too; but you are never saying the same things. For, first, you defined the superior to be the stronger, and then the wiser, and now something else;\u2014what DO you mean? \u201cI mean men of political ability, who ought to govern and to have more than the governed.\u201d Than themselves? \u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d I mean to say that every man is his own governor. \u201cI see that you mean those dolts, the temperate. But my doctrine is, that a man should let his desires grow, and take the means of satisfying them. To the many this is impossible, and therefore they combine to prevent him. But if he is a king, and has power, how base would he be in submitting to them! To invite the common herd to be lord over him, when he might have the enjoyment of all things! For the truth is, Socrates, that luxury and self-indulgence are virtue and happiness; all the rest is mere talk.\u201d Socrates compliments Callicles on his frankness in saying what other men only think. According to his view, those who want nothing are not happy. \u201cWhy,\u201d says Callicles, \u201cif they were, stones and the dead would be happy.\u201d Socrates in reply is led into a half-serious, half-comic vein of reflection. \u201cWho knows,\u201d as Euripides says, \u201cwhether life may not be death, and death life?\u201d Nay, there are philosophers who maintain that even in life we are dead, and that the body (soma) is the tomb (sema) of the soul. And some ingenious Sicilian has made an allegory, in which he represents fools as the uninitiated, who are supposed to be carrying water to a vessel, which is full of holes, in a similarly holey sieve, and this sieve is their own soul. The idea is fanciful, but nevertheless is a figure of a truth which I want to make you acknowledge, viz. that the life of contentment is better than the life of indulgence. Are you disposed to admit that? \u201cFar otherwise.\u201d Then hear another parable. The life of self-contentment and self-indulgence may be represented respectively by two men, who are filling jars with streams of wine, honey, milk,\u2014the jars of the one are sound, and the jars of the other leaky; the first fills his jars, and has no more trouble with them; the second is always filling them, and would suffer extreme misery if he desisted. Are you of the same opinion still? \u201cYes, Socrates, and the figure expresses what I mean. For true pleasure is a perpetual stream, flowing in and flowing out. To be hungry and always eating, to be thirsty and always drinking, and to have all the other desires and to satisfy them, that, as I admit, is my idea of happiness.\u201d And to be itching and always scratching? \u201cI do not deny that there may be happiness even in that.\u201d And to indulge unnatural desires, if they are abundantly satisfied? Callicles is indignant at the introduction of such topics. But he is reminded by Socrates that they are introduced, not by him, but by the maintainer of the identity of pleasure and good. Will Callicles still maintain this? \u201cYes, for the sake of consistency, he will.\u201d The answer does not satisfy Socrates, who fears that he is losing his touchstone. A profession of seriousness on the part of Callicles reassures him, and they proceed with the argument. Pleasure and good are the same, but knowledge and courage are not the same either with pleasure or good, or with one another. Socrates disproves the first of these statements by showing that two opposites cannot coexist, but must alternate with one another\u2014to be well and ill together is impossible. But pleasure and pain are simultaneous, and the cessation of them is simultaneous; e.g. in the case of drinking and thirsting, whereas good and evil are not simultaneous, and do not cease simultaneously, and therefore pleasure cannot be the same as good. Callicles has already lost his temper, and can only be persuaded to go on by the interposition of Gorgias. Socrates, having already guarded against objections by distinguishing courage and knowledge from pleasure and good, proceeds:\u2014The good are good by the presence of good, and the bad are bad by the presence of evil. And the brave and wise are good, and the cowardly and foolish are bad. And he who feels pleasure is good, and he who feels pain is bad, and both feel pleasure and pain in nearly the same degree, and sometimes the bad man or coward in a greater degree. Therefore the bad man or coward is as good as the brave or may be even better. Callicles endeavours now to avert the inevitable absurdity by affirming that he and all mankind admitted some pleasures to be good and others bad. The good are the beneficial, and the bad are the hurtful, and we should choose the one and avoid the other. But this, as Socrates observes, is a return to the old doctrine of himself and Polus, that all things should be done for the sake of the good. Callicles assents to this, and Socrates, finding that they are agreed in distinguishing pleasure from good, returns to his old division of empirical habits, or shams, or flatteries, which study pleasure only, and the arts which are concerned with the higher interests of soul and body. Does Callicles agree to this division? Callicles will agree to anything, in order that he may get through the argument. Which of the arts then are flatteries? Flute-playing, harp-playing, choral exhibitions, the dithyrambics of Cinesias are all equally condemned on the ground that they give pleasure only; and Meles the harp-player, who was the father of Cinesias, failed even in that. The stately muse of Tragedy is bent upon pleasure, and not upon improvement. Poetry in general is only a rhetorical address to a mixed audience of men, women, and children. And the orators are very far from speaking with a view to what is best; their way is to humour the assembly as if they were children. Callicles replies, that this is only true of some of them; others have a real regard for their fellow-citizens. Granted; then there are two species of oratory; the one a flattery, another which has a real regard for the citizens. But where are the orators among whom you find the latter? Callicles admits that there are none remaining, but there were such in the days when Themistocles, Cimon, Miltiades, and the great Pericles were still alive. Socrates replies that none of these were true artists, setting before themselves the duty of bringing order out of disorder. The good man and true orator has a settled design, running through his life, to which he conforms all his words and actions; he desires to implant justice and eradicate injustice, to implant all virtue and eradicate all vice in the minds of his citizens. He is the physician who will not allow the sick man to indulge his appetites with a variety of meats and drinks, but insists on his exercising self-restraint. And this is good for the soul, and better than the unrestrained indulgence which Callicles was recently approving. Here Callicles, who had been with difficulty brought to this point, turns restive, and suggests that Socrates shall answer his own questions. \u201cThen,\u201d says Socrates, \u201cone man must do for two;\u201d and though he had hoped to have given Callicles an \u201cAmphion\u201d in return for his \u201cZethus,\u201d he is willing to proceed; at the same time, he hopes that Callicles will correct him, if he falls into error. He recapitulates the advantages which he has already won:\u2014 The pleasant is not the same as the good\u2014Callicles and I are agreed about that,\u2014but pleasure is to be pursued for the sake of the good, and the good is that of which the presence makes us good; we and all things good have acquired some virtue or other. And virtue, whether of body or soul, of things or persons, is not attained by accident, but is due to order and harmonious arrangement. And the soul which has order is better than the soul which is without order, and is therefore temperate and is therefore good, and the intemperate is bad. And he who is temperate is also just and brave and pious, and has attained the perfection of goodness and therefore of happiness, and the intemperate whom you approve is the opposite of all this and is wretched. He therefore who would be happy must pursue temperance and avoid intemperance, and if possible escape the necessity of punishment, but if he have done wrong he must endure punishment. In this way states and individuals should seek to attain harmony, which, as the wise tell us, is the bond of heaven and earth, of gods and men. Callicles has never discovered the power of geometrical proportion in both worlds; he would have men aim at disproportion and excess. But if he be wrong in this, and if self-control is the true secret of happiness, then the paradox is true that the only use of rhetoric is in self-accusation, and Polus was right in saying that to do wrong is worse than to suffer wrong, and Gorgias was right in saying that the rhetorician must be a just man. And you were wrong in taunting me with my defenceless condition, and in saying that I might be accused or put to death or boxed on the ears with impunity. For I may repeat once more, that to strike is worse than to be stricken\u2014to do than to suffer. What I said then is now made fast in adamantine bonds. I myself know not the true nature of these things, but I know that no one can deny my words and not be ridiculous. To do wrong is the greatest of evils, and to suffer wrong is the next greatest evil. He who would avoid the last must be a ruler, or the friend of a ruler; and to be the friend he must be the equal of the ruler, and must also resemble him. Under his protection he will suffer no evil, but will he also do no evil? Nay, will he not rather do all the evil which he can and escape? And in this way the greatest of all evils will befall him. \u201cBut this imitator of the tyrant,\u201d rejoins Callicles, \u201cwill kill any one who does not similarly imitate him.\u201d Socrates replies that he is not deaf, and that he has heard that repeated many times, and can only reply, that a bad man will kill a good one. \u201cYes, and that is the provoking thing.\u201d Not provoking to a man of sense who is not studying the arts which will preserve him from danger; and this, as you say, is the use of rhetoric in courts of justice. But how many other arts are there which also save men from death, and are yet quite humble in their pretensions\u2014such as the art of swimming, or the art of the pilot? Does not the pilot do men at least as much service as the rhetorician, and yet for the voyage from Aegina to Athens he does not charge more than two obols, and when he disembarks is quite unassuming in his demeanour? The reason is that he is not certain whether he has done his passengers any good in saving them from death, if one of them is diseased in body, and still more if he is diseased in mind\u2014who can say? The engineer too will often save whole cities, and yet you despise him, and would not allow your son to marry his daughter, or his son to marry yours. But what reason is there in this? For if virtue only means the saving of life, whether your own or another\u2019s, you have no right to despise him or any practiser of saving arts. But is not virtue something different from saving and being saved? I would have you rather consider whether you ought not to disregard length of life, and think only how you can live best, leaving all besides to the will of Heaven. For you must not expect to have influence either with the Athenian Demos or with Demos the son of Pyrilampes, unless you become like them. What do you say to this? \u201cThere is some truth in what you are saying, but I do not entirely believe you.\u201d That is because you are in love with Demos. But let us have a little more conversation. You remember the two processes\u2014one which was directed to pleasure, the other which was directed to making men as good as possible. And those who have the care of the city should make the citizens as good as possible. But who would undertake a public building, if he had never had a teacher of the art of building, and had never constructed a building before? or who would undertake the duty of state-physician, if he had never cured either himself or any one else? Should we not examine him before we entrusted him with the office? And as Callicles is about to enter public life, should we not examine him? Whom has he made better? For we have already admitted that this is the statesman\u2019s proper business. And we must ask the same question about Pericles, and Cimon, and Miltiades, and Themistocles. Whom did they make better? Nay, did not Pericles make the citizens worse? For he gave them pay, and at first he was very popular with them, but at last they condemned him to death. Yet surely he would be a bad tamer of animals who, having received them gentle, taught them to kick and butt, and man is an animal; and Pericles who had the charge of man only made him wilder, and more savage and unjust, and therefore he could not have been a good statesman. The same tale might be repeated about Cimon, Themistocles, Miltiades. But the charioteer who keeps his seat at first is not thrown out when he gains greater experience and skill. The inference is, that the statesman of a past age were no better than those of our own. They may have been cleverer constructors of docks and harbours, but they did not improve the character of the citizens. I have told you again and again (and I purposely use the same images) that the soul, like the body, may be treated in two ways\u2014there is the meaner and the higher art. You seemed to understand what I said at the time, but when I ask you who were the really good statesmen, you answer\u2014as if I asked you who were the good trainers, and you answered, Thearion, the baker, Mithoecus, the author of the Sicilian cookery-book, Sarambus, the vintner. And you would be affronted if I told you that these are a parcel of cooks who make men fat only to make them thin. And those whom they have fattened applaud them, instead of finding fault with them, and lay the blame of their subsequent disorders on their physicians. In this respect, Callicles, you are like them; you applaud the statesmen of old, who pandered to the vices of the citizens, and filled the city with docks and harbours, but neglected virtue and justice. And when the fit of illness comes, the citizens who in like manner applauded Themistocles, Pericles, and others, will lay hold of you and my friend Alcibiades, and you will suffer for the misdeeds of your predecessors. The old story is always being repeated\u2014\u201cafter all his services, the ungrateful city banished him, or condemned him to death.\u201d As if the statesman should not have taught the city better! He surely cannot blame the state for having unjustly used him, any more than the sophist or teacher can find fault with his pupils if they cheat him. And the sophist and orator are in the same case; although you admire rhetoric and despise sophistic, whereas sophistic is really the higher of the two. The teacher of the arts takes money, but the teacher of virtue or politics takes no money, because this is the only kind of service which makes the disciple desirous of requiting his teacher. Socrates concludes by finally asking, to which of the two modes of serving the state Callicles invites him:\u2014\u201cto the inferior and ministerial one,\u201d is the ingenuous reply. That is the only way of avoiding death, replies Socrates; and he has heard often enough, and would rather not hear again, that the bad man will kill the good. But he thinks that such a fate is very likely reserved for him, because he remarks that he is the only person who teaches the true art of politics. And very probably, as in the case which he described to Polus, he may be the physician who is tried by a jury of children. He cannot say that he has procured the citizens any pleasure, and if any one charges him with perplexing them, or with reviling their elders, he will not be able to make them understand that he has only been actuated by a desire for their good. And therefore there is no saying what his fate may be. \u201cAnd do you think that a man who is unable to help himself is in a good condition?\u201d Yes, Callicles, if he have the true self-help, which is never to have said or done any wrong to himself or others. If I had not this kind of self-help, I should be ashamed; but if I die for want of your flattering rhetoric, I shall die in peace. For death is no evil, but to go to the world below laden with offences is the worst of evils. In proof of which I will tell you a tale:\u2014 Under the rule of Cronos, men were judged on the day of their death, and when judgment had been given upon them they departed\u2014the good to the islands of the blest, the bad to the house of vengeance. But as they were still living, and had their clothes on at the time when they were being judged, there was favouritism, and Zeus, when he came to the throne, was obliged to alter the mode of procedure, and try them after death, having first sent down Prometheus to take away from them the foreknowledge of death. Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus were appointed to be the judges; Rhadamanthus for Asia, Aeacus for Europe, and Minos was to hold the court of appeal. Now death is the separation of soul and body, but after death soul and body alike retain their characteristics; the fat man, the dandy, the branded slave, are all distinguishable. Some prince or potentate, perhaps even the great king himself, appears before Rhadamanthus, and he instantly detects him, though he knows not who he is; he sees the scars of perjury and iniquity, and sends him away to the house of torment. For there are two classes of souls who undergo punishment\u2014the curable and the incurable. The curable are those who are benefited by their punishment; the incurable are such as Archelaus, who benefit others by becoming a warning to them. The latter class are generally kings and potentates; meaner persons, happily for themselves, have not the same power of doing injustice. Sisyphus and Tityus, not Thersites, are supposed by Homer to be undergoing everlasting punishment. Not that there is anything to prevent a great man from being a good one, as is shown by the famous example of Aristeides, the son of Lysimachus. But to Rhadamanthus the souls are only known as good or bad; they are stripped of their dignities and preferments; he despatches the bad to Tartarus, labelled either as curable or incurable, and looks with love and admiration on the soul of some just one, whom he sends to the islands of the blest. Similar is the practice of Aeacus; and Minos overlooks them, holding a golden sceptre, as Odysseus in Homer saw him \u201cWielding a sceptre of gold, and giving laws to the dead.\u201d My wish for myself and my fellow-men is, that we may present our souls undefiled to the judge in that day; my desire in life is to be able to meet death. And I exhort you, and retort upon you the reproach which you cast upon me,\u2014that you will stand before the judge, gaping, and with dizzy brain, and any one may box you on the ear, and do you all manner of evil. Perhaps you think that this is an old wives\u2019 fable. But you, who are the three wisest men in Hellas, have nothing better to say, and no one will ever show that to do is better than to suffer evil. A man should study to be, and not merely to seem. If he is bad, he should become good, and avoid all flattery, whether of the many or of the few. Follow me, then; and if you are looked down upon, that will do you no harm. And when we have practised virtue, we will betake ourselves to politics, but not until we are delivered from the shameful state of ignorance and uncertainty in which we are at present. Let us follow in the way of virtue and justice, and not in the way to which you, Callicles, invite us; for that way is nothing worth. We will now consider in order some of the principal points of the dialogue. Having regard (1) to the age of Plato and the ironical character of his writings, we may compare him with himself, and with other great teachers, and we may note in passing the objections of his critics. And then (2) casting one eye upon him, we may cast another upon ourselves, and endeavour to draw out the great lessons which he teaches for all time, stripped of the accidental form in which they are enveloped. (1) In the Gorgias, as in nearly all the other dialogues of Plato, we are made aware that formal logic has as yet no existence. The old difficulty of framing a definition recurs. The illusive analogy of the arts and the virtues also continues. The ambiguity of several words, such as nature, custom, the honourable, the good, is not cleared up. The Sophists are still floundering about the distinction of the real and seeming. Figures of speech are made the basis of arguments. The possibility of conceiving a universal art or science, which admits of application to a particular subject-matter, is a difficulty which remains unsolved, and has not altogether ceased to haunt the world at the present day (compare Charmides). The defect of clearness is also apparent in Socrates himself, unless we suppose him to be practising on the simplicity of his opponent, or rather perhaps trying an experiment in dialectics. Nothing can be more fallacious than the contradiction which he pretends to have discovered in the answers of Gorgias (see above). The advantages which he gains over Polus are also due to a false antithesis of pleasure and good, and to an erroneous assertion that an agent and a patient may be described by similar predicates;\u2014a mistake which Aristotle partly shares and partly corrects in the Nicomachean Ethics. Traces of a \u201crobust sophistry\u201d are likewise discernible in his argument with Callicles. (2) Although Socrates professes to be convinced by reason only, yet the argument is often a sort of dialectical fiction, by which he conducts himself and others to his own ideal of life and action. And we may sometimes wish that we could have suggested answers to his antagonists, or pointed out to them the rocks which lay concealed under the ambiguous terms good, pleasure, and the like. But it would be as useless to examine his arguments by the requirements of modern logic, as to criticise this ideal from a merely utilitarian point of view. If we say that the ideal is generally regarded as unattainable, and that mankind will by no means agree in thinking that the criminal is happier when punished than when unpunished, any more than they would agree to the stoical paradox that a man may be happy on the rack, Plato has already admitted that the world is against him. Neither does he mean to say that Archelaus is tormented by the stings of conscience; or that the sensations of the impaled criminal are more agreeable than those of the tyrant drowned in luxurious enjoyment. Neither is he speaking, as in the Protagoras, of virtue as a calculation of pleasure, an opinion which he afterwards repudiates in the Phaedo. What then is his meaning? His meaning we shall be able to illustrate best by parallel notions, which, whether justifiable by logic or not, have always existed among mankind. We must remind the reader that Socrates himself implies that he will be understood or appreciated by very few. He is speaking not of the consciousness of happiness, but of the idea of happiness. When a martyr dies in a good cause, when a soldier falls in battle, we do not suppose that death or wounds are without pain, or that their physical suffering is always compensated by a mental satisfaction. Still we regard them as happy, and we would a thousand times rather have their death than a shameful life. Nor is this only because we believe that they will obtain an immortality of fame, or that they will have crowns of glory in another world, when their enemies and persecutors will be proportionably tormented. Men are found in a few instances to do what is right, without reference to public opinion or to consequences. And we regard them as happy on this ground only, much as Socrates\u2019 friends in the opening of the Phaedo are described as regarding him; or as was said of another, \u201cthey looked upon his face as upon the face of an angel.\u201d We are not concerned to justify this idealism by the standard of utility or public opinion, but merely to point out the existence of such a sentiment in the better part of human nature. The idealism of Plato is founded upon this sentiment. He would maintain that in some sense or other truth and right are alone to be sought, and that all other goods are only desirable as means towards these. He is thought to have erred in \u201cconsidering the agent only, and making no reference to the happiness of others, as affected by him.\u201d But the happiness of others or of mankind, if regarded as an end, is really quite as ideal and almost as paradoxical to the common understanding as Plato\u2019s conception of happiness. For the greatest happiness of the greatest number may mean also the greatest pain of the individual which will procure the greatest pleasure of the greatest number. Ideas of utility, like those of duty and right, may be pushed to unpleasant consequences. Nor can Plato in the Gorgias be deemed purely self-regarding, considering that Socrates expressly mentions the duty of imparting the truth when discovered to others. Nor must we forget that the side of ethics which regards others is by the ancients merged in politics. Both in Plato and Aristotle, as well as in the Stoics, the social principle, though taking another form, is really far more prominent than in most modern treatises on ethics. The idealizing of suffering is one of the conceptions which have exercised the greatest influence on mankind. Into the theological import of this, or into the consideration of the errors to which the idea may have given rise, we need not now enter. All will agree that the ideal of the Divine Sufferer, whose words the world would not receive, the man of sorrows of whom the Hebrew prophets spoke, has sunk deep into the heart of the human race. It is a similar picture of suffering goodness which Plato desires to pourtray, not without an allusion to the fate of his master Socrates. He is convinced that, somehow or other, such an one must be happy in life or after death. In the Republic, he endeavours to show that his happiness would be assured here in a well-ordered state. But in the actual condition of human things the wise and good are weak and miserable; such an one is like a man fallen among wild beasts, exposed to every sort of wrong and obloquy. Plato, like other philosophers, is thus led on to the conclusion, that if \u201cthe ways of God\u201d to man are to be \u201cjustified,\u201d the hopes of another life must be included. If the question could have been put to him, whether a man dying in torments was happy still, even if, as he suggests in the Apology, \u201cdeath be only a long sleep,\u201d we can hardly tell what would have been his answer. There have been a few, who, quite independently of rewards and punishments or of posthumous reputation, or any other influence of public opinion, have been willing to sacrifice their lives for the good of others. It is difficult to say how far in such cases an unconscious hope of a future life, or a general faith in the victory of good in the world, may have supported the sufferers. But this extreme idealism is not in accordance with the spirit of Plato. He supposes a day of retribution, in which the good are to be rewarded and the wicked punished. Though, as he says in the Phaedo, no man of sense will maintain that the details of the stories about another world are true, he will insist that something of the kind is true, and will frame his life with a view to this unknown future. Even in the Republic he introduces a future life as an afterthought, when the superior happiness of the just has been established on what is thought to be an immutable foundation. At the same time he makes a point of determining his main thesis independently of remoter consequences. (3) Plato\u2019s theory of punishment is partly vindictive, partly corrective. In the Gorgias, as well as in the Phaedo and Republic, a few great criminals, chiefly tyrants, are reserved as examples. But most men have never had the opportunity of attaining this pre-eminence of evil. They are not incurable, and their punishment is intended for their improvement. They are to suffer because they have sinned; like sick men, they must go to the physician and be healed. On this representation of Plato\u2019s the criticism has been made, that the analogy of disease and injustice is partial only, and that suffering, instead of improving men, may have just the opposite effect. Like the general analogy of the arts and the virtues, the analogy of disease and injustice, or of medicine and justice, is certainly imperfect. But ideas must be given through something; the nature of the mind which is unseen can only be represented under figures derived from visible objects. If these figures are suggestive of some new aspect under which the mind may be considered, we cannot find fault with them for not exactly coinciding with the ideas represented. They partake of the imperfect nature of language, and must not be construed in too strict a manner. That Plato sometimes reasons from them as if they were not figures but realities, is due to the defective logical analysis of his age. Nor does he distinguish between the suffering which improves and the suffering which only punishes and deters. He applies to the sphere of ethics a conception of punishment which is really derived from criminal law. He does not see that such punishment is only negative, and supplies no principle of moral growth or development. He is not far off the higher notion of an education of man to be begun in this world, and to be continued in other stages of existence, which is further developed in the Republic. And Christian thinkers, who have ventured out of the beaten track in their meditations on the \u201clast things,\u201d have found a ray of light in his writings. But he has not explained how or in what way punishment is to contribute to the improvement of mankind. He has not followed out the principle which he affirms in the Republic, that \u201cGod is the author of evil only with a view to good,\u201d and that \u201cthey were the better for being punished.\u201d Still his doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments may be compared favourably with that perversion of Christian doctrine which makes the everlasting punishment of human beings depend on a brief moment of time, or even on the accident of an accident. And he has escaped the difficulty which has often beset divines, respecting the future destiny of the meaner sort of men (Thersites and the like), who are neither very good nor very bad, by not counting them worthy of eternal damnation. We do Plato violence in pressing his figures of speech or chains of argument; and not less so in asking questions which were beyond the horizon of his vision, or did not come within the scope of his design. The main purpose of the Gorgias is not to answer questions about a future world, but to place in antagonism the true and false life, and to contrast the judgments and opinions of men with judgment according to the truth. Plato may be accused of representing a superhuman or transcendental virtue in the description of the just man in the Gorgias, or in the companion portrait of the philosopher in the Theaetetus; and at the same time may be thought to be condemning a state of the world which always has existed and always will exist among men. But such ideals act powerfully on the imagination of mankind. And such condemnations are not mere paradoxes of philosophers, but the natural rebellion of the higher sense of right in man against the ordinary conditions of human life. The greatest statesmen have fallen very far short of the political ideal, and are therefore justly involved in the general condemnation. Subordinate to the main purpose of the dialogue are some other questions, which may be briefly considered:\u2014 a. The antithesis of good and pleasure, which as in other dialogues is supposed to consist in the permanent nature of the one compared with the transient and relative nature of the other. Good and pleasure, knowledge and sense, truth and opinion, essence and generation, virtue and pleasure, the real and the apparent, the infinite and finite, harmony or beauty and discord, dialectic and rhetoric or poetry, are so many pairs of opposites, which in Plato easily pass into one another, and are seldom kept perfectly distinct. And we must not forget that Plato\u2019s conception of pleasure is the Heracleitean flux transferred to the sphere of human conduct. There is some degree of unfairness in opposing the principle of good, which is objective, to the principle of pleasure, which is subjective. For the assertion of the permanence of good is only based on the assumption of its objective character. Had Plato fixed his mind, not on the ideal nature of good, but on the subjective consciousness of happiness, that would have been found to be as transient and precarious as pleasure. b. The arts or sciences, when pursued without any view to truth, or the improvement of human life, are called flatteries. They are all alike dependent upon the opinion of mankind, from which they are derived. To Plato the whole world appears to be sunk in error, based on self-interest. To this is opposed the one wise man hardly professing to have found truth, yet strong in the conviction that a virtuous life is the only good, whether regarded with reference to this world or to another. Statesmen, Sophists, rhetoricians, poets, are alike brought up for judgment. They are the parodies of wise men, and their arts are the parodies of true arts and sciences. All that they call science is merely the result of that study of the tempers of the Great Beast, which he describes in the Republic. c. Various other points of contact naturally suggest themselves between the Gorgias and other dialogues, especially the Republic, the Philebus, and the Protagoras. There are closer resemblances both of spirit and language in the Republic than in any other dialogue, the verbal similarity tending to show that they were written at the same period of Plato\u2019s life. For the Republic supplies that education and training of which the Gorgias suggests the necessity. The theory of the many weak combining against the few strong in the formation of society (which is indeed a partial truth), is similar in both of them, and is expressed in nearly the same language. The sufferings and fate of the just man, the powerlessness of evil, and the reversal of the situation in another life, are also points of similarity. The poets, like the rhetoricians, are condemned because they aim at pleasure only, as in the Republic they are expelled by the State, because they are imitators, and minister to the weaker side of human nature. That poetry is akin to rhetoric may be compared with the analogous notion, which occurs in the Protagoras, that the ancient poets were the Sophists of their day. In some other respects the Protagoras rather offers a contrast than a parallel. The character of Protagoras may be compared with that of Gorgias, but the conception of happiness is different in the two dialogues; being described in the former, according to the old Socratic notion, as deferred or accumulated pleasure, while in the Gorgias, and in the Phaedo, pleasure and good are distinctly opposed. This opposition is carried out from a speculative point of view in the Philebus. There neither pleasure nor wisdom are allowed to be the chief good, but pleasure and good are not so completely opposed as in the Gorgias. For innocent pleasures, and such as have no antecedent pains, are allowed to rank in the class of goods. The allusion to Gorgias\u2019 definition of rhetoric (Philebus; compare Gorg.), as the art of persuasion, of all arts the best, for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their own free will\u2014marks a close and perhaps designed connection between the two dialogues. In both the ideas of measure, order, harmony, are the connecting links between the beautiful and the good. In general spirit and character, that is, in irony and antagonism to public opinion, the Gorgias most nearly resembles the Apology, Crito, and portions of the Republic, and like the Philebus, though from another point of view, may be thought to stand in the same relation to Plato\u2019s theory of morals which the Theaetetus bears to his theory of knowledge. d. A few minor points still remain to be summed up: (1) The extravagant irony in the reason which is assigned for the pilot\u2019s modest charge; and in the proposed use of rhetoric as an instrument of self-condemnation; and in the mighty power of geometrical equality in both worlds. (2) The reference of the mythus to the previous discussion should not be overlooked: the fate reserved for incurable criminals such as Archelaus; the retaliation of the box on the ears; the nakedness of the souls and of the judges who are stript of the clothes or disguises which rhetoric and public opinion have hitherto provided for them (compare Swift\u2019s notion that the universe is a suit of clothes, Tale of a Tub). The fiction seems to have involved Plato in the necessity of supposing that the soul retained a sort of corporeal likeness after death. (3) The appeal of the authority of Homer, who says that Odysseus saw Minos in his court \u201cholding a golden sceptre,\u201d which gives verisimilitude to the tale. It is scarcely necessary to repeat that Plato is playing \u201cboth sides of the game,\u201d and that in criticising the characters of Gorgias and Polus, we are not passing any judgment on historical individuals, but only attempting to analyze the \u201cdramatis personae\u2019 as they were conceived by him. Neither is it necessary to enlarge upon the obvious fact that Plato is a dramatic writer, whose real opinions cannot always be assumed to be those which he puts into the mouth of Socrates, or any other speaker who appears to have the best of the argument; or to repeat the observation that he is a poet as well as a philosopher; or to remark that he is not to be tried by a modern standard, but interpreted with reference to his place in the history of thought and the opinion of his time. It has been said that the most characteristic feature of the Gorgias is the assertion of the right of dissent, or private judgment. But this mode of stating the question is really opposed both to the spirit of Plato and of ancient philosophy generally. For Plato is not asserting any abstract right or duty of toleration, or advantage to be derived from freedom of thought; indeed, in some other parts of his writings (e.g. Laws), he has fairly laid himself open to the charge of intolerance. No speculations had as yet arisen respecting the \u201cliberty of prophesying;\u2019 and Plato is not affirming any abstract right of this nature: but he is asserting the duty and right of the one wise and true man to dissent from the folly and falsehood of the many. At the same time he acknowledges the natural result, which he hardly seeks to avert, that he who speaks the truth to a multitude, regardless of consequences, will probably share the fate of Socrates. The irony of Plato sometimes veils from us the height of idealism to which he soars. When declaring truths which the many will not receive, he puts on an armour which cannot be pierced by them. The weapons of ridicule are taken out of their hands and the laugh is turned against themselves. The disguises which Socrates assumes are like the parables of the New Testament, or the oracles of the Delphian God; they half conceal, half reveal, his meaning. The more he is in earnest, the more ironical he becomes; and he is never more in earnest or more ironical than in the Gorgias. He hardly troubles himself to answer seriously the objections of Gorgias and Polus, and therefore he sometimes appears to be careless of the ordinary requirements of logic. Yet in the highest sense he is always logical and consistent with himself. The form of the argument may be paradoxical; the substance is an appeal to the higher reason. He is uttering truths before they can be understood, as in all ages the words of philosophers, when they are first uttered, have found the world unprepared for them. A further misunderstanding arises out of the wildness of his humour; he is supposed not only by Callicles, but by the rest of mankind, to be jesting when he is profoundly serious. At length he makes even Polus in earnest. Finally, he drops the argument, and heedless any longer of the forms of dialectic, he loses himself in a sort of triumph, while at the same time he retaliates upon his adversaries. From this confusion of jest and earnest, we may now return to the ideal truth, and draw out in a simple form the main theses of the dialogue. First Thesis:\u2014 It is a greater evil to do than to suffer injustice. Compare the New Testament\u2014 \u201cIt is better to suffer for well doing than for evil doing.\u201d\u20141 Pet. And the Sermon on the Mount\u2014 \u201cBlessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness\u2019 sake.\u201d\u2014Matt. The words of Socrates are more abstract than the words of Christ, but they equally imply that the only real evil is moral evil. The righteous may suffer or die, but they have their reward; and even if they had no reward, would be happier than the wicked. The world, represented by Polus, is ready, when they are asked, to acknowledge that injustice is dishonourable, and for their own sakes men are willing to punish the offender (compare Republic). But they are not equally willing to acknowledge that injustice, even if successful, is essentially evil, and has the nature of disease and death. Especially when crimes are committed on the great scale\u2014the crimes of tyrants, ancient or modern\u2014after a while, seeing that they cannot be undone, and have become a part of history, mankind are disposed to forgive them, not from any magnanimity or charity, but because their feelings are blunted by time, and \u201cto forgive is convenient to them.\u201d The tangle of good and evil can no longer be unravelled; and although they know that the end cannot justify the means, they feel also that good has often come out of evil. But Socrates would have us pass the same judgment on the tyrant now and always; though he is surrounded by his satellites, and has the applauses of Europe and Asia ringing in his ears; though he is the civilizer or liberator of half a continent, he is, and always will be, the most miserable of men. The greatest consequences for good or for evil cannot alter a hair\u2019s breadth the morality of actions which are right or wrong in themselves. This is the standard which Socrates holds up to us. Because politics, and perhaps human life generally, are of a mixed nature we must not allow our principles to sink to the level of our practice. And so of private individuals\u2014to them, too, the world occasionally speaks of the consequences of their actions:\u2014if they are lovers of pleasure, they will ruin their health; if they are false or dishonest, they will lose their character. But Socrates would speak to them, not of what will be, but of what is\u2014of the present consequence of lowering and degrading the soul. And all higher natures, or perhaps all men everywhere, if they were not tempted by interest or passion, would agree with him\u2014they would rather be the victims than the perpetrators of an act of treachery or of tyranny. Reason tells them that death comes sooner or later to all, and is not so great an evil as an unworthy life, or rather, if rightly regarded, not an evil at all, but to a good man the greatest good. For in all of us there are slumbering ideals of truth and right, which may at any time awaken and develop a new life in us. Second Thesis:\u2014 It is better to suffer for wrong doing than not to suffer. There might have been a condition of human life in which the penalty followed at once, and was proportioned to the offence. Moral evil would then be scarcely distinguishable from physical; mankind would avoid vice as they avoid pain or death. But nature, with a view of deepening and enlarging our characters, has for the most part hidden from us the consequences of our actions, and we can only foresee them by an effort of reflection. To awaken in us this habit of reflection is the business of early education, which is continued in maturer years by observation and experience. The spoilt child is in later life said to be unfortunate\u2014he had better have suffered when he was young, and been saved from suffering afterwards. But is not the sovereign equally unfortunate whose education and manner of life are always concealing from him the consequences of his own actions, until at length they are revealed to him in some terrible downfall, which may, perhaps, have been caused not by his own fault? Another illustration is afforded by the pauper and criminal classes, who scarcely reflect at all, except on the means by which they can compass their immediate ends. We pity them, and make allowances for them; but we do not consider that the same principle applies to human actions generally. Not to have been found out in some dishonesty or folly, regarded from a moral or religious point of view, is the greatest of misfortunes. The success of our evil doings is a proof that the gods have ceased to strive with us, and have given us over to ourselves. There is nothing to remind us of our sins, and therefore nothing to correct them. Like our sorrows, they are healed by time; \u201cWhile rank corruption, mining all within, Infects unseen.\u201d The \u201caccustomed irony\u201d of Socrates adds a corollary to the argument:\u2014\u201cWould you punish your enemy, you should allow him to escape unpunished\u201d\u2014this is the true retaliation. (Compare the obscure verse of Proverbs, \u201cTherefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him,\u201d etc., quoted in Romans.) Men are not in the habit of dwelling upon the dark side of their own lives: they do not easily see themselves as others see them. They are very kind and very blind to their own faults; the rhetoric of self-love is always pleading with them on their own behalf. Adopting a similar figure of speech, Socrates would have them use rhetoric, not in defence but in accusation of themselves. As they are guided by feeling rather than by reason, to their feelings the appeal must be made. They must speak to themselves; they must argue with themselves; they must paint in eloquent words the character of their own evil deeds. To any suffering which they have deserved, they must persuade themselves to submit. Under the figure there lurks a real thought, which, expressed in another form, admits of an easy application to ourselves. For do not we too accuse as well as excuse ourselves? And we call to our aid the rhetoric of prayer and preaching, which the mind silently employs while the struggle between the better and the worse is going on within us. And sometimes we are too hard upon ourselves, because we want to restore the balance which self-love has overthrown or disturbed; and then again we may hear a voice as of a parent consoling us. In religious diaries a sort of drama is often enacted by the consciences of men \u201caccusing or else excusing them.\u201d For all our life long we are talking with ourselves:\u2014What is thought but speech? What is feeling but rhetoric? And if rhetoric is used on one side only we shall be always in danger of being deceived. And so the words of Socrates, which at first sounded paradoxical, come home to the experience of all of us. Third Thesis:\u2014 We do not what we will, but what we wish. Socrates would teach us a lesson which we are slow to learn\u2014that good intentions, and even benevolent actions, when they are not prompted by wisdom, are of no value. We believe something to be for our good which we afterwards find out not to be for our good. The consequences may be inevitable, for they may follow an invariable law, yet they may often be the very opposite of what is expected by us. When we increase pauperism by almsgiving; when we tie up property without regard to changes of circumstances; when we say hastily what we deliberately disapprove; when we do in a moment of passion what upon reflection we regret; when from any want of self-control we give another an advantage over us\u2014we are doing not what we will, but what we wish. All actions of which the consequences are not weighed and foreseen, are of this impotent and paralytic sort; and the author of them has \u201cthe least possible power\u201d while seeming to have the greatest. For he is actually bringing about the reverse of what he intended. And yet the book of nature is open to him, in which he who runs may read if he will exercise ordinary attention; every day offers him experiences of his own and of other men\u2019s characters, and he passes them unheeded by. The contemplation of the consequences of actions, and the ignorance of men in regard to them, seems to have led Socrates to his famous thesis:\u2014\u201cVirtue is knowledge;\u201d which is not so much an error or paradox as a half truth, seen first in the twilight of ethical philosophy, but also the half of the truth which is especially needed in the present age. For as the world has grown older men have been too apt to imagine a right and wrong apart from consequences; while a few, on the other hand, have sought to resolve them wholly into their consequences. But Socrates, or Plato for him, neither divides nor identifies them; though the time has not yet arrived either for utilitarian or transcendental systems of moral philosophy, he recognizes the two elements which seem to lie at the basis of morality. (Compare the following: \u201cNow, and for us, it is a time to Hellenize and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraized too much and have overvalued doing. But the habits and discipline received from Hebraism remain for our race an eternal possession. And as humanity is constituted, one must never assign the second rank to-day without being ready to restore them to the first to-morrow.\u201d Sir William W. Hunter, Preface to Orissa.) Fourth Thesis:\u2014 To be and not to seem is the end of life. The Greek in the age of Plato admitted praise to be one of the chief incentives to moral virtue, and to most men the opinion of their fellows is a leading principle of action. Hence a certain element of seeming enters into all things; all or almost all desire to appear better than they are, that they may win the esteem or admiration of others. A man of ability can easily feign the language of piety or virtue; and there is an unconscious as well as a conscious hypocrisy which, according to Socrates, is the worst of the two. Again, there is the sophistry of classes and professions. There are the different opinions about themselves and one another which prevail in different ranks of society. There is the bias given to the mind by the study of one department of human knowledge to the exclusion of the rest; and stronger far the prejudice engendered by a pecuniary or party interest in certain tenets. There is the sophistry of law, the sophistry of medicine, the sophistry of politics, the sophistry of theology. All of these disguises wear the appearance of the truth; some of them are very ancient, and we do not easily disengage ourselves from them; for we have inherited them, and they have become a part of us. The sophistry of an ancient Greek sophist is nothing compared with the sophistry of a religious order, or of a church in which during many ages falsehood has been accumulating, and everything has been said on one side, and nothing on the other. The conventions and customs which we observe in conversation, and the opposition of our interests when we have dealings with one another (\u201cthe buyer saith, it is nought\u2014it is nought,\u201d etc.), are always obscuring our sense of truth and right. The sophistry of human nature is far more subtle than the deceit of any one man. Few persons speak freely from their own natures, and scarcely any one dares to think for himself: most of us imperceptibly fall into the opinions of those around us, which we partly help to make. A man who would shake himself loose from them, requires great force of mind; he hardly knows where to begin in the search after truth. On every side he is met by the world, which is not an abstraction of theologians, but the most real of all things, being another name for ourselves when regarded collectively and subjected to the influences of society. Then comes Socrates, impressed as no other man ever was, with the unreality and untruthfulness of popular opinion, and tells mankind that they must be and not seem. How are they to be? At any rate they must have the spirit and desire to be. If they are ignorant, they must acknowledge their ignorance to themselves; if they are conscious of doing evil, they must learn to do well; if they are weak, and have nothing in them which they can call themselves, they must acquire firmness and consistency; if they are indifferent, they must begin to take an interest in the great questions which surround them. They must try to be what they would fain appear in the eyes of their fellow-men. A single individual cannot easily change public opinion; but he can be true and innocent, simple and independent; he can know what he does, and what he does not know; and though not without an effort, he can form a judgment of his own, at least in common matters. In his most secret actions he can show the same high principle (compare Republic) which he shows when supported and watched by public opinion. And on some fitting occasion, on some question of humanity or truth or right, even an ordinary man, from the natural rectitude of his disposition, may be found to take up arms against a whole tribe of politicians and lawyers, and be too much for them. Who is the true and who the false statesman?\u2014 The true statesman is he who brings order out of disorder; who first organizes and then administers the government of his own country; and having made a nation, seeks to reconcile the national interests with those of Europe and of mankind. He is not a mere theorist, nor yet a dealer in expedients; the whole and the parts grow together in his mind; while the head is conceiving, the hand is executing. Although obliged to descend to the world, he is not of the world. His thoughts are fixed not on power or riches or extension of territory, but on an ideal state, in which all the citizens have an equal chance of health and life, and the highest education is within the reach of all, and the moral and intellectual qualities of every individual are freely developed, and \u201cthe idea of good\u201d is the animating principle of the whole. Not the attainment of freedom alone, or of order alone, but how to unite freedom with order is the problem which he has to solve. The statesman who places before himself these lofty aims has undertaken a task which will call forth all his powers. He must control himself before he can control others; he must know mankind before he can manage them. He has no private likes or dislikes; he does not conceal personal enmity under the disguise of moral or political principle: such meannesses, into which men too often fall unintentionally, are absorbed in the consciousness of his mission, and in his love for his country and for mankind. He will sometimes ask himself what the next generation will say of him; not because he is careful of posthumous fame, but because he knows that the result of his life as a whole will then be more fairly judged. He will take time for the execution of his plans; not hurrying them on when the mind of a nation is unprepared for them; but like the Ruler of the Universe Himself, working in the appointed time, for he knows that human life, \u201cif not long in comparison with eternity\u201d (Republic), is sufficient for the fulfilment of many great purposes. He knows, too, that the work will be still going on when he is no longer here; and he will sometimes, especially when his powers are failing, think of that other \u201ccity of which the pattern is in heaven\u201d (Republic). The false politician is the serving-man of the state. In order to govern men he becomes like them; their \u201cminds are married in conjunction;\u201d they \u201cbear themselves\u201d like vulgar and tyrannical masters, and he is their obedient servant. The true politician, if he would rule men, must make them like himself; he must \u201ceducate his party\u201d until they cease to be a party; he must breathe into them the spirit which will hereafter give form to their institutions. Politics with him are not a mechanism for seeming what he is not, or for carrying out the will of the majority. Himself a representative man, he is the representative not of the lower but of the higher elements of the nation. There is a better (as well as a worse) public opinion of which he seeks to lay hold; as there is also a deeper current of human affairs in which he is borne up when the waves nearer the shore are threatening him. He acknowledges that he cannot take the world by force\u2014two or three moves on the political chess board are all that he can fore see\u2014two or three weeks moves on the political chessboard are all that he can foresee\u2014two or three weeks or months are granted to him in which he can provide against a coming struggle. But he knows also that there are permanent principles of politics which are always tending to the well-being of states\u2014better administration, better education, the reconciliation of conflicting elements, increased security against external enemies. These are not \u201cof to-day or yesterday,\u201d but are the same in all times, and under all forms of government. Then when the storm descends and the winds blow, though he knows not beforehand the hour of danger, the pilot, not like Plato\u2019s captain in the Republic, half-blind and deaf, but with penetrating eye and quick ear, is ready to take command of the ship and guide her into port. The false politician asks not what is true, but what is the opinion of the world\u2014not what is right, but what is expedient. The only measures of which he approves are the measures which will pass. He has no intention of fighting an uphill battle; he keeps the roadway of politics. He is unwilling to incur the persecution and enmity which political convictions would entail upon him. He begins with popularity, and in fair weather sails gallantly along. But unpopularity soon follows him. For men expect their leaders to be better and wiser than themselves: to be their guides in danger, their saviours in extremity; they do not really desire them to obey all the ignorant impulses of the popular mind; and if they fail them in a crisis they are disappointed. Then, as Socrates says, the cry of ingratitude is heard, which is most unreasonable; for the people, who have been taught no better, have done what might be expected of them, and their statesmen have received justice at their hands. The true statesman is aware that he must adapt himself to times and circumstances. He must have allies if he is to fight against the world; he must enlighten public opinion; he must accustom his followers to act together. Although he is not the mere executor of the will of the majority, he must win over the majority to himself. He is their leader and not their follower, but in order to lead he must also follow. He will neither exaggerate nor undervalue the power of a statesman, neither adopting the \u201claissez faire\u201d nor the \u201cpaternal government\u201d principle; but he will, whether he is dealing with children in politics, or with full-grown men, seek to do for the people what the government can do for them, and what, from imperfect education or deficient powers of combination, they cannot do for themselves. He knows that if he does too much for them they will do nothing; and that if he does nothing for them they will in some states of society be utterly helpless. For the many cannot exist without the few, if the material force of a country is from below, wisdom and experience are from above. It is not a small part of human evils which kings and governments make or cure. The statesman is well aware that a great purpose carried out consistently during many years will at last be executed. He is playing for a stake which may be partly determined by some accident, and therefore he will allow largely for the unknown element of politics. But the game being one in which chance and skill are combined, if he plays long enough he is certain of victory. He will not be always consistent, for the world is changing; and though he depends upon the support of a party, he will remember that he is the minister of the whole. He lives not for the present, but for the future, and he is not at all sure that he will be appreciated either now or then. For he may have the existing order of society against him, and may not be remembered by a distant posterity. There are always discontented idealists in politics who, like Socrates in the Gorgias, find fault with all statesmen past as well as present, not excepting the greatest names of history. Mankind have an uneasy feeling that they ought to be better governed than they are. Just as the actual philosopher falls short of the one wise man, so does the actual statesman fall short of the ideal. And so partly from vanity and egotism, but partly also from a true sense of the faults of eminent men, a temper of dissatisfaction and criticism springs up among those who are ready enough to acknowledge the inferiority of their own powers. No matter whether a statesman makes high professions or none at all\u2014they are reduced sooner or later to the same level. And sometimes the more unscrupulous man is better esteemed than the more conscientious, because he has not equally deceived expectations. Such sentiments may be unjust, but they are widely spread; we constantly find them recurring in reviews and newspapers, and still oftener in private conversation. We may further observe that the art of government, while in some respects tending to improve, has in others a tendency to degenerate, as institutions become more popular. Governing for the people cannot easily be combined with governing by the people: the interests of classes are too strong for the ideas of the statesman who takes a comprehensive view of the whole. According to Socrates the true governor will find ruin or death staring him in the face, and will only be induced to govern from the fear of being governed by a worse man than himself (Republic). And in modern times, though the world has grown milder, and the terrible consequences which Plato foretells no longer await an English statesman, any one who is not actuated by a blind ambition will only undertake from a sense of duty a work in which he is most likely to fail; and even if he succeed, will rarely be rewarded by the gratitude of his own generation. Socrates, who is not a politician at all, tells us that he is the only real politician of his time. Let us illustrate the meaning of his words by applying them to the history of our own country. He would have said that not Pitt or Fox, or Canning or Sir R. Peel, are the real politicians of their time, but Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Bentham, Ricardo. These during the greater part of their lives occupied an inconsiderable space in the eyes of the public. They were private persons; nevertheless they sowed in the minds of men seeds which in the next generation have become an irresistible power. \u201cHerein is that saying true, One soweth and another reapeth.\u201d We may imagine with Plato an ideal statesman in whom practice and speculation are perfectly harmonized; for there is no necessary opposition between them. But experience shows that they are commonly divorced\u2014the ordinary politician is the interpreter or executor of the thoughts of others, and hardly ever brings to the birth a new political conception. One or two only in modern times, like the Italian statesman Cavour, have created the world in which they moved. The philosopher is naturally unfitted for political life; his great ideas are not understood by the many; he is a thousand miles away from the questions of the day. Yet perhaps the lives of thinkers, as they are stiller and deeper, are also happier than the lives of those who are more in the public eye. They have the promise of the future, though they are regarded as dreamers and visionaries by their own contemporaries. And when they are no longer here, those who would have been ashamed of them during their lives claim kindred with them, and are proud to be called by their names. (Compare Thucyd.) Who is the true poet? Plato expels the poets from his Republic because they are allied to sense; because they stimulate the emotions; because they are thrice removed from the ideal truth. And in a similar spirit he declares in the Gorgias that the stately muse of tragedy is a votary of pleasure and not of truth. In modern times we almost ridicule the idea of poetry admitting of a moral. The poet and the prophet, or preacher, in primitive antiquity are one and the same; but in later ages they seem to fall apart. The great art of novel writing, that peculiar creation of our own and the last century, which, together with the sister art of review writing, threatens to absorb all literature, has even less of seriousness in her composition. Do we not often hear the novel writer censured for attempting to convey a lesson to the minds of his readers? Yet the true office of a poet or writer of fiction is not merely to give amusement, or to be the expression of the feelings of mankind, good or bad, or even to increase our knowledge of human nature. There have been poets in modern times, such as Goethe or Wordsworth, who have not forgotten their high vocation of teachers; and the two greatest of the Greek dramatists owe their sublimity to their ethical character. The noblest truths, sung of in the purest and sweetest language, are still the proper material of poetry. The poet clothes them with beauty, and has a power of making them enter into the hearts and memories of men. He has not only to speak of themes above the level of ordinary life, but to speak of them in a deeper and tenderer way than they are ordinarily felt, so as to awaken the feeling of them in others. The old he makes young again; the familiar principle he invests with a new dignity; he finds a noble expression for the common-places of morality and politics. He uses the things of sense so as to indicate what is beyond; he raises us through earth to heaven. He expresses what the better part of us would fain say, and the half-conscious feeling is strengthened by the expression. He is his own critic, for the spirit of poetry and of criticism are not divided in him. His mission is not to disguise men from themselves, but to reveal to them their own nature, and make them better acquainted with the world around them. True poetry is the remembrance of youth, of love, the embodiment in words of the happiest and holiest moments of life, of the noblest thoughts of man, of the greatest deeds of the past. The poet of the future may return to his greater calling of the prophet or teacher; indeed, we hardly know what may not be effected for the human race by a better use of the poetical and imaginative faculty. The reconciliation of poetry, as of religion, with truth, may still be possible. Neither is the element of pleasure to be excluded. For when we substitute a higher pleasure for a lower we raise men in the scale of existence. Might not the novelist, too, make an ideal, or rather many ideals of social life, better than a thousand sermons? Plato, like the Puritans, is too much afraid of poetic and artistic influences. But he is not without a true sense of the noble purposes to which art may be applied (Republic). Modern poetry is often a sort of plaything, or, in Plato\u2019s language, a flattery, a sophistry, or sham, in which, without any serious purpose, the poet lends wings to his fancy and exhibits his gifts of language and metre. Such an one seeks to gratify the taste of his readers; he has the \u201csavoir faire,\u201d or trick of writing, but he has not the higher spirit of poetry. He has no conception that true art should bring order out of disorder; that it should make provision for the soul\u2019s highest interest; that it should be pursued only with a view to \u201cthe improvement of the citizens.\u201d He ministers to the weaker side of human nature (Republic); he idealizes the sensual; he sings the strain of love in the latest fashion; instead of raising men above themselves he brings them back to the \u201ctyranny of the many masters,\u201d from which all his life long a good man has been praying to be delivered. And often, forgetful of measure and order, he will express not that which is truest, but that which is strongest. Instead of a great and nobly-executed subject, perfect in every part, some fancy of a heated brain is worked out with the strangest incongruity. He is not the master of his words, but his words\u2014perhaps borrowed from another\u2014the faded reflection of some French or German or Italian writer, have the better of him. Though we are not going to banish the poets, how can we suppose that such utterances have any healing or life-giving influence on the minds of men? \u201cLet us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:\u201d Art then must be true, and politics must be true, and the life of man must be true and not a seeming or sham. In all of them order has to be brought out of disorder, truth out of error and falsehood. This is what we mean by the greatest improvement of man. And so, having considered in what way \u201cwe can best spend the appointed time, we leave the result with God.\u201d Plato does not say that God will order all things for the best (compare Phaedo), but he indirectly implies that the evils of this life will be corrected in another. And as we are very far from the best imaginable world at present, Plato here, as in the Phaedo and Republic, supposes a purgatory or place of education for mankind in general, and for a very few a Tartarus or hell. The myth which terminates the dialogue is not the revelation, but rather, like all similar descriptions, whether in the Bible or Plato, the veil of another life. For no visible thing can reveal the invisible. Of this Plato, unlike some commentators on Scripture, is fully aware. Neither will he dogmatize about the manner in which we are \u201cborn again\u201d (Republic). Only he is prepared to maintain the ultimate triumph of truth and right, and declares that no one, not even the wisest of the Greeks, can affirm any other doctrine without being ridiculous. There is a further paradox of ethics, in which pleasure and pain are held to be indifferent, and virtue at the time of action and without regard to consequences is happiness. From this elevation or exaggeration of feeling Plato seems to shrink: he leaves it to the Stoics in a later generation to maintain that when impaled or on the rack the philosopher may be happy (compare Republic). It is observable that in the Republic he raises this question, but it is not really discussed; the veil of the ideal state, the shadow of another life, are allowed to descend upon it and it passes out of sight. The martyr or sufferer in the cause of right or truth is often supposed to die in raptures, having his eye fixed on a city which is in heaven. But if there were no future, might he not still be happy in the performance of an action which was attended only by a painful death? He himself may be ready to thank God that he was thought worthy to do Him the least service, without looking for a reward; the joys of another life may not have been present to his mind at all. Do we suppose that the mediaeval saint, St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. Catharine of Sienna, or the Catholic priest who lately devoted himself to death by a lingering disease that he might solace and help others, was thinking of the \u201csweets\u201d of heaven? No; the work was already heaven to him and enough. Much less will the dying patriot be dreaming of the praises of man or of an immortality of fame: the sense of duty, of right, and trust in God will be sufficient, and as far as the mind can reach, in that hour. If he were certain that there were no life to come, he would not have wished to speak or act otherwise than he did in the cause of truth or of humanity. Neither, on the other hand, will he suppose that God has forsaken him or that the future is to be a mere blank to him. The greatest act of faith, the only faith which cannot pass away, is his who has not known, but yet has believed. A very few among the sons of men have made themselves independent of circumstances, past, present, or to come. He who has attained to such a temper of mind has already present with him eternal life; he needs no arguments to convince him of immortality; he has in him already a principle stronger than death. He who serves man without the thought of reward is deemed to be a more faithful servant than he who works for hire. May not the service of God, which is the more disinterested, be in like manner the higher? And although only a very few in the course of the world\u2019s history\u2014Christ himself being one of them\u2014have attained to such a noble conception of God and of the human soul, yet the ideal of them may be present to us, and the remembrance of them be an example to us, and their lives may shed a light on many dark places both of philosophy and theology. THE MYTHS OF PLATO. The myths of Plato are a phenomenon unique in literature. There are four longer ones: these occur in the Phaedrus, Phaedo, Gorgias, and Republic. That in the Republic is the most elaborate and finished of them. Three of these greater myths, namely those contained in the Phaedo, the Gorgias and the Republic, relate to the destiny of human souls in a future life. The magnificent myth in the Phaedrus treats of the immortality, or rather the eternity of the soul, in which is included a former as well as a future state of existence. To these may be added, (1) the myth, or rather fable, occurring in the Statesman, in which the life of innocence is contrasted with the ordinary life of man and the consciousness of evil: (2) the legend of the Island of Atlantis, an imaginary history, which is a fragment only, commenced in the Timaeus and continued in the Critias: (3) the much less artistic fiction of the foundation of the Cretan colony which is introduced in the preface to the Laws, but soon falls into the background: (4) the beautiful but rather artificial tale of Prometheus and Epimetheus narrated in his rhetorical manner by Protagoras in the dialogue called after him: (5) the speech at the beginning of the Phaedrus, which is a parody of the orator Lysias; the rival speech of Socrates and the recantation of it. To these may be added (6) the tale of the grasshoppers, and (7) the tale of Thamus and of Theuth, both in the Phaedrus: (8) the parable of the Cave (Republic), in which the previous argument is recapitulated, and the nature and degrees of knowledge having been previously set forth in the abstract are represented in a picture: (9) the fiction of the earth-born men (Republic; compare Laws), in which by the adaptation of an old tradition Plato makes a new beginning for his society: (10) the myth of Aristophanes respecting the division of the sexes, Sym.: (11) the parable of the noble captain, the pilot, and the mutinous sailors (Republic), in which is represented the relation of the better part of the world, and of the philosopher, to the mob of politicians: (12) the ironical tale of the pilot who plies between Athens and Aegina charging only a small payment for saving men from death, the reason being that he is uncertain whether to live or die is better for them (Gor.): (13) the treatment of freemen and citizens by physicians and of slaves by their apprentices,\u2014a somewhat laboured figure of speech intended to illustrate the two different ways in which the laws speak to men (Laws). There also occur in Plato continuous images; some of them extend over several pages, appearing and reappearing at intervals: such as the bees stinging and stingless (paupers and thieves) in the Eighth Book of the Republic, who are generated in the transition from timocracy to oligarchy: the sun, which is to the visible world what the idea of good is to the intellectual, in the Sixth Book of the Republic: the composite animal, having the form of a man, but containing under a human skin a lion and a many-headed monster (Republic): the great beast, i.e. the populace: and the wild beast within us, meaning the passions which are always liable to break out: the animated comparisons of the degradation of philosophy by the arts to the dishonoured maiden, and of the tyrant to the parricide, who \u201cbeats his father, having first taken away his arms\u201d: the dog, who is your only philosopher: the grotesque and rather paltry image of the argument wandering about without a head (Laws), which is repeated, not improved, from the Gorgias: the argument personified as veiling her face (Republic), as engaged in a chase, as breaking upon us in a first, second and third wave:\u2014on these figures of speech the changes are rung many times over. It is observable that nearly all these parables or continuous images are found in the Republic; that which occurs in the Theaetetus, of the midwifery of Socrates, is perhaps the only exception. To make the list complete, the mathematical figure of the number of the state (Republic), or the numerical interval which separates king from tyrant, should not be forgotten. The myth in the Gorgias is one of those descriptions of another life which, like the Sixth Aeneid of Virgil, appear to contain reminiscences of the mysteries. It is a vision of the rewards and punishments which await good and bad men after death. It supposes the body to continue and to be in another world what it has become in this. It includes a Paradiso, Purgatorio, and Inferno, like the sister myths of the Phaedo and the Republic. The Inferno is reserved for great criminals only. The argument of the dialogue is frequently referred to, and the meaning breaks through so as rather to destroy the liveliness and consistency of the picture. The structure of the fiction is very slight, the chief point or moral being that in the judgments of another world there is no possibility of concealment: Zeus has taken from men the power of foreseeing death, and brings together the souls both of them and their judges naked and undisguised at the judgment-seat. Both are exposed to view, stripped of the veils and clothes which might prevent them from seeing into or being seen by one another. The myth of the Phaedo is of the same type, but it is more cosmological, and also more poetical. The beautiful and ingenious fancy occurs to Plato that the upper atmosphere is an earth and heaven in one, a glorified earth, fairer and purer than that in which we dwell. As the fishes live in the ocean, mankind are living in a lower sphere, out of which they put their heads for a moment or two and behold a world beyond. The earth which we inhabit is a sediment of the coarser particles which drop from the world above, and is to that heavenly earth what the desert and the shores of the ocean are to us. A part of the myth consists of description of the interior of the earth, which gives the opportunity of introducing several mythological names and of providing places of torment for the wicked. There is no clear distinction of soul and body; the spirits beneath the earth are spoken of as souls only, yet they retain a sort of shadowy form when they cry for mercy on the shores of the lake; and the philosopher alone is said to have got rid of the body. All the three myths in Plato which relate to the world below have a place for repentant sinners, as well as other homes or places for the very good and very bad. It is a natural reflection which is made by Plato elsewhere, that the two extremes of human character are rarely met with, and that the generality of mankind are between them. Hence a place must be found for them. In the myth of the Phaedo they are carried down the river Acheron to the Acherusian lake, where they dwell, and are purified of their evil deeds, and receive the rewards of their good. There are also incurable sinners, who are cast into Tartarus, there to remain as the penalty of atrocious crimes; these suffer everlastingly. And there is another class of hardly-curable sinners who are allowed from time to time to approach the shores of the Acherusian lake, where they cry to their victims for mercy; which if they obtain they come out into the lake and cease from their torments. Neither this, nor any of the three greater myths of Plato, nor perhaps any allegory or parable relating to the unseen world, is consistent with itself. The language of philosophy mingles with that of mythology; abstract ideas are transformed into persons, figures of speech into realities. These myths may be compared with the Pilgrim\u2019s Progress of Bunyan, in which discussions of theology are mixed up with the incidents of travel, and mythological personages are associated with human beings: they are also garnished with names and phrases taken out of Homer, and with other fragments of Greek tradition. The myth of the Republic is more subtle and also more consistent than either of the two others. It has a greater verisimilitude than they have, and is full of touches which recall the experiences of human life. It will be noticed by an attentive reader that the twelve days during which Er lay in a trance after he was slain coincide with the time passed by the spirits in their pilgrimage. It is a curious observation, not often made, that good men who have lived in a well-governed city (shall we say in a religious and respectable society?) are more likely to make mistakes in their choice of life than those who have had more experience of the world and of evil. It is a more familiar remark that we constantly blame others when we have only ourselves to blame; and the philosopher must acknowledge, however reluctantly, that there is an element of chance in human life with which it is sometimes impossible for man to cope. That men drink more of the waters of forgetfulness than is good for them is a poetical description of a familiar truth. We have many of us known men who, like Odysseus, have wearied of ambition and have only desired rest. We should like to know what became of the infants \u201cdying almost as soon as they were born,\u201d but Plato only raises, without satisfying, our curiosity. The two companies of souls, ascending and descending at either chasm of heaven and earth, and conversing when they come out into the meadow, the majestic figures of the judges sitting in heaven, the voice heard by Ardiaeus, are features of the great allegory which have an indescribable grandeur and power. The remark already made respecting the inconsistency of the two other myths must be extended also to this: it is at once an orrery, or model of the heavens, and a picture of the Day of Judgment. The three myths are unlike anything else in Plato. There is an Oriental, or rather an Egyptian element in them, and they have an affinity to the mysteries and to the Orphic modes of worship. To a certain extent they are un-Greek; at any rate there is hardly anything like them in other Greek writings which have a serious purpose; in spirit they are mediaeval. They are akin to what may be termed the underground religion in all ages and countries. They are presented in the most lively and graphic manner, but they are never insisted on as true; it is only affirmed that nothing better can be said about a future life. Plato seems to make use of them when he has reached the limits of human knowledge; or, to borrow an expression of his own, when he is standing on the outside of the intellectual world. They are very simple in style; a few touches bring the picture home to the mind, and make it present to us. They have also a kind of authority gained by the employment of sacred and familiar names, just as mere fragments of the words of Scripture, put together in any form and applied to any subject, have a power of their own. They are a substitute for poetry and mythology; and they are also a reform of mythology. The moral of them may be summed up in a word or two: After death the Judgment; and \u201cthere is some better thing remaining for the good than for the evil.\u201d All literature gathers into itself many elements of the past: for example, the tale of the earth-born men in the Republic appears at first sight to be an extravagant fancy, but it is restored to propriety when we remember that it is based on a legendary belief. The art of making stories of ghosts and apparitions credible is said to consist in the manner of telling them. The effect is gained by many literary and conversational devices, such as the previous raising of curiosity, the mention of little circumstances, simplicity, picturesqueness, the naturalness of the occasion, and the like. This art is possessed by Plato in a degree which has never been equalled. The myth in the Phaedrus is even greater than the myths which have been already described, but is of a different character. It treats of a former rather than of a future life. It represents the conflict of reason aided by passion or righteous indignation on the one hand, and of the animal lusts and instincts on the other. The soul of man has followed the company of some god, and seen truth in the form of the universal before it was born in this world. Our present life is the result of the struggle which was then carried on. This world is relative to a former world, as it is often projected into a future. We ask the question, Where were men before birth? As we likewise enquire, What will become of them after death? The first question is unfamiliar to us, and therefore seems to be unnatural; but if we survey the whole human race, it has been as influential and as widely spread as the other. In the Phaedrus it is really a figure of speech in which the \u201cspiritual combat\u201d of this life is represented. The majesty and power of the whole passage\u2014especially of what may be called the theme or proem (beginning \u201cThe mind through all her being is immortal\u201d)\u2014can only be rendered very inadequately in another language. The myth in the Statesman relates to a former cycle of existence, in which men were born of the earth, and by the reversal of the earth\u2019s motion had their lives reversed and were restored to youth and beauty: the dead came to life, the old grew middle-aged, and the middle-aged young; the youth became a child, the child an infant, the infant vanished into the earth. The connection between the reversal of the earth\u2019s motion and the reversal of human life is of course verbal only, yet Plato, like theologians in other ages, argues from the consistency of the tale to its truth. The new order of the world was immediately under the government of God; it was a state of innocence in which men had neither wants nor cares, in which the earth brought forth all things spontaneously, and God was to man what man now is to the animals. There were no great estates, or families, or private possessions, nor any traditions of the past, because men were all born out of the earth. This is what Plato calls the \u201creign of Cronos;\u201d and in like manner he connects the reversal of the earth\u2019s motion with some legend of which he himself was probably the inventor. The question is then asked, under which of these two cycles of existence was man the happier,\u2014under that of Cronos, which was a state of innocence, or that of Zeus, which is our ordinary life? For a while Plato balances the two sides of the serious controversy, which he has suggested in a figure. The answer depends on another question: What use did the children of Cronos make of their time? They had boundless leisure and the faculty of discoursing, not only with one another, but with the animals. Did they employ these advantages with a view to philosophy, gathering from every nature some addition to their store of knowledge? or, Did they pass their time in eating and drinking and telling stories to one another and to the beasts?\u2014in either case there would be no difficulty in answering. But then, as Plato rather mischievously adds, \u201cNobody knows what they did,\u201d and therefore the doubt must remain undetermined. To the first there succeeds a second epoch. After another natural convulsion, in which the order of the world and of human life is once more reversed, God withdraws his guiding hand, and man is left to the government of himself. The world begins again, and arts and laws are slowly and painfully invented. A secular age succeeds to a theocratical. In this fanciful tale Plato has dropped, or almost dropped, the garb of mythology. He suggests several curious and important thoughts, such as the possibility of a state of innocence, the existence of a world without traditions, and the difference between human and divine government. He has also carried a step further his speculations concerning the abolition of the family and of property, which he supposes to have no place among the children of Cronos any more than in the ideal state. It is characteristic of Plato and of his age to pass from the abstract to the concrete, from poetry to reality. Language is the expression of the seen, and also of the unseen, and moves in a region between them. A great writer knows how to strike both these chords, sometimes remaining within the sphere of the visible, and then again comprehending a wider range and soaring to the abstract and universal. Even in the same sentence he may employ both modes of speech not improperly or inharmoniously. It is useless to criticise the broken metaphors of Plato, if the effect of the whole is to create a picture not such as can be painted on canvas, but which is full of life and meaning to the reader. A poem may be contained in a word or two, which may call up not one but many latent images; or half reveal to us by a sudden flash the thoughts of many hearts. Often the rapid transition from one image to another is pleasing to us: on the other hand, any single figure of speech if too often repeated, or worked out too much at length, becomes prosy and monotonous. In theology and philosophy we necessarily include both \u201cthe moral law within and the starry heaven above,\u201d and pass from one to the other (compare for examples Psalms xviii. and xix.). Whether such a use of language is puerile or noble depends upon the genius of the writer or speaker, and the familiarity of the associations employed. In the myths and parables of Plato the ease and grace of conversation is not forgotten: they are spoken, not written words, stories which are told to a living audience, and so well told that we are more than half-inclined to believe them (compare Phaedrus). As in conversation too, the striking image or figure of speech is not forgotten, but is quickly caught up, and alluded to again and again; as it would still be in our own day in a genial and sympathetic society. The descriptions of Plato have a greater life and reality than is to be found in any modern writing. This is due to their homeliness and simplicity. Plato can do with words just as he pleases; to him they are indeed \u201cmore plastic than wax\u201d (Republic). We are in the habit of opposing speech and writing, poetry and prose. But he has discovered a use of language in which they are united; which gives a fitting expression to the highest truths; and in which the trifles of courtesy and the familiarities of daily life are not overlooked. GORGIAS By Plato Translated by Benjamin Jowett PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Callicles, Socrates, Chaerephon, Gorgias, Polus."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SCENE","Dialogue":"The house of Callicles."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"The wise man, as the proverb says, is late for a fray, but not for a feast."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are we late for a feast?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, and a delightful feast; for Gorgias has just been exhibiting to us many fine things."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"It is not my fault, Callicles; our friend Chaerephon is to blame; for he would keep us loitering in the Agora."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"Never mind, Socrates; the misfortune of which I have been the cause I will also repair; for Gorgias is a friend of mine, and I will make him give the exhibition again either now, or, if you prefer, at some other time."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"What is the matter, Chaerephon\u2014does Socrates want to hear Gorgias?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"Yes, that was our intention in coming."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Come into my house, then; for Gorgias is staying with me, and he shall exhibit to you."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good, Callicles; but will he answer our questions? for I want to hear from him what is the nature of his art, and what it is which he professes and teaches; he may, as you (Chaerephon) suggest, defer the exhibition to some other time."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"There is nothing like asking him, Socrates; and indeed to answer questions is a part of his exhibition, for he was saying only just now, that any one in my house might put any question to him, and that he would answer."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How fortunate! will you ask him, Chaerephon\u2014?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"What shall I ask him?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Ask him who he is."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean such a question as would elicit from him, if he had been a maker of shoes, the answer that he is a cobbler. Do you understand?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"I understand, and will ask him: Tell me, Gorgias, is our friend Callicles right in saying that you undertake to answer any questions which you are asked?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Quite right, Chaerephon: I was saying as much only just now; and I may add, that many years have elapsed since any one has asked me a new one."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"Then you must be very ready, Gorgias."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Of that, Chaerephon, you can make trial."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed, and if you like, Chaerephon, you may make trial of me too, for I think that Gorgias, who has been talking a long time, is tired."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"And do you, Polus, think that you can answer better than Gorgias?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"What does that matter if I answer well enough for you?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"Not at all:\u2014and you shall answer if you like."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Ask:\u2014"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"My question is this: If Gorgias had the skill of his brother Herodicus, what ought we to call him? Ought he not to have the name which is given to his brother?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"Then we should be right in calling him a physician?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"And if he had the skill of Aristophon the son of Aglaophon, or of his brother Polygnotus, what ought we to call him?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Clearly, a painter."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"But now what shall we call him\u2014what is the art in which he is skilled."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"O Chaerephon, there are many arts among mankind which are experimental, and have their origin in experience, for experience makes the days of men to proceed according to art, and inexperience according to chance, and different persons in different ways are proficient in different arts, and the best persons in the best arts. And our friend Gorgias is one of the best, and the art in which he is a proficient is the noblest."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Polus has been taught how to make a capital speech, Gorgias; but he is not fulfilling the promise which he made to Chaerephon."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean that he has not exactly answered the question which he was asked."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Then why not ask him yourself?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But I would much rather ask you, if you are disposed to answer: for I see, from the few words which Polus has uttered, that he has attended more to the art which is called rhetoric than to dialectic."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"What makes you say so, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because, Polus, when Chaerephon asked you what was the art which Gorgias knows, you praised it as if you were answering some one who found fault with it, but you never said what the art was."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Why, did I not say that it was the noblest of arts?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed, but that was no answer to the question: nobody asked what was the quality, but what was the nature, of the art, and by what name we were to describe Gorgias. And I would still beg you briefly and clearly, as you answered Chaerephon when he asked you at first, to say what this art is, and what we ought to call Gorgias: Or rather, Gorgias, let me turn to you, and ask the same question,\u2014what are we to call you, and what is the art which you profess?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Rhetoric, Socrates, is my art."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I am to call you a rhetorician?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, and a good one too, if you would call me that which, in Homeric language, \u201cI boast myself to be.\u201d"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should wish to do so."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Then pray do."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are we to say that you are able to make other men rhetoricians?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is exactly what I profess to make them, not only at Athens, but in all places."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will you continue to ask and answer questions, Gorgias, as we are at present doing, and reserve for another occasion the longer mode of speech which Polus was attempting? Will you keep your promise, and answer shortly the questions which are asked of you?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Some answers, Socrates, are of necessity longer; but I will do my best to make them as short as possible; for a part of my profession is that I can be as short as any one."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is what is wanted, Gorgias; exhibit the shorter method now, and the longer one at some other time."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Well, I will; and you will certainly say, that you never heard a man use fewer words."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good then; as you profess to be a rhetorician, and a maker of rhetoricians, let me ask you, with what is rhetoric concerned: I might ask with what is weaving concerned, and you would reply (would you not?), with the making of garments?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And music is concerned with the composition of melodies?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"It is."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"By Here, Gorgias, I admire the surpassing brevity of your answers."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, I do think myself good at that."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am glad to hear it; answer me in like manner about rhetoric: with what is rhetoric concerned?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"With discourse."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What sort of discourse, Gorgias?\u2014such discourse as would teach the sick under what treatment they might get well?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then rhetoric does not treat of all kinds of discourse?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet rhetoric makes men able to speak?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And to understand that about which they speak?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But does not the art of medicine, which we were just now mentioning, also make men able to understand and speak about the sick?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then medicine also treats of discourse?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Of discourse concerning diseases?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Just so."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does not gymnastic also treat of discourse concerning the good or evil condition of the body?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same, Gorgias, is true of the other arts:\u2014all of them treat of discourse concerning the subjects with which they severally have to do."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then why, if you call rhetoric the art which treats of discourse, and all the other arts treat of discourse, do you not call them arts of rhetoric?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Because, Socrates, the knowledge of the other arts has only to do with some sort of external action, as of the hand; but there is no such action of the hand in rhetoric which works and takes effect only through the medium of discourse. And therefore I am justified in saying that rhetoric treats of discourse."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am not sure whether I entirely understand you, but I dare say I shall soon know better; please to answer me a question:\u2014you would allow that there are arts?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"As to the arts generally, they are for the most part concerned with doing, and require little or no speaking; in painting, and statuary, and many other arts, the work may proceed in silence; and of such arts I suppose you would say that they do not come within the province of rhetoric."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"You perfectly conceive my meaning, Socrates."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But there are other arts which work wholly through the medium of language, and require either no action or very little, as, for example, the arts of arithmetic, of calculation, of geometry, and of playing draughts; in some of these speech is pretty nearly co-extensive with action, but in most of them the verbal element is greater\u2014they depend wholly on words for their efficacy and power: and I take your meaning to be that rhetoric is an art of this latter sort?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet I do not believe that you really mean to call any of these arts rhetoric; although the precise expression which you used was, that rhetoric is an art which works and takes effect only through the medium of discourse; and an adversary who wished to be captious might say, \u201cAnd so, Gorgias, you call arithmetic rhetoric.\u201d But I do not think that you really call arithmetic rhetoric any more than geometry would be so called by you."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"You are quite right, Socrates, in your apprehension of my meaning."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, let me now have the rest of my answer:\u2014seeing that rhetoric is one of those arts which works mainly by the use of words, and there are other arts which also use words, tell me what is that quality in words with which rhetoric is concerned:\u2014Suppose that a person asks me about some of the arts which I was mentioning just now; he might say, \u201cSocrates, what is arithmetic?\u201d and I should reply to him, as you replied to me, that arithmetic is one of those arts which take effect through words. And then he would proceed to ask: \u201cWords about what?\u201d and I should reply, Words about odd and even numbers, and how many there are of each. And if he asked again: \u201cWhat is the art of calculation?\u201d I should say, That also is one of the arts which is concerned wholly with words. And if he further said, \u201cConcerned with what?\u201d I should say, like the clerks in the assembly, \u201cas aforesaid\u201d of arithmetic, but with a difference, the difference being that the art of calculation considers not only the quantities of odd and even numbers, but also their numerical relations to themselves and to one another. And suppose, again, I were to say that astronomy is only words\u2014he would ask, \u201cWords about what, Socrates?\u201d and I should answer, that astronomy tells us about the motions of the stars and sun and moon, and their relative swiftness."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"You would be quite right, Socrates."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now let us have from you, Gorgias, the truth about rhetoric: which you would admit (would you not?) to be one of those arts which act always and fulfil all their ends through the medium of words?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Words which do what? I should ask. To what class of things do the words which rhetoric uses relate?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"To the greatest, Socrates, and the best of human things."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That again, Gorgias is ambiguous; I am still in the dark: for which are the greatest and best of human things? I dare say that you have heard men singing at feasts the old drinking song, in which the singers enumerate the goods of life, first health, beauty next, thirdly, as the writer of the song says, wealth honestly obtained."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, I know the song; but what is your drift?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean to say, that the producers of those things which the author of the song praises, that is to say, the physician, the trainer, the money-maker, will at once come to you, and first the physician will say: \u201cO Socrates, Gorgias is deceiving you, for my art is concerned with the greatest good of men and not his.\u201d And when I ask, Who are you? he will reply, \u201cI am a physician.\u201d What do you mean? I shall say. Do you mean that your art produces the greatest good? \u201cCertainly,\u201d he will answer, \u201cfor is not health the greatest good? What greater good can men have, Socrates?\u201d And after him the trainer will come and say, \u201cI too, Socrates, shall be greatly surprised if Gorgias can show more good of his art than I can show of mine.\u201d To him again I shall say, Who are you, honest friend, and what is your business? \u201cI am a trainer,\u201d he will reply, \u201cand my business is to make men beautiful and strong in body.\u201d When I have done with the trainer, there arrives the money-maker, and he, as I expect, will utterly despise them all. \u201cConsider Socrates,\u201d he will say, \u201cwhether Gorgias or any one else can produce any greater good than wealth.\u201d Well, you and I say to him, and are you a creator of wealth? \u201cYes,\u201d he replies. And who are you? \u201cA money-maker.\u201d And do you consider wealth to be the greatest good of man? \u201cOf course,\u201d will be his reply. And we shall rejoin: Yes; but our friend Gorgias contends that his art produces a greater good than yours. And then he will be sure to go on and ask, \u201cWhat good? Let Gorgias answer.\u201d Now I want you, Gorgias, to imagine that this question is asked of you by them and by me; What is that which, as you say, is the greatest good of man, and of which you are the creator? Answer us."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"That good, Socrates, which is truly the greatest, being that which gives to men freedom in their own persons, and to individuals the power of ruling over others in their several states."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what would you consider this to be?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"What is there greater than the word which persuades the judges in the courts, or the senators in the council, or the citizens in the assembly, or at any other political meeting?\u2014if you have the power of uttering this word, you will have the physician your slave, and the trainer your slave, and the money-maker of whom you talk will be found to gather treasures, not for himself, but for you who are able to speak and to persuade the multitude."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now I think, Gorgias, that you have very accurately explained what you conceive to be the art of rhetoric; and you mean to say, if I am not mistaken, that rhetoric is the artificer of persuasion, having this and no other business, and that this is her crown and end. Do you know any other effect of rhetoric over and above that of producing persuasion?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"No: the definition seems to me very fair, Socrates; for persuasion is the chief end of rhetoric."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then hear me, Gorgias, for I am quite sure that if there ever was a man who entered on the discussion of a matter from a pure love of knowing the truth, I am such a one, and I should say the same of you."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"What is coming, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will tell you: I am very well aware that I do not know what, according to you, is the exact nature, or what are the topics of that persuasion of which you speak, and which is given by rhetoric; although I have a suspicion about both the one and the other. And I am going to ask\u2014what is this power of persuasion which is given by rhetoric, and about what? But why, if I have a suspicion, do I ask instead of telling you? Not for your sake, but in order that the argument may proceed in such a manner as is most likely to set forth the truth. And I would have you observe, that I am right in asking this further question: If I asked, \u201cWhat sort of a painter is Zeuxis?\u201d and you said, \u201cThe painter of figures,\u201d should I not be right in asking, \u201cWhat kind of figures, and where do you find them?\u201d"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the reason for asking this second question would be, that there are other painters besides, who paint many other figures?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if there had been no one but Zeuxis who painted them, then you would have answered very well?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Quite so."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now I want to know about rhetoric in the same way;\u2014is rhetoric the only art which brings persuasion, or do other arts have the same effect? I mean to say\u2014Does he who teaches anything persuade men of that which he teaches or not?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"He persuades, Socrates,\u2014there can be no mistake about that."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Again, if we take the arts of which we were just now speaking:\u2014do not arithmetic and the arithmeticians teach us the properties of number?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And therefore persuade us of them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then arithmetic as well as rhetoric is an artificer of persuasion?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if any one asks us what sort of persuasion, and about what,\u2014we shall answer, persuasion which teaches the quantity of odd and even; and we shall be able to show that all the other arts of which we were just now speaking are artificers of persuasion, and of what sort, and about what."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then rhetoric is not the only artificer of persuasion?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Seeing, then, that not only rhetoric works by persuasion, but that other arts do the same, as in the case of the painter, a question has arisen which is a very fair one: Of what persuasion is rhetoric the artificer, and about what?\u2014is not that a fair way of putting the question?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"I think so."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, if you approve the question, Gorgias, what is the answer?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"I answer, Socrates, that rhetoric is the art of persuasion in courts of law and other assemblies, as I was just now saying, and about the just and unjust."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that, Gorgias, was what I was suspecting to be your notion; yet I would not have you wonder if by-and-by I am found repeating a seemingly plain question; for I ask not in order to confute you, but as I was saying that the argument may proceed consecutively, and that we may not get the habit of anticipating and suspecting the meaning of one another\u2019s words; I would have you develope your own views in your own way, whatever may be your hypothesis."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"I think that you are quite right, Socrates."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let me raise another question; there is such a thing as \u201chaving learned\u201d?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there is also \u201chaving believed\u201d?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is the \u201chaving learned\u201d the same as \u201chaving believed,\u201d and are learning and belief the same things?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"In my judgment, Socrates, they are not the same."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And your judgment is right, as you may ascertain in this way:\u2014If a person were to say to you, \u201cIs there, Gorgias, a false belief as well as a true?\u201d\u2014you would reply, if I am not mistaken, that there is."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but is there a false knowledge as well as a true?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No, indeed; and this again proves that knowledge and belief differ."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet those who have learned as well as those who have believed are persuaded?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Just so."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall we then assume two sorts of persuasion,\u2014one which is the source of belief without knowledge, as the other is of knowledge?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And which sort of persuasion does rhetoric create in courts of law and other assemblies about the just and unjust, the sort of persuasion which gives belief without knowledge, or that which gives knowledge?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly, Socrates, that which only gives belief."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then rhetoric, as would appear, is the artificer of a persuasion which creates belief about the just and unjust, but gives no instruction about them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the rhetorician does not instruct the courts of law or other assemblies about things just and unjust, but he creates belief about them; for no one can be supposed to instruct such a vast multitude about such high matters in a short time?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Come, then, and let us see what we really mean about rhetoric; for I do not know what my own meaning is as yet. When the assembly meets to elect a physician or a shipwright or any other craftsman, will the rhetorician be taken into counsel? Surely not. For at every election he ought to be chosen who is most skilled; and, again, when walls have to be built or harbours or docks to be constructed, not the rhetorician but the master workman will advise; or when generals have to be chosen and an order of battle arranged, or a position taken, then the military will advise and not the rhetoricians: what do you say, Gorgias? Since you profess to be a rhetorician and a maker of rhetoricians, I cannot do better than learn the nature of your art from you. And here let me assure you that I have your interest in view as well as my own. For likely enough some one or other of the young men present might desire to become your pupil, and in fact I see some, and a good many too, who have this wish, but they would be too modest to question you. And therefore when you are interrogated by me, I would have you imagine that you are interrogated by them. \u201cWhat is the use of coming to you, Gorgias?\u201d they will say\u2014\u201cabout what will you teach us to advise the state?\u2014about the just and unjust only, or about those other things also which Socrates has just mentioned?\u201d How will you answer them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"I like your way of leading us on, Socrates, and I will endeavour to reveal to you the whole nature of rhetoric. You must have heard, I think, that the docks and the walls of the Athenians and the plan of the harbour were devised in accordance with the counsels, partly of Themistocles, and partly of Pericles, and not at the suggestion of the builders."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Such is the tradition, Gorgias, about Themistocles; and I myself heard the speech of Pericles when he advised us about the middle wall."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"And you will observe, Socrates, that when a decision has to be given in such matters the rhetoricians are the advisers; they are the men who win their point."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I had that in my admiring mind, Gorgias, when I asked what is the nature of rhetoric, which always appears to me, when I look at the matter in this way, to be a marvel of greatness."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"A marvel, indeed, Socrates, if you only knew how rhetoric comprehends and holds under her sway all the inferior arts. Let me offer you a striking example of this. On several occasions I have been with my brother Herodicus or some other physician to see one of his patients, who would not allow the physician to give him medicine, or apply the knife or hot iron to him; and I have persuaded him to do for me what he would not do for the physician just by the use of rhetoric. And I say that if a rhetorician and a physician were to go to any city, and had there to argue in the Ecclesia or any other assembly as to which of them should be elected state-physician, the physician would have no chance; but he who could speak would be chosen if he wished; and in a contest with a man of any other profession the rhetorician more than any one would have the power of getting himself chosen, for he can speak more persuasively to the multitude than any of them, and on any subject. Such is the nature and power of the art of rhetoric! And yet, Socrates, rhetoric should be used like any other competitive art, not against everybody,\u2014the rhetorician ought not to abuse his strength any more than a pugilist or pancratiast or other master of fence;\u2014because he has powers which are more than a match either for friend or enemy, he ought not therefore to strike, stab, or slay his friends. Suppose a man to have been trained in the palestra and to be a skilful boxer,\u2014he in the fulness of his strength goes and strikes his father or mother or one of his familiars or friends; but that is no reason why the trainers or fencing-masters should be held in detestation or banished from the city;\u2014surely not. For they taught their art for a good purpose, to be used against enemies and evil-doers, in self-defence not in aggression, and others have perverted their instructions, and turned to a bad use their own strength and skill. But not on this account are the teachers bad, neither is the art in fault, or bad in itself; I should rather say that those who make a bad use of the art are to blame. And the same argument holds good of rhetoric; for the rhetorician can speak against all men and upon any subject,\u2014in short, he can persuade the multitude better than any other man of anything which he pleases, but he should not therefore seek to defraud the physician or any other artist of his reputation merely because he has the power; he ought to use rhetoric fairly, as he would also use his athletic powers. And if after having become a rhetorician he makes a bad use of his strength and skill, his instructor surely ought not on that account to be held in detestation or banished. For he was intended by his teacher to make a good use of his instructions, but he abuses them. And therefore he is the person who ought to be held in detestation, banished, and put to death, and not his instructor."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You, Gorgias, like myself, have had great experience of disputations, and you must have observed, I think, that they do not always terminate in mutual edification, or in the definition by either party of the subjects which they are discussing; but disagreements are apt to arise\u2014somebody says that another has not spoken truly or clearly; and then they get into a passion and begin to quarrel, both parties conceiving that their opponents are arguing from personal feeling only and jealousy of themselves, not from any interest in the question at issue. And sometimes they will go on abusing one another until the company at last are quite vexed at themselves for ever listening to such fellows. Why do I say this? Why, because I cannot help feeling that you are now saying what is not quite consistent or accordant with what you were saying at first about rhetoric. And I am afraid to point this out to you, lest you should think that I have some animosity against you, and that I speak, not for the sake of discovering the truth, but from jealousy of you. Now if you are one of my sort, I should like to cross-examine you, but if not I will let you alone. And what is my sort? you will ask. I am one of those who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute; for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing another. For I imagine that there is no evil which a man can endure so great as an erroneous opinion about the matters of which we are speaking; and if you claim to be one of my sort, let us have the discussion out, but if you would rather have done, no matter;\u2014let us make an end of it."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"I should say, Socrates, that I am quite the man whom you indicate; but, perhaps, we ought to consider the audience, for, before you came, I had already given a long exhibition, and if we proceed the argument may run on to a great length. And therefore I think that we should consider whether we may not be detaining some part of the company when they are wanting to do something else."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"You hear the audience cheering, Gorgias and Socrates, which shows their desire to listen to you; and for myself, Heaven forbid that I should have any business on hand which would take me away from a discussion so interesting and so ably maintained."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"By the gods, Chaerephon, although I have been present at many discussions, I doubt whether I was ever so much delighted before, and therefore if you go on discoursing all day I shall be the better pleased."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I may truly say, Callicles, that I am willing, if Gorgias is."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"After all this, Socrates, I should be disgraced if I refused, especially as I have promised to answer all comers; in accordance with the wishes of the company, then, do you begin, and ask of me any question which you like."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me tell you then, Gorgias, what surprises me in your words; though I dare say that you may be right, and I may have misunderstood your meaning. You say that you can make any man, who will learn of you, a rhetorician?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you mean that you will teach him to gain the ears of the multitude on any subject, and this not by instruction but by persuasion?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Quite so."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You were saying, in fact, that the rhetorician will have greater powers of persuasion than the physician even in a matter of health?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, with the multitude,\u2014that is."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You mean to say, with the ignorant; for with those who know he cannot be supposed to have greater powers of persuasion."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if he is to have more power of persuasion than the physician, he will have greater power than he who knows?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Although he is not a physician:\u2014is he?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who is not a physician must, obviously, be ignorant of what the physician knows."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, when the rhetorician is more persuasive than the physician, the ignorant is more persuasive with the ignorant than he who has knowledge?\u2014is not that the inference?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"In the case supposed:\u2014yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same holds of the relation of rhetoric to all the other arts; the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, and is not this a great comfort?\u2014not to have learned the other arts, but the art of rhetoric only, and yet to be in no way inferior to the professors of them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Whether the rhetorician is or not inferior on this account is a question which we will hereafter examine if the enquiry is likely to be of any service to us; but I would rather begin by asking, whether he is or is not as ignorant of the just and unjust, base and honourable, good and evil, as he is of medicine and the other arts; I mean to say, does he really know anything of what is good and evil, base or honourable, just or unjust in them; or has he only a way with the ignorant of persuading them that he not knowing is to be esteemed to know more about these things than some one else who knows? Or must the pupil know these things and come to you knowing them before he can acquire the art of rhetoric? If he is ignorant, you who are the teacher of rhetoric will not teach him\u2014it is not your business; but you will make him seem to the multitude to know them, when he does not know them; and seem to be a good man, when he is not. Or will you be unable to teach him rhetoric at all, unless he knows the truth of these things first? What is to be said about all this? By heavens, Gorgias, I wish that you would reveal to me the power of rhetoric, as you were saying that you would."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Well, Socrates, I suppose that if the pupil does chance not to know them, he will have to learn of me these things as well."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Say no more, for there you are right; and so he whom you make a rhetorician must either know the nature of the just and unjust already, or he must be taught by you."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and is not he who has learned carpentering a carpenter?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who has learned music a musician?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who has learned medicine is a physician, in like manner? He who has learned anything whatever is that which his knowledge makes him."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in the same way, he who has learned what is just is just?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who is just may be supposed to do what is just?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And must not the just man always desire to do what is just?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"That is clearly the inference."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Surely, then, the just man will never consent to do injustice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And according to the argument the rhetorician must be a just man?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will therefore never be willing to do injustice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Clearly not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But do you remember saying just now that the trainer is not to be accused or banished if the pugilist makes a wrong use of his pugilistic art; and in like manner, if the rhetorician makes a bad and unjust use of his rhetoric, that is not to be laid to the charge of his teacher, who is not to be banished, but the wrong-doer himself who made a bad use of his rhetoric\u2014he is to be banished\u2014was not that said?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, it was."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But now we are affirming that the aforesaid rhetorician will never have done injustice at all?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And at the very outset, Gorgias, it was said that rhetoric treated of discourse, not (like arithmetic) about odd and even, but about just and unjust? Was not this said?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I was thinking at the time, when I heard you saying so, that rhetoric, which is always discoursing about justice, could not possibly be an unjust thing. But when you added, shortly afterwards, that the rhetorician might make a bad use of rhetoric I noted with surprise the inconsistency into which you had fallen; and I said, that if you thought, as I did, that there was a gain in being refuted, there would be an advantage in going on with the question, but if not, I would leave off. And in the course of our investigations, as you will see yourself, the rhetorician has been acknowledged to be incapable of making an unjust use of rhetoric, or of willingness to do injustice. By the dog, Gorgias, there will be a great deal of discussion, before we get at the truth of all this."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"And do even you, Socrates, seriously believe what you are now saying about rhetoric? What! because Gorgias was ashamed to deny that the rhetorician knew the just and the honourable and the good, and admitted that to any one who came to him ignorant of them he could teach them, and then out of this admission there arose a contradiction\u2014the thing which you dearly love, and to which not he, but you, brought the argument by your captious questions\u2014(do you seriously believe that there is any truth in all this?) For will any one ever acknowledge that he does not know, or cannot teach, the nature of justice? The truth is, that there is great want of manners in bringing the argument to such a pass."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Illustrious Polus, the reason why we provide ourselves with friends and children is, that when we get old and stumble, a younger generation may be at hand to set us on our legs again in our words and in our actions: and now, if I and Gorgias are stumbling, here are you who should raise us up; and I for my part engage to retract any error into which you may think that I have fallen-upon one condition:"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"What condition?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That you contract, Polus, the prolixity of speech in which you indulged at first."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"What! do you mean that I may not use as many words as I please?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Only to think, my friend, that having come on a visit to Athens, which is the most free-spoken state in Hellas, you when you got there, and you alone, should be deprived of the power of speech\u2014that would be hard indeed. But then consider my case:\u2014shall not I be very hardly used, if, when you are making a long oration, and refusing to answer what you are asked, I am compelled to stay and listen to you, and may not go away? I say rather, if you have a real interest in the argument, or, to repeat my former expression, have any desire to set it on its legs, take back any statement which you please; and in your turn ask and answer, like myself and Gorgias\u2014refute and be refuted: for I suppose that you would claim to know what Gorgias knows\u2014would you not?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you, like him, invite any one to ask you about anything which he pleases, and you will know how to answer him?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, which will you do, ask or answer?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I will ask; and do you answer me, Socrates, the same question which Gorgias, as you suppose, is unable to answer: What is rhetoric?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you mean what sort of an art?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"To say the truth, Polus, it is not an art at all, in my opinion."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Then what, in your opinion, is rhetoric?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A thing which, as I was lately reading in a book of yours, you say that you have made an art."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"What thing?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should say a sort of experience."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Does rhetoric seem to you to be an experience?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is my view, but you may be of another mind."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"An experience in what?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"An experience in producing a sort of delight and gratification."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"And if able to gratify others, must not rhetoric be a fine thing?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What are you saying, Polus? Why do you ask me whether rhetoric is a fine thing or not, when I have not as yet told you what rhetoric is?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Did I not hear you say that rhetoric was a sort of experience?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Will you, who are so desirous to gratify others, afford a slight gratification to me?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I will."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Will you ask me, what sort of an art is cookery?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"What sort of an art is cookery?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Not an art at all, Polus."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"What then?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should say an experience."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"In what? I wish that you would explain to me."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"An experience in producing a sort of delight and gratification, Polus."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Then are cookery and rhetoric the same?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No, they are only different parts of the same profession."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Of what profession?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am afraid that the truth may seem discourteous; and I hesitate to answer, lest Gorgias should imagine that I am making fun of his own profession. For whether or not this is that art of rhetoric which Gorgias practises I really cannot tell:\u2014from what he was just now saying, nothing appeared of what he thought of his art, but the rhetoric which I mean is a part of a not very creditable whole."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"A part of what, Socrates? Say what you mean, and never mind me."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In my opinion then, Gorgias, the whole of which rhetoric is a part is not an art at all, but the habit of a bold and ready wit, which knows how to manage mankind: this habit I sum up under the word \u201cflattery\u201d; and it appears to me to have many other parts, one of which is cookery, which may seem to be an art, but, as I maintain, is only an experience or routine and not an art:\u2014another part is rhetoric, and the art of attiring and sophistry are two others: thus there are four branches, and four different things answering to them. And Polus may ask, if he likes, for he has not as yet been informed, what part of flattery is rhetoric: he did not see that I had not yet answered him when he proceeded to ask a further question: Whether I do not think rhetoric a fine thing? But I shall not tell him whether rhetoric is a fine thing or not, until I have first answered, \u201cWhat is rhetoric?\u201d For that would not be right, Polus; but I shall be happy to answer, if you will ask me, What part of flattery is rhetoric?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I will ask and do you answer? What part of flattery is rhetoric?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Will you understand my answer? Rhetoric, according to my view, is the ghost or counterfeit of a part of politics."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"And noble or ignoble?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Ignoble, I should say, if I am compelled to answer, for I call what is bad ignoble: though I doubt whether you understand what I was saying before."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Indeed, Socrates, I cannot say that I understand myself."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I do not wonder, Gorgias; for I have not as yet explained myself, and our friend Polus, colt by name and colt by nature, is apt to run away. (This is an untranslatable play on the name \u201cPolus,\u201d which means \u201ca colt.\u201d)"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Never mind him, but explain to me what you mean by saying that rhetoric is the counterfeit of a part of politics."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will try, then, to explain my notion of rhetoric, and if I am mistaken, my friend Polus shall refute me. We may assume the existence of bodies and of souls?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You would further admit that there is a good condition of either of them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Which condition may not be really good, but good only in appearance? I mean to say, that there are many persons who appear to be in good health, and whom only a physician or trainer will discern at first sight not to be in good health."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this applies not only to the body, but also to the soul: in either there may be that which gives the appearance of health and not the reality?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now I will endeavour to explain to you more clearly what I mean: The soul and body being two, have two arts corresponding to them: there is the art of politics attending on the soul; and another art attending on the body, of which I know no single name, but which may be described as having two divisions, one of them gymnastic, and the other medicine. And in politics there is a legislative part, which answers to gymnastic, as justice does to medicine; and the two parts run into one another, justice having to do with the same subject as legislation, and medicine with the same subject as gymnastic, but with a difference. Now, seeing that there are these four arts, two attending on the body and two on the soul for their highest good; flattery knowing, or rather guessing their natures, has distributed herself into four shams or simulations of them; she puts on the likeness of some one or other of them, and pretends to be that which she simulates, and having no regard for men\u2019s highest interests, is ever making pleasure the bait of the unwary, and deceiving them into the belief that she is of the highest value to them. Cookery simulates the disguise of medicine, and pretends to know what food is the best for the body; and if the physician and the cook had to enter into a competition in which children were the judges, or men who had no more sense than children, as to which of them best understands the goodness or badness of food, the physician would be starved to death. A flattery I deem this to be and of an ignoble sort, Polus, for to you I am now addressing myself, because it aims at pleasure without any thought of the best. An art I do not call it, but only an experience, because it is unable to explain or to give a reason of the nature of its own applications. And I do not call any irrational thing an art; but if you dispute my words, I am prepared to argue in defence of them. Cookery, then, I maintain to be a flattery which takes the form of medicine; and tiring, in like manner, is a flattery which takes the form of gymnastic, and is knavish, false, ignoble, illiberal, working deceitfully by the help of lines, and colours, and enamels, and garments, and making men affect a spurious beauty to the neglect of the true beauty which is given by gymnastic. I would rather not be tedious, and therefore I will only say, after the manner of the geometricians (for I think that by this time you will be able to follow) as tiring: gymnastic:: cookery: medicine; or rather, as tiring: gymnastic:: sophistry: legislation; and as cookery: medicine:: rhetoric: justice. And this, I say, is the natural difference between the rhetorician and the sophist, but by reason of their near connection, they are apt to be jumbled up together; neither do they know what to make of themselves, nor do other men know what to make of them. For if the body presided over itself, and were not under the guidance of the soul, and the soul did not discern and discriminate between cookery and medicine, but the body was made the judge of them, and the rule of judgment was the bodily delight which was given by them, then the word of Anaxagoras, that word with which you, friend Polus, are so well acquainted, would prevail far and wide: \u201cChaos\u201d would come again, and cookery, health, and medicine would mingle in an indiscriminate mass. And now I have told you my notion of rhetoric, which is, in relation to the soul, what cookery is to the body. I may have been inconsistent in making a long speech, when I would not allow you to discourse at length. But I think that I may be excused, because you did not understand me, and could make no use of my answer when I spoke shortly, and therefore I had to enter into an explanation. And if I show an equal inability to make use of yours, I hope that you will speak at equal length; but if I am able to understand you, let me have the benefit of your brevity, as is only fair: And now you may do what you please with my answer."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean? do you think that rhetoric is flattery?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nay, I said a part of flattery; if at your age, Polus, you cannot remember, what will you do by-and-by, when you get older?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"And are the good rhetoricians meanly regarded in states, under the idea that they are flatterers?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is that a question or the beginning of a speech?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I am asking a question."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then my answer is, that they are not regarded at all."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"How not regarded? Have they not very great power in states?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Not if you mean to say that power is a good to the possessor."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"And that is what I do mean to say."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, if so, I think that they have the least power of all the citizens."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"What! are they not like tyrants? They kill and despoil and exile any one whom they please."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"By the dog, Polus, I cannot make out at each deliverance of yours, whether you are giving an opinion of your own, or asking a question of me."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I am asking a question of you."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my friend, but you ask two questions at once."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"How two questions?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, did you not say just now that the rhetoricians are like tyrants, and that they kill and despoil or exile any one whom they please?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I did."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well then, I say to you that here are two questions in one, and I will answer both of them. And I tell you, Polus, that rhetoricians and tyrants have the least possible power in states, as I was just now saying; for they do literally nothing which they will, but only what they think best."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"And is not that a great power?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Polus has already said the reverse."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Said the reverse! nay, that is what I assert."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No, by the great\u2014what do you call him?\u2014not you, for you say that power is a good to him who has the power."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you maintain that if a fool does what he thinks best, this is a good, and would you call this great power?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I should not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you must prove that the rhetorician is not a fool, and that rhetoric is an art and not a flattery\u2014and so you will have refuted me; but if you leave me unrefuted, why, the rhetoricians who do what they think best in states, and the tyrants, will have nothing upon which to congratulate themselves, if as you say, power be indeed a good, admitting at the same time that what is done without sense is an evil."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes; I admit that."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How then can the rhetoricians or the tyrants have great power in states, unless Polus can refute Socrates, and prove to him that they do as they will?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"This fellow\u2014"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I say that they do not do as they will;\u2014now refute me."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Why, have you not already said that they do as they think best?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I say so still."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Then surely they do as they will?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I deny it."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"But they do what they think best?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Aye."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"That, Socrates, is monstrous and absurd."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Good words, good Polus, as I may say in your own peculiar style; but if you have any questions to ask of me, either prove that I am in error or give the answer yourself."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Very well, I am willing to answer that I may know what you mean."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do men appear to you to will that which they do, or to will that further end for the sake of which they do a thing? when they take medicine, for example, at the bidding of a physician, do they will the drinking of the medicine which is painful, or the health for the sake of which they drink?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Clearly, the health."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when men go on a voyage or engage in business, they do not will that which they are doing at the time; for who would desire to take the risk of a voyage or the trouble of business?\u2014But they will, to have the wealth for the sake of which they go on a voyage."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not this universally true? If a man does something for the sake of something else, he wills not that which he does, but that for the sake of which he does it."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are not all things either good or evil, or intermediate and indifferent?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"To be sure, Socrates."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Wisdom and health and wealth and the like you would call goods, and their opposites evils?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the things which are neither good nor evil, and which partake sometimes of the nature of good and at other times of evil, or of neither, are such as sitting, walking, running, sailing; or, again, wood, stones, and the like:\u2014these are the things which you call neither good nor evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Exactly so."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are these indifferent things done for the sake of the good, or the good for the sake of the indifferent?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Clearly, the indifferent for the sake of the good."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When we walk we walk for the sake of the good, and under the idea that it is better to walk, and when we stand we stand equally for the sake of the good?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when we kill a man we kill him or exile him or despoil him of his goods, because, as we think, it will conduce to our good?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Men who do any of these things do them for the sake of the good?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And did we not admit that in doing something for the sake of something else, we do not will those things which we do, but that other thing for the sake of which we do them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we do not will simply to kill a man or to exile him or to despoil him of his goods, but we will to do that which conduces to our good, and if the act is not conducive to our good we do not will it; for we will, as you say, that which is our good, but that which is neither good nor evil, or simply evil, we do not will. Why are you silent, Polus? Am I not right?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"You are right."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Hence we may infer, that if any one, whether he be a tyrant or a rhetorician, kills another or exiles another or deprives him of his property, under the idea that the act is for his own interests when really not for his own interests, he may be said to do what seems best to him?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But does he do what he wills if he does what is evil? Why do you not answer?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Well, I suppose not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then if great power is a good as you allow, will such a one have great power in a state?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"He will not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I was right in saying that a man may do what seems good to him in a state, and not have great power, and not do what he wills?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"As though you, Socrates, would not like to have the power of doing what seemed good to you in the state, rather than not; you would not be jealous when you saw any one killing or despoiling or imprisoning whom he pleased, Oh, no!"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Justly or unjustly, do you mean?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"In either case is he not equally to be envied?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Forbear, Polus!"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Why \u201cforbear\u201d?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because you ought not to envy wretches who are not to be envied, but only to pity them."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"And are those of whom I spoke wretches?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly they are."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"And so you think that he who slays any one whom he pleases, and justly slays him, is pitiable and wretched?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No, I do not say that of him: but neither do I think that he is to be envied."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Were you not saying just now that he is wretched?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my friend, if he killed another unjustly, in which case he is also to be pitied; and he is not to be envied if he killed him justly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"At any rate you will allow that he who is unjustly put to death is wretched, and to be pitied?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Not so much, Polus, as he who kills him, and not so much as he who is justly killed."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"How can that be, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That may very well be, inasmuch as doing injustice is the greatest of evils."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"But is it the greatest? Is not suffering injustice a greater evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Then would you rather suffer than do injustice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should not like either, but if I must choose between them, I would rather suffer than do."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Then you would not wish to be a tyrant?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Not if you mean by tyranny what I mean."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I mean, as I said before, the power of doing whatever seems good to you in a state, killing, banishing, doing in all things as you like."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well then, illustrious friend, when I have said my say, do you reply to me. Suppose that I go into a crowded Agora, and take a dagger under my arm. Polus, I say to you, I have just acquired rare power, and become a tyrant; for if I think that any of these men whom you see ought to be put to death, the man whom I have a mind to kill is as good as dead; and if I am disposed to break his head or tear his garment, he will have his head broken or his garment torn in an instant. Such is my great power in this city. And if you do not believe me, and I show you the dagger, you would probably reply: Socrates, in that sort of way any one may have great power\u2014he may burn any house which he pleases, and the docks and triremes of the Athenians, and all their other vessels, whether public or private\u2014but can you believe that this mere doing as you think best is great power?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not such doing as this."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But can you tell me why you disapprove of such a power?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I can."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why then?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Why, because he who did as you say would be certain to be punished."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And punishment is an evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you would admit once more, my good sir, that great power is a benefit to a man if his actions turn out to his advantage, and that this is the meaning of great power; and if not, then his power is an evil and is no power. But let us look at the matter in another way:\u2014do we not acknowledge that the things of which we were speaking, the infliction of death, and exile, and the deprivation of property are sometimes a good and sometimes not a good?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"About that you and I may be supposed to agree?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Tell me, then, when do you say that they are good and when that they are evil\u2014what principle do you lay down?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I would rather, Socrates, that you should answer as well as ask that question."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, Polus, since you would rather have the answer from me, I say that they are good when they are just, and evil when they are unjust."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"You are hard of refutation, Socrates, but might not a child refute that statement?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I shall be very grateful to the child, and equally grateful to you if you will refute me and deliver me from my foolishness. And I hope that refute me you will, and not weary of doing good to a friend."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, and I need not go far or appeal to antiquity; events which happened only a few days ago are enough to refute you, and to prove that many men who do wrong are happy."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What events?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"You see, I presume, that Archelaus the son of Perdiccas is now the ruler of Macedonia?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"At any rate I hear that he is."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"And do you think that he is happy or miserable?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I cannot say, Polus, for I have never had any acquaintance with him."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"And cannot you tell at once, and without having an acquaintance with him, whether a man is happy?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Most certainly not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Then clearly, Socrates, you would say that you did not even know whether the great king was a happy man?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I should speak the truth; for I do not know how he stands in the matter of education and justice."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"What! and does all happiness consist in this?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed, Polus, that is my doctrine; the men and women who are gentle and good are also happy, as I maintain, and the unjust and evil are miserable."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Then, according to your doctrine, the said Archelaus is miserable?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my friend, if he is wicked."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"That he is wicked I cannot deny; for he had no title at all to the throne which he now occupies, he being only the son of a woman who was the slave of Alcetas the brother of Perdiccas; he himself therefore in strict right was the slave of Alcetas; and if he had meant to do rightly he would have remained his slave, and then, according to your doctrine, he would have been happy. But now he is unspeakably miserable, for he has been guilty of the greatest crimes: in the first place he invited his uncle and master, Alcetas, to come to him, under the pretence that he would restore to him the throne which Perdiccas has usurped, and after entertaining him and his son Alexander, who was his own cousin, and nearly of an age with him, and making them drunk, he threw them into a waggon and carried them off by night, and slew them, and got both of them out of the way; and when he had done all this wickedness he never discovered that he was the most miserable of all men, and was very far from repenting: shall I tell you how he showed his remorse? he had a younger brother, a child of seven years old, who was the legitimate son of Perdiccas, and to him of right the kingdom belonged; Archelaus, however, had no mind to bring him up as he ought and restore the kingdom to him; that was not his notion of happiness; but not long afterwards he threw him into a well and drowned him, and declared to his mother Cleopatra that he had fallen in while running after a goose, and had been killed. And now as he is the greatest criminal of all the Macedonians, he may be supposed to be the most miserable and not the happiest of them, and I dare say that there are many Athenians, and you would be at the head of them, who would rather be any other Macedonian than Archelaus!"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I praised you at first, Polus, for being a rhetorician rather than a reasoner. And this, as I suppose, is the sort of argument with which you fancy that a child might refute me, and by which I stand refuted when I say that the unjust man is not happy. But, my good friend, where is the refutation? I cannot admit a word which you have been saying."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"That is because you will not; for you surely must think as I do."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Not so, my simple friend, but because you will refute me after the manner which rhetoricians practise in courts of law. For there the one party think that they refute the other when they bring forward a number of witnesses of good repute in proof of their allegations, and their adversary has only a single one or none at all. But this kind of proof is of no value where truth is the aim; a man may often be sworn down by a multitude of false witnesses who have a great air of respectability. And in this argument nearly every one, Athenian and stranger alike, would be on your side, if you should bring witnesses in disproof of my statement;\u2014you may, if you will, summon Nicias the son of Niceratus, and let his brothers, who gave the row of tripods which stand in the precincts of Dionysus, come with him; or you may summon Aristocrates, the son of Scellius, who is the giver of that famous offering which is at Delphi; summon, if you will, the whole house of Pericles, or any other great Athenian family whom you choose;\u2014they will all agree with you: I only am left alone and cannot agree, for you do not convince me; although you produce many false witnesses against me, in the hope of depriving me of my inheritance, which is the truth. But I consider that nothing worth speaking of will have been effected by me unless I make you the one witness of my words; nor by you, unless you make me the one witness of yours; no matter about the rest of the world. For there are two ways of refutation, one which is yours and that of the world in general; but mine is of another sort\u2014let us compare them, and see in what they differ. For, indeed, we are at issue about matters which to know is honourable and not to know disgraceful; to know or not to know happiness and misery\u2014that is the chief of them. And what knowledge can be nobler? or what ignorance more disgraceful than this? And therefore I will begin by asking you whether you do not think that a man who is unjust and doing injustice can be happy, seeing that you think Archelaus unjust, and yet happy? May I assume this to be your opinion?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But I say that this is an impossibility\u2014here is one point about which we are at issue:\u2014very good. And do you mean to say also that if he meets with retribution and punishment he will still be happy?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not; in that case he will be most miserable."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"On the other hand, if the unjust be not punished, then, according to you, he will be happy?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But in my opinion, Polus, the unjust or doer of unjust actions is miserable in any case,\u2014more miserable, however, if he be not punished and does not meet with retribution, and less miserable if he be punished and meets with retribution at the hands of gods and men."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"You are maintaining a strange doctrine, Socrates."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I shall try to make you agree with me, O my friend, for as a friend I regard you. Then these are the points at issue between us\u2014are they not? I was saying that to do is worse than to suffer injustice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Exactly so."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you said the opposite?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I said also that the wicked are miserable, and you refuted me?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"By Zeus, I did."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In your own opinion, Polus."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, and I rather suspect that I was in the right."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You further said that the wrong-doer is happy if he be unpunished?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I affirm that he is most miserable, and that those who are punished are less miserable\u2014are you going to refute this proposition also?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"A proposition which is harder of refutation than the other, Socrates."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Say rather, Polus, impossible; for who can refute the truth?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean? If a man is detected in an unjust attempt to make himself a tyrant, and when detected is racked, mutilated, has his eyes burned out, and after having had all sorts of great injuries inflicted on him, and having seen his wife and children suffer the like, is at last impaled or tarred and burned alive, will he be happier than if he escape and become a tyrant, and continue all through life doing what he likes and holding the reins of government, the envy and admiration both of citizens and strangers? Is that the paradox which, as you say, cannot be refuted?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There again, noble Polus, you are raising hobgoblins instead of refuting me; just now you were calling witnesses against me. But please to refresh my memory a little; did you say\u2014\u201cin an unjust attempt to make himself a tyrant\u201d?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I did."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I say that neither of them will be happier than the other,\u2014neither he who unjustly acquires a tyranny, nor he who suffers in the attempt, for of two miserables one cannot be the happier, but that he who escapes and becomes a tyrant is the more miserable of the two. Do you laugh, Polus? Well, this is a new kind of refutation,\u2014when any one says anything, instead of refuting him to laugh at him."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"But do you not think, Socrates, that you have been sufficiently refuted, when you say that which no human being will allow? Ask the company."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"O Polus, I am not a public man, and only last year, when my tribe were serving as Prytanes, and it became my duty as their president to take the votes, there was a laugh at me, because I was unable to take them. And as I failed then, you must not ask me to count the suffrages of the company now; but if, as I was saying, you have no better argument than numbers, let me have a turn, and do you make trial of the sort of proof which, as I think, is required; for I shall produce one witness only of the truth of my words, and he is the person with whom I am arguing; his suffrage I know how to take; but with the many I have nothing to do, and do not even address myself to them. May I ask then whether you will answer in turn and have your words put to the proof? For I certainly think that I and you and every man do really believe, that to do is a greater evil than to suffer injustice: and not to be punished than to be punished."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"And I should say neither I, nor any man: would you yourself, for example, suffer rather than do injustice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, and you, too; I or any man would."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Quite the reverse; neither you, nor I, nor any man."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But will you answer?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"To be sure, I will; for I am curious to hear what you can have to say."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Tell me, then, and you will know, and let us suppose that I am beginning at the beginning: which of the two, Polus, in your opinion, is the worst?\u2014to do injustice or to suffer?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I should say that suffering was worst."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And which is the greater disgrace?\u2014Answer."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"To do."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the greater disgrace is the greater evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I understand you to say, if I am not mistaken, that the honourable is not the same as the good, or the disgraceful as the evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me ask a question of you: When you speak of beautiful things, such as bodies, colours, figures, sounds, institutions, do you not call them beautiful in reference to some standard: bodies, for example, are beautiful in proportion as they are useful, or as the sight of them gives pleasure to the spectators; can you give any other account of personal beauty?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I cannot."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you would say of figures or colours generally that they were beautiful, either by reason of the pleasure which they give, or of their use, or of both?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I should."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you would call sounds and music beautiful for the same reason?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Laws and institutions also have no beauty in them except in so far as they are useful or pleasant or both?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I think not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And may not the same be said of the beauty of knowledge?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"To be sure, Socrates; and I very much approve of your measuring beauty by the standard of pleasure and utility."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And deformity or disgrace may be equally measured by the opposite standard of pain and evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then when of two beautiful things one exceeds in beauty, the measure of the excess is to be taken in one or both of these; that is to say, in pleasure or utility or both?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And of two deformed things, that which exceeds in deformity or disgrace, exceeds either in pain or evil\u2014must it not be so?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But then again, what was the observation which you just now made, about doing and suffering wrong? Did you not say, that suffering wrong was more evil, and doing wrong more disgraceful?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I did."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, if doing wrong is more disgraceful than suffering, the more disgraceful must be more painful and must exceed in pain or in evil or both: does not that also follow?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"First, then, let us consider whether the doing of injustice exceeds the suffering in the consequent pain: Do the injurers suffer more than the injured?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"No, Socrates; certainly not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then they do not exceed in pain?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if not in pain, then not in both?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then they can only exceed in the other?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is to say, in evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then doing injustice will have an excess of evil, and will therefore be a greater evil than suffering injustice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But have not you and the world already agreed that to do injustice is more disgraceful than to suffer?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that is now discovered to be more evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you prefer a greater evil or a greater dishonour to a less one? Answer, Polus, and fear not; for you will come to no harm if you nobly resign yourself into the healing hand of the argument as to a physician without shrinking, and either say \u201cYes\u201d or \u201cNo\u201d to me."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I should say \u201cNo.\u201d"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Would any other man prefer a greater to a less evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"No, not according to this way of putting the case, Socrates."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I said truly, Polus, that neither you, nor I, nor any man, would rather do than suffer injustice; for to do injustice is the greater evil of the two."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"That is the conclusion."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You see, Polus, when you compare the two kinds of refutations, how unlike they are. All men, with the exception of myself, are of your way of thinking; but your single assent and witness are enough for me,\u2014I have no need of any other, I take your suffrage, and am regardless of the rest. Enough of this, and now let us proceed to the next question; which is, Whether the greatest of evils to a guilty man is to suffer punishment, as you supposed, or whether to escape punishment is not a greater evil, as I supposed. Consider:\u2014You would say that to suffer punishment is another name for being justly corrected when you do wrong?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you not allow that all just things are honourable in so far as they are just? Please to reflect, and tell me your opinion."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, I think that they are."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Consider again:\u2014Where there is an agent, must there not also be a patient?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I should say so."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will not the patient suffer that which the agent does, and will not the suffering have the quality of the action? I mean, for example, that if a man strikes, there must be something which is stricken?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if the striker strikes violently or quickly, that which is struck will be struck violently or quickly?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the suffering to him who is stricken is of the same nature as the act of him who strikes?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if a man burns, there is something which is burned?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he burns in excess or so as to cause pain, the thing burned will be burned in the same way?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Truly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he cuts, the same argument holds\u2014there will be something cut?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if the cutting be great or deep or such as will cause pain, the cut will be of the same nature?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"That is evident."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you would agree generally to the universal proposition which I was just now asserting: that the affection of the patient answers to the affection of the agent?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, as this is admitted, let me ask whether being punished is suffering or acting?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Suffering, Socrates; there can be no doubt of that."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And suffering implies an agent?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly, Socrates; and he is the punisher."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who punishes rightly, punishes justly?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And therefore he acts justly?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Justly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who is punished and suffers retribution, suffers justly?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"That is evident."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that which is just has been admitted to be honourable?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the punisher does what is honourable, and the punished suffers what is honourable?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if what is honourable, then what is good, for the honourable is either pleasant or useful?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who is punished suffers what is good?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he is benefited?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do I understand you to mean what I mean by the term \u201cbenefited\u201d? I mean, that if he be justly punished his soul is improved."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Surely."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who is punished is delivered from the evil of his soul?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is he not then delivered from the greatest evil? Look at the matter in this way:\u2014In respect of a man\u2019s estate, do you see any greater evil than poverty?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"There is no greater evil."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Again, in a man\u2019s bodily frame, you would say that the evil is weakness and disease and deformity?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you not imagine that the soul likewise has some evil of her own?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this you would call injustice and ignorance and cowardice, and the like?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"So then, in mind, body, and estate, which are three, you have pointed out three corresponding evils\u2014injustice, disease, poverty?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And which of the evils is the most disgraceful?\u2014Is not the most disgraceful of them injustice, and in general the evil of the soul?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"By far the most."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if the most disgraceful, then also the worst?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean to say, that is most disgraceful has been already admitted to be most painful or hurtful, or both."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now injustice and all evil in the soul has been admitted by us to be most disgraceful?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"It has been admitted."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And most disgraceful either because most painful and causing excessive pain, or most hurtful, or both?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And therefore to be unjust and intemperate, and cowardly and ignorant, is more painful than to be poor and sick?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Nay, Socrates; the painfulness does not appear to me to follow from your premises."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, if, as you would argue, not more painful, the evil of the soul is of all evils the most disgraceful; and the excess of disgrace must be caused by some preternatural greatness, or extraordinary hurtfulness of the evil."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that which exceeds most in hurtfulness will be the greatest of evils?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then injustice and intemperance, and in general the depravity of the soul, are the greatest of evils?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"That is evident."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now, what art is there which delivers us from poverty? Does not the art of making money?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what art frees us from disease? Does not the art of medicine?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what from vice and injustice? If you are not able to answer at once, ask yourself whither we go with the sick, and to whom we take them."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"To the physicians, Socrates."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And to whom do we go with the unjust and intemperate?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"To the judges, you mean."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"\u2014Who are to punish them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do not those who rightly punish others, punish them in accordance with a certain rule of justice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the art of money-making frees a man from poverty; medicine from disease; and justice from intemperance and injustice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"That is evident."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Which, then, is the best of these three?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Will you enumerate them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Money-making, medicine, and justice."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Justice, Socrates, far excels the two others."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And justice, if the best, gives the greatest pleasure or advantage or both?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But is the being healed a pleasant thing, and are those who are being healed pleased?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"I think not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A useful thing, then?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, because the patient is delivered from a great evil; and this is the advantage of enduring the pain\u2014that you get well?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would he be the happier man in his bodily condition, who is healed, or who never was out of health?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Clearly he who was never out of health."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes; for happiness surely does not consist in being delivered from evils, but in never having had them."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And suppose the case of two persons who have some evil in their bodies, and that one of them is healed and delivered from evil, and another is not healed, but retains the evil\u2014which of them is the most miserable?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Clearly he who is not healed."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And was not punishment said by us to be a deliverance from the greatest of evils, which is vice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And justice punishes us, and makes us more just, and is the medicine of our vice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He, then, has the first place in the scale of happiness who has never had vice in his soul; for this has been shown to be the greatest of evils."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he has the second place, who is delivered from vice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is to say, he who receives admonition and rebuke and punishment?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he lives worst, who, having been unjust, has no deliverance from injustice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is, he lives worst who commits the greatest crimes, and who, being the most unjust of men, succeeds in escaping rebuke or correction or punishment; and this, as you say, has been accomplished by Archelaus and other tyrants and rhetoricians and potentates? (Compare Republic.)"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"May not their way of proceeding, my friend, be compared to the conduct of a person who is afflicted with the worst of diseases and yet contrives not to pay the penalty to the physician for his sins against his constitution, and will not be cured, because, like a child, he is afraid of the pain of being burned or cut:\u2014Is not that a parallel case?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes, truly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He would seem as if he did not know the nature of health and bodily vigour; and if we are right, Polus, in our previous conclusions, they are in a like case who strive to evade justice, which they see to be painful, but are blind to the advantage which ensues from it, not knowing how far more miserable a companion a diseased soul is than a diseased body; a soul, I say, which is corrupt and unrighteous and unholy. And hence they do all that they can to avoid punishment and to avoid being released from the greatest of evils; they provide themselves with money and friends, and cultivate to the utmost their powers of persuasion. But if we, Polus, are right, do you see what follows, or shall we draw out the consequences in form?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"If you please."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is it not a fact that injustice, and the doing of injustice, is the greatest of evils?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"That is quite clear."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And further, that to suffer punishment is the way to be released from this evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And not to suffer, is to perpetuate the evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"To do wrong, then, is second only in the scale of evils; but to do wrong and not to be punished, is first and greatest of all?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and was not this the point in dispute, my friend? You deemed Archelaus happy, because he was a very great criminal and unpunished: I, on the other hand, maintained that he or any other who like him has done wrong and has not been punished, is, and ought to be, the most miserable of all men; and that the doer of injustice is more miserable than the sufferer; and he who escapes punishment, more miserable than he who suffers.\u2014Was not that what I said?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And it has been proved to be true?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, Polus, but if this is true, where is the great use of rhetoric? If we admit what has been just now said, every man ought in every way to guard himself against doing wrong, for he will thereby suffer great evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he, or any one about whom he cares, does wrong, he ought of his own accord to go where he will be immediately punished; he will run to the judge, as he would to the physician, in order that the disease of injustice may not be rendered chronic and become the incurable cancer of the soul; must we not allow this consequence, Polus, if our former admissions are to stand:\u2014is any other inference consistent with them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"To that, Socrates, there can be but one answer."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then rhetoric is of no use to us, Polus, in helping a man to excuse his own injustice, that of his parents or friends, or children or country; but may be of use to any one who holds that instead of excusing he ought to accuse\u2014himself above all, and in the next degree his family or any of his friends who may be doing wrong; he should bring to light the iniquity and not conceal it, that so the wrong-doer may suffer and be made whole; and he should even force himself and others not to shrink, but with closed eyes like brave men to let the physician operate with knife or searing iron, not regarding the pain, in the hope of attaining the good and the honourable; let him who has done things worthy of stripes, allow himself to be scourged, if of bonds, to be bound, if of a fine, to be fined, if of exile, to be exiled, if of death, to die, himself being the first to accuse himself and his own relations, and using rhetoric to this end, that his and their unjust actions may be made manifest, and that they themselves may be delivered from injustice, which is the greatest evil. Then, Polus, rhetoric would indeed be useful. Do you say \u201cYes\u201d or \u201cNo\u201d to that?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"To me, Socrates, what you are saying appears very strange, though probably in agreement with your premises."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is not this the conclusion, if the premises are not disproven?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"POLUS","Dialogue":"Yes; it certainly is."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And from the opposite point of view, if indeed it be our duty to harm another, whether an enemy or not\u2014I except the case of self-defence\u2014then I have to be upon my guard\u2014but if my enemy injures a third person, then in every sort of way, by word as well as deed, I should try to prevent his being punished, or appearing before the judge; and if he appears, I should contrive that he should escape, and not suffer punishment: if he has stolen a sum of money, let him keep what he has stolen and spend it on him and his, regardless of religion and justice; and if he have done things worthy of death, let him not die, but rather be immortal in his wickedness; or, if this is not possible, let him at any rate be allowed to live as long as he can. For such purposes, Polus, rhetoric may be useful, but is of small if of any use to him who is not intending to commit injustice; at least, there was no such use discovered by us in the previous discussion."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Tell me, Chaerephon, is Socrates in earnest, or is he joking?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CHAEREPHON","Dialogue":"I should say, Callicles, that he is in most profound earnest; but you may well ask him."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"By the gods, and I will. Tell me, Socrates, are you in earnest, or only in jest? For if you are in earnest, and what you say is true, is not the whole of human life turned upside down; and are we not doing, as would appear, in everything the opposite of what we ought to be doing?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"O Callicles, if there were not some community of feelings among mankind, however varying in different persons\u2014I mean to say, if every man\u2019s feelings were peculiar to himself and were not shared by the rest of his species\u2014I do not see how we could ever communicate our impressions to one another. I make this remark because I perceive that you and I have a common feeling. For we are lovers both, and both of us have two loves apiece:\u2014I am the lover of Alcibiades, the son of Cleinias, and of philosophy; and you of the Athenian Demus, and of Demus the son of Pyrilampes. Now, I observe that you, with all your cleverness, do not venture to contradict your favourite in any word or opinion of his; but as he changes you change, backwards and forwards. When the Athenian Demus denies anything that you are saying in the assembly, you go over to his opinion; and you do the same with Demus, the fair young son of Pyrilampes. For you have not the power to resist the words and ideas of your loves; and if a person were to express surprise at the strangeness of what you say from time to time when under their influence, you would probably reply to him, if you were honest, that you cannot help saying what your loves say unless they are prevented; and that you can only be silent when they are. Now you must understand that my words are an echo too, and therefore you need not wonder at me; but if you want to silence me, silence philosophy, who is my love, for she is always telling me what I am now telling you, my friend; neither is she capricious like my other love, for the son of Cleinias says one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow, but philosophy is always true. She is the teacher at whose words you are now wondering, and you have heard her yourself. Her you must refute, and either show, as I was saying, that to do injustice and to escape punishment is not the worst of all evils; or, if you leave her word unrefuted, by the dog the god of Egypt, I declare, O Callicles, that Callicles will never be at one with himself, but that his whole life will be a discord. And yet, my friend, I would rather that my lyre should be inharmonious, and that there should be no music in the chorus which I provided; aye, or that the whole world should be at odds with me, and oppose me, rather than that I myself should be at odds with myself, and contradict myself."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"O Socrates, you are a regular declaimer, and seem to be running riot in the argument. And now you are declaiming in this way because Polus has fallen into the same error himself of which he accused Gorgias:\u2014for he said that when Gorgias was asked by you, whether, if some one came to him who wanted to learn rhetoric, and did not know justice, he would teach him justice, Gorgias in his modesty replied that he would, because he thought that mankind in general would be displeased if he answered \u201cNo\u201d; and then in consequence of this admission, Gorgias was compelled to contradict himself, that being just the sort of thing in which you delight. Whereupon Polus laughed at you deservedly, as I think; but now he has himself fallen into the same trap. I cannot say very much for his wit when he conceded to you that to do is more dishonourable than to suffer injustice, for this was the admission which led to his being entangled by you; and because he was too modest to say what he thought, he had his mouth stopped. For the truth is, Socrates, that you, who pretend to be engaged in the pursuit of truth, are appealing now to the popular and vulgar notions of right, which are not natural, but only conventional. Convention and nature are generally at variance with one another: and hence, if a person is too modest to say what he thinks, he is compelled to contradict himself; and you, in your ingenuity perceiving the advantage to be thereby gained, slyly ask of him who is arguing conventionally a question which is to be determined by the rule of nature; and if he is talking of the rule of nature, you slip away to custom: as, for instance, you did in this very discussion about doing and suffering injustice. When Polus was speaking of the conventionally dishonourable, you assailed him from the point of view of nature; for by the rule of nature, to suffer injustice is the greater disgrace because the greater evil; but conventionally, to do evil is the more disgraceful. For the suffering of injustice is not the part of a man, but of a slave, who indeed had better die than live; since when he is wronged and trampled upon, he is unable to help himself, or any other about whom he cares. The reason, as I conceive, is that the makers of laws are the majority who are weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests; and they terrify the stronger sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of them, in order that they may not get the better of them; and they say, that dishonesty is shameful and unjust; meaning, by the word injustice, the desire of a man to have more than his neighbours; for knowing their own inferiority, I suspect that they are too glad of equality. And therefore the endeavour to have more than the many, is conventionally said to be shameful and unjust, and is called injustice (compare Republic), whereas nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior. For on what principle of justice did Xerxes invade Hellas, or his father the Scythians? (not to speak of numberless other examples). Nay, but these are the men who act according to nature; yes, by Heaven, and according to the law of nature: not, perhaps, according to that artificial law, which we invent and impose upon our fellows, of whom we take the best and strongest from their youth upwards, and tame them like young lions,\u2014charming them with the sound of the voice, and saying to them, that with equality they must be content, and that the equal is the honourable and the just. But if there were a man who had sufficient force, he would shake off and break through, and escape from all this; he would trample under foot all our formulas and spells and charms, and all our laws which are against nature: the slave would rise in rebellion and be lord over us, and the light of natural justice would shine forth. And this I take to be the sentiment of Pindar, when he says in his poem, that \u201cLaw is the king of all, of mortals as well as of immortals;\u201d this, as he says, \u201cMakes might to be right, doing violence with highest hand; as I infer from the deeds of Heracles, for without buying them\u2014\u201d (Fragm. Incert. 151 (Bockh).) \u2014I do not remember the exact words, but the meaning is, that without buying them, and without their being given to him, he carried off the oxen of Geryon, according to the law of natural right, and that the oxen and other possessions of the weaker and inferior properly belong to the stronger and superior. And this is true, as you may ascertain, if you will leave philosophy and go on to higher things: for philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. Even if a man has good parts, still, if he carries philosophy into later life, he is necessarily ignorant of all those things which a gentleman and a person of honour ought to know; he is inexperienced in the laws of the State, and in the language which ought to be used in the dealings of man with man, whether private or public, and utterly ignorant of the pleasures and desires of mankind and of human character in general. And people of this sort, when they betake themselves to politics or business, are as ridiculous as I imagine the politicians to be, when they make their appearance in the arena of philosophy. For, as Euripides says, \u201cEvery man shines in that and pursues that, and devotes the greatest portion of the day to that in which he most excels,\u201d (Antiope, fragm. 20 (Dindorf).) but anything in which he is inferior, he avoids and depreciates, and praises the opposite from partiality to himself, and because he thinks that he will thus praise himself. The true principle is to unite them. Philosophy, as a part of education, is an excellent thing, and there is no disgrace to a man while he is young in pursuing such a study; but when he is more advanced in years, the thing becomes ridiculous, and I feel towards philosophers as I do towards those who lisp and imitate children. For I love to see a little child, who is not of an age to speak plainly, lisping at his play; there is an appearance of grace and freedom in his utterance, which is natural to his childish years. But when I hear some small creature carefully articulating its words, I am offended; the sound is disagreeable, and has to my ears the twang of slavery. So when I hear a man lisping, or see him playing like a child, his behaviour appears to me ridiculous and unmanly and worthy of stripes. And I have the same feeling about students of philosophy; when I see a youth thus engaged,\u2014the study appears to me to be in character, and becoming a man of liberal education, and him who neglects philosophy I regard as an inferior man, who will never aspire to anything great or noble. But if I see him continuing the study in later life, and not leaving off, I should like to beat him, Socrates; for, as I was saying, such a one, even though he have good natural parts, becomes effeminate. He flies from the busy centre and the market-place, in which, as the poet says, men become distinguished; he creeps into a corner for the rest of his life, and talks in a whisper with three or four admiring youths, but never speaks out like a freeman in a satisfactory manner. Now I, Socrates, am very well inclined towards you, and my feeling may be compared with that of Zethus towards Amphion, in the play of Euripides, whom I was mentioning just now: for I am disposed to say to you much what Zethus said to his brother, that you, Socrates, are careless about the things of which you ought to be careful; and that you \u201cWho have a soul so noble, are remarkable for a puerile exterior; Neither in a court of justice could you state a case, or give any reason or proof, Or offer valiant counsel on another\u2019s behalf.\u201d And you must not be offended, my dear Socrates, for I am speaking out of good-will towards you, if I ask whether you are not ashamed of being thus defenceless; which I affirm to be the condition not of you only but of all those who will carry the study of philosophy too far. For suppose that some one were to take you, or any one of your sort, off to prison, declaring that you had done wrong when you had done no wrong, you must allow that you would not know what to do:\u2014there you would stand giddy and gaping, and not having a word to say; and when you went up before the Court, even if the accuser were a poor creature and not good for much, you would die if he were disposed to claim the penalty of death. And yet, Socrates, what is the value of \u201cAn art which converts a man of sense into a fool,\u201d who is helpless, and has no power to save either himself or others, when he is in the greatest danger and is going to be despoiled by his enemies of all his goods, and has to live, simply deprived of his rights of citizenship?\u2014he being a man who, if I may use the expression, may be boxed on the ears with impunity. Then, my good friend, take my advice, and refute no more: \u201cLearn the philosophy of business, and acquire the reputation of wisdom. But leave to others these niceties,\u201d whether they are to be described as follies or absurdities: \u201cFor they will only Give you poverty for the inmate of your dwelling.\u201d Cease, then, emulating these paltry splitters of words, and emulate only the man of substance and honour, who is well to do."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If my soul, Callicles, were made of gold, should I not rejoice to discover one of those stones with which they test gold, and the very best possible one to which I might bring my soul; and if the stone and I agreed in approving of her training, then I should know that I was in a satisfactory state, and that no other test was needed by me."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"What is your meaning, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will tell you; I think that I have found in you the desired touchstone."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Why?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because I am sure that if you agree with me in any of the opinions which my soul forms, I have at last found the truth indeed. For I consider that if a man is to make a complete trial of the good or evil of the soul, he ought to have three qualities\u2014knowledge, good-will, outspokenness, which are all possessed by you. Many whom I meet are unable to make trial of me, because they are not wise as you are; others are wise, but they will not tell me the truth, because they have not the same interest in me which you have; and these two strangers, Gorgias and Polus, are undoubtedly wise men and my very good friends, but they are not outspoken enough, and they are too modest. Why, their modesty is so great that they are driven to contradict themselves, first one and then the other of them, in the face of a large company, on matters of the highest moment. But you have all the qualities in which these others are deficient, having received an excellent education; to this many Athenians can testify. And you are my friend. Shall I tell you why I think so? I know that you, Callicles, and Tisander of Aphidnae, and Andron the son of Androtion, and Nausicydes of the deme of Cholarges, studied together: there were four of you, and I once heard you advising with one another as to the extent to which the pursuit of philosophy should be carried, and, as I know, you came to the conclusion that the study should not be pushed too much into detail. You were cautioning one another not to be overwise; you were afraid that too much wisdom might unconsciously to yourselves be the ruin of you. And now when I hear you giving the same advice to me which you then gave to your most intimate friends, I have a sufficient evidence of your real good-will to me. And of the frankness of your nature and freedom from modesty I am assured by yourself, and the assurance is confirmed by your last speech. Well then, the inference in the present case clearly is, that if you agree with me in an argument about any point, that point will have been sufficiently tested by us, and will not require to be submitted to any further test. For you could not have agreed with me, either from lack of knowledge or from superfluity of modesty, nor yet from a desire to deceive me, for you are my friend, as you tell me yourself. And therefore when you and I are agreed, the result will be the attainment of perfect truth. Now there is no nobler enquiry, Callicles, than that which you censure me for making,\u2014What ought the character of a man to be, and what his pursuits, and how far is he to go, both in maturer years and in youth? For be assured that if I err in my own conduct I do not err intentionally, but from ignorance. Do not then desist from advising me, now that you have begun, until I have learned clearly what this is which I am to practise, and how I may acquire it. And if you find me assenting to your words, and hereafter not doing that to which I assented, call me \u201cdolt,\u201d and deem me unworthy of receiving further instruction. Once more, then, tell me what you and Pindar mean by natural justice: Do you not mean that the superior should take the property of the inferior by force; that the better should rule the worse, the noble have more than the mean? Am I not right in my recollection?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes; that is what I was saying, and so I still aver."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you mean by the better the same as the superior? for I could not make out what you were saying at the time\u2014whether you meant by the superior the stronger, and that the weaker must obey the stronger, as you seemed to imply when you said that great cities attack small ones in accordance with natural right, because they are superior and stronger, as though the superior and stronger and better were the same; or whether the better may be also the inferior and weaker, and the superior the worse, or whether better is to be defined in the same way as superior:\u2014this is the point which I want to have cleared up. Are the superior and better and stronger the same or different?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I say unequivocally that they are the same."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the many are by nature superior to the one, against whom, as you were saying, they make the laws?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the laws of the many are the laws of the superior?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then they are the laws of the better; for the superior class are far better, as you were saying?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And since they are superior, the laws which are made by them are by nature good?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are not the many of opinion, as you were lately saying, that justice is equality, and that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice?\u2014is that so or not? Answer, Callicles, and let no modesty be found to come in the way; do the many think, or do they not think thus?\u2014I must beg of you to answer, in order that if you agree with me I may fortify myself by the assent of so competent an authority."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes; the opinion of the many is what you say."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then not only custom but nature also affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality; so that you seem to have been wrong in your former assertion, when accusing me you said that nature and custom are opposed, and that I, knowing this, was dishonestly playing between them, appealing to custom when the argument is about nature, and to nature when the argument is about custom?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"This man will never cease talking nonsense. At your age, Socrates, are you not ashamed to be catching at words and chuckling over some verbal slip? do you not see\u2014have I not told you already, that by superior I mean better: do you imagine me to say, that if a rabble of slaves and nondescripts, who are of no use except perhaps for their physical strength, get together, their ipsissima verba are laws?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Ho! my philosopher, is that your line?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I was thinking, Callicles, that something of the kind must have been in your mind, and that is why I repeated the question,\u2014What is the superior? I wanted to know clearly what you meant; for you surely do not think that two men are better than one, or that your slaves are better than you because they are stronger? Then please to begin again, and tell me who the better are, if they are not the stronger; and I will ask you, great Sir, to be a little milder in your instructions, or I shall have to run away from you."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"You are ironical."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No, by the hero Zethus, Callicles, by whose aid you were just now saying many ironical things against me, I am not:\u2014tell me, then, whom you mean, by the better?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I mean the more excellent."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you not see that you are yourself using words which have no meaning and that you are explaining nothing?\u2014will you tell me whether you mean by the better and superior the wiser, or if not, whom?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Most assuredly, I do mean the wiser."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then according to you, one wise man may often be superior to ten thousand fools, and he ought to rule them, and they ought to be his subjects, and he ought to have more than they should. This is what I believe that you mean (and you must not suppose that I am word-catching), if you allow that the one is superior to the ten thousand?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes; that is what I mean, and that is what I conceive to be natural justice\u2014that the better and wiser should rule and have more than the inferior."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Stop there, and let me ask you what you would say in this case: Let us suppose that we are all together as we are now; there are several of us, and we have a large common store of meats and drinks, and there are all sorts of persons in our company having various degrees of strength and weakness, and one of us, being a physician, is wiser in the matter of food than all the rest, and he is probably stronger than some and not so strong as others of us\u2014will he not, being wiser, be also better than we are, and our superior in this matter of food?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Either, then, he will have a larger share of the meats and drinks, because he is better, or he will have the distribution of all of them by reason of his authority, but he will not expend or make use of a larger share of them on his own person, or if he does, he will be punished;\u2014his share will exceed that of some, and be less than that of others, and if he be the weakest of all, he being the best of all will have the smallest share of all, Callicles:\u2014am I not right, my friend?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"You talk about meats and drinks and physicians and other nonsense; I am not speaking of them."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but do you admit that the wiser is the better? Answer \u201cYes\u201d or \u201cNo.\u201d"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And ought not the better to have a larger share?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Not of meats and drinks."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I understand: then, perhaps, of coats\u2014the skilfullest weaver ought to have the largest coat, and the greatest number of them, and go about clothed in the best and finest of them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Fudge about coats!"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the skilfullest and best in making shoes ought to have the advantage in shoes; the shoemaker, clearly, should walk about in the largest shoes, and have the greatest number of them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Fudge about shoes! What nonsense are you talking?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or, if this is not your meaning, perhaps you would say that the wise and good and true husbandman should actually have a larger share of seeds, and have as much seed as possible for his own land?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"How you go on, always talking in the same way, Socrates!"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Callicles, and also about the same things."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, by the Gods, you are literally always talking of cobblers and fullers and cooks and doctors, as if this had to do with our argument."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But why will you not tell me in what a man must be superior and wiser in order to claim a larger share; will you neither accept a suggestion, nor offer one?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I have already told you. In the first place, I mean by superiors not cobblers or cooks, but wise politicians who understand the administration of a state, and who are not only wise, but also valiant and able to carry out their designs, and not the men to faint from want of soul."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"See now, most excellent Callicles, how different my charge against you is from that which you bring against me, for you reproach me with always saying the same; but I reproach you with never saying the same about the same things, for at one time you were defining the better and the superior to be the stronger, then again as the wiser, and now you bring forward a new notion; the superior and the better are now declared by you to be the more courageous: I wish, my good friend, that you would tell me, once for all, whom you affirm to be the better and superior, and in what they are better?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I have already told you that I mean those who are wise and courageous in the administration of a state\u2014they ought to be the rulers of their states, and justice consists in their having more than their subjects."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But whether rulers or subjects will they or will they not have more than themselves, my friend?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean that every man is his own ruler; but perhaps you think that there is no necessity for him to rule himself; he is only required to rule others?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"What do you mean by his \u201cruling over himself\u201d?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A simple thing enough; just what is commonly said, that a man should be temperate and master of himself, and ruler of his own pleasures and passions."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"What innocence! you mean those fools,\u2014the temperate?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Certainly:\u2014any one may know that to be my meaning."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Quite so, Socrates; and they are really fools, for how can a man be happy who is the servant of anything? On the contrary, I plainly assert, that he who would truly live ought to allow his desires to wax to the uttermost, and not to chastise them; but when they have grown to their greatest he should have courage and intelligence to minister to them and to satisfy all his longings. And this I affirm to be natural justice and nobility. To this however the many cannot attain; and they blame the strong man because they are ashamed of their own weakness, which they desire to conceal, and hence they say that intemperance is base. As I have remarked already, they enslave the nobler natures, and being unable to satisfy their pleasures, they praise temperance and justice out of their own cowardice. For if a man had been originally the son of a king, or had a nature capable of acquiring an empire or a tyranny or sovereignty, what could be more truly base or evil than temperance\u2014to a man like him, I say, who might freely be enjoying every good, and has no one to stand in his way, and yet has admitted custom and reason and the opinion of other men to be lords over him?\u2014must not he be in a miserable plight whom the reputation of justice and temperance hinders from giving more to his friends than to his enemies, even though he be a ruler in his city? Nay, Socrates, for you profess to be a votary of the truth, and the truth is this:\u2014that luxury and intemperance and licence, if they be provided with means, are virtue and happiness\u2014all the rest is a mere bauble, agreements contrary to nature, foolish talk of men, nothing worth. (Compare Republic.)"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is a noble freedom, Callicles, in your way of approaching the argument; for what you say is what the rest of the world think, but do not like to say. And I must beg of you to persevere, that the true rule of human life may become manifest. Tell me, then:\u2014you say, do you not, that in the rightly-developed man the passions ought not to be controlled, but that we should let them grow to the utmost and somehow or other satisfy them, and that this is virtue?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes; I do."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then those who want nothing are not truly said to be happy?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"No indeed, for then stones and dead men would be the happiest of all."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But surely life according to your view is an awful thing; and indeed I think that Euripides may have been right in saying, \u201cWho knows if life be not death and death life;\u201d and that we are very likely dead; I have heard a philosopher say that at this moment we are actually dead, and that the body (soma) is our tomb (sema (compare Phaedr.)), and that the part of the soul which is the seat of the desires is liable to be tossed about by words and blown up and down; and some ingenious person, probably a Sicilian or an Italian, playing with the word, invented a tale in which he called the soul\u2014because of its believing and make-believe nature\u2014a vessel (An untranslatable pun,\u2014dia to pithanon te kai pistikon onomase pithon.), and the ignorant he called the uninitiated or leaky, and the place in the souls of the uninitiated in which the desires are seated, being the intemperate and incontinent part, he compared to a vessel full of holes, because it can never be satisfied. He is not of your way of thinking, Callicles, for he declares, that of all the souls in Hades, meaning the invisible world (aeides), these uninitiated or leaky persons are the most miserable, and that they pour water into a vessel which is full of holes out of a colander which is similarly perforated. The colander, as my informer assures me, is the soul, and the soul which he compares to a colander is the soul of the ignorant, which is likewise full of holes, and therefore incontinent, owing to a bad memory and want of faith. These notions are strange enough, but they show the principle which, if I can, I would fain prove to you; that you should change your mind, and, instead of the intemperate and insatiate life, choose that which is orderly and sufficient and has a due provision for daily needs. Do I make any impression on you, and are you coming over to the opinion that the orderly are happier than the intemperate? Or do I fail to persuade you, and, however many tales I rehearse to you, do you continue of the same opinion still?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"The latter, Socrates, is more like the truth."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, I will tell you another image, which comes out of the same school:\u2014Let me request you to consider how far you would accept this as an account of the two lives of the temperate and intemperate in a figure:\u2014There are two men, both of whom have a number of casks; the one man has his casks sound and full, one of wine, another of honey, and a third of milk, besides others filled with other liquids, and the streams which fill them are few and scanty, and he can only obtain them with a great deal of toil and difficulty; but when his casks are once filled he has no need to feed them any more, and has no further trouble with them or care about them. The other, in like manner, can procure streams, though not without difficulty; but his vessels are leaky and unsound, and night and day he is compelled to be filling them, and if he pauses for a moment, he is in an agony of pain. Such are their respective lives:\u2014And now would you say that the life of the intemperate is happier than that of the temperate? Do I not convince you that the opposite is the truth?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"You do not convince me, Socrates, for the one who has filled himself has no longer any pleasure left; and this, as I was just now saying, is the life of a stone: he has neither joy nor sorrow after he is once filled; but the pleasure depends on the superabundance of the influx."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But the more you pour in, the greater the waste; and the holes must be large for the liquid to escape."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The life which you are now depicting is not that of a dead man, or of a stone, but of a cormorant; you mean that he is to be hungering and eating?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he is to be thirsting and drinking?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, that is what I mean; he is to have all his desires about him, and to be able to live happily in the gratification of them."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Capital, excellent; go on as you have begun, and have no shame; I, too, must disencumber myself of shame: and first, will you tell me whether you include itching and scratching, provided you have enough of them and pass your life in scratching, in your notion of happiness?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"What a strange being you are, Socrates! a regular mob-orator."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That was the reason, Callicles, why I scared Polus and Gorgias, until they were too modest to say what they thought; but you will not be too modest and will not be scared, for you are a brave man. And now, answer my question."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I answer, that even the scratcher would live pleasantly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if pleasantly, then also happily?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But what if the itching is not confined to the head? Shall I pursue the question? And here, Callicles, I would have you consider how you would reply if consequences are pressed upon you, especially if in the last resort you are asked, whether the life of a catamite is not terrible, foul, miserable? Or would you venture to say, that they too are happy, if they only get enough of what they want?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Are you not ashamed, Socrates, of introducing such topics into the argument?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, my fine friend, but am I the introducer of these topics, or he who says without any qualification that all who feel pleasure in whatever manner are happy, and who admits of no distinction between good and bad pleasures? And I would still ask, whether you say that pleasure and good are the same, or whether there is some pleasure which is not a good?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Well, then, for the sake of consistency, I will say that they are the same."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You are breaking the original agreement, Callicles, and will no longer be a satisfactory companion in the search after truth, if you say what is contrary to your real opinion."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Why, that is what you are doing too, Socrates."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we are both doing wrong. Still, my dear friend, I would ask you to consider whether pleasure, from whatever source derived, is the good; for, if this be true, then the disagreeable consequences which have been darkly intimated must follow, and many others."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"That, Socrates, is only your opinion."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you, Callicles, seriously maintain what you are saying?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Indeed I do."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, as you are in earnest, shall we proceed with the argument?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"By all means. (Or, \u201cI am in profound earnest.\u201d)"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, if you are willing to proceed, determine this question for me:\u2014There is something, I presume, which you would call knowledge?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"There is."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And were you not saying just now, that some courage implied knowledge?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I was."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you were speaking of courage and knowledge as two things different from one another?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly I was."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you say that pleasure and knowledge are the same, or not the same?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Not the same, O man of wisdom."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you say that courage differed from pleasure?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, let us remember that Callicles, the Acharnian, says that pleasure and good are the same; but that knowledge and courage are not the same, either with one another, or with the good."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"And what does our friend Socrates, of Foxton, say\u2014does he assent to this, or not?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He does not assent; neither will Callicles, when he sees himself truly. You will admit, I suppose, that good and evil fortune are opposed to each other?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if they are opposed to each other, then, like health and disease, they exclude one another; a man cannot have them both, or be without them both, at the same time?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Take the case of any bodily affection:\u2014a man may have the complaint in his eyes which is called ophthalmia?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But he surely cannot have the same eyes well and sound at the same time?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when he has got rid of his ophthalmia, has he got rid of the health of his eyes too? Is the final result, that he gets rid of them both together?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That would surely be marvellous and absurd?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Very."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I suppose that he is affected by them, and gets rid of them in turns?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he may have strength and weakness in the same way, by fits?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or swiftness and slowness?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does he have and not have good and happiness, and their opposites, evil and misery, in a similar alternation? (Compare Republic.)"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly he has."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If then there be anything which a man has and has not at the same time, clearly that cannot be good and evil\u2014do we agree? Please not to answer without consideration."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I entirely agree."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Go back now to our former admissions.\u2014Did you say that to hunger, I mean the mere state of hunger, was pleasant or painful?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I said painful, but that to eat when you are hungry is pleasant."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I know; but still the actual hunger is painful: am I not right?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And thirst, too, is painful?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, very."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Need I adduce any more instances, or would you agree that all wants or desires are painful?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I agree, and therefore you need not adduce any more instances."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good. And you would admit that to drink, when you are thirsty, is pleasant?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in the sentence which you have just uttered, the word \u201cthirsty\u201d implies pain?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the word \u201cdrinking\u201d is expressive of pleasure, and of the satisfaction of the want?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is pleasure in drinking?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When you are thirsty?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in pain?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you see the inference:\u2014that pleasure and pain are simultaneous, when you say that being thirsty, you drink? For are they not simultaneous, and do they not affect at the same time the same part, whether of the soul or the body?\u2014which of them is affected cannot be supposed to be of any consequence: Is not this true?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"It is."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You said also, that no man could have good and evil fortune at the same time?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, I did."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But you admitted, that when in pain a man might also have pleasure?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then pleasure is not the same as good fortune, or pain the same as evil fortune, and therefore the good is not the same as the pleasant?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I wish I knew, Socrates, what your quibbling means."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You know, Callicles, but you affect not to know."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Well, get on, and don\u2019t keep fooling: then you will know what a wiseacre you are in your admonition of me."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Does not a man cease from his thirst and from his pleasure in drinking at the same time?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I do not understand what you are saying."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"Nay, Callicles, answer, if only for our sakes;\u2014we should like to hear the argument out."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, Gorgias, but I must complain of the habitual trifling of Socrates; he is always arguing about little and unworthy questions."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"What matter? Your reputation, Callicles, is not at stake. Let Socrates argue in his own fashion."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Well, then, Socrates, you shall ask these little peddling questions, since Gorgias wishes to have them."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I envy you, Callicles, for having been initiated into the great mysteries before you were initiated into the lesser. I thought that this was not allowable. But to return to our argument:\u2014Does not a man cease from thirsting and from the pleasure of drinking at the same moment?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he is hungry, or has any other desire, does he not cease from the desire and the pleasure at the same moment?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he ceases from pain and pleasure at the same moment?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But he does not cease from good and evil at the same moment, as you have admitted: do you still adhere to what you said?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, I do; but what is the inference?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, my friend, the inference is that the good is not the same as the pleasant, or the evil the same as the painful; there is a cessation of pleasure and pain at the same moment; but not of good and evil, for they are different. How then can pleasure be the same as good, or pain as evil? And I would have you look at the matter in another light, which could hardly, I think, have been considered by you when you identified them: Are not the good good because they have good present with them, as the beautiful are those who have beauty present with them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you call the fools and cowards good men? For you were saying just now that the courageous and the wise are the good\u2014would you not say so?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And did you never see a foolish child rejoicing?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, I have."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And a foolish man too?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly; but what is your drift?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nothing particular, if you will only answer."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, I have."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And did you ever see a sensible man rejoicing or sorrowing?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Which rejoice and sorrow most\u2014the wise or the foolish?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"They are much upon a par, I think, in that respect."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Enough: And did you ever see a coward in battle?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And which rejoiced most at the departure of the enemy, the coward or the brave?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I should say \u201cmost\u201d of both; or at any rate, they rejoiced about equally."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No matter; then the cowards, and not only the brave, rejoice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Greatly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the foolish; so it would seem?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are only the cowards pained at the approach of their enemies, or are the brave also pained?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Both are pained."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are they equally pained?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I should imagine that the cowards are more pained."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are they not better pleased at the enemy\u2019s departure?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I dare say."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then are the foolish and the wise and the cowards and the brave all pleased and pained, as you were saying, in nearly equal degree; but are the cowards more pleased and pained than the brave?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But surely the wise and brave are the good, and the foolish and the cowardly are the bad?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the good and the bad are pleased and pained in a nearly equal degree?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then are the good and bad good and bad in a nearly equal degree, or have the bad the advantage both in good and evil? (i.e. in having more pleasure and more pain.)"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I really do not know what you mean."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, do you not remember saying that the good were good because good was present with them, and the evil because evil; and that pleasures were goods and pains evils?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, I remember."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are not these pleasures or goods present to those who rejoice\u2014if they do rejoice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then those who rejoice are good when goods are present with them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And those who are in pain have evil or sorrow present with them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you still say that the evil are evil by reason of the presence of evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then those who rejoice are good, and those who are in pain evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The degrees of good and evil vary with the degrees of pleasure and of pain?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Have the wise man and the fool, the brave and the coward, joy and pain in nearly equal degrees? or would you say that the coward has more?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I should say that he has."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Help me then to draw out the conclusion which follows from our admissions; for it is good to repeat and review what is good twice and thrice over, as they say. Both the wise man and the brave man we allow to be good?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the foolish man and the coward to be evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who has joy is good?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who is in pain is evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The good and evil both have joy and pain, but, perhaps, the evil has more of them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then must we not infer, that the bad man is as good and bad as the good, or, perhaps, even better?\u2014is not this a further inference which follows equally with the preceding from the assertion that the good and the pleasant are the same:\u2014can this be denied, Callicles?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I have been listening and making admissions to you, Socrates; and I remark that if a person grants you anything in play, you, like a child, want to keep hold and will not give it back. But do you really suppose that I or any other human being denies that some pleasures are good and others bad?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Alas, Callicles, how unfair you are! you certainly treat me as if I were a child, sometimes saying one thing, and then another, as if you were meaning to deceive me. And yet I thought at first that you were my friend, and would not have deceived me if you could have helped. But I see that I was mistaken; and now I suppose that I must make the best of a bad business, as they said of old, and take what I can get out of you.\u2014Well, then, as I understand you to say, I may assume that some pleasures are good and others evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The beneficial are good, and the hurtful are evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the beneficial are those which do some good, and the hurtful are those which do some evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Take, for example, the bodily pleasures of eating and drinking, which we were just now mentioning\u2014you mean to say that those which promote health, or any other bodily excellence, are good, and their opposites evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in the same way there are good pains and there are evil pains?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And ought we not to choose and use the good pleasures and pains?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But not the evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because, if you remember, Polus and I have agreed that all our actions are to be done for the sake of the good;\u2014and will you agree with us in saying, that the good is the end of all our actions, and that all our actions are to be done for the sake of the good, and not the good for the sake of them?\u2014will you add a third vote to our two?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I will."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then pleasure, like everything else, is to be sought for the sake of that which is good, and not that which is good for the sake of pleasure?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But can every man choose what pleasures are good and what are evil, or must he have art or knowledge of them in detail?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"He must have art."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me now remind you of what I was saying to Gorgias and Polus; I was saying, as you will not have forgotten, that there were some processes which aim only at pleasure, and know nothing of a better and worse, and there are other processes which know good and evil. And I considered that cookery, which I do not call an art, but only an experience, was of the former class, which is concerned with pleasure, and that the art of medicine was of the class which is concerned with the good. And now, by the god of friendship, I must beg you, Callicles, not to jest, or to imagine that I am jesting with you; do not answer at random and contrary to your real opinion\u2014for you will observe that we are arguing about the way of human life; and to a man who has any sense at all, what question can be more serious than this?\u2014whether he should follow after that way of life to which you exhort me, and act what you call the manly part of speaking in the assembly, and cultivating rhetoric, and engaging in public affairs, according to the principles now in vogue; or whether he should pursue the life of philosophy;\u2014and in what the latter way differs from the former. But perhaps we had better first try to distinguish them, as I did before, and when we have come to an agreement that they are distinct, we may proceed to consider in what they differ from one another, and which of them we should choose. Perhaps, however, you do not even now understand what I mean?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"No, I do not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I will explain myself more clearly: seeing that you and I have agreed that there is such a thing as good, and that there is such a thing as pleasure, and that pleasure is not the same as good, and that the pursuit and process of acquisition of the one, that is pleasure, is different from the pursuit and process of acquisition of the other, which is good\u2014I wish that you would tell me whether you agree with me thus far or not\u2014do you agree?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I will proceed, and ask whether you also agree with me, and whether you think that I spoke the truth when I further said to Gorgias and Polus that cookery in my opinion is only an experience, and not an art at all; and that whereas medicine is an art, and attends to the nature and constitution of the patient, and has principles of action and reason in each case, cookery in attending upon pleasure never regards either the nature or reason of that pleasure to which she devotes herself, but goes straight to her end, nor ever considers or calculates anything, but works by experience and routine, and just preserves the recollection of what she has usually done when producing pleasure. And first, I would have you consider whether I have proved what I was saying, and then whether there are not other similar processes which have to do with the soul\u2014some of them processes of art, making a provision for the soul\u2019s highest interest\u2014others despising the interest, and, as in the previous case, considering only the pleasure of the soul, and how this may be acquired, but not considering what pleasures are good or bad, and having no other aim but to afford gratification, whether good or bad. In my opinion, Callicles, there are such processes, and this is the sort of thing which I term flattery, whether concerned with the body or the soul, or whenever employed with a view to pleasure and without any consideration of good and evil. And now I wish that you would tell me whether you agree with us in this notion, or whether you differ."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I do not differ; on the contrary, I agree; for in that way I shall soonest bring the argument to an end, and shall oblige my friend Gorgias."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is this notion true of one soul, or of two or more?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Equally true of two or more."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then a man may delight a whole assembly, and yet have no regard for their true interests?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Can you tell me the pursuits which delight mankind\u2014or rather, if you would prefer, let me ask, and do you answer, which of them belong to the pleasurable class, and which of them not? In the first place, what say you of flute-playing? Does not that appear to be an art which seeks only pleasure, Callicles, and thinks of nothing else?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I assent."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not the same true of all similar arts, as, for example, the art of playing the lyre at festivals?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what do you say of the choral art and of dithyrambic poetry?\u2014are not they of the same nature? Do you imagine that Cinesias the son of Meles cares about what will tend to the moral improvement of his hearers, or about what will give pleasure to the multitude?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"There can be no mistake about Cinesias, Socrates."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what do you say of his father, Meles the harp-player? Did he perform with any view to the good of his hearers? Could he be said to regard even their pleasure? For his singing was an infliction to his audience. And of harp-playing and dithyrambic poetry in general, what would you say? Have they not been invented wholly for the sake of pleasure?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"That is my notion of them."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And as for the Muse of Tragedy, that solemn and august personage\u2014what are her aspirations? Is all her aim and desire only to give pleasure to the spectators, or does she fight against them and refuse to speak of their pleasant vices, and willingly proclaim in word and song truths welcome and unwelcome?\u2014which in your judgment is her character?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"There can be no doubt, Socrates, that Tragedy has her face turned towards pleasure and the gratification of the audience."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not that the sort of thing, Callicles, which we were just now describing as flattery?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well now, suppose that we strip all poetry of song and rhythm and metre, there will remain speech? (Compare Republic.)"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And this speech is addressed to a crowd of people?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then poetry is a sort of rhetoric?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do not the poets in the theatres seem to you to be rhetoricians?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now we have discovered a sort of rhetoric which is addressed to a crowd of men, women, and children, freemen and slaves. And this is not much to our taste, for we have described it as having the nature of flattery."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good. And what do you say of that other rhetoric which addresses the Athenian assembly and the assemblies of freemen in other states? Do the rhetoricians appear to you always to aim at what is best, and do they seek to improve the citizens by their speeches, or are they too, like the rest of mankind, bent upon giving them pleasure, forgetting the public good in the thought of their own interest, playing with the people as with children, and trying to amuse them, but never considering whether they are better or worse for this?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I must distinguish. There are some who have a real care of the public in what they say, while others are such as you describe."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am contented with the admission that rhetoric is of two sorts; one, which is mere flattery and disgraceful declamation; the other, which is noble and aims at the training and improvement of the souls of the citizens, and strives to say what is best, whether welcome or unwelcome, to the audience; but have you ever known such a rhetoric; or if you have, and can point out any rhetorician who is of this stamp, who is he?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"But, indeed, I am afraid that I cannot tell you of any such among the orators who are at present living."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, can you mention any one of a former generation, who may be said to have improved the Athenians, who found them worse and made them better, from the day that he began to make speeches? for, indeed, I do not know of such a man."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"What! did you never hear that Themistocles was a good man, and Cimon and Miltiades and Pericles, who is just lately dead, and whom you heard yourself?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Callicles, they were good men, if, as you said at first, true virtue consists only in the satisfaction of our own desires and those of others; but if not, and if, as we were afterwards compelled to acknowledge, the satisfaction of some desires makes us better, and of others, worse, and we ought to gratify the one and not the other, and there is an art in distinguishing them,\u2014can you tell me of any of these statesmen who did distinguish them?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"No, indeed, I cannot."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yet, surely, Callicles, if you look you will find such a one. Suppose that we just calmly consider whether any of these was such as I have described. Will not the good man, who says whatever he says with a view to the best, speak with a reference to some standard and not at random; just as all other artists, whether the painter, the builder, the shipwright, or any other look all of them to their own work, and do not select and apply at random what they apply, but strive to give a definite form to it? The artist disposes all things in order, and compels the one part to harmonize and accord with the other part, until he has constructed a regular and systematic whole; and this is true of all artists, and in the same way the trainers and physicians, of whom we spoke before, give order and regularity to the body: do you deny this?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"No; I am ready to admit it."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the house in which order and regularity prevail is good; that in which there is disorder, evil?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same is true of a ship?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same may be said of the human body?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what would you say of the soul? Will the good soul be that in which disorder is prevalent, or that in which there is harmony and order?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"The latter follows from our previous admissions."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What is the name which is given to the effect of harmony and order in the body?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I suppose that you mean health and strength?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, I do; and what is the name which you would give to the effect of harmony and order in the soul? Try and discover a name for this as well as for the other."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Why not give the name yourself, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, if you had rather that I should, I will; and you shall say whether you agree with me, and if not, you shall refute and answer me. \u201cHealthy,\u201d as I conceive, is the name which is given to the regular order of the body, whence comes health and every other bodily excellence: is that true or not?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And \u201clawful\u201d and \u201claw\u201d are the names which are given to the regular order and action of the soul, and these make men lawful and orderly:\u2014and so we have temperance and justice: have we not?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Granted."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will not the true rhetorician who is honest and understands his art have his eye fixed upon these, in all the words which he addresses to the souls of men, and in all his actions, both in what he gives and in what he takes away? Will not his aim be to implant justice in the souls of his citizens and take away injustice, to implant temperance and take away intemperance, to implant every virtue and take away every vice? Do you not agree?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"For what use is there, Callicles, in giving to the body of a sick man who is in a bad state of health a quantity of the most delightful food or drink or any other pleasant thing, which may be really as bad for him as if you gave him nothing, or even worse if rightly estimated. Is not that true?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I will not say No to it."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"For in my opinion there is no profit in a man\u2019s life if his body is in an evil plight\u2014in that case his life also is evil: am I not right?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When a man is in health the physicians will generally allow him to eat when he is hungry and drink when he is thirsty, and to satisfy his desires as he likes, but when he is sick they hardly suffer him to satisfy his desires at all: even you will admit that?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does not the same argument hold of the soul, my good sir? While she is in a bad state and is senseless and intemperate and unjust and unholy, her desires ought to be controlled, and she ought to be prevented from doing anything which does not tend to her own improvement."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Such treatment will be better for the soul herself?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And to restrain her from her appetites is to chastise her?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then restraint or chastisement is better for the soul than intemperance or the absence of control, which you were just now preferring?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I do not understand you, Socrates, and I wish that you would ask some one who does."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Here is a gentleman who cannot endure to be improved or to subject himself to that very chastisement of which the argument speaks!"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I do not heed a word of what you are saying, and have only answered hitherto out of civility to Gorgias."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What are we to do, then? Shall we break off in the middle?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"You shall judge for yourself."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but people say that \u201ca tale should have a head and not break off in the middle,\u201d and I should not like to have the argument going about without a head (compare Laws); please then to go on a little longer, and put the head on."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"How tyrannical you are, Socrates! I wish that you and your argument would rest, or that you would get some one else to argue with you."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But who else is willing?\u2014I want to finish the argument."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Cannot you finish without my help, either talking straight on, or questioning and answering yourself?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Must I then say with Epicharmus, \u201cTwo men spoke before, but now one shall be enough\u201d? I suppose that there is absolutely no help. And if I am to carry on the enquiry by myself, I will first of all remark that not only I but all of us should have an ambition to know what is true and what is false in this matter, for the discovery of the truth is a common good. And now I will proceed to argue according to my own notion. But if any of you think that I arrive at conclusions which are untrue you must interpose and refute me, for I do not speak from any knowledge of what I am saying; I am an enquirer like yourselves, and therefore, if my opponent says anything which is of force, I shall be the first to agree with him. I am speaking on the supposition that the argument ought to be completed; but if you think otherwise let us leave off and go our ways."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"GORGIAS","Dialogue":"I think, Socrates, that we should not go our ways until you have completed the argument; and this appears to me to be the wish of the rest of the company; I myself should very much like to hear what more you have to say."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I too, Gorgias, should have liked to continue the argument with Callicles, and then I might have given him an \u201cAmphion\u201d in return for his \u201cZethus\u201d; but since you, Callicles, are unwilling to continue, I hope that you will listen, and interrupt me if I seem to you to be in error. And if you refute me, I shall not be angry with you as you are with me, but I shall inscribe you as the greatest of benefactors on the tablets of my soul."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"My good fellow, never mind me, but get on."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Listen to me, then, while I recapitulate the argument:\u2014Is the pleasant the same as the good? Not the same. Callicles and I are agreed about that. And is the pleasant to be pursued for the sake of the good? or the good for the sake of the pleasant? The pleasant is to be pursued for the sake of the good. And that is pleasant at the presence of which we are pleased, and that is good at the presence of which we are good? To be sure. And we are good, and all good things whatever are good when some virtue is present in us or them? That, Callicles, is my conviction. But the virtue of each thing, whether body or soul, instrument or creature, when given to them in the best way comes to them not by chance but as the result of the order and truth and art which are imparted to them: Am I not right? I maintain that I am. And is not the virtue of each thing dependent on order or arrangement? Yes, I say. And that which makes a thing good is the proper order inhering in each thing? Such is my view. And is not the soul which has an order of her own better than that which has no order? Certainly. And the soul which has order is orderly? Of course. And that which is orderly is temperate? Assuredly. And the temperate soul is good? No other answer can I give, Callicles dear; have you any?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Go on, my good fellow."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I shall proceed to add, that if the temperate soul is the good soul, the soul which is in the opposite condition, that is, the foolish and intemperate, is the bad soul. Very true. And will not the temperate man do what is proper, both in relation to the gods and to men;\u2014for he would not be temperate if he did not? Certainly he will do what is proper. In his relation to other men he will do what is just; and in his relation to the gods he will do what is holy; and he who does what is just and holy must be just and holy? Very true. And must he not be courageous? for the duty of a temperate man is not to follow or to avoid what he ought not, but what he ought, whether things or men or pleasures or pains, and patiently to endure when he ought; and therefore, Callicles, the temperate man, being, as we have described, also just and courageous and holy, cannot be other than a perfectly good man, nor can the good man do otherwise than well and perfectly whatever he does; and he who does well must of necessity be happy and blessed, and the evil man who does evil, miserable: now this latter is he whom you were applauding\u2014the intemperate who is the opposite of the temperate. Such is my position, and these things I affirm to be true. And if they are true, then I further affirm that he who desires to be happy must pursue and practise temperance and run away from intemperance as fast as his legs will carry him: he had better order his life so as not to need punishment; but if either he or any of his friends, whether private individual or city, are in need of punishment, then justice must be done and he must suffer punishment, if he would be happy. This appears to me to be the aim which a man ought to have, and towards which he ought to direct all the energies both of himself and of the state, acting so that he may have temperance and justice present with him and be happy, not suffering his lusts to be unrestrained, and in the never-ending desire satisfy them leading a robber\u2019s life. Such a one is the friend neither of God nor man, for he is incapable of communion, and he who is incapable of communion is also incapable of friendship. And philosophers tell us, Callicles, that communion and friendship and orderliness and temperance and justice bind together heaven and earth and gods and men, and that this universe is therefore called Cosmos or order, not disorder or misrule, my friend. But although you are a philosopher you seem to me never to have observed that geometrical equality is mighty, both among gods and men; you think that you ought to cultivate inequality or excess, and do not care about geometry.\u2014Well, then, either the principle that the happy are made happy by the possession of justice and temperance, and the miserable miserable by the possession of vice, must be refuted, or, if it is granted, what will be the consequences? All the consequences which I drew before, Callicles, and about which you asked me whether I was in earnest when I said that a man ought to accuse himself and his son and his friend if he did anything wrong, and that to this end he should use his rhetoric\u2014all those consequences are true. And that which you thought that Polus was led to admit out of modesty is true, viz., that, to do injustice, if more disgraceful than to suffer, is in that degree worse; and the other position, which, according to Polus, Gorgias admitted out of modesty, that he who would truly be a rhetorician ought to be just and have a knowledge of justice, has also turned out to be true. And now, these things being as we have said, let us proceed in the next place to consider whether you are right in throwing in my teeth that I am unable to help myself or any of my friends or kinsmen, or to save them in the extremity of danger, and that I am in the power of another like an outlaw to whom any one may do what he likes,\u2014he may box my ears, which was a brave saying of yours; or take away my goods or banish me, or even do his worst and kill me; a condition which, as you say, is the height of disgrace. My answer to you is one which has been already often repeated, but may as well be repeated once more. I tell you, Callicles, that to be boxed on the ears wrongfully is not the worst evil which can befall a man, nor to have my purse or my body cut open, but that to smite and slay me and mine wrongfully is far more disgraceful and more evil; aye, and to despoil and enslave and pillage, or in any way at all to wrong me and mine, is far more disgraceful and evil to the doer of the wrong than to me who am the sufferer. These truths, which have been already set forth as I state them in the previous discussion, would seem now to have been fixed and riveted by us, if I may use an expression which is certainly bold, in words which are like bonds of iron and adamant; and unless you or some other still more enterprising hero shall break them, there is no possibility of denying what I say. For my position has always been, that I myself am ignorant how these things are, but that I have never met any one who could say otherwise, any more than you can, and not appear ridiculous. This is my position still, and if what I am saying is true, and injustice is the greatest of evils to the doer of injustice, and yet there is if possible a greater than this greatest of evils (compare Republic), in an unjust man not suffering retribution, what is that defence of which the want will make a man truly ridiculous? Must not the defence be one which will avert the greatest of human evils? And will not the worst of all defences be that with which a man is unable to defend himself or his family or his friends?\u2014and next will come that which is unable to avert the next greatest evil; thirdly that which is unable to avert the third greatest evil; and so of other evils. As is the greatness of evil so is the honour of being able to avert them in their several degrees, and the disgrace of not being able to avert them. Am I not right Callicles?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, quite right."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Seeing then that there are these two evils, the doing injustice and the suffering injustice\u2014and we affirm that to do injustice is a greater, and to suffer injustice a lesser evil\u2014by what devices can a man succeed in obtaining the two advantages, the one of not doing and the other of not suffering injustice? must he have the power, or only the will to obtain them? I mean to ask whether a man will escape injustice if he has only the will to escape, or must he have provided himself with the power?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"He must have provided himself with the power; that is clear."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what do you say of doing injustice? Is the will only sufficient, and will that prevent him from doing injustice, or must he have provided himself with power and art; and if he have not studied and practised, will he be unjust still? Surely you might say, Callicles, whether you think that Polus and I were right in admitting the conclusion that no one does wrong voluntarily, but that all do wrong against their will?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Granted, Socrates, if you will only have done."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, as would appear, power and art have to be provided in order that we may do no injustice?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what art will protect us from suffering injustice, if not wholly, yet as far as possible? I want to know whether you agree with me; for I think that such an art is the art of one who is either a ruler or even tyrant himself, or the equal and companion of the ruling power."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Well said, Socrates; and please to observe how ready I am to praise you when you talk sense."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Think and tell me whether you would approve of another view of mine: To me every man appears to be most the friend of him who is most like to him\u2014like to like, as ancient sages say: Would you not agree to this?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But when the tyrant is rude and uneducated, he may be expected to fear any one who is his superior in virtue, and will never be able to be perfectly friendly with him."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Neither will he be the friend of any one who is greatly his inferior, for the tyrant will despise him, and will never seriously regard him as a friend."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"That again is true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the only friend worth mentioning, whom the tyrant can have, will be one who is of the same character, and has the same likes and dislikes, and is at the same time willing to be subject and subservient to him; he is the man who will have power in the state, and no one will injure him with impunity:\u2014is not that so?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if a young man begins to ask how he may become great and formidable, this would seem to be the way\u2014he will accustom himself, from his youth upward, to feel sorrow and joy on the same occasions as his master, and will contrive to be as like him as possible?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in this way he will have accomplished, as you and your friends would say, the end of becoming a great man and not suffering injury?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But will he also escape from doing injury? Must not the very opposite be true,\u2014if he is to be like the tyrant in his injustice, and to have influence with him? Will he not rather contrive to do as much wrong as possible, and not be punished?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And by the imitation of his master and by the power which he thus acquires will not his soul become bad and corrupted, and will not this be the greatest evil to him?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"You always contrive somehow or other, Socrates, to invert everything: do you not know that he who imitates the tyrant will, if he has a mind, kill him who does not imitate him and take away his goods?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Excellent Callicles, I am not deaf, and I have heard that a great many times from you and from Polus and from nearly every man in the city, but I wish that you would hear me too. I dare say that he will kill him if he has a mind\u2014the bad man will kill the good and true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"And is not that just the provoking thing?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nay, not to a man of sense, as the argument shows: do you think that all our cares should be directed to prolonging life to the uttermost, and to the study of those arts which secure us from danger always; like that art of rhetoric which saves men in courts of law, and which you advise me to cultivate?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, truly, and very good advice too."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, my friend, but what do you think of swimming; is that an art of any great pretensions?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"No, indeed."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet surely swimming saves a man from death, and there are occasions on which he must know how to swim. And if you despise the swimmers, I will tell you of another and greater art, the art of the pilot, who not only saves the souls of men, but also their bodies and properties from the extremity of danger, just like rhetoric. Yet his art is modest and unpresuming: it has no airs or pretences of doing anything extraordinary, and, in return for the same salvation which is given by the pleader, demands only two obols, if he brings us from Aegina to Athens, or for the longer voyage from Pontus or Egypt, at the utmost two drachmae, when he has saved, as I was just now saying, the passenger and his wife and children and goods, and safely disembarked them at the Piraeus,\u2014this is the payment which he asks in return for so great a boon; and he who is the master of the art, and has done all this, gets out and walks about on the sea-shore by his ship in an unassuming way. For he is able to reflect and is aware that he cannot tell which of his fellow-passengers he has benefited, and which of them he has injured in not allowing them to be drowned. He knows that they are just the same when he has disembarked them as when they embarked, and not a whit better either in their bodies or in their souls; and he considers that if a man who is afflicted by great and incurable bodily diseases is only to be pitied for having escaped, and is in no way benefited by him in having been saved from drowning, much less he who has great and incurable diseases, not of the body, but of the soul, which is the more valuable part of him; neither is life worth having nor of any profit to the bad man, whether he be delivered from the sea, or the law-courts, or any other devourer;\u2014and so he reflects that such a one had better not live, for he cannot live well. (Compare Republic.) And this is the reason why the pilot, although he is our saviour, is not usually conceited, any more than the engineer, who is not at all behind either the general, or the pilot, or any one else, in his saving power, for he sometimes saves whole cities. Is there any comparison between him and the pleader? And if he were to talk, Callicles, in your grandiose style, he would bury you under a mountain of words, declaring and insisting that we ought all of us to be engine-makers, and that no other profession is worth thinking about; he would have plenty to say. Nevertheless you despise him and his art, and sneeringly call him an engine-maker, and you will not allow your daughters to marry his son, or marry your son to his daughters. And yet, on your principle, what justice or reason is there in your refusal? What right have you to despise the engine-maker, and the others whom I was just now mentioning? I know that you will say, \u201cI am better, and better born.\u201d But if the better is not what I say, and virtue consists only in a man saving himself and his, whatever may be his character, then your censure of the engine-maker, and of the physician, and of the other arts of salvation, is ridiculous. O my friend! I want you to see that the noble and the good may possibly be something different from saving and being saved:\u2014May not he who is truly a man cease to care about living a certain time?\u2014he knows, as women say, that no man can escape fate, and therefore he is not fond of life; he leaves all that with God, and considers in what way he can best spend his appointed term;\u2014whether by assimilating himself to the constitution under which he lives, as you at this moment have to consider how you may become as like as possible to the Athenian people, if you mean to be in their good graces, and to have power in the state; whereas I want you to think and see whether this is for the interest of either of us;\u2014I would not have us risk that which is dearest on the acquisition of this power, like the Thessalian enchantresses, who, as they say, bring down the moon from heaven at the risk of their own perdition. But if you suppose that any man will show you the art of becoming great in the city, and yet not conforming yourself to the ways of the city, whether for better or worse, then I can only say that you are mistaken, Callides; for he who would deserve to be the true natural friend of the Athenian Demus, aye, or of Pyrilampes\u2019 darling who is called after them, must be by nature like them, and not an imitator only. He, then, who will make you most like them, will make you as you desire, a statesman and orator: for every man is pleased when he is spoken to in his own language and spirit, and dislikes any other. But perhaps you, sweet Callicles, may be of another mind. What do you say?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Somehow or other your words, Socrates, always appear to me to be good words; and yet, like the rest of the world, I am not quite convinced by them. (Compare Symp.: 1 Alcib.)"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The reason is, Callicles, that the love of Demus which abides in your soul is an adversary to me; but I dare say that if we recur to these same matters, and consider them more thoroughly, you may be convinced for all that. Please, then, to remember that there are two processes of training all things, including body and soul; in the one, as we said, we treat them with a view to pleasure, and in the other with a view to the highest good, and then we do not indulge but resist them: was not that the distinction which we drew?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the one which had pleasure in view was just a vulgar flattery:\u2014was not that another of our conclusions?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Be it so, if you will have it."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the other had in view the greatest improvement of that which was ministered to, whether body or soul?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And must we not have the same end in view in the treatment of our city and citizens? Must we not try and make them as good as possible? For we have already discovered that there is no use in imparting to them any other good, unless the mind of those who are to have the good, whether money, or office, or any other sort of power, be gentle and good. Shall we say that?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly, if you like."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, if you and I, Callicles, were intending to set about some public business, and were advising one another to undertake buildings, such as walls, docks or temples of the largest size, ought we not to examine ourselves, first, as to whether we know or do not know the art of building, and who taught us?\u2014would not that be necessary, Callicles?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the second place, we should have to consider whether we had ever constructed any private house, either of our own or for our friends, and whether this building of ours was a success or not; and if upon consideration we found that we had had good and eminent masters, and had been successful in constructing many fine buildings, not only with their assistance, but without them, by our own unaided skill\u2014in that case prudence would not dissuade us from proceeding to the construction of public works. But if we had no master to show, and only a number of worthless buildings or none at all, then, surely, it would be ridiculous in us to attempt public works, or to advise one another to undertake them. Is not this true?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does not the same hold in all other cases? If you and I were physicians, and were advising one another that we were competent to practise as state-physicians, should I not ask about you, and would you not ask about me, Well, but how about Socrates himself, has he good health? and was any one else ever known to be cured by him, whether slave or freeman? And I should make the same enquiries about you. And if we arrived at the conclusion that no one, whether citizen or stranger, man or woman, had ever been any the better for the medical skill of either of us, then, by Heaven, Callicles, what an absurdity to think that we or any human being should be so silly as to set up as state-physicians and advise others like ourselves to do the same, without having first practised in private, whether successfully or not, and acquired experience of the art! Is not this, as they say, to begin with the big jar when you are learning the potter\u2019s art; which is a foolish thing?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, my friend, as you are already beginning to be a public character, and are admonishing and reproaching me for not being one, suppose that we ask a few questions of one another. Tell me, then, Callicles, how about making any of the citizens better? Was there ever a man who was once vicious, or unjust, or intemperate, or foolish, and became by the help of Callicles good and noble? Was there ever such a man, whether citizen or stranger, slave or freeman? Tell me, Callicles, if a person were to ask these questions of you, what would you answer? Whom would you say that you had improved by your conversation? There may have been good deeds of this sort which were done by you as a private person, before you came forward in public. Why will you not answer?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"You are contentious, Socrates."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nay, I ask you, not from a love of contention, but because I really want to know in what way you think that affairs should be administered among us\u2014whether, when you come to the administration of them, you have any other aim but the improvement of the citizens? Have we not already admitted many times over that such is the duty of a public man? Nay, we have surely said so; for if you will not answer for yourself I must answer for you. But if this is what the good man ought to effect for the benefit of his own state, allow me to recall to you the names of those whom you were just now mentioning, Pericles, and Cimon, and Miltiades, and Themistocles, and ask whether you still think that they were good citizens."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if they were good, then clearly each of them must have made the citizens better instead of worse?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And, therefore, when Pericles first began to speak in the assembly, the Athenians were not so good as when he spoke last?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Very likely."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nay, my friend, \u201clikely\u201d is not the word; for if he was a good citizen, the inference is certain."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"And what difference does that make?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"None; only I should like further to know whether the Athenians are supposed to have been made better by Pericles, or, on the contrary, to have been corrupted by him; for I hear that he was the first who gave the people pay, and made them idle and cowardly, and encouraged them in the love of talk and money."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"You heard that, Socrates, from the laconising set who bruise their ears."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But what I am going to tell you now is not mere hearsay, but well known both to you and me: that at first, Pericles was glorious and his character unimpeached by any verdict of the Athenians\u2014this was during the time when they were not so good\u2014yet afterwards, when they had been made good and gentle by him, at the very end of his life they convicted him of theft, and almost put him to death, clearly under the notion that he was a malefactor."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Well, but how does that prove Pericles\u2019 badness?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, surely you would say that he was a bad manager of asses or horses or oxen, who had received them originally neither kicking nor butting nor biting him, and implanted in them all these savage tricks? Would he not be a bad manager of any animals who received them gentle, and made them fiercer than they were when he received them? What do you say?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I will do you the favour of saying \u201cyes.\u201d"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will you also do me the favour of saying whether man is an animal?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly he is."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And was not Pericles a shepherd of men?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he was a good political shepherd, ought not the animals who were his subjects, as we were just now acknowledging, to have become more just, and not more unjust?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are not just men gentle, as Homer says?\u2014or are you of another mind?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet he really did make them more savage than he received them, and their savageness was shown towards himself; which he must have been very far from desiring."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Do you want me to agree with you?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, if I seem to you to speak the truth."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Granted then."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if they were more savage, must they not have been more unjust and inferior?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Granted again."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then upon this view, Pericles was not a good statesman?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"That is, upon your view."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nay, the view is yours, after what you have admitted. Take the case of Cimon again. Did not the very persons whom he was serving ostracize him, in order that they might not hear his voice for ten years? and they did just the same to Themistocles, adding the penalty of exile; and they voted that Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, should be thrown into the pit of death, and he was only saved by the Prytanis. And yet, if they had been really good men, as you say, these things would never have happened to them. For the good charioteers are not those who at first keep their place, and then, when they have broken-in their horses, and themselves become better charioteers, are thrown out\u2014that is not the way either in charioteering or in any profession.\u2014What do you think?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I should think not."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but if so, the truth is as I have said already, that in the Athenian State no one has ever shown himself to be a good statesman\u2014you admitted that this was true of our present statesmen, but not true of former ones, and you preferred them to the others; yet they have turned out to be no better than our present ones; and therefore, if they were rhetoricians, they did not use the true art of rhetoric or of flattery, or they would not have fallen out of favour."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"But surely, Socrates, no living man ever came near any one of them in his performances."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"O, my dear friend, I say nothing against them regarded as the serving-men of the State; and I do think that they were certainly more serviceable than those who are living now, and better able to gratify the wishes of the State; but as to transforming those desires and not allowing them to have their way, and using the powers which they had, whether of persuasion or of force, in the improvement of their fellow citizens, which is the prime object of the truly good citizen, I do not see that in these respects they were a whit superior to our present statesmen, although I do admit that they were more clever at providing ships and walls and docks, and all that. You and I have a ridiculous way, for during the whole time that we are arguing, we are always going round and round to the same point, and constantly misunderstanding one another. If I am not mistaken, you have admitted and acknowledged more than once, that there are two kinds of operations which have to do with the body, and two which have to do with the soul: one of the two is ministerial, and if our bodies are hungry provides food for them, and if they are thirsty gives them drink, or if they are cold supplies them with garments, blankets, shoes, and all that they crave. I use the same images as before intentionally, in order that you may understand me the better. The purveyor of the articles may provide them either wholesale or retail, or he may be the maker of any of them,\u2014the baker, or the cook, or the weaver, or the shoemaker, or the currier; and in so doing, being such as he is, he is naturally supposed by himself and every one to minister to the body. For none of them know that there is another art\u2014an art of gymnastic and medicine which is the true minister of the body, and ought to be the mistress of all the rest, and to use their results according to the knowledge which she has and they have not, of the real good or bad effects of meats and drinks on the body. All other arts which have to do with the body are servile and menial and illiberal; and gymnastic and medicine are, as they ought to be, their mistresses. Now, when I say that all this is equally true of the soul, you seem at first to know and understand and assent to my words, and then a little while afterwards you come repeating, Has not the State had good and noble citizens? and when I ask you who they are, you reply, seemingly quite in earnest, as if I had asked, Who are or have been good trainers?\u2014and you had replied, Thearion, the baker, Mithoecus, who wrote the Sicilian cookery-book, Sarambus, the vintner: these are ministers of the body, first-rate in their art; for the first makes admirable loaves, the second excellent dishes, and the third capital wine;\u2014to me these appear to be the exact parallel of the statesmen whom you mention. Now you would not be altogether pleased if I said to you, My friend, you know nothing of gymnastics; those of whom you are speaking to me are only the ministers and purveyors of luxury, who have no good or noble notions of their art, and may very likely be filling and fattening men\u2019s bodies and gaining their approval, although the result is that they lose their original flesh in the long run, and become thinner than they were before; and yet they, in their simplicity, will not attribute their diseases and loss of flesh to their entertainers; but when in after years the unhealthy surfeit brings the attendant penalty of disease, he who happens to be near them at the time, and offers them advice, is accused and blamed by them, and if they could they would do him some harm; while they proceed to eulogize the men who have been the real authors of the mischief. And that, Callicles, is just what you are now doing. You praise the men who feasted the citizens and satisfied their desires, and people say that they have made the city great, not seeing that the swollen and ulcerated condition of the State is to be attributed to these elder statesmen; for they have filled the city full of harbours and docks and walls and revenues and all that, and have left no room for justice and temperance. And when the crisis of the disorder comes, the people will blame the advisers of the hour, and applaud Themistocles and Cimon and Pericles, who are the real authors of their calamities; and if you are not careful they may assail you and my friend Alcibiades, when they are losing not only their new acquisitions, but also their original possessions; not that you are the authors of these misfortunes of theirs, although you may perhaps be accessories to them. A great piece of work is always being made, as I see and am told, now as of old; about our statesmen. When the State treats any of them as malefactors, I observe that there is a great uproar and indignation at the supposed wrong which is done to them; \u201cafter all their many services to the State, that they should unjustly perish,\u201d\u2014so the tale runs. But the cry is all a lie; for no statesman ever could be unjustly put to death by the city of which he is the head. The case of the professed statesman is, I believe, very much like that of the professed sophist; for the sophists, although they are wise men, are nevertheless guilty of a strange piece of folly; professing to be teachers of virtue, they will often accuse their disciples of wronging them, and defrauding them of their pay, and showing no gratitude for their services. Yet what can be more absurd than that men who have become just and good, and whose injustice has been taken away from them, and who have had justice implanted in them by their teachers, should act unjustly by reason of the injustice which is not in them? Can anything be more irrational, my friends, than this? You, Callicles, compel me to be a mob-orator, because you will not answer."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"And you are the man who cannot speak unless there is some one to answer?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I suppose that I can; just now, at any rate, the speeches which I am making are long enough because you refuse to answer me. But I adjure you by the god of friendship, my good sir, do tell me whether there does not appear to you to be a great inconsistency in saying that you have made a man good, and then blaming him for being bad?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, it appears so to me."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you never hear our professors of education speaking in this inconsistent manner?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, but why talk of men who are good for nothing?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I would rather say, why talk of men who profess to be rulers, and declare that they are devoted to the improvement of the city, and nevertheless upon occasion declaim against the utter vileness of the city:\u2014do you think that there is any difference between one and the other? My good friend, the sophist and the rhetorician, as I was saying to Polus, are the same, or nearly the same; but you ignorantly fancy that rhetoric is a perfect thing, and sophistry a thing to be despised; whereas the truth is, that sophistry is as much superior to rhetoric as legislation is to the practice of law, or gymnastic to medicine. The orators and sophists, as I am inclined to think, are the only class who cannot complain of the mischief ensuing to themselves from that which they teach others, without in the same breath accusing themselves of having done no good to those whom they profess to benefit. Is not this a fact?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Certainly it is."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If they were right in saying that they make men better, then they are the only class who can afford to leave their remuneration to those who have been benefited by them. Whereas if a man has been benefited in any other way, if, for example, he has been taught to run by a trainer, he might possibly defraud him of his pay, if the trainer left the matter to him, and made no agreement with him that he should receive money as soon as he had given him the utmost speed; for not because of any deficiency of speed do men act unjustly, but by reason of injustice."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who removes injustice can be in no danger of being treated unjustly: he alone can safely leave the honorarium to his pupils, if he be really able to make them good\u2014am I not right? (Compare Protag.)"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we have found the reason why there is no dishonour in a man receiving pay who is called in to advise about building or any other art?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Yes, we have found the reason."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But when the point is, how a man may become best himself, and best govern his family and state, then to say that you will give no advice gratis is held to be dishonourable?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And why? Because only such benefits call forth a desire to requite them, and there is evidence that a benefit has been conferred when the benefactor receives a return; otherwise not. Is this true?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"It is."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then to which service of the State do you invite me? determine for me. Am I to be the physician of the State who will strive and struggle to make the Athenians as good as possible; or am I to be the servant and flatterer of the State? Speak out, my good friend, freely and fairly as you did at first and ought to do again, and tell me your entire mind."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I say then that you should be the servant of the State."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The flatterer? well, sir, that is a noble invitation."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"The Mysian, Socrates, or what you please. For if you refuse, the consequences will be\u2014"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do not repeat the old story\u2014that he who likes will kill me and get my money; for then I shall have to repeat the old answer, that he will be a bad man and will kill the good, and that the money will be of no use to him, but that he will wrongly use that which he wrongly took, and if wrongly, basely, and if basely, hurtfully."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"How confident you are, Socrates, that you will never come to harm! you seem to think that you are living in another country, and can never be brought into a court of justice, as you very likely may be brought by some miserable and mean person."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I must indeed be a fool, Callicles, if I do not know that in the Athenian State any man may suffer anything. And if I am brought to trial and incur the dangers of which you speak, he will be a villain who brings me to trial\u2014of that I am very sure, for no good man would accuse the innocent. Nor shall I be surprised if I am put to death. Shall I tell you why I anticipate this?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think that I am the only or almost the only Athenian living who practises the true art of politics; I am the only politician of my time. Now, seeing that when I speak my words are not uttered with any view of gaining favour, and that I look to what is best and not to what is most pleasant, having no mind to use those arts and graces which you recommend, I shall have nothing to say in the justice court. And you might argue with me, as I was arguing with Polus:\u2014I shall be tried just as a physician would be tried in a court of little boys at the indictment of the cook. What would he reply under such circumstances, if some one were to accuse him, saying, \u201cO my boys, many evil things has this man done to you: he is the death of you, especially of the younger ones among you, cutting and burning and starving and suffocating you, until you know not what to do; he gives you the bitterest potions, and compels you to hunger and thirst. How unlike the variety of meats and sweets on which I feasted you!\u201d What do you suppose that the physician would be able to reply when he found himself in such a predicament? If he told the truth he could only say, \u201cAll these evil things, my boys, I did for your health,\u201d and then would there not just be a clamour among a jury like that? How they would cry out!"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"I dare say."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Would he not be utterly at a loss for a reply?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"He certainly would."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I too shall be treated in the same way, as I well know, if I am brought before the court. For I shall not be able to rehearse to the people the pleasures which I have procured for them, and which, although I am not disposed to envy either the procurers or enjoyers of them, are deemed by them to be benefits and advantages. And if any one says that I corrupt young men, and perplex their minds, or that I speak evil of old men, and use bitter words towards them, whether in private or public, it is useless for me to reply, as I truly might:\u2014\u201cAll this I do for the sake of justice, and with a view to your interest, my judges, and to nothing else.\u201d And therefore there is no saying what may happen to me."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"And do you think, Socrates, that a man who is thus defenceless is in a good position?"}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Callicles, if he have that defence, which as you have often acknowledged he should have\u2014if he be his own defence, and have never said or done anything wrong, either in respect of gods or men; and this has been repeatedly acknowledged by us to be the best sort of defence. And if any one could convict me of inability to defend myself or others after this sort, I should blush for shame, whether I was convicted before many, or before a few, or by myself alone; and if I died from want of ability to do so, that would indeed grieve me. But if I died because I have no powers of flattery or rhetoric, I am very sure that you would not find me repining at death. For no man who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid of death itself, but he is afraid of doing wrong. For to go to the world below having one\u2019s soul full of injustice is the last and worst of all evils. And in proof of what I say, if you have no objection, I should like to tell you a story."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"CALLICLES","Dialogue":"Very well, proceed; and then we shall have done."}
{"Book":"gorgias","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Listen, then, as story-tellers say, to a very pretty tale, which I dare say that you may be disposed to regard as a fable only, but which, as I believe, is a true tale, for I mean to speak the truth. Homer tells us (Il.), how Zeus and Poseidon and Pluto divided the empire which they inherited from their father. Now in the days of Cronos there existed a law respecting the destiny of man, which has always been, and still continues to be in Heaven,\u2014that he who has lived all his life in justice and holiness shall go, when he is dead, to the Islands of the Blessed, and dwell there in perfect happiness out of the reach of evil; but that he who has lived unjustly and impiously shall go to the house of vengeance and punishment, which is called Tartarus. And in the time of Cronos, and even quite lately in the reign of Zeus, the judgment was given on the very day on which the men were to die; the judges were alive, and the men were alive; and the consequence was that the judgments were not well given. Then Pluto and the authorities from the Islands of the Blessed came to Zeus, and said that the souls found their way to the wrong places. Zeus said: \u201cI shall put a stop to this; the judgments are not well given, because the persons who are judged have their clothes on, for they are alive; and there are many who, having evil souls, are apparelled in fair bodies, or encased in wealth or rank, and, when the day of judgment arrives, numerous witnesses come forward and testify on their behalf that they have lived righteously. The judges are awed by them, and they themselves too have their clothes on when judging; their eyes and ears and their whole bodies are interposed as a veil before their own souls. All this is a hindrance to them; there are the clothes of the judges and the clothes of the judged.\u2014What is to be done? I will tell you:\u2014In the first place, I will deprive men of the foreknowledge of death, which they possess at present: this power which they have Prometheus has already received my orders to take from them: in the second place, they shall be entirely stripped before they are judged, for they shall be judged when they are dead; and the judge too shall be naked, that is to say, dead\u2014he with his naked soul shall pierce into the other naked souls; and they shall die suddenly and be deprived of all their kindred, and leave their brave attire strewn upon the earth\u2014conducted in this manner, the judgment will be just. I knew all about the matter before any of you, and therefore I have made my sons judges; two from Asia, Minos and Rhadamanthus, and one from Europe, Aeacus. And these, when they are dead, shall give judgment in the meadow at the parting of the ways, whence the two roads lead, one to the Islands of the Blessed, and the other to Tartarus. Rhadamanthus shall judge those who come from Asia, and Aeacus those who come from Europe. And to Minos I shall give the primacy, and he shall hold a court of appeal, in case either of the two others are in any doubt:\u2014then the judgment respecting the last journey of men will be as just as possible.\u201d From this tale, Callicles, which I have heard and believe, I draw the following inferences:\u2014Death, if I am right, is in the first place the separation from one another of two things, soul and body; nothing else. And after they are separated they retain their several natures, as in life; the body keeps the same habit, and the results of treatment or accident are distinctly visible in it: for example, he who by nature or training or both, was a tall man while he was alive, will remain as he was, after he is dead; and the fat man will remain fat; and so on; and the dead man, who in life had a fancy to have flowing hair, will have flowing hair. And if he was marked with the whip and had the prints of the scourge, or of wounds in him when he was alive, you might see the same in the dead body; and if his limbs were broken or misshapen when he was alive, the same appearance would be visible in the dead. And in a word, whatever was the habit of the body during life would be distinguishable after death, either perfectly, or in a great measure and for a certain time. And I should imagine that this is equally true of the soul, Callicles; when a man is stripped of the body, all the natural or acquired affections of the soul are laid open to view.\u2014And when they come to the judge, as those from Asia come to Rhadamanthus, he places them near him and inspects them quite impartially, not knowing whose the soul is: perhaps he may lay hands on the soul of the great king, or of some other king or potentate, who has no soundness in him, but his soul is marked with the whip, and is full of the prints and scars of perjuries and crimes with which each action has stained him, and he is all crooked with falsehood and imposture, and has no straightness, because he has lived without truth. Him Rhadamanthus beholds, full of all deformity and disproportion, which is caused by licence and luxury and insolence and incontinence, and despatches him ignominiously to his prison, and there he undergoes the punishment which he deserves. Now the proper office of punishment is twofold: he who is rightly punished ought either to become better and profit by it, or he ought to be made an example to his fellows, that they may see what he suffers, and fear and become better. Those who are improved when they are punished by gods and men, are those whose sins are curable; and they are improved, as in this world so also in another, by pain and suffering; for there is no other way in which they can be delivered from their evil. But they who have been guilty of the worst crimes, and are incurable by reason of their crimes, are made examples; for, as they are incurable, the time has passed at which they can receive any benefit. They get no good themselves, but others get good when they behold them enduring for ever the most terrible and painful and fearful sufferings as the penalty of their sins\u2014there they are, hanging up as examples, in the prison-house of the world below, a spectacle and a warning to all unrighteous men who come thither. And among them, as I confidently affirm, will be found Archelaus, if Polus truly reports of him, and any other tyrant who is like him. Of these fearful examples, most, as I believe, are taken from the class of tyrants and kings and potentates and public men, for they are the authors of the greatest and most impious crimes, because they have the power. And Homer witnesses to the truth of this; for they are always kings and potentates whom he has described as suffering everlasting punishment in the world below: such were Tantalus and Sisyphus and Tityus. But no one ever described Thersites, or any private person who was a villain, as suffering everlasting punishment, or as incurable. For to commit the worst crimes, as I am inclined to think, was not in his power, and he was happier than those who had the power. No, Callicles, the very bad men come from the class of those who have power (compare Republic). And yet in that very class there may arise good men, and worthy of all admiration they are, for where there is great power to do wrong, to live and to die justly is a hard thing, and greatly to be praised, and few there are who attain to this. Such good and true men, however, there have been, and will be again, at Athens and in other states, who have fulfilled their trust righteously; and there is one who is quite famous all over Hellas, Aristeides, the son of Lysimachus. But, in general, great men are also bad, my friend. As I was saying, Rhadamanthus, when he gets a soul of the bad kind, knows nothing about him, neither who he is, nor who his parents are; he knows only that he has got hold of a villain; and seeing this, he stamps him as curable or incurable, and sends him away to Tartarus, whither he goes and receives his proper recompense. Or, again, he looks with admiration on the soul of some just one who has lived in holiness and truth; he may have been a private man or not; and I should say, Callicles, that he is most likely to have been a philosopher who has done his own work, and not troubled himself with the doings of other men in his lifetime; him Rhadamanthus sends to the Islands of the Blessed. Aeacus does the same; and they both have sceptres, and judge; but Minos alone has a golden sceptre and is seated looking on, as Odysseus in Homer declares that he saw him: \u201cHolding a sceptre of gold, and giving laws to the dead.\u201d Now I, Callicles, am persuaded of the truth of these things, and I consider how I shall present my soul whole and undefiled before the judge in that day. Renouncing the honours at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can, and, when I die, to die as well as I can. And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same. And, in return for your exhortation of me, I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict. And I retort your reproach of me, and say, that you will not be able to help yourself when the day of trial and judgment, of which I was speaking, comes upon you; you will go before the judge, the son of Aegina, and, when he has got you in his grip and is carrying you off, you will gape and your head will swim round, just as mine would in the courts of this world, and very likely some one will shamefully box you on the ears, and put upon you any sort of insult. Perhaps this may appear to you to be only an old wife\u2019s tale, which you will contemn. And there might be reason in your contemning such tales, if by searching we could find out anything better or truer: but now you see that you and Polus and Gorgias, who are the three wisest of the Greeks of our day, are not able to show that we ought to live any life which does not profit in another world as well as in this. And of all that has been said, nothing remains unshaken but the saying, that to do injustice is more to be avoided than to suffer injustice, and that the reality and not the appearance of virtue is to be followed above all things, as well in public as in private life; and that when any one has been wrong in anything, he is to be chastised, and that the next best thing to a man being just is that he should become just, and be chastised and punished; also that he should avoid all flattery of himself as well as of others, of the few or of the many: and rhetoric and any other art should be used by him, and all his actions should be done always, with a view to justice. Follow me then, and I will lead you where you will be happy in life and after death, as the argument shows. And never mind if some one despises you as a fool, and insults you, if he has a mind; let him strike you, by Zeus, and do you be of good cheer, and do not mind the insulting blow, for you will never come to any harm in the practice of virtue, if you are a really good and true man. When we have practised virtue together, we will apply ourselves to politics, if that seems desirable, or we will advise about whatever else may seem good to us, for we shall be better able to judge then. In our present condition we ought not to give ourselves airs, for even on the most important subjects we are always changing our minds; so utterly stupid are we! Let us, then, take the argument as our guide, which has revealed to us that the best way of life is to practise justice and every virtue in life and death. This way let us go; and in this exhort all men to follow, not in the way to which you trust and in which you exhort me to follow you; for that way, Callicles, is nothing worth. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GORGIAS *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are you going, Alcibiades, to offer prayer to Zeus?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, I am."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"you seem to be troubled and to cast your eyes on the ground, as though you were thinking about something."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Of what do you suppose that I am thinking?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Of the greatest of all things, as I believe. Tell me, do you not suppose that the Gods sometimes partly grant and partly reject the requests which we make in public and private, and favour some persons and not others?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you not imagine, then, that a man ought to be very careful, lest perchance without knowing it he implore great evils for himself, deeming that he is asking for good, especially if the Gods are in the mood to grant whatever he may request? There is the story of Oedipus, for instance, who prayed that his children might divide their inheritance between them by the sword: he did not, as he might have done, beg that his present evils might be averted, but called down new ones. And was not his prayer accomplished, and did not many and terrible evils thence arise, upon which I need not dilate?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, but you are speaking of a madman: surely you do not think that any one in his senses would venture to make such a prayer?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Madness, then, you consider to be the opposite of discretion?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And some men seem to you to be discreet, and others the contrary?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"They do."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, let us discuss who these are. We acknowledge that some are discreet, some foolish, and that some are mad?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And again, there are some who are in health?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"There are."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"While others are ailing?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And they are not the same?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor are there any who are in neither state?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A man must either be sick or be well?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is my opinion."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good: and do you think the same about discretion and want of discretion?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you believe that a man must be either in or out of his senses; or is there some third or intermediate condition, in which he is neither one nor the other?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Decidedly not."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He must be either sane or insane?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"So I suppose."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Did you not acknowledge that madness was the opposite of discretion?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that there is no third or middle term between discretion and indiscretion?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there cannot be two opposites to one thing?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"There cannot."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then madness and want of sense are the same?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That appears to be the case."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We shall be in the right, therefore, Alcibiades, if we say that all who are senseless are mad. For example, if among persons of your own age or older than yourself there are some who are senseless,--as there certainly are,--they are mad. For tell me, by heaven, do you not think that in the city the wise are few, while the foolish, whom you call mad, are many?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But how could we live in safety with so many crazy people? Should we not long since have paid the penalty at their hands, and have been struck and beaten and endured every other form of ill-usage which madmen are wont to inflict? Consider, my dear friend: may it not be quite otherwise?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Why, Socrates, how is that possible? I must have been mistaken."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"So it seems to me. But perhaps we may consider the matter thus:--"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will tell you. We think that some are sick; do we not?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And must every sick person either have the gout, or be in a fever, or suffer from ophthalmia? Or do you believe that a man may labour under some other disease, even although he has none of these complaints? Surely, they are not the only maladies which exist?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is every kind of ophthalmia a disease?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And every disease ophthalmia?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Surely not. But I scarcely understand what I mean myself."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Perhaps, if you give me your best attention, 'two of us' looking together, we may find what we seek."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I am attending, Socrates, to the best of my power."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We are agreed, then, that every form of ophthalmia is a disease, but not every disease ophthalmia?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"We are."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And so far we seem to be right. For every one who suffers from a fever is sick; but the sick, I conceive, do not all have fever or gout or ophthalmia, although each of these is a disease, which, according to those whom we call physicians, may require a different treatment. They are not all alike, nor do they produce the same result, but each has its own effect, and yet they are all diseases. May we not take an illustration from the artizans?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There are cobblers and carpenters and sculptors and others of all sorts and kinds, whom we need not stop to enumerate. All have their distinct employments and all are workmen, although they are not all of them cobblers or carpenters or sculptors."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No, indeed."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in like manner men differ in regard to want of sense. Those who are most out of their wits we call 'madmen,' while we term those who are less far gone 'stupid' or 'idiotic,' or, if we prefer gentler language, describe them as 'romantic' or 'simple-minded,' or, again, as 'innocent' or 'inexperienced' or 'foolish.' You may even find other names, if you seek for them; but by all of them lack of sense is intended. They only differ as one art appeared to us to differ from another or one disease from another. Or what is your opinion?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I agree with you."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let us return to the point at which we digressed. We said at first that we should have to consider who were the wise and who the foolish. For we acknowledged that there are these two classes? Did we not?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you regard those as sensible who know what ought to be done or said?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The senseless are those who do not know this?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The latter will say or do what they ought not without their own knowledge?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Oedipus, as I was saying, Alcibiades, was a person of this sort. And even now-a-days you will find many who (have offered inauspicious prayers), although, unlike him, they were not in anger nor thought that they were asking evil. He neither sought, nor supposed that he sought for good, but others have had quite the contrary notion. I believe that if the God whom you are about to consult should appear to you, and, in anticipation of your request, enquired whether you would be contented to become tyrant of Athens, and if this seemed in your eyes a small and mean thing, should add to it the dominion of all Hellas; and seeing that even then you would not be satisfied unless you were ruler of the whole of Europe, should promise, not only that, but, if you so desired, should proclaim to all mankind in one and the same day that Alcibiades, son of Cleinias, was tyrant:--in such a case, I imagine, you would depart full of joy, as one who had obtained the greatest of goods."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"And not only I, Socrates, but any one else who should meet with such luck."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yet you would not accept the dominion and lordship of all the Hellenes and all the barbarians in exchange for your life?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not: for then what use could I make of them?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you accept them if you were likely to use them to a bad and mischievous end?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I would not."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You see that it is not safe for a man either rashly to accept whatever is offered him, or himself to request a thing, if he is likely to suffer thereby or immediately to lose his life. And yet we could tell of many who, having long desired and diligently laboured to obtain a tyranny, thinking that thus they would procure an advantage, have nevertheless fallen victims to designing enemies. You must have heard of what happened only the other day, how Archelaus of Macedonia was slain by his beloved (compare Aristotle, Pol.), whose love for the tyranny was not less than that of Archelaus for him. The tyrannicide expected by his crime to become tyrant and afterwards to have a happy life; but when he had held the tyranny three or four days, he was in his turn conspired against and slain. Or look at certain of our own citizens,--and of their actions we have been not hearers, but eyewitnesses,--who have desired to obtain military command: of those who have gained their object, some are even to this day exiles from the city, while others have lost their lives. And even they who seem to have fared best, have not only gone through many perils and terrors during their office, but after their return home they have been beset by informers worse than they once were by their foes, insomuch that several of them have wished that they had remained in a private station rather than have had the glories of command. If, indeed, such perils and terrors were of profit to the commonwealth, there would be reason in undergoing them; but the very contrary is the case. Again, you will find persons who have prayed for offspring, and when their prayers were heard, have fallen into the greatest pains and sufferings. For some have begotten children who were utterly bad, and have therefore passed all their days in misery, while the parents of good children have undergone the misfortune of losing them, and have been so little happier than the others that they would have preferred never to have had children rather than to have had them and lost them. And yet, although these and the like examples are manifest and known of all, it is rare to find any one who has refused what has been offered him, or, if he were likely to gain aught by prayer, has refrained from making his petition. The mass of mankind would not decline to accept a tyranny, or the command of an army, or any of the numerous things which cause more harm than good: but rather, if they had them not, would have prayed to obtain them. And often in a short space of time they change their tone, and wish their old prayers unsaid. Wherefore also I suspect that men are entirely wrong when they blame the gods as the authors of the ills which befall them (compare Republic): 'their own presumption,' or folly (whichever is the right word)-- 'Has brought these unmeasured woes upon them.' (Homer. Odyss.) He must have been a wise poet, Alcibiades, who, seeing as I believe, his friends foolishly praying for and doing things which would not really profit them, offered up a common prayer in behalf of them all:-- 'King Zeus, grant us good whether prayed for or unsought by us; But that which we ask amiss, do thou avert.' (The author of these lines, which are probably of Pythagorean origin, is unknown. They are found also in the Anthology (Anth. Pal.).) In my opinion, I say, the poet spoke both well and prudently; but if you have anything to say in answer to him, speak out."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"It is difficult, Socrates, to oppose what has been well said. And I perceive how many are the ills of which ignorance is the cause, since, as would appear, through ignorance we not only do, but what is worse, pray for the greatest evils. No man would imagine that he would do so; he would rather suppose that he was quite capable of praying for what was best: to call down evils seems more like a curse than a prayer."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But perhaps, my good friend, some one who is wiser than either you or I will say that we have no right to blame ignorance thus rashly, unless we can add what ignorance we mean and of what, and also to whom and how it is respectively a good or an evil?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"How do you mean? Can ignorance possibly be better than knowledge for any person in any conceivable case?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"So I believe:--you do not think so?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet surely I may not suppose that you would ever wish to act towards your mother as they say that Orestes and Alcmeon and others have done towards their parent."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Good words, Socrates, prithee."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You ought not to bid him use auspicious words, who says that you would not be willing to commit so horrible a deed, but rather him who affirms the contrary, if the act appear to you unfit even to be mentioned. Or do you think that Orestes, had he been in his senses and knew what was best for him to do, would ever have dared to venture on such a crime?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor would any one else, I fancy?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That ignorance is bad then, it would appear, which is of the best and does not know what is best?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"So I think, at least."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And both to the person who is ignorant and everybody else?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us take another case. Suppose that you were suddenly to get into your head that it would be a good thing to kill Pericles, your kinsman and guardian, and were to seize a sword and, going to the doors of his house, were to enquire if he were at home, meaning to slay only him and no one else:--the servants reply, 'Yes': (Mind, I do not mean that you would really do such a thing; but there is nothing, you think, to prevent a man who is ignorant of the best, having occasionally the whim that what is worst is best?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No.)"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"--If, then, you went indoors, and seeing him, did not know him, but thought that he was some one else, would you venture to slay him?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Most decidedly not (it seems to me). (These words are omitted in several MSS.)"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"For you designed to kill, not the first who offered, but Pericles himself?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if you made many attempts, and each time failed to recognize Pericles, you would never attack him?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Never."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but if Orestes in like manner had not known his mother, do you think that he would ever have laid hands upon her?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He did not intend to slay the first woman he came across, nor any one else's mother, but only his own?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Ignorance, then, is better for those who are in such a frame of mind, and have such ideas?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Obviously."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You acknowledge that for some persons in certain cases the ignorance of some things is a good and not an evil, as you formerly supposed?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there is still another case which will also perhaps appear strange to you, if you will consider it? (The reading is here uncertain.)"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What is that, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"It may be, in short, that the possession of all the sciences, if unaccompanied by the knowledge of the best, will more often than not injure the possessor. Consider the matter thus:--Must we not, when we intend either to do or say anything, suppose that we know or ought to know that which we propose so confidently to do or say?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes, in my opinion."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We may take the orators for an example, who from time to time advise us about war and peace, or the building of walls and the construction of harbours, whether they understand the business in hand, or only think that they do. Whatever the city, in a word, does to another city, or in the management of her own affairs, all happens by the counsel of the orators."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But now see what follows, if I can (make it clear to you). (Some words appear to have dropped out here.) You would distinguish the wise from the foolish?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The many are foolish, the few wise?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you use both the terms, 'wise' and 'foolish,' in reference to something?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Would you call a person wise who can give advice, but does not know whether or when it is better to carry out the advice?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Decidedly not."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor again, I suppose, a person who knows the art of war, but does not know whether it is better to go to war or for how long?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor, once more, a person who knows how to kill another or to take away his property or to drive him from his native land, but not when it is better to do so or for whom it is better?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But he who understands anything of the kind and has at the same time the knowledge of the best course of action:--and the best and the useful are surely the same?--"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"--Such an one, I say, we should call wise and a useful adviser both of himself and of the city. What do you think?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if any one knows how to ride or to shoot with the bow or to box or to wrestle, or to engage in any other sort of contest or to do anything whatever which is in the nature of an art,--what do you call him who knows what is best according to that art? Do you not speak of one who knows what is best in riding as a good rider?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in a similar way you speak of a good boxer or a good flute-player or a good performer in any other art?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But is it necessary that the man who is clever in any of these arts should be wise also in general? Or is there a difference between the clever artist and the wise man?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"All the difference in the world."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what sort of a state do you think that would be which was composed of good archers and flute-players and athletes and masters in other arts, and besides them of those others about whom we spoke, who knew how to go to war and how to kill, as well as of orators puffed up with political pride, but in which not one of them all had this knowledge of the best, and there was no one who could tell when it was better to apply any of these arts or in regard to whom?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I should call such a state bad, Socrates."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You certainly would when you saw each of them rivalling the other and esteeming that of the greatest importance in the state, 'Wherein he himself most excelled.' (Euripides, Antiope.) --I mean that which was best in any art, while he was entirely ignorant of what was best for himself and for the state, because, as I think, he trusts to opinion which is devoid of intelligence. In such a case should we not be right if we said that the state would be full of anarchy and lawlessness?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Decidedly."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But ought we not then, think you, either to fancy that we know or really to know, what we confidently propose to do or say?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if a person does that which he knows or supposes that he knows, and the result is beneficial, he will act advantageously both for himself and for the state?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he do the contrary, both he and the state will suffer?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and are you of the same mind, as before?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I am."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But were you not saying that you would call the many unwise and the few wise?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I was."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And have we not come back to our old assertion that the many fail to obtain the best because they trust to opinion which is devoid of intelligence?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"That is the case."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"It is good, then, for the many, if they particularly desire to do that which they know or suppose that they know, neither to know nor to suppose that they know, in cases where if they carry out their ideas in action they will be losers rather than gainers?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"What you say is very true."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you not see that I was really speaking the truth when I affirmed that the possession of any other kind of knowledge was more likely to injure than to benefit the possessor, unless he had also the knowledge of the best?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I do now, if I did not before, Socrates."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The state or the soul, therefore, which wishes to have a right existence must hold firmly to this knowledge, just as the sick man clings to the physician, or the passenger depends for safety on the pilot. And if the soul does not set sail until she have obtained this she will be all the safer in the voyage through life. But when she rushes in pursuit of wealth or bodily strength or anything else, not having the knowledge of the best, so much the more is she likely to meet with misfortune. And he who has the love of learning (Or, reading polumatheian, 'abundant learning.'), and is skilful in many arts, and does not possess the knowledge of the best, but is under some other guidance, will make, as he deserves, a sorry voyage:--he will, I believe, hurry through the brief space of human life, pilotless in mid-ocean, and the words will apply to him in which the poet blamed his enemy:-- '...Full many a thing he knew; But knew them all badly.' (A fragment from the pseudo-Homeric poem, 'Margites.')"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"How in the world, Socrates, do the words of the poet apply to him? They seem to me to have no bearing on the point whatever."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Quite the contrary, my sweet friend: only the poet is talking in riddles after the fashion of his tribe. For all poetry has by nature an enigmatical character, and it is by no means everybody who can interpret it. And if, moreover, the spirit of poetry happen to seize on a man who is of a begrudging temper and does not care to manifest his wisdom but keeps it to himself as far as he can, it does indeed require an almost superhuman wisdom to discover what the poet would be at. You surely do not suppose that Homer, the wisest and most divine of poets, was unaware of the impossibility of knowing a thing badly: for it was no less a person than he who said of Margites that 'he knew many things, but knew them all badly.' The solution of the riddle is this, I imagine:--By 'badly' Homer meant 'bad' and 'knew' stands for 'to know.' Put the words together;--the metre will suffer, but the poet's meaning is clear;--'Margites knew all these things, but it was bad for him to know them.' And, obviously, if it was bad for him to know so many things, he must have been a good-for-nothing, unless the argument has played us false."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"But I do not think that it has, Socrates: at least, if the argument is fallacious, it would be difficult for me to find another which I could trust."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you are right in thinking so."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Well, that is my opinion."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But tell me, by Heaven:--you must see now the nature and greatness of the difficulty in which you, like others, have your part. For you change about in all directions, and never come to rest anywhere: what you once most strongly inclined to suppose, you put aside again and quite alter your mind. If the God to whose shrine you are going should appear at this moment, and ask before you made your prayer, 'Whether you would desire to have one of the things which we mentioned at first, or whether he should leave you to make your own request:'--what in either case, think you, would be the best way to take advantage of the opportunity?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Indeed, Socrates, I could not answer you without consideration. It seems to me to be a wild thing (The Homeric word margos is said to be here employed in allusion to the quotation from the 'Margites' which Socrates has just made; but it is not used in the sense which it has in Homer.) to make such a request; a man must be very careful lest he pray for evil under the idea that he is asking for good, when shortly after he may have to recall his prayer, and, as you were saying, demand the opposite of what he at first requested."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And was not the poet whose words I originally quoted wiser than we are, when he bade us (pray God) to defend us from evil even though we asked for it?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I believe that you are right."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The Lacedaemonians, too, whether from admiration of the poet or because they have discovered the idea for themselves, are wont to offer the prayer alike in public and private, that the Gods will give unto them the beautiful as well as the good:--no one is likely to hear them make any further petition. And yet up to the present time they have not been less fortunate than other men; or if they have sometimes met with misfortune, the fault has not been due to their prayer. For surely, as I conceive, the Gods have power either to grant our requests, or to send us the contrary of what we ask. And now I will relate to you a story which I have heard from certain of our elders. It chanced that when the Athenians and Lacedaemonians were at war, our city lost every battle by land and sea and never gained a victory. The Athenians being annoyed and perplexed how to find a remedy for their troubles, decided to send and enquire at the shrine of Ammon. Their envoys were also to ask, 'Why the Gods always granted the victory to the Lacedaemonians?' 'We,' (they were to say,) 'offer them more and finer sacrifices than any other Hellenic state, and adorn their temples with gifts, as nobody else does; moreover, we make the most solemn and costly processions to them every year, and spend more money in their service than all the rest of the Hellenes put together. But the Lacedaemonians take no thought of such matters, and pay so little respect to the Gods that they have a habit of sacrificing blemished animals to them, and in various ways are less zealous than we are, although their wealth is quite equal to ours.' When they had thus spoken, and had made their request to know what remedy they could find against the evils which troubled them, the prophet made no direct answer,--clearly because he was not allowed by the God to do so;--but he summoned them to him and said: 'Thus saith Ammon to the Athenians: \"The silent worship of the Lacedaemonians pleaseth me better than all the offerings of the other Hellenes.\"' Such were the words of the God, and nothing more. He seems to have meant by 'silent worship' the prayer of the Lacedaemonians, which is indeed widely different from the usual requests of the Hellenes. For they either bring to the altar bulls with gilded horns or make offerings to the Gods, and beg at random for what they need, good or bad. When, therefore, the Gods hear them using words of ill omen they reject these costly processions and sacrifices of theirs. And we ought, I think, to be very careful and consider well what we should say and what leave unsaid. Homer, too, will furnish us with similar stories. For he tells us how the Trojans in making their encampment, 'Offered up whole hecatombs to the immortals,' and how the 'sweet savour' was borne 'to the heavens by the winds; 'But the blessed Gods were averse and received it not. For exceedingly did they hate the holy Ilium, Both Priam and the people of the spear-skilled king.' So that it was in vain for them to sacrifice and offer gifts, seeing that they were hateful to the Gods, who are not, like vile usurers, to be gained over by bribes. And it is foolish for us to boast that we are superior to the Lacedaemonians by reason of our much worship. The idea is inconceivable that the Gods have regard, not to the justice and purity of our souls, but to costly processions and sacrifices, which men may celebrate year after year, although they have committed innumerable crimes against the Gods or against their fellow-men or the state. For the Gods, as Ammon and his prophet declare, are no receivers of gifts, and they scorn such unworthy service. Wherefore also it would seem that wisdom and justice are especially honoured both by the Gods and by men of sense; and they are the wisest and most just who know how to speak and act towards Gods and men. But I should like to hear what your opinion is about these matters."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I agree, Socrates, with you and with the God, whom, indeed, it would be unbecoming for me to oppose."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you not remember saying that you were in great perplexity, lest perchance you should ask for evil, supposing that you were asking for good?"}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You see, then, that there is a risk in your approaching the God in prayer, lest haply he should refuse your sacrifice when he hears the blasphemy which you utter, and make you partake of other evils as well. The wisest plan, therefore, seems to me that you should keep silence; for your 'highmindedness'--to use the mildest term which men apply to folly--will most likely prevent you from using the prayer of the Lacedaemonians. You had better wait until we find out how we should behave towards the Gods and towards men."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"And how long must I wait, Socrates, and who will be my teacher? I should be very glad to see the man."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"It is he who takes an especial interest in you. But first of all, I think, the darkness must be taken away in which your soul is now enveloped, just as Athene in Homer removes the mist from the eyes of Diomede that 'He may distinguish between God and mortal man.' Afterwards the means may be given to you whereby you may distinguish between good and evil. At present, I fear, this is beyond your power."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"Only let my instructor take away the impediment, whether it pleases him to call it mist or anything else! I care not who he is; but I am resolved to disobey none of his commands, if I am likely to be the better for them."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And surely he has a wondrous care for you."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"It seems to be altogether advisable to put off the sacrifice until he is found."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You are right: that will be safer than running such a tremendous risk."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"ALCIBIADES","Dialogue":"But how shall we manage, Socrates?--At any rate I will set this crown of mine upon your head, as you have given me such excellent advice, and to the Gods we will offer crowns and perform the other customary rites when I see that day approaching: nor will it be long hence, if they so will."}
{"Book":"second_alcibiades","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I accept your gift, and shall be ready and willing to receive whatever else you may proffer. Euripides makes Creon say in the play, when he beholds Teiresias with his crown and hears that he has gained it by his skill as the first-fruits of the spoil:-- 'An auspicious omen I deem thy victor's wreath: For well thou knowest that wave and storm oppress us.' And so I count your gift to be a token of good-fortune; for I am in no less stress than Creon, and would fain carry off the victory over your lovers. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALCIBIADES II *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SCENE","Dialogue":"The Prison of Socrates."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why have you come at this hour, Crito? it must be quite early."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes, certainly."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What is the exact time?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"The dawn is breaking."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I wonder that the keeper of the prison would let you in."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"He knows me because I often come, Socrates; moreover.  I have done him a kindness."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are you only just arrived?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"No, I came some time ago."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then why did you sit and say nothing, instead of at once awakening me?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"I should not have liked myself, Socrates, to be in such great trouble and unrest as you are--indeed I should not:  I have been watching with amazement your peaceful slumbers; and for that reason I did not awake you, because I wished to minimize the pain.  I have always thought you to be of a happy disposition; but never did I see anything like the easy, tranquil manner in which you bear this calamity."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, Crito, when a man has reached my age he ought not to be repining at the approach of death."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"And yet other old men find themselves in similar misfortunes, and age does not prevent them from repining."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is true.  But you have not told me why you come at this early hour."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"I come to bring you a message which is sad and painful; not, as I believe, to yourself, but to all of us who are your friends, and saddest of all to me."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What?  Has the ship come from Delos, on the arrival of which I am to die?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"No, the ship has not actually arrived, but she will probably be here to-day, as persons who have come from Sunium tell me that they have left her there; and therefore to-morrow, Socrates, will be the last day of your life."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very well, Crito; if such is the will of God, I am willing; but my belief is that there will be a delay of a day."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Why do you think so?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will tell you.  I am to die on the day after the arrival of the ship?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes; that is what the authorities say."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But I do not think that the ship will be here until to-morrow; this I infer from a vision which I had last night, or rather only just now, when you fortunately allowed me to sleep."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"And what was the nature of the vision?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There appeared to me the likeness of a woman, fair and comely, clothed in bright raiment, who called to me and said:  O Socrates, 'The third day hence to fertile Phthia shalt thou go.'  (Homer, Il.)"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"What a singular dream, Socrates!"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There can be no doubt about the meaning, Crito, I think."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes; the meaning is only too clear.  But, oh! my beloved Socrates, let me entreat you once more to take my advice and escape.  For if you die I shall not only lose a friend who can never be replaced, but there is another evil:  people who do not know you and me will believe that I might have saved you if I had been willing to give money, but that I did not care.  Now, can there be a worse disgrace than this--that I should be thought to value money more than the life of a friend?  For the many will not be persuaded that I wanted you to escape, and that you refused."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the many?  Good men, and they are the only persons who are worth considering, will think of these things truly as they occurred."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"But you see, Socrates, that the opinion of the many must be regarded, for what is now happening shows that they can do the greatest evil to any one who has lost their good opinion."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I only wish it were so, Crito; and that the many could do the greatest evil; for then they would also be able to do the greatest good-- and what a fine thing this would be!  But in reality they can do neither; for they cannot make a man either wise or foolish; and whatever they do is the result of chance."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Well, I will not dispute with you; but please to tell me, Socrates, whether you are not acting out of regard to me and your other friends:  are you not afraid that if you escape from prison we may get into trouble with the informers for having stolen you away, and lose either the whole or a great part of our property; or that even a worse evil may happen to us? Now, if you fear on our account, be at ease; for in order to save you, we ought surely to run this, or even a greater risk; be persuaded, then, and do as I say."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Crito, that is one fear which you mention, but by no means the only one."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Fear not--there are persons who are willing to get you out of prison at no great cost; and as for the informers they are far from being exorbitant in their demands--a little money will satisfy them.  My means, which are certainly ample, are at your service, and if you have a scruple about spending all mine, here are strangers who will give you the use of theirs; and one of them, Simmias the Theban, has brought a large sum of money for this very purpose; and Cebes and many others are prepared to spend their money in helping you to escape.  I say, therefore, do not hesitate on our account, and do not say, as you did in the court (compare Apol.), that you will have a difficulty in knowing what to do with yourself anywhere else.  For men will love you in other places to which you may go, and not in Athens only; there are friends of mine in Thessaly, if you like to go to them, who will value and protect you, and no Thessalian will give you any trouble.  Nor can I think that you are at all justified, Socrates, in betraying your own life when you might be saved; in acting thus you are playing into the hands of your enemies, who are hurrying on your destruction.  And further I should say that you are deserting your own children; for you might bring them up and educate them; instead of which you go away and leave them, and they will have to take their chance; and if they do not meet with the usual fate of orphans, there will be small thanks to you.  No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nurture and education.  But you appear to be choosing the easier part, not the better and manlier, which would have been more becoming in one who professes to care for virtue in all his actions, like yourself.  And indeed, I am ashamed not only of you, but of us who are your friends, when I reflect that the whole business will be attributed entirely to our want of courage.  The trial need never have come on, or might have been managed differently; and this last act, or crowning folly, will seem to have occurred through our negligence and cowardice, who might have saved you, if we had been good for anything; and you might have saved yourself, for there was no difficulty at all.  See now, Socrates, how sad and discreditable are the consequences, both to us and you.  Make up your mind then, or rather have your mind already made up, for the time of deliberation is over, and there is only one thing to be done, which must be done this very night, and if we delay at all will be no longer practicable or possible; I beseech you therefore, Socrates, be persuaded by me, and do as I say."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Dear Crito, your zeal is invaluable, if a right one; but if wrong, the greater the zeal the greater the danger; and therefore we ought to consider whether I shall or shall not do as you say.  For I am and always have been one of those natures who must be guided by reason, whatever the reason may be which upon reflection appears to me to be the best; and now that this chance has befallen me, I cannot repudiate my own words:  the principles which I have hitherto honoured and revered I still honour, and unless we can at once find other and better principles, I am certain not to agree with you; no, not even if the power of the multitude could inflict many more imprisonments, confiscations, deaths, frightening us like children with hobgoblin terrors (compare Apol.).  What will be the fairest way of considering the question?  Shall I return to your old argument about the opinions of men?--we were saying that some of them are to be regarded, and others not.  Now were we right in maintaining this before I was condemned?  And has the argument which was once good now proved to be talk for the sake of talking--mere childish nonsense?  That is what I want to consider with your help, Crito:--whether, under my present circumstances, the argument appears to be in any way different or not; and is to be allowed by me or disallowed.  That argument, which, as I believe, is maintained by many persons of authority, was to the effect, as I was saying, that the opinions of some men are to be regarded, and of other men not to be regarded.  Now you, Crito, are not going to die to-morrow--at least, there is no human probability of this, and therefore you are disinterested and not liable to be deceived by the circumstances in which you are placed.  Tell me then, whether I am right in saying that some opinions, and the opinions of some men only, are to be valued, and that other opinions, and the opinions of other men, are not to be valued.  I ask you whether I was right in maintaining this?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The good are to be regarded, and not the bad?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the opinions of the wise are good, and the opinions of the unwise are evil?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what was said about another matter?  Is the pupil who devotes himself to the practice of gymnastics supposed to attend to the praise and blame and opinion of every man, or of one man only--his physician or trainer, whoever he may be?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Of one man only."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he ought to fear the censure and welcome the praise of that one only, and not of the many?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Clearly so."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he ought to act and train, and eat and drink in the way which seems good to his single master who has understanding, rather than according to the opinion of all other men put together?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he disobeys and disregards the opinion and approval of the one, and regards the opinion of the many who have no understanding, will he not suffer evil?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Certainly he will."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what will the evil be, whither tending and what affecting, in the disobedient person?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Clearly, affecting the body; that is what is destroyed by the evil."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good; and is not this true, Crito, of other things which we need not separately enumerate?  In questions of just and unjust, fair and foul, good and evil, which are the subjects of our present consultation, ought we to follow the opinion of the many and to fear them; or the opinion of the one man who has understanding? ought we not to fear and reverence him more than all the rest of the world:  and if we desert him shall we not destroy and injure that principle in us which may be assumed to be improved by justice and deteriorated by injustice;--there is such a principle?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Certainly there is, Socrates."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Take a parallel instance:--if, acting under the advice of those who have no understanding, we destroy that which is improved by health and is deteriorated by disease, would life be worth having?  And that which has been destroyed is--the body?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Could we live, having an evil and corrupted body?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will life be worth having, if that higher part of man be destroyed, which is improved by justice and depraved by injustice?  Do we suppose that principle, whatever it may be in man, which has to do with justice and injustice, to be inferior to the body?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"More honourable than the body?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Far more."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, my friend, we must not regard what the many say of us: but what he, the one man who has understanding of just and unjust, will say, and what the truth will say.  And therefore you begin in error when you advise that we should regard the opinion of the many about just and unjust, good and evil, honorable and dishonorable.--'Well,' some one will say, 'but the many can kill us.'"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; that will clearly be the answer."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And it is true; but still I find with surprise that the old argument is unshaken as ever.  And I should like to know whether I may say the same of another proposition--that not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes, that also remains unshaken."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And a good life is equivalent to a just and honorable one--that holds also?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes, it does."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"From these premisses I proceed to argue the question whether I ought or ought not to try and escape without the consent of the Athenians: and if I am clearly right in escaping, then I will make the attempt; but if not, I will abstain.  The other considerations which you mention, of money and loss of character and the duty of educating one's children, are, I fear, only the doctrines of the multitude, who would be as ready to restore people to life, if they were able, as they are to put them to death--and with as little reason.  But now, since the argument has thus far prevailed, the only question which remains to be considered is, whether we shall do rightly either in escaping or in suffering others to aid in our escape and paying them in money and thanks, or whether in reality we shall not do rightly; and if the latter, then death or any other calamity which may ensue on my remaining here must not be allowed to enter into the calculation."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"I think that you are right, Socrates; how then shall we proceed?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us consider the matter together, and do you either refute me if you can, and I will be convinced; or else cease, my dear friend, from repeating to me that I ought to escape against the wishes of the Athenians: for I highly value your attempts to persuade me to do so, but I may not be persuaded against my own better judgment.  And now please to consider my first position, and try how you can best answer me."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"I will."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are we to say that we are never intentionally to do wrong, or that in one way we ought and in another way we ought not to do wrong, or is doing wrong always evil and dishonorable, as I was just now saying, and as has been already acknowledged by us?  Are all our former admissions which were made within a few days to be thrown away?  And have we, at our age, been earnestly discoursing with one another all our life long only to discover that we are no better than children?  Or, in spite of the opinion of the many, and in spite of consequences whether better or worse, shall we insist on the truth of what was then said, that injustice is always an evil and dishonour to him who acts unjustly?  Shall we say so or not?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we must do no wrong?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor when injured injure in return, as the many imagine; for we must injure no one at all?  (E.g. compare Rep.)"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Clearly not."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Again, Crito, may we do evil?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Surely not, Socrates."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what of doing evil in return for evil, which is the morality of the many--is that just or not?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Not just."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"For doing evil to another is the same as injuring him?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to any one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.  But I would have you consider, Crito, whether you really mean what you are saying.  For this opinion has never been held, and never will be held, by any considerable number of persons; and those who are agreed and those who are not agreed upon this point have no common ground, and can only despise one another when they see how widely they differ.  Tell me, then, whether you agree with and assent to my first principle, that neither injury nor retaliation nor warding off evil by evil is ever right.  And shall that be the premiss of our argument?  Or do you decline and dissent from this?  For so I have ever thought, and continue to think; but, if you are of another opinion, let me hear what you have to say.  If, however, you remain of the same mind as formerly, I will proceed to the next step."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"You may proceed, for I have not changed my mind."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I will go on to the next point, which may be put in the form of a question:--Ought a man to do what he admits to be right, or ought he to betray the right?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"He ought to do what he thinks right."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if this is true, what is the application?  In leaving the prison against the will of the Athenians, do I wrong any? or rather do I not wrong those whom I ought least to wrong?  Do I not desert the principles which were acknowledged by us to be just--what do you say?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"I cannot tell, Socrates, for I do not know."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then consider the matter in this way:--Imagine that I am about to play truant (you may call the proceeding by any name which you like), and the laws and the government come and interrogate me:  'Tell us, Socrates,' they say; 'what are you about? are you not going by an act of yours to overturn us--the laws, and the whole state, as far as in you lies? Do you imagine that a state can subsist and not be overthrown, in which the decisions of law have no power, but are set aside and trampled upon by individuals?'  What will be our answer, Crito, to these and the like words? Any one, and especially a rhetorician, will have a good deal to say on behalf of the law which requires a sentence to be carried out.  He will argue that this law should not be set aside; and shall we reply, 'Yes; but the state has injured us and given an unjust sentence.'  Suppose I say that?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"Very good, Socrates."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"'And was that our agreement with you?' the law would answer; 'or were you to abide by the sentence of the state?'  And if I were to express my astonishment at their words, the law would probably add:  'Answer, Socrates, instead of opening your eyes--you are in the habit of asking and answering questions.  Tell us,--What complaint have you to make against us which justifies you in attempting to destroy us and the state?  In the first place did we not bring you into existence?  Your father married your mother by our aid and begat you.  Say whether you have any objection to urge against those of us who regulate marriage?'  None, I should reply. 'Or against those of us who after birth regulate the nurture and education of children, in which you also were trained?  Were not the laws, which have the charge of education, right in commanding your father to train you in music and gymnastic?'  Right, I should reply.  'Well then, since you were brought into the world and nurtured and educated by us, can you deny in the first place that you are our child and slave, as your fathers were before you?  And if this is true you are not on equal terms with us; nor can you think that you have a right to do to us what we are doing to you.  Would you have any right to strike or revile or do any other evil to your father or your master, if you had one, because you have been struck or reviled by him, or received some other evil at his hands?--you would not say this? And because we think right to destroy you, do you think that you have any right to destroy us in return, and your country as far as in you lies? Will you, O professor of true virtue, pretend that you are justified in this?  Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding? also to be soothed, and gently and reverently entreated when angry, even more than a father, and either to be persuaded, or if not persuaded, to be obeyed?  And when we are punished by her, whether with imprisonment or stripes, the punishment is to be endured in silence; and if she lead us to wounds or death in battle, thither we follow as is right; neither may any one yield or retreat or leave his rank, but whether in battle or in a court of law, or in any other place, he must do what his city and his country order him; or he must change their view of what is just:  and if he may do no violence to his father or mother, much less may he do violence to his country.'  What answer shall we make to this, Crito? Do the laws speak truly, or do they not?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"I think that they do."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the laws will say:  'Consider, Socrates, if we are speaking truly that in your present attempt you are going to do us an injury.  For, having brought you into the world, and nurtured and educated you, and given you and every other citizen a share in every good which we had to give, we further proclaim to any Athenian by the liberty which we allow him, that if he does not like us when he has become of age and has seen the ways of the city, and made our acquaintance, he may go where he pleases and take his goods with him.  None of us laws will forbid him or interfere with him. Any one who does not like us and the city, and who wants to emigrate to a colony or to any other city, may go where he likes, retaining his property. But he who has experience of the manner in which we order justice and administer the state, and still remains, has entered into an implied contract that he will do as we command him.  And he who disobeys us is, as we maintain, thrice wrong:  first, because in disobeying us he is disobeying his parents; secondly, because we are the authors of his education; thirdly, because he has made an agreement with us that he will duly obey our commands; and he neither obeys them nor convinces us that our commands are unjust; and we do not rudely impose them, but give him the alternative of obeying or convincing us;--that is what we offer, and he does neither. 'These are the sort of accusations to which, as we were saying, you, Socrates, will be exposed if you accomplish your intentions; you, above all other Athenians.'  Suppose now I ask, why I rather than anybody else? they will justly retort upon me that I above all other men have acknowledged the agreement.  'There is clear proof,' they will say, 'Socrates, that we and the city were not displeasing to you.  Of all Athenians you have been the most constant resident in the city, which, as you never leave, you may be supposed to love (compare Phaedr.).  For you never went out of the city either to see the games, except once when you went to the Isthmus, or to any other place unless when you were on military service; nor did you travel as other men do.  Nor had you any curiosity to know other states or their laws:  your affections did not go beyond us and our state; we were your especial favourites, and you acquiesced in our government of you; and here in this city you begat your children, which is a proof of your satisfaction.  Moreover, you might in the course of the trial, if you had liked, have fixed the penalty at banishment; the state which refuses to let you go now would have let you go then.  But you pretended that you preferred death to exile (compare Apol.), and that you were not unwilling to die.  And now you have forgotten these fine sentiments, and pay no respect to us the laws, of whom you are the destroyer; and are doing what only a miserable slave would do, running away and turning your back upon the compacts and agreements which you made as a citizen.  And first of all answer this very question:  Are we right in saying that you agreed to be governed according to us in deed, and not in word only?  Is that true or not?'  How shall we answer, Crito?  Must we not assent?"}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"We cannot help it, Socrates."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then will they not say:  'You, Socrates, are breaking the covenants and agreements which you made with us at your leisure, not in any haste or under any compulsion or deception, but after you have had seventy years to think of them, during which time you were at liberty to leave the city, if we were not to your mind, or if our covenants appeared to you to be unfair.  You had your choice, and might have gone either to Lacedaemon or Crete, both which states are often praised by you for their good government, or to some other Hellenic or foreign state.  Whereas you, above all other Athenians, seemed to be so fond of the state, or, in other words, of us her laws (and who would care about a state which has no laws?), that you never stirred out of her; the halt, the blind, the maimed, were not more stationary in her than you were.  And now you run away and forsake your agreements.  Not so, Socrates, if you will take our advice; do not make yourself ridiculous by escaping out of the city. 'For just consider, if you transgress and err in this sort of way, what good will you do either to yourself or to your friends?  That your friends will be driven into exile and deprived of citizenship, or will lose their property, is tolerably certain; and you yourself, if you fly to one of the neighbouring cities, as, for example, Thebes or Megara, both of which are well governed, will come to them as an enemy, Socrates, and their government will be against you, and all patriotic citizens will cast an evil eye upon you as a subverter of the laws, and you will confirm in the minds of the judges the justice of their own condemnation of you.  For he who is a corrupter of the laws is more than likely to be a corrupter of the young and foolish portion of mankind.  Will you then flee from well-ordered cities and virtuous men? and is existence worth having on these terms?  Or will you go to them without shame, and talk to them, Socrates?  And what will you say to them?  What you say here about virtue and justice and institutions and laws being the best things among men?  Would that be decent of you?  Surely not.  But if you go away from well-governed states to Crito's friends in Thessaly, where there is great disorder and licence, they will be charmed to hear the tale of your escape from prison, set off with ludicrous particulars of the manner in which you were wrapped in a goatskin or some other disguise, and metamorphosed as the manner is of runaways; but will there be no one to remind you that in your old age you were not ashamed to violate the most sacred laws from a miserable desire of a little more life?  Perhaps not, if you keep them in a good temper; but if they are out of temper you will hear many degrading things; you will live, but how?--as the flatterer of all men, and the servant of all men; and doing what?--eating and drinking in Thessaly, having gone abroad in order that you may get a dinner.  And where will be your fine sentiments about justice and virtue?  Say that you wish to live for the sake of your children--you want to bring them up and educate them--will you take them into Thessaly and deprive them of Athenian citizenship?  Is this the benefit which you will confer upon them?  Or are you under the impression that they will be better cared for and educated here if you are still alive, although absent from them; for your friends will take care of them? Do you fancy that if you are an inhabitant of Thessaly they will take care of them, and if you are an inhabitant of the other world that they will not take care of them?  Nay; but if they who call themselves friends are good for anything, they will--to be sure they will. 'Listen, then, Socrates, to us who have brought you up.  Think not of life and children first, and of justice afterwards, but of justice first, that you may be justified before the princes of the world below.  For neither will you nor any that belong to you be happier or holier or juster in this life, or happier in another, if you do as Crito bids.  Now you depart in innocence, a sufferer and not a doer of evil; a victim, not of the laws, but of men.  But if you go forth, returning evil for evil, and injury for injury, breaking the covenants and agreements which you have made with us, and wronging those whom you ought least of all to wrong, that is to say, yourself, your friends, your country, and us, we shall be angry with you while you live, and our brethren, the laws in the world below, will receive you as an enemy; for they will know that you have done your best to destroy us.  Listen, then, to us and not to Crito.' This, dear Crito, is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other.  And I know that anything more which you may say will be vain.  Yet speak, if you have anything to say."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"CRITO","Dialogue":"I have nothing to say, Socrates."}
{"Book":"crito","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Leave me then, Crito, to fulfil the will of God, and to follow whither he leads. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITO *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"symposium","Speaker":"SCENE","Dialogue":"The House of Agathon. Concerning the things about which you ask to be informed I believe that I am not ill-prepared with an answer. For the day before yesterday I was coming from my own home at Phalerum to the city, and one of my acquaintance, who had caught a sight of me from behind, calling out playfully in the distance, said: Apollodorus, O thou Phalerian (Probably a play of words on (Greek), 'bald-headed.') man, halt! So I did as I was bid; and then he said, I was looking for you, Apollodorus, only just now, that I might ask you about the speeches in praise of love, which were delivered by Socrates, Alcibiades, and others, at Agathon's supper. Phoenix, the son of Philip, told another person who told me of them; his narrative was very indistinct, but he said that you knew, and I wish that you would give me an account of them. Who, if not you, should be the reporter of the words of your friend? And first tell me, he said, were you present at this meeting? Your informant, Glaucon, I said, must have been very indistinct indeed, if you imagine that the occasion was recent; or that I could have been of the party. Why, yes, he replied, I thought so. Impossible: I said. Are you ignorant that for many years Agathon has not resided at Athens; and not three have elapsed since I became acquainted with Socrates, and have made it my daily business to know all that he says and does. There was a time when I was running about the world, fancying myself to be well employed, but I was really a most wretched being, no better than you are now. I thought that I ought to do anything rather than be a philosopher. Well, he said, jesting apart, tell me when the meeting occurred. In our boyhood, I replied, when Agathon won the prize with his first tragedy, on the day after that on which he and his chorus offered the sacrifice of victory. Then it must have been a long while ago, he said; and who told you--did Socrates? No indeed, I replied, but the same person who told Phoenix;--he was a little fellow, who never wore any shoes, Aristodemus, of the deme of Cydathenaeum. He had been at Agathon's feast; and I think that in those days there was no one who was a more devoted admirer of Socrates. Moreover, I have asked Socrates about the truth of some parts of his narrative, and he confirmed them. Then, said Glaucon, let us have the tale over again; is not the road to Athens just made for conversation? And so we walked, and talked of the discourses on love; and therefore, as I said at first, I am not ill-prepared to comply with your request, and will have another rehearsal of them if you like. For to speak or to hear others speak of philosophy always gives me the greatest pleasure, to say nothing of the profit. But when I hear another strain, especially that of you rich men and traders, such conversation displeases me; and I pity you who are my companions, because you think that you are doing something when in reality you are doing nothing. And I dare say that you pity me in return, whom you regard as an unhappy creature, and very probably you are right. But I certainly know of you what you only think of me--there is the difference."}
{"Book":"symposium","Speaker":"COMPANION","Dialogue":"I see, Apollodorus, that you are just the same--always speaking evil of yourself, and of others; and I do believe that you pity all mankind, with the exception of Socrates, yourself first of all, true in this to your old name, which, however deserved, I know not how you acquired, of Apollodorus the madman; for you are always raging against yourself and everybody but Socrates."}
{"Book":"symposium","Speaker":"APOLLODORUS","Dialogue":"Yes, friend, and the reason why I am said to be mad, and out of my wits, is just because I have these notions of myself and you; no other evidence is required."}
{"Book":"symposium","Speaker":"COMPANION","Dialogue":"No more of that, Apollodorus; but let me renew my request that you would repeat the conversation."}
{"Book":"symposium","Speaker":"APOLLODORUS","Dialogue":"Well, the tale of love was on this wise:--But perhaps I had better begin at the beginning, and endeavour to give you the exact words of Aristodemus: He said that he met Socrates fresh from the bath and sandalled; and as the sight of the sandals was unusual, he asked him whither he was going that he had been converted into such a beau:-- To a banquet at Agathon's, he replied, whose invitation to his sacrifice of victory I refused yesterday, fearing a crowd, but promising that I would come to-day instead; and so I have put on my finery, because he is such a fine man. What say you to going with me unasked? I will do as you bid me, I replied. Follow then, he said, and let us demolish the proverb:-- 'To the feasts of inferior men the good unbidden go;' instead of which our proverb will run:-- 'To the feasts of the good the good unbidden go;' and this alteration may be supported by the authority of Homer himself, who not only demolishes but literally outrages the proverb. For, after picturing Agamemnon as the most valiant of men, he makes Menelaus, who is but a fainthearted warrior, come unbidden (Iliad) to the banquet of Agamemnon, who is feasting and offering sacrifices, not the better to the worse, but the worse to the better. I rather fear, Socrates, said Aristodemus, lest this may still be my case; and that, like Menelaus in Homer, I shall be the inferior person, who 'To the feasts of the wise unbidden goes.' But I shall say that I was bidden of you, and then you will have to make an excuse. 'Two going together,' he replied, in Homeric fashion, one or other of them may invent an excuse by the way (Iliad). This was the style of their conversation as they went along. Socrates dropped behind in a fit of abstraction, and desired Aristodemus, who was waiting, to go on before him. When he reached the house of Agathon he found the doors wide open, and a comical thing happened. A servant coming out met him, and led him at once into the banqueting-hall in which the guests were reclining, for the banquet was about to begin. Welcome, Aristodemus, said Agathon, as soon as he appeared--you are just in time to sup with us; if you come on any other matter put it off, and make one of us, as I was looking for you yesterday and meant to have asked you, if I could have found you. But what have you done with Socrates? I turned round, but Socrates was nowhere to be seen; and I had to explain that he had been with me a moment before, and that I came by his invitation to the supper. You were quite right in coming, said Agathon; but where is he himself? He was behind me just now, as I entered, he said, and I cannot think what has become of him. Go and look for him, boy, said Agathon, and bring him in; and do you, Aristodemus, meanwhile take the place by Eryximachus. The servant then assisted him to wash, and he lay down, and presently another servant came in and reported that our friend Socrates had retired into the portico of the neighbouring house. 'There he is fixed,' said he, 'and when I call to him he will not stir.' How strange, said Agathon; then you must call him again, and keep calling him. Let him alone, said my informant; he has a way of stopping anywhere and losing himself without any reason. I believe that he will soon appear; do not therefore disturb him. Well, if you think so, I will leave him, said Agathon. And then, turning to the servants, he added, 'Let us have supper without waiting for him. Serve up whatever you please, for there is no one to give you orders; hitherto I have never left you to yourselves. But on this occasion imagine that you are our hosts, and that I and the company are your guests; treat us well, and then we shall commend you.' After this, supper was served, but still no Socrates; and during the meal Agathon several times expressed a wish to send for him, but Aristodemus objected; and at last when the feast was about half over--for the fit, as usual, was not of long duration--Socrates entered. Agathon, who was reclining alone at the end of the table, begged that he would take the place next to him; that 'I may touch you,' he said, 'and have the benefit of that wise thought which came into your mind in the portico, and is now in your possession; for I am certain that you would not have come away until you had found what you sought.' How I wish, said Socrates, taking his place as he was desired, that wisdom could be infused by touch, out of the fuller into the emptier man, as water runs through wool out of a fuller cup into an emptier one; if that were so, how greatly should I value the privilege of reclining at your side! For you would have filled me full with a stream of wisdom plenteous and fair; whereas my own is of a very mean and questionable sort, no better than a dream. But yours is bright and full of promise, and was manifested forth in all the splendour of youth the day before yesterday, in the presence of more than thirty thousand Hellenes. You are mocking, Socrates, said Agathon, and ere long you and I will have to determine who bears off the palm of wisdom--of this Dionysus shall be the judge; but at present you are better occupied with supper. Socrates took his place on the couch, and supped with the rest; and then libations were offered, and after a hymn had been sung to the god, and there had been the usual ceremonies, they were about to commence drinking, when Pausanias said, And now, my friends, how can we drink with least injury to ourselves? I can assure you that I feel severely the effect of yesterday's potations, and must have time to recover; and I suspect that most of you are in the same predicament, for you were of the party yesterday. Consider then: How can the drinking be made easiest? I entirely agree, said Aristophanes, that we should, by all means, avoid hard drinking, for I was myself one of those who were yesterday drowned in drink. I think that you are right, said Eryximachus, the son of Acumenus; but I should still like to hear one other person speak: Is Agathon able to drink hard? I am not equal to it, said Agathon. Then, said Eryximachus, the weak heads like myself, Aristodemus, Phaedrus, and others who never can drink, are fortunate in finding that the stronger ones are not in a drinking mood. (I do not include Socrates, who is able either to drink or to abstain, and will not mind, whichever we do.) Well, as of none of the company seem disposed to drink much, I may be forgiven for saying, as a physician, that drinking deep is a bad practice, which I never follow, if I can help, and certainly do not recommend to another, least of all to any one who still feels the effects of yesterday's carouse. I always do what you advise, and especially what you prescribe as a physician, rejoined Phaedrus the Myrrhinusian, and the rest of the company, if they are wise, will do the same. It was agreed that drinking was not to be the order of the day, but that they were all to drink only so much as they pleased. Then, said Eryximachus, as you are all agreed that drinking is to be voluntary, and that there is to be no compulsion, I move, in the next place, that the flute-girl, who has just made her appearance, be told to go away and play to herself, or, if she likes, to the women who are within (compare Prot.). To-day let us have conversation instead; and, if you will allow me, I will tell you what sort of conversation. This proposal having been accepted, Eryximachus proceeded as follows:-- I will begin, he said, after the manner of Melanippe in Euripides, 'Not mine the word' which I am about to speak, but that of Phaedrus. For often he says to me in an indignant tone:--'What a strange thing it is, Eryximachus, that, whereas other gods have poems and hymns made in their honour, the great and glorious god, Love, has no encomiast among all the poets who are so many. There are the worthy sophists too--the excellent Prodicus for example, who have descanted in prose on the virtues of Heracles and other heroes; and, what is still more extraordinary, I have met with a philosophical work in which the utility of salt has been made the theme of an eloquent discourse; and many other like things have had a like honour bestowed upon them. And only to think that there should have been an eager interest created about them, and yet that to this day no one has ever dared worthily to hymn Love's praises! So entirely has this great deity been neglected.' Now in this Phaedrus seems to me to be quite right, and therefore I want to offer him a contribution; also I think that at the present moment we who are here assembled cannot do better than honour the god Love. If you agree with me, there will be no lack of conversation; for I mean to propose that each of us in turn, going from left to right, shall make a speech in honour of Love. Let him give us the best which he can; and Phaedrus, because he is sitting first on the left hand, and because he is the father of the thought, shall begin. No one will vote against you, Eryximachus, said Socrates. How can I oppose your motion, who profess to understand nothing but matters of love; nor, I presume, will Agathon and Pausanias; and there can be no doubt of Aristophanes, whose whole concern is with Dionysus and Aphrodite; nor will any one disagree of those whom I see around me. The proposal, as I am aware, may seem rather hard upon us whose place is last; but we shall be contented if we hear some good speeches first. Let Phaedrus begin the praise of Love, and good luck to him. All the company expressed their assent, and desired him to do as Socrates bade him. Aristodemus did not recollect all that was said, nor do I recollect all that he related to me; but I will tell you what I thought most worthy of remembrance, and what the chief speakers said. Phaedrus began by affirming that Love is a mighty god, and wonderful among gods and men, but especially wonderful in his birth. For he is the eldest of the gods, which is an honour to him; and a proof of his claim to this honour is, that of his parents there is no memorial; neither poet nor prose-writer has ever affirmed that he had any. As Hesiod says:-- 'First Chaos came, and then broad-bosomed Earth, The everlasting seat of all that is, And Love.' In other words, after Chaos, the Earth and Love, these two, came into being. Also Parmenides sings of Generation: 'First in the train of gods, he fashioned Love.' And Acusilaus agrees with Hesiod. Thus numerous are the witnesses who acknowledge Love to be the eldest of the gods. And not only is he the eldest, he is also the source of the greatest benefits to us. For I know not any greater blessing to a young man who is beginning life than a virtuous lover, or to the lover than a beloved youth. For the principle which ought to be the guide of men who would nobly live--that principle, I say, neither kindred, nor honour, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able to implant so well as love. Of what am I speaking? Of the sense of honour and dishonour, without which neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work. And I say that a lover who is detected in doing any dishonourable act, or submitting through cowardice when any dishonour is done to him by another, will be more pained at being detected by his beloved than at being seen by his father, or by his companions, or by any one else. The beloved too, when he is found in any disgraceful situation, has the same feeling about his lover. And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves (compare Rep.), they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him. That courage which, as Homer says, the god breathes into the souls of some heroes, Love of his own nature infuses into the lover. Love will make men dare to die for their beloved--love alone; and women as well as men. Of this, Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias, is a monument to all Hellas; for she was willing to lay down her life on behalf of her husband, when no one else would, although he had a father and mother; but the tenderness of her love so far exceeded theirs, that she made them seem to be strangers in blood to their own son, and in name only related to him; and so noble did this action of hers appear to the gods, as well as to men, that among the many who have done virtuously she is one of the very few to whom, in admiration of her noble action, they have granted the privilege of returning alive to earth; such exceeding honour is paid by the gods to the devotion and virtue of love. But Orpheus, the son of Oeagrus, the harper, they sent empty away, and presented to him an apparition only of her whom he sought, but herself they would not give up, because he showed no spirit; he was only a harp-player, and did not dare like Alcestis to die for love, but was contriving how he might enter Hades alive; moreover, they afterwards caused him to suffer death at the hands of women, as the punishment of his cowardliness. Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus--his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two, fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless, and younger far). And greatly as the gods honour the virtue of love, still the return of love on the part of the beloved to the lover is more admired and valued and rewarded by them, for the lover is more divine; because he is inspired by God. Now Achilles was quite aware, for he had been told by his mother, that he might avoid death and return home, and live to a good old age, if he abstained from slaying Hector. Nevertheless he gave his life to revenge his friend, and dared to die, not only in his defence, but after he was dead. Wherefore the gods honoured him even above Alcestis, and sent him to the Islands of the Blest. These are my reasons for affirming that Love is the eldest and noblest and mightiest of the gods; and the chiefest author and giver of virtue in life, and of happiness after death. This, or something like this, was the speech of Phaedrus; and some other speeches followed which Aristodemus did not remember; the next which he repeated was that of Pausanias. Phaedrus, he said, the argument has not been set before us, I think, quite in the right form;--we should not be called upon to praise Love in such an indiscriminate manner. If there were only one Love, then what you said would be well enough; but since there are more Loves than one,--should have begun by determining which of them was to be the theme of our praises. I will amend this defect; and first of all I will tell you which Love is deserving of praise, and then try to hymn the praiseworthy one in a manner worthy of him. For we all know that Love is inseparable from Aphrodite, and if there were only one Aphrodite there would be only one Love; but as there are two goddesses there must be two Loves. And am I not right in asserting that there are two goddesses? The elder one, having no mother, who is called the heavenly Aphrodite--she is the daughter of Uranus; the younger, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione--her we call common; and the Love who is her fellow-worker is rightly named common, as the other love is called heavenly. All the gods ought to have praise given to them, but not without distinction of their natures; and therefore I must try to distinguish the characters of the two Loves. Now actions vary according to the manner of their performance. Take, for example, that which we are now doing, drinking, singing and talking--these actions are not in themselves either good or evil, but they turn out in this or that way according to the mode of performing them; and when well done they are good, and when wrongly done they are evil; and in like manner not every love, but only that which has a noble purpose, is noble and worthy of praise. The Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite is essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul--the most foolish beings are the objects of this love which desires only to gain an end, but never thinks of accomplishing the end nobly, and therefore does good and evil quite indiscriminately. The goddess who is his mother is far younger than the other, and she was born of the union of the male and female, and partakes of both. But the offspring of the heavenly Aphrodite is derived from a mother in whose birth the female has no part,--she is from the male only; this is that love which is of youths, and the goddess being older, there is nothing of wantonness in her. Those who are inspired by this love turn to the male, and delight in him who is the more valiant and intelligent nature; any one may recognise the pure enthusiasts in the very character of their attachments. For they love not boys, but intelligent beings whose reason is beginning to be developed, much about the time at which their beards begin to grow. And in choosing young men to be their companions, they mean to be faithful to them, and pass their whole life in company with them, not to take them in their inexperience, and deceive them, and play the fool with them, or run away from one to another of them. But the love of young boys should be forbidden by law, because their future is uncertain; they may turn out good or bad, either in body or soul, and much noble enthusiasm may be thrown away upon them; in this matter the good are a law to themselves, and the coarser sort of lovers ought to be restrained by force; as we restrain or attempt to restrain them from fixing their affections on women of free birth. These are the persons who bring a reproach on love; and some have been led to deny the lawfulness of such attachments because they see the impropriety and evil of them; for surely nothing that is decorously and lawfully done can justly be censured. Now here and in Lacedaemon the rules about love are perplexing, but in most cities they are simple and easily intelligible; in Elis and Boeotia, and in countries having no gifts of eloquence, they are very straightforward; the law is simply in favour of these connexions, and no one, whether young or old, has anything to say to their discredit; the reason being, as I suppose, that they are men of few words in those parts, and therefore the lovers do not like the trouble of pleading their suit. In Ionia and other places, and generally in countries which are subject to the barbarians, the custom is held to be dishonourable; loves of youths share the evil repute in which philosophy and gymnastics are held, because they are inimical to tyranny; for the interests of rulers require that their subjects should be poor in spirit (compare Arist. Politics), and that there should be no strong bond of friendship or society among them, which love, above all other motives, is likely to inspire, as our Athenian tyrants learned by experience; for the love of Aristogeiton and the constancy of Harmodius had a strength which undid their power. And, therefore, the ill-repute into which these attachments have fallen is to be ascribed to the evil condition of those who make them to be ill-reputed; that is to say, to the self-seeking of the governors and the cowardice of the governed; on the other hand, the indiscriminate honour which is given to them in some countries is attributable to the laziness of those who hold this opinion of them. In our own country a far better principle prevails, but, as I was saying, the explanation of it is rather perplexing. For, observe that open loves are held to be more honourable than secret ones, and that the love of the noblest and highest, even if their persons are less beautiful than others, is especially honourable. Consider, too, how great is the encouragement which all the world gives to the lover; neither is he supposed to be doing anything dishonourable; but if he succeeds he is praised, and if he fail he is blamed. And in the pursuit of his love the custom of mankind allows him to do many strange things, which philosophy would bitterly censure if they were done from any motive of interest, or wish for office or power. He may pray, and entreat, and supplicate, and swear, and lie on a mat at the door, and endure a slavery worse than that of any slave--in any other case friends and enemies would be equally ready to prevent him, but now there is no friend who will be ashamed of him and admonish him, and no enemy will charge him with meanness or flattery; the actions of a lover have a grace which ennobles them; and custom has decided that they are highly commendable and that there no loss of character in them; and, what is strangest of all, he only may swear and forswear himself (so men say), and the gods will forgive his transgression, for there is no such thing as a lover's oath. Such is the entire liberty which gods and men have allowed the lover, according to the custom which prevails in our part of the world. From this point of view a man fairly argues that in Athens to love and to be loved is held to be a very honourable thing. But when parents forbid their sons to talk with their lovers, and place them under a tutor's care, who is appointed to see to these things, and their companions and equals cast in their teeth anything of the sort which they may observe, and their elders refuse to silence the reprovers and do not rebuke them--any one who reflects on all this will, on the contrary, think that we hold these practices to be most disgraceful. But, as I was saying at first, the truth as I imagine is, that whether such practices are honourable or whether they are dishonourable is not a simple question; they are honourable to him who follows them honourably, dishonourable to him who follows them dishonourably. There is dishonour in yielding to the evil, or in an evil manner; but there is honour in yielding to the good, or in an honourable manner. Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting. The custom of our country would have both of them proven well and truly, and would have us yield to the one sort of lover and avoid the other, and therefore encourages some to pursue, and others to fly; testing both the lover and beloved in contests and trials, until they show to which of the two classes they respectively belong. And this is the reason why, in the first place, a hasty attachment is held to be dishonourable, because time is the true test of this as of most other things; and secondly there is a dishonour in being overcome by the love of money, or of wealth, or of political power, whether a man is frightened into surrender by the loss of them, or, having experienced the benefits of money and political corruption, is unable to rise above the seductions of them. For none of these things are of a permanent or lasting nature; not to mention that no generous friendship ever sprang from them. There remains, then, only one way of honourable attachment which custom allows in the beloved, and this is the way of virtue; for as we admitted that any service which the lover does to him is not to be accounted flattery or a dishonour to himself, so the beloved has one way only of voluntary service which is not dishonourable, and this is virtuous service. For we have a custom, and according to our custom any one who does service to another under the idea that he will be improved by him either in wisdom, or in some other particular of virtue--such a voluntary service, I say, is not to be regarded as a dishonour, and is not open to the charge of flattery. And these two customs, one the love of youth, and the other the practice of philosophy and virtue in general, ought to meet in one, and then the beloved may honourably indulge the lover. For when the lover and beloved come together, having each of them a law, and the lover thinks that he is right in doing any service which he can to his gracious loving one; and the other that he is right in showing any kindness which he can to him who is making him wise and good; the one capable of communicating wisdom and virtue, the other seeking to acquire them with a view to education and wisdom, when the two laws of love are fulfilled and meet in one--then, and then only, may the beloved yield with honour to the lover. Nor when love is of this disinterested sort is there any disgrace in being deceived, but in every other case there is equal disgrace in being or not being deceived. For he who is gracious to his lover under the impression that he is rich, and is disappointed of his gains because he turns out to be poor, is disgraced all the same: for he has done his best to show that he would give himself up to any one's 'uses base' for the sake of money; but this is not honourable. And on the same principle he who gives himself to a lover because he is a good man, and in the hope that he will be improved by his company, shows himself to be virtuous, even though the object of his affection turn out to be a villain, and to have no virtue; and if he is deceived he has committed a noble error. For he has proved that for his part he will do anything for anybody with a view to virtue and improvement, than which there can be nothing nobler. Thus noble in every case is the acceptance of another for the sake of virtue. This is that love which is the love of the heavenly godess, and is heavenly, and of great price to individuals and cities, making the lover and the beloved alike eager in the work of their own improvement. But all other loves are the offspring of the other, who is the common goddess. To you, Phaedrus, I offer this my contribution in praise of love, which is as good as I could make extempore. Pausanias came to a pause--this is the balanced way in which I have been taught by the wise to speak; and Aristodemus said that the turn of Aristophanes was next, but either he had eaten too much, or from some other cause he had the hiccough, and was obliged to change turns with Eryximachus the physician, who was reclining on the couch below him. Eryximachus, he said, you ought either to stop my hiccough, or to speak in my turn until I have left off. I will do both, said Eryximachus: I will speak in your turn, and do you speak in mine; and while I am speaking let me recommend you to hold your breath, and if after you have done so for some time the hiccough is no better, then gargle with a little water; and if it still continues, tickle your nose with something and sneeze; and if you sneeze once or twice, even the most violent hiccough is sure to go. I will do as you prescribe, said Aristophanes, and now get on. Eryximachus spoke as follows: Seeing that Pausanias made a fair beginning, and but a lame ending, I must endeavour to supply his deficiency. I think that he has rightly distinguished two kinds of love. But my art further informs me that the double love is not merely an affection of the soul of man towards the fair, or towards anything, but is to be found in the bodies of all animals and in productions of the earth, and I may say in all that is; such is the conclusion which I seem to have gathered from my own art of medicine, whence I learn how great and wonderful and universal is the deity of love, whose empire extends over all things, divine as well as human. And from medicine I will begin that I may do honour to my art. There are in the human body these two kinds of love, which are confessedly different and unlike, and being unlike, they have loves and desires which are unlike; and the desire of the healthy is one, and the desire of the diseased is another; and as Pausanias was just now saying that to indulge good men is honourable, and bad men dishonourable:--so too in the body the good and healthy elements are to be indulged, and the bad elements and the elements of disease are not to be indulged, but discouraged. And this is what the physician has to do, and in this the art of medicine consists: for medicine may be regarded generally as the knowledge of the loves and desires of the body, and how to satisfy them or not; and the best physician is he who is able to separate fair love from foul, or to convert one into the other; and he who knows how to eradicate and how to implant love, whichever is required, and can reconcile the most hostile elements in the constitution and make them loving friends, is a skilful practitioner. Now the most hostile are the most opposite, such as hot and cold, bitter and sweet, moist and dry, and the like. And my ancestor, Asclepius, knowing how to implant friendship and accord in these elements, was the creator of our art, as our friends the poets here tell us, and I believe them; and not only medicine in every branch but the arts of gymnastic and husbandry are under his dominion. Any one who pays the least attention to the subject will also perceive that in music there is the same reconciliation of opposites; and I suppose that this must have been the meaning of Heracleitus, although his words are not accurate; for he says that The One is united by disunion, like the harmony of the bow and the lyre. Now there is an absurdity saying that harmony is discord or is composed of elements which are still in a state of discord. But what he probably meant was, that harmony is composed of differing notes of higher or lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by the art of music; for if the higher and lower notes still disagreed, there could be no harmony,--clearly not. For harmony is a symphony, and symphony is an agreement; but an agreement of disagreements while they disagree there cannot be; you cannot harmonize that which disagrees. In like manner rhythm is compounded of elements short and long, once differing and now in accord; which accordance, as in the former instance, medicine, so in all these other cases, music implants, making love and unison to grow up among them; and thus music, too, is concerned with the principles of love in their application to harmony and rhythm. Again, in the essential nature of harmony and rhythm there is no difficulty in discerning love which has not yet become double. But when you want to use them in actual life, either in the composition of songs or in the correct performance of airs or metres composed already, which latter is called education, then the difficulty begins, and the good artist is needed. Then the old tale has to be repeated of fair and heavenly love--the love of Urania the fair and heavenly muse, and of the duty of accepting the temperate, and those who are as yet intemperate only that they may become temperate, and of preserving their love; and again, of the vulgar Polyhymnia, who must be used with circumspection that the pleasure be enjoyed, but may not generate licentiousness; just as in my own art it is a great matter so to regulate the desires of the epicure that he may gratify his tastes without the attendant evil of disease. Whence I infer that in music, in medicine, in all other things human as well as divine, both loves ought to be noted as far as may be, for they are both present. The course of the seasons is also full of both these principles; and when, as I was saying, the elements of hot and cold, moist and dry, attain the harmonious love of one another and blend in temperance and harmony, they bring to men, animals, and plants health and plenty, and do them no harm; whereas the wanton love, getting the upper hand and affecting the seasons of the year, is very destructive and injurious, being the source of pestilence, and bringing many other kinds of diseases on animals and plants; for hoar-frost and hail and blight spring from the excesses and disorders of these elements of love, which to know in relation to the revolutions of the heavenly bodies and the seasons of the year is termed astronomy. Furthermore all sacrifices and the whole province of divination, which is the art of communion between gods and men--these, I say, are concerned only with the preservation of the good and the cure of the evil love. For all manner of impiety is likely to ensue if, instead of accepting and honouring and reverencing the harmonious love in all his actions, a man honours the other love, whether in his feelings towards gods or parents, towards the living or the dead. Wherefore the business of divination is to see to these loves and to heal them, and divination is the peacemaker of gods and men, working by a knowledge of the religious or irreligious tendencies which exist in human loves. Such is the great and mighty, or rather omnipotent force of love in general. And the love, more especially, which is concerned with the good, and which is perfected in company with temperance and justice, whether among gods or men, has the greatest power, and is the source of all our happiness and harmony, and makes us friends with the gods who are above us, and with one another. I dare say that I too have omitted several things which might be said in praise of Love, but this was not intentional, and you, Aristophanes, may now supply the omission or take some other line of commendation; for I perceive that you are rid of the hiccough. Yes, said Aristophanes, who followed, the hiccough is gone; not, however, until I applied the sneezing; and I wonder whether the harmony of the body has a love of such noises and ticklings, for I no sooner applied the sneezing than I was cured. Eryximachus said: Beware, friend Aristophanes, although you are going to speak, you are making fun of me; and I shall have to watch and see whether I cannot have a laugh at your expense, when you might speak in peace. You are right, said Aristophanes, laughing. I will unsay my words; but do you please not to watch me, as I fear that in the speech which I am about to make, instead of others laughing with me, which is to the manner born of our muse and would be all the better, I shall only be laughed at by them. Do you expect to shoot your bolt and escape, Aristophanes? Well, perhaps if you are very careful and bear in mind that you will be called to account, I may be induced to let you off. Aristophanes professed to open another vein of discourse; he had a mind to praise Love in another way, unlike that either of Pausanias or Eryximachus. Mankind, he said, judging by their neglect of him, have never, as I think, at all understood the power of Love. For if they had understood him they would surely have built noble temples and altars, and offered solemn sacrifices in his honour; but this is not done, and most certainly ought to be done: since of all the gods he is the best friend of men, the helper and the healer of the ills which are the great impediment to the happiness of the race. I will try to describe his power to you, and you shall teach the rest of the world what I am teaching you. In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word 'Androgynous' is only preserved as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three; and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round like their parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained. At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: 'Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.' He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them,--being the sections of entire men or women,--and clung to that. They were being destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan: he turned the parts of generation round to the front, for this had not been always their position, and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the transposition the male generated in the female in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man. Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like them. And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach manhood they are lovers of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,--if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, 'What do you people want of one another?' they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: 'Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two--I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?'--there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need (compare Arist. Pol.). And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love. There was a time, I say, when we were one, but now because of the wickedness of mankind God has dispersed us, as the Arcadians were dispersed into villages by the Lacedaemonians (compare Arist. Pol.). And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo, like the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments, and that we shall be like tallies. Wherefore let us exhort all men to piety, that we may avoid evil, and obtain the good, of which Love is to us the lord and minister; and let no one oppose him--he is the enemy of the gods who opposes him. For if we are friends of the God and at peace with him we shall find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this world at present. I am serious, and therefore I must beg Eryximachus not to make fun or to find any allusion in what I am saying to Pausanias and Agathon, who, as I suspect, are both of the manly nature, and belong to the class which I have been describing. But my words have a wider application--they include men and women everywhere; and I believe that if our loves were perfectly accomplished, and each one returning to his primeval nature had his original true love, then our race would be happy. And if this would be best of all, the best in the next degree and under present circumstances must be the nearest approach to such an union; and that will be the attainment of a congenial love. Wherefore, if we would praise him who has given to us the benefit, we must praise the god Love, who is our greatest benefactor, both leading us in this life back to our own nature, and giving us high hopes for the future, for he promises that if we are pious, he will restore us to our original state, and heal us and make us happy and blessed. This, Eryximachus, is my discourse of love, which, although different to yours, I must beg you to leave unassailed by the shafts of your ridicule, in order that each may have his turn; each, or rather either, for Agathon and Socrates are the only ones left. Indeed, I am not going to attack you, said Eryximachus, for I thought your speech charming, and did I not know that Agathon and Socrates are masters in the art of love, I should be really afraid that they would have nothing to say, after the world of things which have been said already. But, for all that, I am not without hopes. Socrates said: You played your part well, Eryximachus; but if you were as I am now, or rather as I shall be when Agathon has spoken, you would, indeed, be in a great strait. You want to cast a spell over me, Socrates, said Agathon, in the hope that I may be disconcerted at the expectation raised among the audience that I shall speak well. I should be strangely forgetful, Agathon replied Socrates, of the courage and magnanimity which you showed when your own compositions were about to be exhibited, and you came upon the stage with the actors and faced the vast theatre altogether undismayed, if I thought that your nerves could be fluttered at a small party of friends. Do you think, Socrates, said Agathon, that my head is so full of the theatre as not to know how much more formidable to a man of sense a few good judges are than many fools? Nay, replied Socrates, I should be very wrong in attributing to you, Agathon, that or any other want of refinement. And I am quite aware that if you happened to meet with any whom you thought wise, you would care for their opinion much more than for that of the many. But then we, having been a part of the foolish many in the theatre, cannot be regarded as the select wise; though I know that if you chanced to be in the presence, not of one of ourselves, but of some really wise man, you would be ashamed of disgracing yourself before him--would you not? Yes, said Agathon. But before the many you would not be ashamed, if you thought that you were doing something disgraceful in their presence? Here Phaedrus interrupted them, saying: not answer him, my dear Agathon; for if he can only get a partner with whom he can talk, especially a good-looking one, he will no longer care about the completion of our plan. Now I love to hear him talk; but just at present I must not forget the encomium on Love which I ought to receive from him and from every one. When you and he have paid your tribute to the god, then you may talk. Very good, Phaedrus, said Agathon; I see no reason why I should not proceed with my speech, as I shall have many other opportunities of conversing with Socrates. Let me say first how I ought to speak, and then speak:-- The previous speakers, instead of praising the god Love, or unfolding his nature, appear to have congratulated mankind on the benefits which he confers upon them. But I would rather praise the god first, and then speak of his gifts; this is always the right way of praising everything. May I say without impiety or offence, that of all the blessed gods he is the most blessed because he is the fairest and best? And he is the fairest: for, in the first place, he is the youngest, and of his youth he is himself the witness, fleeing out of the way of age, who is swift enough, swifter truly than most of us like:--Love hates him and will not come near him; but youth and love live and move together--like to like, as the proverb says. Many things were said by Phaedrus about Love in which I agree with him; but I cannot agree that he is older than Iapetus and Kronos:--not so; I maintain him to be the youngest of the gods, and youthful ever. The ancient doings among the gods of which Hesiod and Parmenides spoke, if the tradition of them be true, were done of Necessity and not of Love; had Love been in those days, there would have been no chaining or mutilation of the gods, or other violence, but peace and sweetness, as there is now in heaven, since the rule of Love began. Love is young and also tender; he ought to have a poet like Homer to describe his tenderness, as Homer says of Ate, that she is a goddess and tender:-- 'Her feet are tender, for she sets her steps, Not on the ground but on the heads of men:' herein is an excellent proof of her tenderness,--that she walks not upon the hard but upon the soft. Let us adduce a similar proof of the tenderness of Love; for he walks not upon the earth, nor yet upon the skulls of men, which are not so very soft, but in the hearts and souls of both gods and men, which are of all things the softest: in them he walks and dwells and makes his home. Not in every soul without exception, for where there is hardness he departs, where there is softness there he dwells; and nestling always with his feet and in all manner of ways in the softest of soft places, how can he be other than the softest of all things? Of a truth he is the tenderest as well as the youngest, and also he is of flexile form; for if he were hard and without flexure he could not enfold all things, or wind his way into and out of every soul of man undiscovered. And a proof of his flexibility and symmetry of form is his grace, which is universally admitted to be in an especial manner the attribute of Love; ungrace and love are always at war with one another. The fairness of his complexion is revealed by his habitation among the flowers; for he dwells not amid bloomless or fading beauties, whether of body or soul or aught else, but in the place of flowers and scents, there he sits and abides. Concerning the beauty of the god I have said enough; and yet there remains much more which I might say. Of his virtue I have now to speak: his greatest glory is that he can neither do nor suffer wrong to or from any god or any man; for he suffers not by force if he suffers; force comes not near him, neither when he acts does he act by force. For all men in all things serve him of their own free will, and where there is voluntary agreement, there, as the laws which are the lords of the city say, is justice. And not only is he just but exceedingly temperate, for Temperance is the acknowledged ruler of the pleasures and desires, and no pleasure ever masters Love; he is their master and they are his servants; and if he conquers them he must be temperate indeed. As to courage, even the God of War is no match for him; he is the captive and Love is the lord, for love, the love of Aphrodite, masters him, as the tale runs; and the master is stronger than the servant. And if he conquers the bravest of all others, he must be himself the bravest. Of his courage and justice and temperance I have spoken, but I have yet to speak of his wisdom; and according to the measure of my ability I must try to do my best. In the first place he is a poet (and here, like Eryximachus, I magnify my art), and he is also the source of poesy in others, which he could not be if he were not himself a poet. And at the touch of him every one becomes a poet, even though he had no music in him before (A fragment of the Sthenoaoea of Euripides.); this also is a proof that Love is a good poet and accomplished in all the fine arts; for no one can give to another that which he has not himself, or teach that of which he has no knowledge. Who will deny that the creation of the animals is his doing? Are they not all the works of his wisdom, born and begotten of him? And as to the artists, do we not know that he only of them whom love inspires has the light of fame?--he whom Love touches not walks in darkness. The arts of medicine and archery and divination were discovered by Apollo, under the guidance of love and desire; so that he too is a disciple of Love. Also the melody of the Muses, the metallurgy of Hephaestus, the weaving of Athene, the empire of Zeus over gods and men, are all due to Love, who was the inventor of them. And so Love set in order the empire of the gods--the love of beauty, as is evident, for with deformity Love has no concern. In the days of old, as I began by saying, dreadful deeds were done among the gods, for they were ruled by Necessity; but now since the birth of Love, and from the Love of the beautiful, has sprung every good in heaven and earth. Therefore, Phaedrus, I say of Love that he is the fairest and best in himself, and the cause of what is fairest and best in all other things. And there comes into my mind a line of poetry in which he is said to be the god who 'Gives peace on earth and calms the stormy deep, Who stills the winds and bids the sufferer sleep.' This is he who empties men of disaffection and fills them with affection, who makes them to meet together at banquets such as these: in sacrifices, feasts, dances, he is our lord--who sends courtesy and sends away discourtesy, who gives kindness ever and never gives unkindness; the friend of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the gods; desired by those who have no part in him, and precious to those who have the better part in him; parent of delicacy, luxury, desire, fondness, softness, grace; regardful of the good, regardless of the evil: in every word, work, wish, fear--saviour, pilot, comrade, helper; glory of gods and men, leader best and brightest: in whose footsteps let every man follow, sweetly singing in his honour and joining in that sweet strain with which love charms the souls of gods and men. Such is the speech, Phaedrus, half-playful, yet having a certain measure of seriousness, which, according to my ability, I dedicate to the god. When Agathon had done speaking, Aristodemus said that there was a general cheer; the young man was thought to have spoken in a manner worthy of himself, and of the god. And Socrates, looking at Eryximachus, said: Tell me, son of Acumenus, was there not reason in my fears? and was I not a true prophet when I said that Agathon would make a wonderful oration, and that I should be in a strait? The part of the prophecy which concerns Agathon, replied Eryximachus, appears to me to be true; but not the other part--that you will be in a strait. Why, my dear friend, said Socrates, must not I or any one be in a strait who has to speak after he has heard such a rich and varied discourse? I am especially struck with the beauty of the concluding words--who could listen to them without amazement? When I reflected on the immeasurable inferiority of my own powers, I was ready to run away for shame, if there had been a possibility of escape. For I was reminded of Gorgias, and at the end of his speech I fancied that Agathon was shaking at me the Gorginian or Gorgonian head of the great master of rhetoric, which was simply to turn me and my speech into stone, as Homer says (Odyssey), and strike me dumb. And then I perceived how foolish I had been in consenting to take my turn with you in praising love, and saying that I too was a master of the art, when I really had no conception how anything ought to be praised. For in my simplicity I imagined that the topics of praise should be true, and that this being presupposed, out of the true the speaker was to choose the best and set them forth in the best manner. And I felt quite proud, thinking that I knew the nature of true praise, and should speak well. Whereas I now see that the intention was to attribute to Love every species of greatness and glory, whether really belonging to him or not, without regard to truth or falsehood--that was no matter; for the original proposal seems to have been not that each of you should really praise Love, but only that you should appear to praise him. And so you attribute to Love every imaginable form of praise which can be gathered anywhere; and you say that 'he is all this,' and 'the cause of all that,' making him appear the fairest and best of all to those who know him not, for you cannot impose upon those who know him. And a noble and solemn hymn of praise have you rehearsed. But as I misunderstood the nature of the praise when I said that I would take my turn, I must beg to be absolved from the promise which I made in ignorance, and which (as Euripides would say (Eurip. Hyppolytus)) was a promise of the lips and not of the mind. Farewell then to such a strain: for I do not praise in that way; no, indeed, I cannot. But if you like to hear the truth about love, I am ready to speak in my own manner, though I will not make myself ridiculous by entering into any rivalry with you. Say then, Phaedrus, whether you would like to have the truth about love, spoken in any words and in any order which may happen to come into my mind at the time. Will that be agreeable to you? Aristodemus said that Phaedrus and the company bid him speak in any manner which he thought best. Then, he added, let me have your permission first to ask Agathon a few more questions, in order that I may take his admissions as the premisses of my discourse. I grant the permission, said Phaedrus: put your questions. Socrates then proceeded as follows:-- In the magnificent oration which you have just uttered, I think that you were right, my dear Agathon, in proposing to speak of the nature of Love first and afterwards of his works--that is a way of beginning which I very much approve. And as you have spoken so eloquently of his nature, may I ask you further, Whether love is the love of something or of nothing? And here I must explain myself: I do not want you to say that love is the love of a father or the love of a mother--that would be ridiculous; but to answer as you would, if I asked is a father a father of something? to which you would find no difficulty in replying, of a son or daughter: and the answer would be right. Very true, said Agathon. And you would say the same of a mother? He assented. Yet let me ask you one more question in order to illustrate my meaning: Is not a brother to be regarded essentially as a brother of something? Certainly, he replied. That is, of a brother or sister? Yes, he said. And now, said Socrates, I will ask about Love:--Is Love of something or of nothing? Of something, surely, he replied. Keep in mind what this is, and tell me what I want to know--whether Love desires that of which love is. Yes, surely. And does he possess, or does he not possess, that which he loves and desires? Probably not, I should say. Nay, replied Socrates, I would have you consider whether 'necessarily' is not rather the word. The inference that he who desires something is in want of something, and that he who desires nothing is in want of nothing, is in my judgment, Agathon, absolutely and necessarily true. What do you think? I agree with you, said Agathon. Very good. Would he who is great, desire to be great, or he who is strong, desire to be strong? That would be inconsistent with our previous admissions. True. For he who is anything cannot want to be that which he is? Very true. And yet, added Socrates, if a man being strong desired to be strong, or being swift desired to be swift, or being healthy desired to be healthy, in that case he might be thought to desire something which he already has or is. I give the example in order that we may avoid misconception. For the possessors of these qualities, Agathon, must be supposed to have their respective advantages at the time, whether they choose or not; and who can desire that which he has? Therefore, when a person says, I am well and wish to be well, or I am rich and wish to be rich, and I desire simply to have what I have--to him we shall reply: 'You, my friend, having wealth and health and strength, want to have the continuance of them; for at this moment, whether you choose or no, you have them. And when you say, I desire that which I have and nothing else, is not your meaning that you want to have what you now have in the future?' He must agree with us--must he not? He must, replied Agathon. Then, said Socrates, he desires that what he has at present may be preserved to him in the future, which is equivalent to saying that he desires something which is non-existent to him, and which as yet he has not got: Very true, he said. Then he and every one who desires, desires that which he has not already, and which is future and not present, and which he has not, and is not, and of which he is in want;--these are the sort of things which love and desire seek? Very true, he said. Then now, said Socrates, let us recapitulate the argument. First, is not love of something, and of something too which is wanting to a man? Yes, he replied. Remember further what you said in your speech, or if you do not remember I will remind you: you said that the love of the beautiful set in order the empire of the gods, for that of deformed things there is no love--did you not say something of that kind? Yes, said Agathon. Yes, my friend, and the remark was a just one. And if this is true, Love is the love of beauty and not of deformity? He assented. And the admission has been already made that Love is of something which a man wants and has not? True, he said. Then Love wants and has not beauty? Certainly, he replied. And would you call that beautiful which wants and does not possess beauty? Certainly not. Then would you still say that love is beautiful? Agathon replied: I fear that I did not understand what I was saying. You made a very good speech, Agathon, replied Socrates; but there is yet one small question which I would fain ask:--Is not the good also the beautiful? Yes. Then in wanting the beautiful, love wants also the good? I cannot refute you, Socrates, said Agathon:--Let us assume that what you say is true. Say rather, beloved Agathon, that you cannot refute the truth; for Socrates is easily refuted. And now, taking my leave of you, I would rehearse a tale of love which I heard from Diotima of Mantineia (compare 1 Alcibiades), a woman wise in this and in many other kinds of knowledge, who in the days of old, when the Athenians offered sacrifice before the coming of the plague, delayed the disease ten years. She was my instructress in the art of love, and I shall repeat to you what she said to me, beginning with the admissions made by Agathon, which are nearly if not quite the same which I made to the wise woman when she questioned me: I think that this will be the easiest way, and I shall take both parts myself as well as I can (compare Gorgias). As you, Agathon, suggested (supra), I must speak first of the being and nature of Love, and then of his works. First I said to her in nearly the same words which he used to me, that Love was a mighty god, and likewise fair; and she proved to me as I proved to him that, by my own showing, Love was neither fair nor good. 'What do you mean, Diotima,' I said, 'is love then evil and foul?' 'Hush,' she cried; 'must that be foul which is not fair?' 'Certainly,' I said. 'And is that which is not wise, ignorant? do you not see that there is a mean between wisdom and ignorance?' 'And what may that be?' I said. 'Right opinion,' she replied; 'which, as you know, being incapable of giving a reason, is not knowledge (for how can knowledge be devoid of reason? nor again, ignorance, for neither can ignorance attain the truth), but is clearly something which is a mean between ignorance and wisdom.' 'Quite true,' I replied. 'Do not then insist,' she said, 'that what is not fair is of necessity foul, or what is not good evil; or infer that because love is not fair and good he is therefore foul and evil; for he is in a mean between them.' 'Well,' I said, 'Love is surely admitted by all to be a great god.' 'By those who know or by those who do not know?' 'By all.' 'And how, Socrates,' she said with a smile, 'can Love be acknowledged to be a great god by those who say that he is not a god at all?' 'And who are they?' I said. 'You and I are two of them,' she replied. 'How can that be?' I said. 'It is quite intelligible,' she replied; 'for you yourself would acknowledge that the gods are happy and fair--of course you would--would you dare to say that any god was not?' 'Certainly not,' I replied. 'And you mean by the happy, those who are the possessors of things good or fair?' 'Yes.' 'And you admitted that Love, because he was in want, desires those good and fair things of which he is in want?' 'Yes, I did.' 'But how can he be a god who has no portion in what is either good or fair?' 'Impossible.' 'Then you see that you also deny the divinity of Love.' 'What then is Love?' I asked; 'Is he mortal?' 'No.' 'What then?' 'As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between the two.' 'What is he, Diotima?' 'He is a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal.' 'And what,' I said, 'is his power?' 'He interprets,' she replied, 'between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together, and through him the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices and mysteries and charms, and all prophecy and incantation, find their way. For God mingles not with man; but through Love all the intercourse and converse of God with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. The wisdom which understands this is spiritual; all other wisdom, such as that of arts and handicrafts, is mean and vulgar. Now these spirits or intermediate powers are many and diverse, and one of them is Love.' 'And who,' I said, 'was his father, and who his mother?' 'The tale,' she said, 'will take time; nevertheless I will tell you. On the birthday of Aphrodite there was a feast of the gods, at which the god Poros or Plenty, who is the son of Metis or Discretion, was one of the guests. When the feast was over, Penia or Poverty, as the manner is on such occasions, came about the doors to beg. Now Plenty who was the worse for nectar (there was no wine in those days), went into the garden of Zeus and fell into a heavy sleep, and Poverty considering her own straitened circumstances, plotted to have a child by him, and accordingly she lay down at his side and conceived Love, who partly because he is naturally a lover of the beautiful, and because Aphrodite is herself beautiful, and also because he was born on her birthday, is her follower and attendant. And as his parentage is, so also are his fortunes. In the first place he is always poor, and anything but tender and fair, as the many imagine him; and he is rough and squalid, and has no shoes, nor a house to dwell in; on the bare earth exposed he lies under the open heaven, in the streets, or at the doors of houses, taking his rest; and like his mother he is always in distress. Like his father too, whom he also partly resembles, he is always plotting against the fair and good; he is bold, enterprising, strong, a mighty hunter, always weaving some intrigue or other, keen in the pursuit of wisdom, fertile in resources; a philosopher at all times, terrible as an enchanter, sorcerer, sophist. He is by nature neither mortal nor immortal, but alive and flourishing at one moment when he is in plenty, and dead at another moment, and again alive by reason of his father's nature. But that which is always flowing in is always flowing out, and so he is never in want and never in wealth; and, further, he is in a mean between ignorance and knowledge. The truth of the matter is this: No god is a philosopher or seeker after wisdom, for he is wise already; nor does any man who is wise seek after wisdom. Neither do the ignorant seek after wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want.' 'But who then, Diotima,' I said, 'are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the foolish?' 'A child may answer that question,' she replied; 'they are those who are in a mean between the two; Love is one of them. For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, and being a lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant. And of this too his birth is the cause; for his father is wealthy and wise, and his mother poor and foolish. Such, my dear Socrates, is the nature of the spirit Love. The error in your conception of him was very natural, and as I imagine from what you say, has arisen out of a confusion of love and the beloved, which made you think that love was all beautiful. For the beloved is the truly beautiful, and delicate, and perfect, and blessed; but the principle of love is of another nature, and is such as I have described.' I said, 'O thou stranger woman, thou sayest well; but, assuming Love to be such as you say, what is the use of him to men?' 'That, Socrates,' she replied, 'I will attempt to unfold: of his nature and birth I have already spoken; and you acknowledge that love is of the beautiful. But some one will say: Of the beautiful in what, Socrates and Diotima?--or rather let me put the question more clearly, and ask: When a man loves the beautiful, what does he desire?' I answered her 'That the beautiful may be his.' 'Still,' she said, 'the answer suggests a further question: What is given by the possession of beauty?' 'To what you have asked,' I replied, 'I have no answer ready.' 'Then,' she said, 'let me put the word \"good\" in the place of the beautiful, and repeat the question once more: If he who loves loves the good, what is it then that he loves?' 'The possession of the good,' I said. 'And what does he gain who possesses the good?' 'Happiness,' I replied; 'there is less difficulty in answering that question.' 'Yes,' she said, 'the happy are made happy by the acquisition of good things. Nor is there any need to ask why a man desires happiness; the answer is already final.' 'You are right.' I said. 'And is this wish and this desire common to all? and do all men always desire their own good, or only some men?--what say you?' 'All men,' I replied; 'the desire is common to all.' 'Why, then,' she rejoined, 'are not all men, Socrates, said to love, but only some of them? whereas you say that all men are always loving the same things.' 'I myself wonder,' I said, 'why this is.' 'There is nothing to wonder at,' she replied; 'the reason is that one part of love is separated off and receives the name of the whole, but the other parts have other names.' 'Give an illustration,' I said. She answered me as follows: 'There is poetry, which, as you know, is complex and manifold. All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or making, and the processes of all art are creative; and the masters of arts are all poets or makers.' 'Very true.' 'Still,' she said, 'you know that they are not called poets, but have other names; only that portion of the art which is separated off from the rest, and is concerned with music and metre, is termed poetry, and they who possess poetry in this sense of the word are called poets.' 'Very true,' I said. 'And the same holds of love. For you may say generally that all desire of good and happiness is only the great and subtle power of love; but they who are drawn towards him by any other path, whether the path of money-making or gymnastics or philosophy, are not called lovers--the name of the whole is appropriated to those whose affection takes one form only--they alone are said to love, or to be lovers.' 'I dare say,' I replied, 'that you are right.' 'Yes,' she added, 'and you hear people say that lovers are seeking for their other half; but I say that they are seeking neither for the half of themselves, nor for the whole, unless the half or the whole be also a good. And they will cut off their own hands and feet and cast them away, if they are evil; for they love not what is their own, unless perchance there be some one who calls what belongs to him the good, and what belongs to another the evil. For there is nothing which men love but the good. Is there anything?' 'Certainly, I should say, that there is nothing.' 'Then,' she said, 'the simple truth is, that men love the good.' 'Yes,' I said. 'To which must be added that they love the possession of the good?' 'Yes, that must be added.' 'And not only the possession, but the everlasting possession of the good?' 'That must be added too.' 'Then love,' she said, 'may be described generally as the love of the everlasting possession of the good?' 'That is most true.' 'Then if this be the nature of love, can you tell me further,' she said, 'what is the manner of the pursuit? what are they doing who show all this eagerness and heat which is called love? and what is the object which they have in view? Answer me.' 'Nay, Diotima,' I replied, 'if I had known, I should not have wondered at your wisdom, neither should I have come to learn from you about this very matter.' 'Well,' she said, 'I will teach you:--The object which they have in view is birth in beauty, whether of body or soul.' 'I do not understand you,' I said; 'the oracle requires an explanation.' 'I will make my meaning clearer,' she replied. 'I mean to say, that all men are bringing to the birth in their bodies and in their souls. There is a certain age at which human nature is desirous of procreation--procreation which must be in beauty and not in deformity; and this procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing; for conception and generation are an immortal principle in the mortal creature, and in the inharmonious they can never be. But the deformed is always inharmonious with the divine, and the beautiful harmonious. Beauty, then, is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides at birth, and therefore, when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is propitious, and diffusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit: at the sight of ugliness she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains from conception. And this is the reason why, when the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy about beauty whose approach is the alleviation of the pain of travail. For love, Socrates, is not, as you imagine, the love of the beautiful only.' 'What then?' 'The love of generation and of birth in beauty.' 'Yes,' I said. 'Yes, indeed,' she replied. 'But why of generation?' 'Because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality,' she replied; 'and if, as has been already admitted, love is of the everlasting possession of the good, all men will necessarily desire immortality together with good: Wherefore love is of immortality.' All this she taught me at various times when she spoke of love. And I remember her once saying to me, 'What is the cause, Socrates, of love, and the attendant desire? See you not how all animals, birds, as well as beasts, in their desire of procreation, are in agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire of union; whereto is added the care of offspring, on whose behalf the weakest are ready to battle against the strongest even to the uttermost, and to die for them, and will let themselves be tormented with hunger or suffer anything in order to maintain their young. Man may be supposed to act thus from reason; but why should animals have these passionate feelings? Can you tell me why?' Again I replied that I did not know. She said to me: 'And do you expect ever to become a master in the art of love, if you do not know this?' 'But I have told you already, Diotima, that my ignorance is the reason why I come to you; for I am conscious that I want a teacher; tell me then the cause of this and of the other mysteries of love.' 'Marvel not,' she said, 'if you believe that love is of the immortal, as we have several times acknowledged; for here again, and on the same principle too, the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old. Nay even in the life of the same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation--hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and going; and equally true of knowledge, and what is still more surprising to us mortals, not only do the sciences in general spring up and decay, so that in respect of them we are never the same; but each of them individually experiences a like change. For what is implied in the word \"recollection,\" but the departure of knowledge, which is ever being forgotten, and is renewed and preserved by recollection, and appears to be the same although in reality new, according to that law of succession by which all mortal things are preserved, not absolutely the same, but by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving another new and similar existence behind--unlike the divine, which is always the same and not another? And in this way, Socrates, the mortal body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality; but the immortal in another way. Marvel not then at the love which all men have of their offspring; for that universal love and interest is for the sake of immortality.' I was astonished at her words, and said: 'Is this really true, O thou wise Diotima?' And she answered with all the authority of an accomplished sophist: 'Of that, Socrates, you may be assured;--think only of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal. Do you imagine that Alcestis would have died to save Admetus, or Achilles to avenge Patroclus, or your own Codrus in order to preserve the kingdom for his sons, if they had not imagined that the memory of their virtues, which still survives among us, would be immortal? Nay,' she said, 'I am persuaded that all men do all things, and the better they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame of immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal. 'Those who are pregnant in the body only, betake themselves to women and beget children--this is the character of their love; their offspring, as they hope, will preserve their memory and giving them the blessedness and immortality which they desire in the future. But souls which are pregnant--for there certainly are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies--conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or contain. And what are these conceptions?--wisdom and virtue in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who are deserving of the name inventor. But the greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and families, and which is called temperance and justice. And he who in youth has the seed of these implanted in him and is himself inspired, when he comes to maturity desires to beget and generate. He wanders about seeking beauty that he may beget offspring--for in deformity he will beget nothing--and naturally embraces the beautiful rather than the deformed body; above all when he finds a fair and noble and well-nurtured soul, he embraces the two in one person, and to such an one he is full of speech about virtue and the nature and pursuits of a good man; and he tries to educate him; and at the touch of the beautiful which is ever present to his memory, even when absent, he brings forth that which he had conceived long before, and in company with him tends that which he brings forth; and they are married by a far nearer tie and have a closer friendship than those who beget mortal children, for the children who are their common offspring are fairer and more immortal. Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory? Or who would not have such children as Lycurgus left behind him to be the saviours, not only of Lacedaemon, but of Hellas, as one may say? There is Solon, too, who is the revered father of Athenian laws; and many others there are in many other places, both among Hellenes and barbarians, who have given to the world many noble works, and have been the parents of virtue of every kind; and many temples have been raised in their honour for the sake of children such as theirs; which were never raised in honour of any one, for the sake of his mortal children. 'These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates, may enter; to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of these, and to which, if you pursue them in a right spirit, they will lead, I know not whether you will be able to attain. But I will do my utmost to inform you, and do you follow if you can. For he who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one such form only--out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is and the same! And when he perceives this he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the outward form. So that if a virtuous soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend him, and will search out and bring to the birth thoughts which may improve the young, until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like a servant in love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution, himself a slave mean and narrow-minded, but drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere. To this I will proceed; please to give me your very best attention: 'He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)--a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place fair, at another time or in another relation or at another place foul, as if fair to some and foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any other being, as for example, in an animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other place; but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things. He who from these ascending under the influence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This, my dear Socrates,' said the stranger of Mantineia, 'is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths, whose presence now entrances you; and you and many a one would be content to live seeing them only and conversing with them without meat or drink, if that were possible--you only want to look at them and to be with them. But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty--the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life--thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?' Such, Phaedrus--and I speak not only to you, but to all of you--were the words of Diotima; and I am persuaded of their truth. And being persuaded of them, I try to persuade others, that in the attainment of this end human nature will not easily find a helper better than love: And therefore, also, I say that every man ought to honour him as I myself honour him, and walk in his ways, and exhort others to do the same, and praise the power and spirit of love according to the measure of my ability now and ever. The words which I have spoken, you, Phaedrus, may call an encomium of love, or anything else which you please. When Socrates had done speaking, the company applauded, and Aristophanes was beginning to say something in answer to the allusion which Socrates had made to his own speech, when suddenly there was a great knocking at the door of the house, as of revellers, and the sound of a flute-girl was heard. Agathon told the attendants to go and see who were the intruders. 'If they are friends of ours,' he said, 'invite them in, but if not, say that the drinking is over.' A little while afterwards they heard the voice of Alcibiades resounding in the court; he was in a great state of intoxication, and kept roaring and shouting 'Where is Agathon? Lead me to Agathon,' and at length, supported by the flute-girl and some of his attendants, he found his way to them. 'Hail, friends,' he said, appearing at the door crowned with a massive garland of ivy and violets, his head flowing with ribands. 'Will you have a very drunken man as a companion of your revels? Or shall I crown Agathon, which was my intention in coming, and go away? For I was unable to come yesterday, and therefore I am here to-day, carrying on my head these ribands, that taking them from my own head, I may crown the head of this fairest and wisest of men, as I may be allowed to call him. Will you laugh at me because I am drunk? Yet I know very well that I am speaking the truth, although you may laugh. But first tell me; if I come in shall we have the understanding of which I spoke (supra Will you have a very drunken man? etc.)? Will you drink with me or not?' The company were vociferous in begging that he would take his place among them, and Agathon specially invited him. Thereupon he was led in by the people who were with him; and as he was being led, intending to crown Agathon, he took the ribands from his own head and held them in front of his eyes; he was thus prevented from seeing Socrates, who made way for him, and Alcibiades took the vacant place between Agathon and Socrates, and in taking the place he embraced Agathon and crowned him. Take off his sandals, said Agathon, and let him make a third on the same couch. By all means; but who makes the third partner in our revels? said Alcibiades, turning round and starting up as he caught sight of Socrates. By Heracles, he said, what is this? here is Socrates always lying in wait for me, and always, as his way is, coming out at all sorts of unsuspected places: and now, what have you to say for yourself, and why are you lying here, where I perceive that you have contrived to find a place, not by a joker or lover of jokes, like Aristophanes, but by the fairest of the company? Socrates turned to Agathon and said: I must ask you to protect me, Agathon; for the passion of this man has grown quite a serious matter to me. Since I became his admirer I have never been allowed to speak to any other fair one, or so much as to look at them. If I do, he goes wild with envy and jealousy, and not only abuses me but can hardly keep his hands off me, and at this moment he may do me some harm. Please to see to this, and either reconcile me to him, or, if he attempts violence, protect me, as I am in bodily fear of his mad and passionate attempts. There can never be reconciliation between you and me, said Alcibiades; but for the present I will defer your chastisement. And I must beg you, Agathon, to give me back some of the ribands that I may crown the marvellous head of this universal despot--I would not have him complain of me for crowning you, and neglecting him, who in conversation is the conqueror of all mankind; and this not only once, as you were the day before yesterday, but always. Whereupon, taking some of the ribands, he crowned Socrates, and again reclined. Then he said: You seem, my friends, to be sober, which is a thing not to be endured; you must drink--for that was the agreement under which I was admitted--and I elect myself master of the feast until you are well drunk. Let us have a large goblet, Agathon, or rather, he said, addressing the attendant, bring me that wine-cooler. The wine-cooler which had caught his eye was a vessel holding more than two quarts--this he filled and emptied, and bade the attendant fill it again for Socrates. Observe, my friends, said Alcibiades, that this ingenious trick of mine will have no effect on Socrates, for he can drink any quantity of wine and not be at all nearer being drunk. Socrates drank the cup which the attendant filled for him. Eryximachus said: What is this, Alcibiades? Are we to have neither conversation nor singing over our cups; but simply to drink as if we were thirsty? Alcibiades replied: Hail, worthy son of a most wise and worthy sire! The same to you, said Eryximachus; but what shall we do? That I leave to you, said Alcibiades. 'The wise physician skilled our wounds to heal (from Pope's Homer, Il.)' shall prescribe and we will obey. What do you want? Well, said Eryximachus, before you appeared we had passed a resolution that each one of us in turn should make a speech in praise of love, and as good a one as he could: the turn was passed round from left to right; and as all of us have spoken, and you have not spoken but have well drunken, you ought to speak, and then impose upon Socrates any task which you please, and he on his right hand neighbour, and so on. That is good, Eryximachus, said Alcibiades; and yet the comparison of a drunken man's speech with those of sober men is hardly fair; and I should like to know, sweet friend, whether you really believe what Socrates was just now saying; for I can assure you that the very reverse is the fact, and that if I praise any one but himself in his presence, whether God or man, he will hardly keep his hands off me. For shame, said Socrates. Hold your tongue, said Alcibiades, for by Poseidon, there is no one else whom I will praise when you are of the company. Well then, said Eryximachus, if you like praise Socrates. What do you think, Eryximachus? said Alcibiades: shall I attack him and inflict the punishment before you all? What are you about? said Socrates; are you going to raise a laugh at my expense? Is that the meaning of your praise? I am going to speak the truth, if you will permit me. I not only permit, but exhort you to speak the truth. Then I will begin at once, said Alcibiades, and if I say anything which is not true, you may interrupt me if you will, and say 'that is a lie,' though my intention is to speak the truth. But you must not wonder if I speak any how as things come into my mind; for the fluent and orderly enumeration of all your singularities is not a task which is easy to a man in my condition. And now, my boys, I shall praise Socrates in a figure which will appear to him to be a caricature, and yet I speak, not to make fun of him, but only for the truth's sake. I say, that he is exactly like the busts of Silenus, which are set up in the statuaries' shops, holding pipes and flutes in their mouths; and they are made to open in the middle, and have images of gods inside them. I say also that he is like Marsyas the satyr. You yourself will not deny, Socrates, that your face is like that of a satyr. Aye, and there is a resemblance in other points too. For example, you are a bully, as I can prove by witnesses, if you will not confess. And are you not a flute-player? That you are, and a performer far more wonderful than Marsyas. He indeed with instruments used to charm the souls of men by the power of his breath, and the players of his music do so still: for the melodies of Olympus (compare Arist. Pol.) are derived from Marsyas who taught them, and these, whether they are played by a great master or by a miserable flute-girl, have a power which no others have; they alone possess the soul and reveal the wants of those who have need of gods and mysteries, because they are divine. But you produce the same effect with your words only, and do not require the flute: that is the difference between you and him. When we hear any other speaker, even a very good one, he produces absolutely no effect upon us, or not much, whereas the mere fragments of you and your words, even at second-hand, and however imperfectly repeated, amaze and possess the souls of every man, woman, and child who comes within hearing of them. And if I were not afraid that you would think me hopelessly drunk, I would have sworn as well as spoken to the influence which they have always had and still have over me. For my heart leaps within me more than that of any Corybantian reveller, and my eyes rain tears when I hear them. And I observe that many others are affected in the same manner. I have heard Pericles and other great orators, and I thought that they spoke well, but I never had any similar feeling; my soul was not stirred by them, nor was I angry at the thought of my own slavish state. But this Marsyas has often brought me to such a pass, that I have felt as if I could hardly endure the life which I am leading (this, Socrates, you will admit); and I am conscious that if I did not shut my ears against him, and fly as from the voice of the siren, my fate would be like that of others,--he would transfix me, and I should grow old sitting at his feet. For he makes me confess that I ought not to live as I do, neglecting the wants of my own soul, and busying myself with the concerns of the Athenians; therefore I hold my ears and tear myself away from him. And he is the only person who ever made me ashamed, which you might think not to be in my nature, and there is no one else who does the same. For I know that I cannot answer him or say that I ought not to do as he bids, but when I leave his presence the love of popularity gets the better of me. And therefore I run away and fly from him, and when I see him I am ashamed of what I have confessed to him. Many a time have I wished that he were dead, and yet I know that I should be much more sorry than glad, if he were to die: so that I am at my wit's end. And this is what I and many others have suffered from the flute-playing of this satyr. Yet hear me once more while I show you how exact the image is, and how marvellous his power. For let me tell you; none of you know him; but I will reveal him to you; having begun, I must go on. See you how fond he is of the fair? He is always with them and is always being smitten by them, and then again he knows nothing and is ignorant of all things--such is the appearance which he puts on. Is he not like a Silenus in this? To be sure he is: his outer mask is the carved head of the Silenus; but, O my companions in drink, when he is opened, what temperance there is residing within! Know you that beauty and wealth and honour, at which the many wonder, are of no account with him, and are utterly despised by him: he regards not at all the persons who are gifted with them; mankind are nothing to him; all his life is spent in mocking and flouting at them. But when I opened him, and looked within at his serious purpose, I saw in him divine and golden images of such fascinating beauty that I was ready to do in a moment whatever Socrates commanded: they may have escaped the observation of others, but I saw them. Now I fancied that he was seriously enamoured of my beauty, and I thought that I should therefore have a grand opportunity of hearing him tell what he knew, for I had a wonderful opinion of the attractions of my youth. In the prosecution of this design, when I next went to him, I sent away the attendant who usually accompanied me (I will confess the whole truth, and beg you to listen; and if I speak falsely, do you, Socrates, expose the falsehood). Well, he and I were alone together, and I thought that when there was nobody with us, I should hear him speak the language which lovers use to their loves when they are by themselves, and I was delighted. Nothing of the sort; he conversed as usual, and spent the day with me and then went away. Afterwards I challenged him to the palaestra; and he wrestled and closed with me several times when there was no one present; I fancied that I might succeed in this manner. Not a bit; I made no way with him. Lastly, as I had failed hitherto, I thought that I must take stronger measures and attack him boldly, and, as I had begun, not give him up, but see how matters stood between him and me. So I invited him to sup with me, just as if he were a fair youth, and I a designing lover. He was not easily persuaded to come; he did, however, after a while accept the invitation, and when he came the first time, he wanted to go away at once as soon as supper was over, and I had not the face to detain him. The second time, still in pursuance of my design, after we had supped, I went on conversing far into the night, and when he wanted to go away, I pretended that the hour was late and that he had much better remain. So he lay down on the couch next to me, the same on which he had supped, and there was no one but ourselves sleeping in the apartment. All this may be told without shame to any one. But what follows I could hardly tell you if I were sober. Yet as the proverb says, 'In vino veritas,' whether with boys, or without them (In allusion to two proverbs.); and therefore I must speak. Nor, again, should I be justified in concealing the lofty actions of Socrates when I come to praise him. Moreover I have felt the serpent's sting; and he who has suffered, as they say, is willing to tell his fellow-sufferers only, as they alone will be likely to understand him, and will not be extreme in judging of the sayings or doings which have been wrung from his agony. For I have been bitten by a more than viper's tooth; I have known in my soul, or in my heart, or in some other part, that worst of pangs, more violent in ingenuous youth than any serpent's tooth, the pang of philosophy, which will make a man say or do anything. And you whom I see around me, Phaedrus and Agathon and Eryximachus and Pausanias and Aristodemus and Aristophanes, all of you, and I need not say Socrates himself, have had experience of the same madness and passion in your longing after wisdom. Therefore listen and excuse my doings then and my sayings now. But let the attendants and other profane and unmannered persons close up the doors of their ears. When the lamp was put out and the servants had gone away, I thought that I must be plain with him and have no more ambiguity. So I gave him a shake, and I said: 'Socrates, are you asleep?' 'No,' he said. 'Do you know what I am meditating? 'What are you meditating?' he said. 'I think,' I replied, 'that of all the lovers whom I have ever had you are the only one who is worthy of me, and you appear to be too modest to speak. Now I feel that I should be a fool to refuse you this or any other favour, and therefore I come to lay at your feet all that I have and all that my friends have, in the hope that you will assist me in the way of virtue, which I desire above all things, and in which I believe that you can help me better than any one else. And I should certainly have more reason to be ashamed of what wise men would say if I were to refuse a favour to such as you, than of what the world, who are mostly fools, would say of me if I granted it.' To these words he replied in the ironical manner which is so characteristic of him:--'Alcibiades, my friend, you have indeed an elevated aim if what you say is true, and if there really is in me any power by which you may become better; truly you must see in me some rare beauty of a kind infinitely higher than any which I see in you. And therefore, if you mean to share with me and to exchange beauty for beauty, you will have greatly the advantage of me; you will gain true beauty in return for appearance--like Diomede, gold in exchange for brass. But look again, sweet friend, and see whether you are not deceived in me. The mind begins to grow critical when the bodily eye fails, and it will be a long time before you get old.' Hearing this, I said: 'I have told you my purpose, which is quite serious, and do you consider what you think best for you and me.' 'That is good,' he said; 'at some other time then we will consider and act as seems best about this and about other matters.' Whereupon, I fancied that he was smitten, and that the words which I had uttered like arrows had wounded him, and so without waiting to hear more I got up, and throwing my coat about him crept under his threadbare cloak, as the time of year was winter, and there I lay during the whole night having this wonderful monster in my arms. This again, Socrates, will not be denied by you. And yet, notwithstanding all, he was so superior to my solicitations, so contemptuous and derisive and disdainful of my beauty--which really, as I fancied, had some attractions--hear, O judges; for judges you shall be of the haughty virtue of Socrates--nothing more happened, but in the morning when I awoke (let all the gods and goddesses be my witnesses) I arose as from the couch of a father or an elder brother. What do you suppose must have been my feelings, after this rejection, at the thought of my own dishonour? And yet I could not help wondering at his natural temperance and self-restraint and manliness. I never imagined that I could have met with a man such as he is in wisdom and endurance. And therefore I could not be angry with him or renounce his company, any more than I could hope to win him. For I well knew that if Ajax could not be wounded by steel, much less he by money; and my only chance of captivating him by my personal attractions had failed. So I was at my wit's end; no one was ever more hopelessly enslaved by another. All this happened before he and I went on the expedition to Potidaea; there we messed together, and I had the opportunity of observing his extraordinary power of sustaining fatigue. His endurance was simply marvellous when, being cut off from our supplies, we were compelled to go without food--on such occasions, which often happen in time of war, he was superior not only to me but to everybody; there was no one to be compared to him. Yet at a festival he was the only person who had any real powers of enjoyment; though not willing to drink, he could if compelled beat us all at that,--wonderful to relate! no human being had ever seen Socrates drunk; and his powers, if I am not mistaken, will be tested before long. His fortitude in enduring cold was also surprising. There was a severe frost, for the winter in that region is really tremendous, and everybody else either remained indoors, or if they went out had on an amazing quantity of clothes, and were well shod, and had their feet swathed in felt and fleeces: in the midst of this, Socrates with his bare feet on the ice and in his ordinary dress marched better than the other soldiers who had shoes, and they looked daggers at him because he seemed to despise them. I have told you one tale, and now I must tell you another, which is worth hearing, 'Of the doings and sufferings of the enduring man' while he was on the expedition. One morning he was thinking about something which he could not resolve; he would not give it up, but continued thinking from early dawn until noon--there he stood fixed in thought; and at noon attention was drawn to him, and the rumour ran through the wondering crowd that Socrates had been standing and thinking about something ever since the break of day. At last, in the evening after supper, some Ionians out of curiosity (I should explain that this was not in winter but in summer), brought out their mats and slept in the open air that they might watch him and see whether he would stand all night. There he stood until the following morning; and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the sun, and went his way (compare supra). I will also tell, if you please--and indeed I am bound to tell--of his courage in battle; for who but he saved my life? Now this was the engagement in which I received the prize of valour: for I was wounded and he would not leave me, but he rescued me and my arms; and he ought to have received the prize of valour which the generals wanted to confer on me partly on account of my rank, and I told them so, (this, again, Socrates will not impeach or deny), but he was more eager than the generals that I and not he should have the prize. There was another occasion on which his behaviour was very remarkable--in the flight of the army after the battle of Delium, where he served among the heavy-armed,--I had a better opportunity of seeing him than at Potidaea, for I was myself on horseback, and therefore comparatively out of danger. He and Laches were retreating, for the troops were in flight, and I met them and told them not to be discouraged, and promised to remain with them; and there you might see him, Aristophanes, as you describe (Aristoph. Clouds), just as he is in the streets of Athens, stalking like a pelican, and rolling his eyes, calmly contemplating enemies as well as friends, and making very intelligible to anybody, even from a distance, that whoever attacked him would be likely to meet with a stout resistance; and in this way he and his companion escaped--for this is the sort of man who is never touched in war; those only are pursued who are running away headlong. I particularly observed how superior he was to Laches in presence of mind. Many are the marvels which I might narrate in praise of Socrates; most of his ways might perhaps be paralleled in another man, but his absolute unlikeness to any human being that is or ever has been is perfectly astonishing. You may imagine Brasidas and others to have been like Achilles; or you may imagine Nestor and Antenor to have been like Pericles; and the same may be said of other famous men, but of this strange being you will never be able to find any likeness, however remote, either among men who now are or who ever have been--other than that which I have already suggested of Silenus and the satyrs; and they represent in a figure not only himself, but his words. For, although I forgot to mention this to you before, his words are like the images of Silenus which open; they are ridiculous when you first hear them; he clothes himself in language that is like the skin of the wanton satyr--for his talk is of pack-asses and smiths and cobblers and curriers, and he is always repeating the same things in the same words (compare Gorg.), so that any ignorant or inexperienced person might feel disposed to laugh at him; but he who opens the bust and sees what is within will find that they are the only words which have a meaning in them, and also the most divine, abounding in fair images of virtue, and of the widest comprehension, or rather extending to the whole duty of a good and honourable man. This, friends, is my praise of Socrates. I have added my blame of him for his ill-treatment of me; and he has ill-treated not only me, but Charmides the son of Glaucon, and Euthydemus the son of Diocles, and many others in the same way--beginning as their lover he has ended by making them pay their addresses to him. Wherefore I say to you, Agathon, 'Be not deceived by him; learn from me and take warning, and do not be a fool and learn by experience, as the proverb says.' When Alcibiades had finished, there was a laugh at his outspokenness; for he seemed to be still in love with Socrates. You are sober, Alcibiades, said Socrates, or you would never have gone so far about to hide the purpose of your satyr's praises, for all this long story is only an ingenious circumlocution, of which the point comes in by the way at the end; you want to get up a quarrel between me and Agathon, and your notion is that I ought to love you and nobody else, and that you and you only ought to love Agathon. But the plot of this Satyric or Silenic drama has been detected, and you must not allow him, Agathon, to set us at variance. I believe you are right, said Agathon, and I am disposed to think that his intention in placing himself between you and me was only to divide us; but he shall gain nothing by that move; for I will go and lie on the couch next to you. Yes, yes, replied Socrates, by all means come here and lie on the couch below me. Alas, said Alcibiades, how I am fooled by this man; he is determined to get the better of me at every turn. I do beseech you, allow Agathon to lie between us. Certainly not, said Socrates, as you praised me, and I in turn ought to praise my neighbour on the right, he will be out of order in praising me again when he ought rather to be praised by me, and I must entreat you to consent to this, and not be jealous, for I have a great desire to praise the youth. Hurrah! cried Agathon, I will rise instantly, that I may be praised by Socrates. The usual way, said Alcibiades; where Socrates is, no one else has any chance with the fair; and now how readily has he invented a specious reason for attracting Agathon to himself. Agathon arose in order that he might take his place on the couch by Socrates, when suddenly a band of revellers entered, and spoiled the order of the banquet. Some one who was going out having left the door open, they had found their way in, and made themselves at home; great confusion ensued, and every one was compelled to drink large quantities of wine. Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others went away--he himself fell asleep, and as the nights were long took a good rest: he was awakened towards daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and when he awoke, the others were either asleep, or had gone away; there remained only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were drinking out of a large goblet which they passed round, and Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus was only half awake, and he did not hear the beginning of the discourse; the chief thing which he remembered was Socrates compelling the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this they were constrained to assent, being drowsy, and not quite following the argument. And first of all Aristophanes dropped off, then, when the day was already dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to sleep, rose to depart; Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. In the evening he retired to rest at his own home. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SYMPOSIUM *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. 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{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Here we are, Socrates, true to our agreement of yesterday; and we bring with us a stranger from Elea, who is a disciple of Parmenides and Zeno, and a true philosopher."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is he not rather a god, Theodorus, who comes to us in the disguise of a stranger? For Homer says that all the gods, and especially the god of strangers, are companions of the meek and just, and visit the good and evil among men. And may not your companion be one of those higher powers, a cross-examining deity, who has come to spy out our weakness in argument, and to cross-examine us?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Nay, Socrates, he is not one of the disputatious sort--he is too good for that. And, in my opinion, he is not a god at all; but divine he certainly is, for this is a title which I should give to all philosophers."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Capital, my friend! and I may add that they are almost as hard to be discerned as the gods. For the true philosophers, and such as are not merely made up for the occasion, appear in various forms unrecognized by the ignorance of men, and they 'hover about cities,' as Homer declares, looking from above upon human life; and some think nothing of them, and others can never think enough; and sometimes they appear as statesmen, and sometimes as sophists; and then, again, to many they seem to be no better than madmen. I should like to ask our Eleatic friend, if he would tell us, what is thought about them in Italy, and to whom the terms are applied."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"What terms?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Sophist, statesman, philosopher."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"What is your difficulty about them, and what made you ask?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I want to know whether by his countrymen they are regarded as one or two; or do they, as the names are three, distinguish also three kinds, and assign one to each name?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"I dare say that the Stranger will not object to discuss the question. What do you say, Stranger?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I am far from objecting, Theodorus, nor have I any difficulty in replying that by us they are regarded as three. But to define precisely the nature of each of them is by no means a slight or easy task."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"You have happened to light, Socrates, almost on the very question which we were asking our friend before we came hither, and he excused himself to us, as he does now to you; although he admitted that the matter had been fully discussed, and that he remembered the answer."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then do not, Stranger, deny us the first favour which we ask of you: I am sure that you will not, and therefore I shall only beg of you to say whether you like and are accustomed to make a long oration on a subject which you want to explain to another, or to proceed by the method of question and answer. I remember hearing a very noble discussion in which Parmenides employed the latter of the two methods, when I was a young man, and he was far advanced in years. (Compare Parm.)"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I prefer to talk with another when he responds pleasantly, and is light in hand; if not, I would rather have my own say."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Any one of the present company will respond kindly to you, and you can choose whom you like of them; I should recommend you to take a young person--Theaetetus, for example--unless you have a preference for some one else."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I feel ashamed, Socrates, being a new-comer into your society, instead of talking a little and hearing others talk, to be spinning out a long soliloquy or address, as if I wanted to show off. For the true answer will certainly be a very long one, a great deal longer than might be expected from such a short and simple question. At the same time, I fear that I may seem rude and ungracious if I refuse your courteous request, especially after what you have said. For I certainly cannot object to your proposal, that Theaetetus should respond, having already conversed with him myself, and being recommended by you to take him."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"But are you sure, Stranger, that this will be quite so acceptable to the rest of the company as Socrates imagines?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You hear them applauding, Theaetetus; after that, there is nothing more to be said. Well then, I am to argue with you, and if you tire of the argument, you may complain of your friends and not of me."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do not think that I shall tire, and if I do, I shall get my friend here, young Socrates, the namesake of the elder Socrates, to help; he is about my own age, and my partner at the gymnasium, and is constantly accustomed to work with me."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Very good; you can decide about that for yourself as we proceed. Meanwhile you and I will begin together and enquire into the nature of the Sophist, first of the three: I should like you to make out what he is and bring him to light in a discussion; for at present we are only agreed about the name, but of the thing to which we both apply the name possibly you have one notion and I another; whereas we ought always to come to an understanding about the thing itself in terms of a definition, and not merely about the name minus the definition. Now the tribe of Sophists which we are investigating is not easily caught or defined; and the world has long ago agreed, that if great subjects are to be adequately treated, they must be studied in the lesser and easier instances of them before we proceed to the greatest of all. And as I know that the tribe of Sophists is troublesome and hard to be caught, I should recommend that we practise beforehand the method which is to be applied to him on some simple and smaller thing, unless you can suggest a better way."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Indeed I cannot."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then suppose that we work out some lesser example which will be a pattern of the greater?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Good."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"What is there which is well known and not great, and is yet as susceptible of definition as any larger thing? Shall I say an angler? He is familiar to all of us, and not a very interesting or important person."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"He is not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yet I suspect that he will furnish us with the sort of definition and line of enquiry which we want."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us begin by asking whether he is a man having art or not having art, but some other power."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"He is clearly a man of art."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And of arts there are two kinds?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is agriculture, and the tending of mortal creatures, and the art of constructing or moulding vessels, and there is the art of imitation--all these may be appropriately called by a single name."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean? And what is the name?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"He who brings into existence something that did not exist before is said to be a producer, and that which is brought into existence is said to be produced."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And all the arts which were just now mentioned are characterized by this power of producing?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"They are."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then let us sum them up under the name of productive or creative art."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Next follows the whole class of learning and cognition; then comes trade, fighting, hunting. And since none of these produces anything, but is only engaged in conquering by word or deed, or in preventing others from conquering, things which exist and have been already produced--in each and all of these branches there appears to be an art which may be called acquisitive."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is the proper name."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Seeing, then, that all arts are either acquisitive or creative, in which class shall we place the art of the angler?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly in the acquisitive class."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the acquisitive may be subdivided into two parts: there is exchange, which is voluntary and is effected by gifts, hire, purchase; and the other part of acquisitive, which takes by force of word or deed, may be termed conquest?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is implied in what has been said."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And may not conquest be again subdivided?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Open force may be called fighting, and secret force may have the general name of hunting?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And there is no reason why the art of hunting should not be further divided."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How would you make the division?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Into the hunting of living and of lifeless prey."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, if both kinds exist."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Of course they exist; but the hunting after lifeless things having no special name, except some sorts of diving, and other small matters, may be omitted; the hunting after living things may be called animal hunting."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And animal hunting may be truly said to have two divisions, land-animal hunting, which has many kinds and names, and water-animal hunting, or the hunting after animals who swim?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And of swimming animals, one class lives on the wing and the other in the water?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Fowling is the general term under which the hunting of all birds is included."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The hunting of animals who live in the water has the general name of fishing."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And this sort of hunting may be further divided also into two principal kinds?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is one kind which takes them in nets, another which takes them by a blow."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, and how do you distinguish them?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"As to the first kind--all that surrounds and encloses anything to prevent egress, may be rightly called an enclosure."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"For which reason twig baskets, casting-nets, nooses, creels, and the like may all be termed 'enclosures'?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And therefore this first kind of capture may be called by us capture with enclosures, or something of that sort?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The other kind, which is practised by a blow with hooks and three-pronged spears, when summed up under one name, may be called striking, unless you, Theaetetus, can find some better name?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Never mind the name--what you suggest will do very well."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is one mode of striking, which is done at night, and by the light of a fire, and is by the hunters themselves called firing, or spearing by firelight."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the fishing by day is called by the general name of barbing, because the spears, too, are barbed at the point."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is the term."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Of this barb-fishing, that which strikes the fish who is below from above is called spearing, because this is the way in which the three-pronged spears are mostly used."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, it is often called so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then now there is only one kind remaining."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is that?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When a hook is used, and the fish is not struck in any chance part of his body, as he is with the spear, but only about the head and mouth, and is then drawn out from below upwards with reeds and rods:--What is the right name of that mode of fishing, Theaetetus?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I suspect that we have now discovered the object of our search."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then now you and I have come to an understanding not only about the name of the angler's art, but about the definition of the thing itself. One half of all art was acquisitive--half of the acquisitive art was conquest or taking by force, half of this was hunting, and half of hunting was hunting animals, half of this was hunting water animals--of this again, the under half was fishing, half of fishing was striking; a part of striking was fishing with a barb, and one half of this again, being the kind which strikes with a hook and draws the fish from below upwards, is the art which we have been seeking, and which from the nature of the operation is denoted angling or drawing up (aspalieutike, anaspasthai)."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"The result has been quite satisfactorily brought out."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now, following this pattern, let us endeavour to find out what a Sophist is."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The first question about the angler was, whether he was a skilled artist or unskilled?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And shall we call our new friend unskilled, or a thorough master of his craft?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not unskilled, for his name, as, indeed, you imply, must surely express his nature."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then he must be supposed to have some art."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What art?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"By heaven, they are cousins! it never occurred to us."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Who are cousins?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The angler and the Sophist."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"In what way are they related?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"They both appear to me to be hunters."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How the Sophist? Of the other we have spoken."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You remember our division of hunting, into hunting after swimming animals and land animals?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And you remember that we subdivided the swimming and left the land animals, saying that there were many kinds of them?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Thus far, then, the Sophist and the angler, starting from the art of acquiring, take the same road?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"So it would appear."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Their paths diverge when they reach the art of animal hunting; the one going to the sea-shore, and to the rivers and to the lakes, and angling for the animals which are in them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"While the other goes to land and water of another sort--rivers of wealth and broad meadow-lands of generous youth; and he also is intending to take the animals which are in them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Of hunting on land there are two principal divisions."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"One is the hunting of tame, and the other of wild animals."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"But are tame animals ever hunted?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, if you include man under tame animals. But if you like you may say that there are no tame animals, or that, if there are, man is not among them; or you may say that man is a tame animal but is not hunted--you shall decide which of these alternatives you prefer."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should say, Stranger, that man is a tame animal, and I admit that he is hunted."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then let us divide the hunting of tame animals into two parts."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How shall we make the division?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us define piracy, man-stealing, tyranny, the whole military art, by one name, as hunting with violence."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But the art of the lawyer, of the popular orator, and the art of conversation may be called in one word the art of persuasion."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And of persuasion, there may be said to be two kinds?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"One is private, and the other public."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes; each of them forms a class."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And of private hunting, one sort receives hire, and the other brings gifts."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do not understand you."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You seem never to have observed the manner in which lovers hunt."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To what do you refer?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I mean that they lavish gifts on those whom they hunt in addition to other inducements."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us admit this, then, to be the amatory art."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But that sort of hireling whose conversation is pleasing and who baits his hook only with pleasure and exacts nothing but his maintenance in return, we should all, if I am not mistaken, describe as possessing flattery or an art of making things pleasant."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And that sort, which professes to form acquaintances only for the sake of virtue, and demands a reward in the shape of money, may be fairly called by another name?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And what is the name? Will you tell me?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"It is obvious enough; for I believe that we have discovered the Sophist: which is, as I conceive, the proper name for the class described."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then now, Theaetetus, his art may be traced as a branch of the appropriative, acquisitive family--which hunts animals,--living--land-- tame animals; which hunts man,--privately--for hire,--taking money in exchange--having the semblance of education; and this is termed Sophistry, and is a hunt after young men of wealth and rank--such is the conclusion."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Just so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us take another branch of his genealogy; for he is a professor of a great and many-sided art; and if we look back at what has preceded we see that he presents another aspect, besides that of which we are speaking."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"In what respect?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There were two sorts of acquisitive art; the one concerned with hunting, the other with exchange."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"There were."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And of the art of exchange there are two divisions, the one of giving, and the other of selling."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Let us assume that."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Next, we will suppose the art of selling to be divided into two parts."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is one part which is distinguished as the sale of a man's own productions; another, which is the exchange of the works of others."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And is not that part of exchange which takes place in the city, being about half of the whole, termed retailing?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And that which exchanges the goods of one city for those of another by selling and buying is the exchange of the merchant?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And you are aware that this exchange of the merchant is of two kinds: it is partly concerned with food for the use of the body, and partly with the food of the soul which is bartered and received in exchange for money."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You want to know what is the meaning of food for the soul; the other kind you surely understand."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Take music in general and painting and marionette playing and many other things, which are purchased in one city, and carried away and sold in another--wares of the soul which are hawked about either for the sake of instruction or amusement;--may not he who takes them about and sells them be quite as truly called a merchant as he who sells meats and drinks?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure he may."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And would you not call by the same name him who buys up knowledge and goes about from city to city exchanging his wares for money?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly I should."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Of this merchandise of the soul, may not one part be fairly termed the art of display? And there is another part which is certainly not less ridiculous, but being a trade in learning must be called by some name germane to the matter?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The latter should have two names,--one descriptive of the sale of the knowledge of virtue, and the other of the sale of other kinds of knowledge."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The name of art-seller corresponds well enough to the latter; but you must try and tell me the name of the other."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"He must be the Sophist, whom we are seeking; no other name can possibly be right."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"No other; and so this trader in virtue again turns out to be our friend the Sophist, whose art may now be traced from the art of acquisition through exchange, trade, merchandise, to a merchandise of the soul which is concerned with speech and the knowledge of virtue."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And there may be a third reappearance of him;--for he may have settled down in a city, and may fabricate as well as buy these same wares, intending to live by selling them, and he would still be called a Sophist?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then that part of the acquisitive art which exchanges, and of exchange which either sells a man's own productions or retails those of others, as the case may be, and in either way sells the knowledge of virtue, you would again term Sophistry?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I must, if I am to keep pace with the argument."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us consider once more whether there may not be yet another aspect of sophistry."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In the acquisitive there was a subdivision of the combative or fighting art."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"There was."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Perhaps we had better divide it."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What shall be the divisions?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There shall be one division of the competitive, and another of the pugnacious."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That part of the pugnacious which is a contest of bodily strength may be properly called by some such name as violent."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And when the war is one of words, it may be termed controversy?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And controversy may be of two kinds."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When long speeches are answered by long speeches, and there is public discussion about the just and unjust, that is forensic controversy."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And there is a private sort of controversy, which is cut up into questions and answers, and this is commonly called disputation?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is the name."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And of disputation, that sort which is only a discussion about contracts, and is carried on at random, and without rules of art, is recognized by the reasoning faculty to be a distinct class, but has hitherto had no distinctive name, and does not deserve to receive one from us."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No; for the different sorts of it are too minute and heterogeneous."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But that which proceeds by rules of art to dispute about justice and injustice in their own nature, and about things in general, we have been accustomed to call argumentation (Eristic)?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And of argumentation, one sort wastes money, and the other makes money."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Suppose we try and give to each of these two classes a name."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Let us do so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I should say that the habit which leads a man to neglect his own affairs for the pleasure of conversation, of which the style is far from being agreeable to the majority of his hearers, may be fairly termed loquacity: such is my opinion."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is the common name for it."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But now who the other is, who makes money out of private disputation, it is your turn to say."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"There is only one true answer: he is the wonderful Sophist, of whom we are in pursuit, and who reappears again for the fourth time."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, and with a fresh pedigree, for he is the money-making species of the Eristic, disputatious, controversial, pugnacious, combative, acquisitive family, as the argument has already proven."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"How true was the observation that he was a many-sided animal, and not to be caught with one hand, as they say!"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Then you must catch him with two."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, we must, if we can. And therefore let us try another track in our pursuit of him: You are aware that there are certain menial occupations which have names among servants?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, there are many such; which of them do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I mean such as sifting, straining, winnowing, threshing."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And besides these there are a great many more, such as carding, spinning, adjusting the warp and the woof; and thousands of similar expressions are used in the arts."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of what are they to be patterns, and what are we going to do with them all?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I think that in all of these there is implied a notion of division."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then if, as I was saying, there is one art which includes all of them, ought not that art to have one name?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"And what is the name of the art?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The art of discerning or discriminating."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Think whether you cannot divide this."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should have to think a long while."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In all the previously named processes either like has been separated from like or the better from the worse."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I see now what you mean."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is no name for the first kind of separation; of the second, which throws away the worse and preserves the better, I do know a name."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Every discernment or discrimination of that kind, as I have observed, is called a purification."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is the usual expression."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And any one may see that purification is of two kinds."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Perhaps so, if he were allowed time to think; but I do not see at this moment."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There are many purifications of bodies which may with propriety be comprehended under a single name."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they, and what is their name?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is the purification of living bodies in their inward and in their outward parts, of which the former is duly effected by medicine and gymnastic, the latter by the not very dignified art of the bath-man; and there is the purification of inanimate substances--to this the arts of fulling and of furbishing in general attend in a number of minute particulars, having a variety of names which are thought ridiculous."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There can be no doubt that they are thought ridiculous, Theaetetus; but then the dialectical art never considers whether the benefit to be derived from the purge is greater or less than that to be derived from the sponge, and has not more interest in the one than in the other; her endeavour is to know what is and is not kindred in all arts, with a view to the acquisition of intelligence; and having this in view, she honours them all alike, and when she makes comparisons, she counts one of them not a whit more ridiculous than another; nor does she esteem him who adduces as his example of hunting, the general's art, at all more decorous than another who cites that of the vermin-destroyer, but only as the greater pretender of the two. And as to your question concerning the name which was to comprehend all these arts of purification, whether of animate or inanimate bodies, the art of dialectic is in no wise particular about fine words, if she may be only allowed to have a general name for all other purifications, binding them up together and separating them off from the purification of the soul or intellect. For this is the purification at which she wants to arrive, and this we should understand to be her aim."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I understand; and I agree that there are two sorts of purification, and that one of them is concerned with the soul, and that there is another which is concerned with the body."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Excellent; and now listen to what I am going to say, and try to divide further the first of the two."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Whatever line of division you suggest, I will endeavour to assist you."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Do we admit that virtue is distinct from vice in the soul?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And purification was to leave the good and to cast out whatever is bad?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then any taking away of evil from the soul may be properly called purification?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And in the soul there are two kinds of evil."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The one may be compared to disease in the body, the other to deformity."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do not understand."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Perhaps you have never reflected that disease and discord are the same."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To this, again, I know not what I should reply."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Do you not conceive discord to be a dissolution of kindred elements, originating in some disagreement?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Just that."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And is deformity anything but the want of measure, which is always unsightly?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do we not see that opinion is opposed to desire, pleasure to anger, reason to pain, and that all these elements are opposed to one another in the souls of bad men?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And yet they must all be akin?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we shall be right in calling vice a discord and disease of the soul?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And when things having motion, and aiming at an appointed mark, continually miss their aim and glance aside, shall we say that this is the effect of symmetry among them, or of the want of symmetry?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly of the want of symmetry."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But surely we know that no soul is voluntarily ignorant of anything?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And what is ignorance but the aberration of a mind which is bent on truth, and in which the process of understanding is perverted?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we are to regard an unintelligent soul as deformed and devoid of symmetry?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then there are these two kinds of evil in the soul--the one which is generally called vice, and is obviously a disease of the soul..."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And there is the other, which they call ignorance, and which, because existing only in the soul, they will not allow to be vice."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I certainly admit what I at first disputed--that there are two kinds of vice in the soul, and that we ought to consider cowardice, intemperance, and injustice to be alike forms of disease in the soul, and ignorance, of which there are all sorts of varieties, to be deformity."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And in the case of the body are there not two arts which have to do with the two bodily states?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is gymnastic, which has to do with deformity, and medicine, which has to do with disease."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And where there is insolence and injustice and cowardice, is not chastisement the art which is most required?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That certainly appears to be the opinion of mankind."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Again, of the various kinds of ignorance, may not instruction be rightly said to be the remedy?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And of the art of instruction, shall we say that there is one or many kinds? At any rate there are two principal ones. Think."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I will."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I believe that I can see how we shall soonest arrive at the answer to this question."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"If we can discover a line which divides ignorance into two halves. For a division of ignorance into two parts will certainly imply that the art of instruction is also twofold, answering to the two divisions of ignorance."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Well, and do you see what you are looking for?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I do seem to myself to see one very large and bad sort of ignorance which is quite separate, and may be weighed in the scale against all other sorts of ignorance put together."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When a person supposes that he knows, and does not know; this appears to be the great source of all the errors of the intellect."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And this, if I am not mistaken, is the kind of ignorance which specially earns the title of stupidity."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"What name, then, shall be given to the sort of instruction which gets rid of this?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"The instruction which you mean, Stranger, is, I should imagine, not the teaching of handicraft arts, but what, thanks to us, has been termed education in this part the world."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, Theaetetus, and by nearly all Hellenes. But we have still to consider whether education admits of any further division."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"We have."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I think that there is a point at which such a division is possible."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Where?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Of education, one method appears to be rougher, and another smoother."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How are we to distinguish the two?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is the time-honoured mode which our fathers commonly practised towards their sons, and which is still adopted by many--either of roughly reproving their errors, or of gently advising them; which varieties may be correctly included under the general term of admonition."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But whereas some appear to have arrived at the conclusion that all ignorance is involuntary, and that no one who thinks himself wise is willing to learn any of those things in which he is conscious of his own cleverness, and that the admonitory sort of instruction gives much trouble and does little good--"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"There they are quite right."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Accordingly, they set to work to eradicate the spirit of conceit in another way."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"In what way?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"They cross-examine a man's words, when he thinks that he is saying something and is really saying nothing, and easily convict him of inconsistencies in his opinions; these they then collect by the dialectical process, and placing them side by side, show that they contradict one another about the same things, in relation to the same things, and in the same respect. He, seeing this, is angry with himself, and grows gentle towards others, and thus is entirely delivered from great prejudices and harsh notions, in a way which is most amusing to the hearer, and produces the most lasting good effect on the person who is the subject of the operation. For as the physician considers that the body will receive no benefit from taking food until the internal obstacles have been removed, so the purifier of the soul is conscious that his patient will receive no benefit from the application of knowledge until he is refuted, and from refutation learns modesty; he must be purged of his prejudices first and made to think that he knows only what he knows, and no more."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is certainly the best and wisest state of mind."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"For all these reasons, Theaetetus, we must admit that refutation is the greatest and chiefest of purifications, and he who has not been refuted, though he be the Great King himself, is in an awful state of impurity; he is uninstructed and deformed in those things in which he who would be truly blessed ought to be fairest and purest."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And who are the ministers of this art? I am afraid to say the Sophists."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Why?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Lest we should assign to them too high a prerogative."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yet the Sophist has a certain likeness to our minister of purification."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, the same sort of likeness which a wolf, who is the fiercest of animals, has to a dog, who is the gentlest. But he who would not be found tripping, ought to be very careful in this matter of comparisons, for they are most slippery things. Nevertheless, let us assume that the Sophists are the men. I say this provisionally, for I think that the line which divides them will be marked enough if proper care is taken."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Likely enough."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us grant, then, that from the discerning art comes purification, and from purification let there be separated off a part which is concerned with the soul; of this mental purification instruction is a portion, and of instruction education, and of education, that refutation of vain conceit which has been discovered in the present argument; and let this be called by you and me the nobly-descended art of Sophistry."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very well; and yet, considering the number of forms in which he has presented himself, I begin to doubt how I can with any truth or confidence describe the real nature of the Sophist."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You naturally feel perplexed; and yet I think that he must be still more perplexed in his attempt to escape us, for as the proverb says, when every way is blocked, there is no escape; now, then, is the time of all others to set upon him."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"First let us wait a moment and recover breath, and while we are resting, we may reckon up in how many forms he has appeared. In the first place, he was discovered to be a paid hunter after wealth and youth."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In the second place, he was a merchant in the goods of the soul."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In the third place, he has turned out to be a retailer of the same sort of wares."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes; and in the fourth place, he himself manufactured the learned wares which he sold."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Quite right; I will try and remember the fifth myself. He belonged to the fighting class, and was further distinguished as a hero of debate, who professed the eristic art."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The sixth point was doubtful, and yet we at last agreed that he was a purger of souls, who cleared away notions obstructive to knowledge."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Do you not see that when the professor of any art has one name and many kinds of knowledge, there must be something wrong? The multiplicity of names which is applied to him shows that the common principle to which all these branches of knowledge are tending, is not understood."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should imagine this to be the case."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"At any rate we will understand him, and no indolence shall prevent us. Let us begin again, then, and re-examine some of our statements concerning the Sophist; there was one thing which appeared to me especially characteristic of him."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To what are you referring?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We were saying of him, if I am not mistaken, that he was a disputer?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"We were."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And does he not also teach others the art of disputation?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly he does."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And about what does he profess that he teaches men to dispute? To begin at the beginning--Does he make them able to dispute about divine things, which are invisible to men in general?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"At any rate, he is said to do so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And what do you say of the visible things in heaven and earth, and the like?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly he disputes, and teaches to dispute about them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, again, in private conversation, when any universal assertion is made about generation and essence, we know that such persons are tremendous argufiers, and are able to impart their own skill to others."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Undoubtedly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do they not profess to make men able to dispute about law and about politics in general?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Why, no one would have anything to say to them, if they did not make these professions."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In all and every art, what the craftsman ought to say in answer to any question is written down in a popular form, and he who likes may learn."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I suppose that you are referring to the precepts of Protagoras about wrestling and the other arts?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, my friend, and about a good many other things. In a word, is not the art of disputation a power of disputing about all things?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly; there does not seem to be much which is left out."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But oh! my dear youth, do you suppose this possible? for perhaps your young eyes may see things which to our duller sight do not appear."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To what are you alluding? I do not think that I understand your present question."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I ask whether anybody can understand all things."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Happy would mankind be if such a thing were possible!"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But how can any one who is ignorant dispute in a rational manner against him who knows?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"He cannot."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then why has the sophistical art such a mysterious power?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To what do you refer?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"How do the Sophists make young men believe in their supreme and universal wisdom? For if they neither disputed nor were thought to dispute rightly, or being thought to do so were deemed no wiser for their controversial skill, then, to quote your own observation, no one would give them money or be willing to learn their art."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"They certainly would not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But they are willing."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, they are."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, and the reason, as I should imagine, is that they are supposed to have knowledge of those things about which they dispute?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And they dispute about all things?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And therefore, to their disciples, they appear to be all-wise?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But they are not; for that was shown to be impossible."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Impossible, of course."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then the Sophist has been shown to have a sort of conjectural or apparent knowledge only of all things, which is not the truth?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Exactly; no better description of him could be given."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us now take an illustration, which will still more clearly explain his nature."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I will tell you, and you shall answer me, giving your very closest attention. Suppose that a person were to profess, not that he could speak or dispute, but that he knew how to make and do all things, by a single art."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"All things?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I see that you do not understand the first word that I utter, for you do not understand the meaning of 'all.'"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No, I do not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Under all things, I include you and me, and also animals and trees."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Suppose a person to say that he will make you and me, and all creatures."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What would he mean by 'making'? He cannot be a husbandman;--for you said that he is a maker of animals."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes; and I say that he is also the maker of the sea, and the earth, and the heavens, and the gods, and of all other things; and, further, that he can make them in no time, and sell them for a few pence."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That must be a jest."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And when a man says that he knows all things, and can teach them to another at a small cost, and in a short time, is not that a jest?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And is there any more artistic or graceful form of jest than imitation?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not; and imitation is a very comprehensive term, which includes under one class the most diverse sorts of things."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We know, of course, that he who professes by one art to make all things is really a painter, and by the painter's art makes resemblances of real things which have the same name with them; and he can deceive the less intelligent sort of young children, to whom he shows his pictures at a distance, into the belief that he has the absolute power of making whatever he likes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And may there not be supposed to be an imitative art of reasoning? Is it not possible to enchant the hearts of young men by words poured through their ears, when they are still at a distance from the truth of facts, by exhibiting to them fictitious arguments, and making them think that they are true, and that the speaker is the wisest of men in all things?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes; why should there not be another such art?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But as time goes on, and their hearers advance in years, and come into closer contact with realities, and have learnt by sad experience to see and feel the truth of things, are not the greater part of them compelled to change many opinions which they formerly entertained, so that the great appears small to them, and the easy difficult, and all their dreamy speculations are overturned by the facts of life?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is my view, as far as I can judge, although, at my age, I may be one of those who see things at a distance only."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the wish of all of us, who are your friends, is and always will be to bring you as near to the truth as we can without the sad reality. And now I should like you to tell me, whether the Sophist is not visibly a magician and imitator of true being; or are we still disposed to think that he may have a true knowledge of the various matters about which he disputes?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"But how can he, Stranger? Is there any doubt, after what has been said, that he is to be located in one of the divisions of children's play?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we must place him in the class of magicians and mimics."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly we must."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now our business is not to let the animal out, for we have got him in a sort of dialectical net, and there is one thing which he decidedly will not escape."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is that?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The inference that he is a juggler."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Precisely my own opinion of him."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, clearly, we ought as soon as possible to divide the image-making art, and go down into the net, and, if the Sophist does not run away from us, to seize him according to orders and deliver him over to reason, who is the lord of the hunt, and proclaim the capture of him; and if he creeps into the recesses of the imitative art, and secretes himself in one of them, to divide again and follow him up until in some sub-section of imitation he is caught. For our method of tackling each and all is one which neither he nor any other creature will ever escape in triumph."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Well said; and let us do as you propose."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Well, then, pursuing the same analytic method as before, I think that I can discern two divisions of the imitative art, but I am not as yet able to see in which of them the desired form is to be found."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Will you tell me first what are the two divisions of which you are speaking?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"One is the art of likeness-making;--generally a likeness of anything is made by producing a copy which is executed according to the proportions of the original, similar in length and breadth and depth, each thing receiving also its appropriate colour."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Is not this always the aim of imitation?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Not always; in works either of sculpture or of painting, which are of any magnitude, there is a certain degree of deception; for artists were to give the true proportions of their fair works, the upper part, which is farther off, would appear to be out of proportion in comparison with the lower, which is nearer; and so they give up the truth in their images and make only the proportions which appear to be beautiful, disregarding the real ones."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And that which being other is also like, may we not fairly call a likeness or image?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And may we not, as I did just now, call that part of the imitative art which is concerned with making such images the art of likeness-making?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Let that be the name."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And what shall we call those resemblances of the beautiful, which appear such owing to the unfavourable position of the spectator, whereas if a person had the power of getting a correct view of works of such magnitude, they would appear not even like that to which they profess to be like? May we not call these 'appearances,' since they appear only and are not really like?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is a great deal of this kind of thing in painting, and in all imitation."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And may we not fairly call the sort of art, which produces an appearance and not an image, phantastic art?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most fairly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"These then are the two kinds of image-making--the art of making likenesses, and phantastic or the art of making appearances?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I was doubtful before in which of them I should place the Sophist, nor am I even now able to see clearly; verily he is a wonderful and inscrutable creature. And now in the cleverest manner he has got into an impossible place."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, he has."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Do you speak advisedly, or are you carried away at the moment by the habit of assenting into giving a hasty answer?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"May I ask to what you are referring?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"My dear friend, we are engaged in a very difficult speculation--there can be no doubt of that; for how a thing can appear and seem, and not be, or how a man can say a thing which is not true, has always been and still remains a very perplexing question. Can any one say or think that falsehood really exists, and avoid being caught in a contradiction? Indeed, Theaetetus, the task is a difficult one."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Why?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"He who says that falsehood exists has the audacity to assert the being of not-being; for this is implied in the possibility of falsehood. But, my boy, in the days when I was a boy, the great Parmenides protested against this doctrine, and to the end of his life he continued to inculcate the same lesson--always repeating both in verse and out of verse: 'Keep your mind from this way of enquiry, for never will you show that not-being is.' Such is his testimony, which is confirmed by the very expression when sifted a little. Would you object to begin with the consideration of the words themselves?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Never mind about me; I am only desirous that you should carry on the argument in the best way, and that you should take me with you."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Very good; and now say, do we venture to utter the forbidden word 'not-being'?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly we do."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us be serious then, and consider the question neither in strife nor play: suppose that one of the hearers of Parmenides was asked, 'To what is the term \"not-being\" to be applied?'--do you know what sort of object he would single out in reply, and what answer he would make to the enquirer?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is a difficult question, and one not to be answered at all by a person like myself."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is at any rate no difficulty in seeing that the predicate 'not-being' is not applicable to any being."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"None, certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And if not to being, then not to something."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"It is also plain, that in speaking of something we speak of being, for to speak of an abstract something naked and isolated from all being is impossible."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You mean by assenting to imply that he who says something must say some one thing?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Some in the singular (ti) you would say is the sign of one, some in the dual (tine) of two, some in the plural (tines) of many?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then he who says 'not something' must say absolutely nothing."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most assuredly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And as we cannot admit that a man speaks and says nothing, he who says 'not-being' does not speak at all."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"The difficulty of the argument can no further go."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Not yet, my friend, is the time for such a word; for there still remains of all perplexities the first and greatest, touching the very foundation of the matter."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean? Do not be afraid to speak."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"To that which is, may be attributed some other thing which is?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But can anything which is, be attributed to that which is not?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And all number is to be reckoned among things which are?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, surely number, if anything, has a real existence."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we must not attempt to attribute to not-being number either in the singular or plural?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"The argument implies that we should be wrong in doing so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But how can a man either express in words or even conceive in thought things which are not or a thing which is not without number?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How indeed?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When we speak of things which are not, are we not attributing plurality to not-being?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But, on the other hand, when we say 'what is not,' do we not attribute unity?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Manifestly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Nevertheless, we maintain that you may not and ought not to attribute being to not-being?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Do you see, then, that not-being in itself can neither be spoken, uttered, or thought, but that it is unthinkable, unutterable, unspeakable, indescribable?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But, if so, I was wrong in telling you just now that the difficulty which was coming is the greatest of all."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What! is there a greater still behind?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Well, I am surprised, after what has been said already, that you do not see the difficulty in which he who would refute the notion of not-being is involved. For he is compelled to contradict himself as soon as he makes the attempt."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean? Speak more clearly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Do not expect clearness from me. For I, who maintain that not-being has no part either in the one or many, just now spoke and am still speaking of not-being as one; for I say 'not-being.' Do you understand?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And a little while ago I said that not-being is unutterable, unspeakable, indescribable: do you follow?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do after a fashion."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When I introduced the word 'is,' did I not contradict what I said before?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And in using the singular verb, did I not speak of not-being as one?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And when I spoke of not-being as indescribable and unspeakable and unutterable, in using each of these words in the singular, did I not refer to not-being as one?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And yet we say that, strictly speaking, it should not be defined as one or many, and should not even be called 'it,' for the use of the word 'it' would imply a form of unity."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"How, then, can any one put any faith in me? For now, as always, I am unequal to the refutation of not-being. And therefore, as I was saying, do not look to me for the right way of speaking about not-being; but come, let us try the experiment with you."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Make a noble effort, as becomes youth, and endeavour with all your might to speak of not-being in a right manner, without introducing into it either existence or unity or plurality."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"It would be a strange boldness in me which would attempt the task when I see you thus discomfited."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Say no more of ourselves; but until we find some one or other who can speak of not-being without number, we must acknowledge that the Sophist is a clever rogue who will not be got out of his hole."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And if we say to him that he professes an art of making appearances, he will grapple with us and retort our argument upon ourselves; and when we call him an image-maker he will say, 'Pray what do you mean at all by an image?'--and I should like to know, Theaetetus, how we can possibly answer the younker's question?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"We shall doubtless tell him of the images which are reflected in water or in mirrors; also of sculptures, pictures, and other duplicates."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I see, Theaetetus, that you have never made the acquaintance of the Sophist."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Why do you think so?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"He will make believe to have his eyes shut, or to have none."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When you tell him of something existing in a mirror, or in sculpture, and address him as though he had eyes, he will laugh you to scorn, and will pretend that he knows nothing of mirrors and streams, or of sight at all; he will say that he is asking about an idea."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What can he mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The common notion pervading all these objects, which you speak of as many, and yet call by the single name of image, as though it were the unity under which they were all included. How will you maintain your ground against him?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How, Stranger, can I describe an image except as something fashioned in the likeness of the true?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do you mean this something to be some other true thing, or what do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not another true thing, but only a resemblance."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And you mean by true that which really is?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the not true is that which is the opposite of the true?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"A resemblance, then, is not really real, if, as you say, not true?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Nay, but it is in a certain sense."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You mean to say, not in a true sense?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes; it is in reality only an image."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then what we call an image is in reality really unreal."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"In what a strange complication of being and not-being we are involved!"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Strange! I should think so. See how, by his reciprocation of opposites, the many-headed Sophist has compelled us, quite against our will, to admit the existence of not-being."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed, I see."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The difficulty is how to define his art without falling into a contradiction."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How do you mean? And where does the danger lie?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When we say that he deceives us with an illusion, and that his art is illusory, do we mean that our soul is led by his art to think falsely, or what do we mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"There is nothing else to be said."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Again, false opinion is that form of opinion which thinks the opposite of the truth:--You would assent?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You mean to say that false opinion thinks what is not?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Does false opinion think that things which are not are not, or that in a certain sense they are?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Things that are not must be imagined to exist in a certain sense, if any degree of falsehood is to be possible."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And does not false opinion also think that things which most certainly exist do not exist at all?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And here, again, is falsehood?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Falsehood--yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And in like manner, a false proposition will be deemed to be one which asserts the non-existence of things which are, and the existence of things which are not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"There is no other way in which a false proposition can arise."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is not; but the Sophist will deny these statements. And indeed how can any rational man assent to them, when the very expressions which we have just used were before acknowledged by us to be unutterable, unspeakable, indescribable, unthinkable? Do you see his point, Theaetetus?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course he will say that we are contradicting ourselves when we hazard the assertion, that falsehood exists in opinion and in words; for in maintaining this, we are compelled over and over again to assert being of not-being, which we admitted just now to be an utter impossibility."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"How well you remember! And now it is high time to hold a consultation as to what we ought to do about the Sophist; for if we persist in looking for him in the class of false workers and magicians, you see that the handles for objection and the difficulties which will arise are very numerous and obvious."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"They are indeed."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We have gone through but a very small portion of them, and they are really infinite."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"If that is the case, we cannot possibly catch the Sophist."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Shall we then be so faint-hearted as to give him up?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not, I should say, if we can get the slightest hold upon him."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Will you then forgive me, and, as your words imply, not be altogether displeased if I flinch a little from the grasp of such a sturdy argument?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure I will."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I have a yet more urgent request to make."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Which is--?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That you will promise not to regard me as a parricide."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"And why?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Because, in self-defence, I must test the philosophy of my father Parmenides, and try to prove by main force that in a certain sense not-being is, and that being, on the other hand, is not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Some attempt of the kind is clearly needed."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, a blind man, as they say, might see that, and, unless these questions are decided in one way or another, no one when he speaks of false words, or false opinion, or idols, or images, or imitations, or appearances, or about the arts which are concerned with them; can avoid falling into ridiculous contradictions."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And therefore I must venture to lay hands on my father's argument; for if I am to be over-scrupulous, I shall have to give the matter up."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Nothing in the world should ever induce us to do so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I have a third little request which I wish to make."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You heard me say what I have always felt and still feel--that I have no heart for this argument?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I did."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I tremble at the thought of what I have said, and expect that you will deem me mad, when you hear of my sudden changes and shiftings; let me therefore observe, that I am examining the question entirely out of regard for you."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"There is no reason for you to fear that I shall impute any impropriety to you, if you attempt this refutation and proof; take heart, therefore, and proceed."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And where shall I begin the perilous enterprise? I think that the road which I must take is--"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Which?--Let me hear."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I think that we had better, first of all, consider the points which at present are regarded as self-evident, lest we may have fallen into some confusion, and be too ready to assent to one another, fancying that we are quite clear about them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Say more distinctly what you mean."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I think that Parmenides, and all ever yet undertook to determine the number and nature of existences, talked to us in rather a light and easy strain."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"As if we had been children, to whom they repeated each his own mythus or story;--one said that there were three principles, and that at one time there was war between certain of them; and then again there was peace, and they were married and begat children, and brought them up; and another spoke of two principles,--a moist and a dry, or a hot and a cold, and made them marry and cohabit. The Eleatics, however, in our part of the world, say that all things are many in name, but in nature one; this is their mythus, which goes back to Xenophanes, and is even older. Then there are Ionian, and in more recent times Sicilian muses, who have arrived at the conclusion that to unite the two principles is safer, and to say that being is one and many, and that these are held together by enmity and friendship, ever parting, ever meeting, as the severer Muses assert, while the gentler ones do not insist on the perpetual strife and peace, but admit a relaxation and alternation of them; peace and unity sometimes prevailing under the sway of Aphrodite, and then again plurality and war, by reason of a principle of strife. Whether any of them spoke the truth in all this is hard to determine; besides, antiquity and famous men should have reverence, and not be liable to accusations so serious. Yet one thing may be said of them without offence--"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What thing?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That they went on their several ways disdaining to notice people like ourselves; they did not care whether they took us with them, or left us behind them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I mean to say, that when they talk of one, two, or more elements, which are or have become or are becoming, or again of heat mingling with cold, assuming in some other part of their works separations and mixtures,--tell me, Theaetetus, do you understand what they mean by these expressions? When I was a younger man, I used to fancy that I understood quite well what was meant by the term 'not-being,' which is our present subject of dispute; and now you see in what a fix we are about it."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I see."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And very likely we have been getting into the same perplexity about 'being,' and yet may fancy that when anybody utters the word, we understand him quite easily, although we do not know about not-being. But we may be; equally ignorant of both."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I dare say."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the same may be said of all the terms just mentioned."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The consideration of most of them may be deferred; but we had better now discuss the chief captain and leader of them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of what are you speaking? You clearly think that we must first investigate what people mean by the word 'being.'"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You follow close at my heels, Theaetetus. For the right method, I conceive, will be to call into our presence the dualistic philosophers and to interrogate them. 'Come,' we will say, 'Ye, who affirm that hot and cold or any other two principles are the universe, what is this term which you apply to both of them, and what do you mean when you say that both and each of them \"are\"? How are we to understand the word \"are\"? Upon your view, are we to suppose that there is a third principle over and above the other two,--three in all, and not two? For clearly you cannot say that one of the two principles is being, and yet attribute being equally to both of them; for, if you did, whichever of the two is identified with being, will comprehend the other; and so they will be one and not two.'"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But perhaps you mean to give the name of 'being' to both of them together?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite likely."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"'Then, friends,' we shall reply to them, 'the answer is plainly that the two will still be resolved into one.'"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"'Since, then, we are in a difficulty, please to tell us what you mean, when you speak of being; for there can be no doubt that you always from the first understood your own meaning, whereas we once thought that we understood you, but now we are in a great strait. Please to begin by explaining this matter to us, and let us no longer fancy that we understand you, when we entirely misunderstand you.' There will be no impropriety in our demanding an answer to this question, either of the dualists or of the pluralists?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And what about the assertors of the oneness of the all--must we not endeavour to ascertain from them what they mean by 'being'?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then let them answer this question: One, you say, alone is? 'Yes,' they will reply."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And there is something which you call 'being'?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"'Yes.'"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And is being the same as one, and do you apply two names to the same thing?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What will be their answer, Stranger?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"It is clear, Theaetetus, that he who asserts the unity of being will find a difficulty in answering this or any other question."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Why so?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"To admit of two names, and to affirm that there is nothing but unity, is surely ridiculous?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And equally irrational to admit that a name is anything?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"To distinguish the name from the thing, implies duality."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And yet he who identifies the name with the thing will be compelled to say that it is the name of nothing, or if he says that it is the name of something, even then the name will only be the name of a name, and of nothing else."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the one will turn out to be only one of one, and being absolute unity, will represent a mere name."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And would they say that the whole is other than the one that is, or the same with it?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure they would, and they actually say so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"If being is a whole, as Parmenides sings,-- 'Every way like unto the fullness of a well-rounded sphere, Evenly balanced from the centre on every side, And must needs be neither greater nor less in any way, Neither on this side nor on that--' then being has a centre and extremes, and, having these, must also have parts."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yet that which has parts may have the attribute of unity in all the parts, and in this way being all and a whole, may be one?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But that of which this is the condition cannot be absolute unity?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Why not?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Because, according to right reason, that which is truly one must be affirmed to be absolutely indivisible."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But this indivisible, if made up of many parts, will contradict reason."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I understand."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Shall we say that being is one and a whole, because it has the attribute of unity? Or shall we say that being is not a whole at all?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is a hard alternative to offer."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Most true; for being, having in a certain sense the attribute of one, is yet proved not to be the same as one, and the all is therefore more than one."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And yet if being be not a whole, through having the attribute of unity, and there be such a thing as an absolute whole, being lacks something of its own nature?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Upon this view, again, being, having a defect of being, will become not-being?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And, again, the all becomes more than one, for being and the whole will each have their separate nature."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But if the whole does not exist at all, all the previous difficulties remain the same, and there will be the further difficulty, that besides having no being, being can never have come into being."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Why so?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Because that which comes into being always comes into being as a whole, so that he who does not give whole a place among beings, cannot speak either of essence or generation as existing."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that certainly appears to be true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Again; how can that which is not a whole have any quantity? For that which is of a certain quantity must necessarily be the whole of that quantity."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And there will be innumerable other points, each of them causing infinite trouble to him who says that being is either one or two."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"The difficulties which are dawning upon us prove this; for one objection connects with another, and they are always involving what has preceded in a greater and worse perplexity."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We are far from having exhausted the more exact thinkers who treat of being and not-being. But let us be content to leave them, and proceed to view those who speak less precisely; and we shall find as the result of all, that the nature of being is quite as difficult to comprehend as that of not-being."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Then now we will go to the others."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on amongst them; they are fighting with one another about the nature of essence."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How is that?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Some of them are dragging down all things from heaven and from the unseen to earth, and they literally grasp in their hands rocks and oaks; of these they lay hold, and obstinately maintain, that the things only which can be touched or handled have being or essence, because they define being and body as one, and if any one else says that what is not a body exists they altogether despise him, and will hear of nothing but body."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I have often met with such men, and terrible fellows they are."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And that is the reason why their opponents cautiously defend themselves from above, out of an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas; the bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not essence, but generation and motion. Between the two armies, Theaetetus, there is always an endless conflict raging concerning these matters."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us ask each party in turn, to give an account of that which they call essence."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How shall we get it out of them?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"With those who make being to consist in ideas, there will be less difficulty, for they are civil people enough; but there will be very great difficulty, or rather an absolute impossibility, in getting an opinion out of those who drag everything down to matter. Shall I tell you what we must do?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us, if we can, really improve them; but if this is not possible, let us imagine them to be better than they are, and more willing to answer in accordance with the rules of argument, and then their opinion will be more worth having; for that which better men acknowledge has more weight than that which is acknowledged by inferior men. Moreover we are no respecters of persons, but seekers after truth."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then now, on the supposition that they are improved, let us ask them to state their views, and do you interpret them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Agreed."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let them say whether they would admit that there is such a thing as a mortal animal."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course they would."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do they not acknowledge this to be a body having a soul?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly they do."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Meaning to say that the soul is something which exists?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do they not say that one soul is just, and another unjust, and that one soul is wise, and another foolish?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And that the just and wise soul becomes just and wise by the possession of justice and wisdom, and the opposite under opposite circumstances?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, they do."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But surely that which may be present or may be absent will be admitted by them to exist?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And, allowing that justice, wisdom, the other virtues, and their opposites exist, as well as a soul in which they inhere, do they affirm any of them to be visible and tangible, or are they all invisible?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"They would say that hardly any of them are visible."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And would they say that they are corporeal?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"They would distinguish: the soul would be said by them to have a body; but as to the other qualities of justice, wisdom, and the like, about which you asked, they would not venture either to deny their existence, or to maintain that they were all corporeal."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Verily, Theaetetus, I perceive a great improvement in them; the real aborigines, children of the dragon's teeth, would have been deterred by no shame at all, but would have obstinately asserted that nothing is which they are not able to squeeze in their hands."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is pretty much their notion."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us push the question; for if they will admit that any, even the smallest particle of being, is incorporeal, it is enough; they must then say what that nature is which is common to both the corporeal and incorporeal, and which they have in their mind's eye when they say of both of them that they 'are.' Perhaps they may be in a difficulty; and if this is the case, there is a possibility that they may accept a notion of ours respecting the nature of being, having nothing of their own to offer."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is the notion? Tell me, and we shall soon see."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"My notion would be, that anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or to be affected by another, if only for a single moment, however trifling the cause and however slight the effect, has real existence; and I hold that the definition of being is simply power."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"They accept your suggestion, having nothing better of their own to offer."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Very good; perhaps we, as well as they, may one day change our minds; but, for the present, this may be regarded as the understanding which is established with them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Agreed."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us now go to the friends of ideas; of their opinions, too, you shall be the interpreter."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I will."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"To them we say--You would distinguish essence from generation?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"'Yes,' they reply."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And you would allow that we participate in generation with the body, and through perception, but we participate with the soul through thought in true essence; and essence you would affirm to be always the same and immutable, whereas generation or becoming varies?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes; that is what we should affirm."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Well, fair sirs, we say to them, what is this participation, which you assert of both? Do you agree with our recent definition?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What definition?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We said that being was an active or passive energy, arising out of a certain power which proceeds from elements meeting with one another. Perhaps your ears, Theaetetus, may fail to catch their answer, which I recognize because I have been accustomed to hear it."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"And what is their answer?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"They deny the truth of what we were just now saying to the aborigines about existence."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What was that?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Any power of doing or suffering in a degree however slight was held by us to be a sufficient definition of being?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"They deny this, and say that the power of doing or suffering is confined to becoming, and that neither power is applicable to being."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"And is there not some truth in what they say?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes; but our reply will be, that we want to ascertain from them more distinctly, whether they further admit that the soul knows, and that being or essence is known."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"There can be no doubt that they say so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And is knowing and being known doing or suffering, or both, or is the one doing and the other suffering, or has neither any share in either?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly, neither has any share in either; for if they say anything else, they will contradict themselves."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I understand; but they will allow that if to know is active, then, of course, to be known is passive. And on this view being, in so far as it is known, is acted upon by knowledge, and is therefore in motion; for that which is in a state of rest cannot be acted upon, as we affirm."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And, O heavens, can we ever be made to believe that motion and life and soul and mind are not present with perfect being? Can we imagine that being is devoid of life and mind, and exists in awful unmeaningness an everlasting fixture?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That would be a dreadful thing to admit, Stranger."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But shall we say that has mind and not life?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How is that possible?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Or shall we say that both inhere in perfect being, but that it has no soul which contains them?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"And in what other way can it contain them?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Or that being has mind and life and soul, but although endowed with soul remains absolutely unmoved?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"All three suppositions appear to me to be irrational."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Under being, then, we must include motion, and that which is moved."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, Theaetetus, our inference is, that if there is no motion, neither is there any mind anywhere, or about anything or belonging to any one."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And yet this equally follows, if we grant that all things are in motion--upon this view too mind has no existence."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Do you think that sameness of condition and mode and subject could ever exist without a principle of rest?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Can you see how without them mind could exist, or come into existence anywhere?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And surely contend we must in every possible way against him who would annihilate knowledge and reason and mind, and yet ventures to speak confidently about anything."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, with all our might."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then the philosopher, who has the truest reverence for these qualities, cannot possibly accept the notion of those who say that the whole is at rest, either as unity or in many forms: and he will be utterly deaf to those who assert universal motion. As children say entreatingly 'Give us both,' so he will include both the moveable and immoveable in his definition of being and all."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now, do we seem to have gained a fair notion of being?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes truly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Alas, Theaetetus, methinks that we are now only beginning to see the real difficulty of the enquiry into the nature of it."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"O my friend, do you not see that nothing can exceed our ignorance, and yet we fancy that we are saying something good?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I certainly thought that we were; and I do not at all understand how we never found out our desperate case."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Reflect: after having made these admissions, may we not be justly asked the same questions which we ourselves were asking of those who said that all was hot and cold?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What were they? Will you recall them to my mind?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"To be sure I will, and I will remind you of them, by putting the same questions to you which I did to them, and then we shall get on."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Would you not say that rest and motion are in the most entire opposition to one another?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And yet you would say that both and either of them equally are?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And when you admit that both or either of them are, do you mean to say that both or either of them are in motion?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Or do you wish to imply that they are both at rest, when you say that they are?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then you conceive of being as some third and distinct nature, under which rest and motion are alike included; and, observing that they both participate in being, you declare that they are."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Truly we seem to have an intimation that being is some third thing, when we say that rest and motion are."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then being is not the combination of rest and motion, but something different from them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"So it would appear."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Being, then, according to its own nature, is neither in motion nor at rest."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is very much the truth."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Where, then, is a man to look for help who would have any clear or fixed notion of being in his mind?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Where, indeed?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I scarcely think that he can look anywhere; for that which is not in motion must be at rest, and again, that which is not at rest must be in motion; but being is placed outside of both these classes. Is this possible?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Utterly impossible."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Here, then, is another thing which we ought to bear in mind."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When we were asked to what we were to assign the appellation of not-being, we were in the greatest difficulty:--do you remember?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And are we not now in as great a difficulty about being?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should say, Stranger, that we are in one which is, if possible, even greater."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then let us acknowledge the difficulty; and as being and not-being are involved in the same perplexity, there is hope that when the one appears more or less distinctly, the other will equally appear; and if we are able to see neither, there may still be a chance of steering our way in between them, without any great discredit."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us enquire, then, how we come to predicate many names of the same thing."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Give an example."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I mean that we speak of man, for example, under many names--that we attribute to him colours and forms and magnitudes and virtues and vices, in all of which instances and in ten thousand others we not only speak of him as a man, but also as good, and having numberless other attributes, and in the same way anything else which we originally supposed to be one is described by us as many, and under many names."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And thus we provide a rich feast for tyros, whether young or old; for there is nothing easier than to argue that the one cannot be many, or the many one; and great is their delight in denying that a man is good; for man, they insist, is man and good is good. I dare say that you have met with persons who take an interest in such matters--they are often elderly men, whose meagre sense is thrown into amazement by these discoveries of theirs, which they believe to be the height of wisdom."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly, I have."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, not to exclude any one who has ever speculated at all upon the nature of being, let us put our questions to them as well as to our former friends."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What questions?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Shall we refuse to attribute being to motion and rest, or anything to anything, and assume that they do not mingle, and are incapable of participating in one another? Or shall we gather all into one class of things communicable with one another? Or are some things communicable and others not?--Which of these alternatives, Theaetetus, will they prefer?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I have nothing to answer on their behalf. Suppose that you take all these hypotheses in turn, and see what are the consequences which follow from each of them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Very good, and first let us assume them to say that nothing is capable of participating in anything else in any respect; in that case rest and motion cannot participate in being at all."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"They cannot."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But would either of them be if not participating in being?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then by this admission everything is instantly overturned, as well the doctrine of universal motion as of universal rest, and also the doctrine of those who distribute being into immutable and everlasting kinds; for all these add on a notion of being, some affirming that things 'are' truly in motion, and others that they 'are' truly at rest."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Just so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Again, those who would at one time compound, and at another resolve all things, whether making them into one and out of one creating infinity, or dividing them into finite elements, and forming compounds out of these; whether they suppose the processes of creation to be successive or continuous, would be talking nonsense in all this if there were no admixture."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Most ridiculous of all will the men themselves be who want to carry out the argument and yet forbid us to call anything, because participating in some affection from another, by the name of that other."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Why so?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Why, because they are compelled to use the words 'to be,' 'apart,' 'from others,' 'in itself,' and ten thousand more, which they cannot give up, but must make the connecting links of discourse; and therefore they do not require to be refuted by others, but their enemy, as the saying is, inhabits the same house with them; they are always carrying about with them an adversary, like the wonderful ventriloquist, Eurycles, who out of their own bellies audibly contradicts them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Precisely so; a very true and exact illustration."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now, if we suppose that all things have the power of communion with one another--what will follow?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Even I can solve that riddle."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Why, because motion itself would be at rest, and rest again in motion, if they could be attributed to one another."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But this is utterly impossible."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then only the third hypothesis remains."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"For, surely, either all things have communion with all; or nothing with any other thing; or some things communicate with some things and others not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And two out of these three suppositions have been found to be impossible."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Every one then, who desires to answer truly, will adopt the third and remaining hypothesis of the communion of some with some."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"This communion of some with some may be illustrated by the case of letters; for some letters do not fit each other, while others do."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the vowels, especially, are a sort of bond which pervades all the other letters, so that without a vowel one consonant cannot be joined to another."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But does every one know what letters will unite with what? Or is art required in order to do so?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Art is required."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"What art?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"The art of grammar."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And is not this also true of sounds high and low?--Is not he who has the art to know what sounds mingle, a musician, and he who is ignorant, not a musician?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And we shall find this to be generally true of art or the absence of art."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And as classes are admitted by us in like manner to be some of them capable and others incapable of intermixture, must not he who would rightly show what kinds will unite and what will not, proceed by the help of science in the path of argument? And will he not ask if the connecting links are universal, and so capable of intermixture with all things; and again, in divisions, whether there are not other universal classes, which make them possible?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure he will require science, and, if I am not mistaken, the very greatest of all sciences."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"How are we to call it? By Zeus, have we not lighted unwittingly upon our free and noble science, and in looking for the Sophist have we not entertained the philosopher unawares?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Should we not say that the division according to classes, which neither makes the same other, nor makes other the same, is the business of the dialectical science?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is what we should say."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, surely, he who can divide rightly is able to see clearly one form pervading a scattered multitude, and many different forms contained under one higher form; and again, one form knit together into a single whole and pervading many such wholes, and many forms, existing only in separation and isolation. This is the knowledge of classes which determines where they can have communion with one another and where not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the art of dialectic would be attributed by you only to the philosopher pure and true?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Who but he can be worthy?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In this region we shall always discover the philosopher, if we look for him; like the Sophist, he is not easily discovered, but for a different reason."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"For what reason?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Because the Sophist runs away into the darkness of not-being, in which he has learned by habit to feel about, and cannot be discovered because of the darkness of the place. Is not that true?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"It seems to be so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the philosopher, always holding converse through reason with the idea of being, is also dark from excess of light; for the souls of the many have no eye which can endure the vision of the divine."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes; that seems to be quite as true as the other."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Well, the philosopher may hereafter be more fully considered by us, if we are disposed; but the Sophist must clearly not be allowed to escape until we have had a good look at him."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Since, then, we are agreed that some classes have a communion with one another, and others not, and some have communion with a few and others with many, and that there is no reason why some should not have universal communion with all, let us now pursue the enquiry, as the argument suggests, not in relation to all ideas, lest the multitude of them should confuse us, but let us select a few of those which are reckoned to be the principal ones, and consider their several natures and their capacity of communion with one another, in order that if we are not able to apprehend with perfect clearness the notions of being and not-being, we may at least not fall short in the consideration of them, so far as they come within the scope of the present enquiry, if peradventure we may be allowed to assert the reality of not-being, and yet escape unscathed."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"We must do so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The most important of all the genera are those which we were just now mentioning--being and rest and motion."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, by far."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And two of these are, as we affirm, incapable of communion with one another."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite incapable."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Whereas being surely has communion with both of them, for both of them are?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That makes up three of them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And each of them is other than the remaining two, but the same with itself."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But then, what is the meaning of these two words, 'same' and 'other'? Are they two new kinds other than the three, and yet always of necessity intermingling with them, and are we to have five kinds instead of three; or when we speak of the same and other, are we unconsciously speaking of one of the three first kinds?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very likely we are."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But, surely, motion and rest are neither the other nor the same."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How is that?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Whatever we attribute to motion and rest in common, cannot be either of them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Why not?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Because motion would be at rest and rest in motion, for either of them, being predicated of both, will compel the other to change into the opposite of its own nature, because partaking of its opposite."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yet they surely both partake of the same and of the other?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we must not assert that motion, any more than rest, is either the same or the other."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No; we must not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But are we to conceive that being and the same are identical?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Possibly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But if they are identical, then again in saying that motion and rest have being, we should also be saying that they are the same."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Which surely cannot be."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then being and the same cannot be one."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Scarcely."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we may suppose the same to be a fourth class, which is now to be added to the three others."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And shall we call the other a fifth class? Or should we consider being and other to be two names of the same class?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very likely."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But you would agree, if I am not mistaken, that existences are relative as well as absolute?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the other is always relative to other?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But this would not be the case unless being and the other entirely differed; for, if the other, like being, were absolute as well as relative, then there would have been a kind of other which was not other than other. And now we find that what is other must of necessity be what it is in relation to some other."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is the true state of the case."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we must admit the other as the fifth of our selected classes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the fifth class pervades all classes, for they all differ from one another, not by reason of their own nature, but because they partake of the idea of the other."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then let us now put the case with reference to each of the five."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"First there is motion, which we affirm to be absolutely 'other' than rest: what else can we say?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"It is so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And therefore is not rest."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And yet is, because partaking of being."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Again, motion is other than the same?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Just so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And is therefore not the same."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"It is not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yet, surely, motion is the same, because all things partake of the same."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we must admit, and not object to say, that motion is the same and is not the same, for we do not apply the terms 'same' and 'not the same,' in the same sense; but we call it the 'same,' in relation to itself, because partaking of the same; and not the same, because having communion with the other, it is thereby severed from the same, and has become not that but other, and is therefore rightly spoken of as 'not the same.'"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And if absolute motion in any point of view partook of rest, there would be no absurdity in calling motion stationary."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite right,--that is, on the supposition that some classes mingle with one another, and others not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That such a communion of kinds is according to nature, we had already proved before we arrived at this part of our discussion."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us proceed, then. May we not say that motion is other than the other, having been also proved by us to be other than the same and other than rest?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is certain."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, according to this view, motion is other and also not other?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"What is the next step? Shall we say that motion is other than the three and not other than the fourth,--for we agreed that there are five classes about and in the sphere of which we proposed to make enquiry?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Surely we cannot admit that the number is less than it appeared to be just now."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we may without fear contend that motion is other than being?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Without the least fear."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The plain result is that motion, since it partakes of being, really is and also is not?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Nothing can be plainer."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then not-being necessarily exists in the case of motion and of every class; for the nature of the other entering into them all, makes each of them other than being, and so non-existent; and therefore of all of them, in like manner, we may truly say that they are not; and again, inasmuch as they partake of being, that they are and are existent."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"So we may assume."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Every class, then, has plurality of being and infinity of not-being."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"So we must infer."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And being itself may be said to be other than the other kinds."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then we may infer that being is not, in respect of as many other things as there are; for not-being these it is itself one, and is not the other things, which are infinite in number."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is not far from the truth."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And we must not quarrel with this result, since it is of the nature of classes to have communion with one another; and if any one denies our present statement [viz., that being is not, etc.], let him first argue with our former conclusion [i.e., respecting the communion of ideas], and then he may proceed to argue with what follows."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Nothing can be fairer."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let me ask you to consider a further question."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What question?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When we speak of not-being, we speak, I suppose, not of something opposed to being, but only different."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When we speak of something as not great, does the expression seem to you to imply what is little any more than what is equal?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The negative particles, ou and me, when prefixed to words, do not imply opposition, but only difference from the words, or more correctly from the things represented by the words, which follow them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is another point to be considered, if you do not object."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The nature of the other appears to me to be divided into fractions like knowledge."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Knowledge, like the other, is one; and yet the various parts of knowledge have each of them their own particular name, and hence there are many arts and kinds of knowledge."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And is not the case the same with the parts of the other, which is also one?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very likely; but will you tell me how?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is some part of the other which is opposed to the beautiful?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"There is."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Shall we say that this has or has not a name?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"It has; for whatever we call not-beautiful is other than the beautiful, not than something else."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now tell me another thing."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Is the not-beautiful anything but this--an existence parted off from a certain kind of existence, and again from another point of view opposed to an existing something?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then the not-beautiful turns out to be the opposition of being to being?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But upon this view, is the beautiful a more real and the not-beautiful a less real existence?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Not at all."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the not-great may be said to exist, equally with the great?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And, in the same way, the just must be placed in the same category with the not-just--the one cannot be said to have any more existence than the other."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The same may be said of other things; seeing that the nature of the other has a real existence, the parts of this nature must equally be supposed to exist."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, as would appear, the opposition of a part of the other, and of a part of being, to one another, is, if I may venture to say so, as truly essence as being itself, and implies not the opposite of being, but only what is other than being."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Beyond question."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"What then shall we call it?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly, not-being; and this is the very nature for which the Sophist compelled us to search."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And has not this, as you were saying, as real an existence as any other class? May I not say with confidence that not-being has an assured existence, and a nature of its own? Just as the great was found to be great and the beautiful beautiful, and the not-great not-great, and the not-beautiful not-beautiful, in the same manner not-being has been found to be and is not-being, and is to be reckoned one among the many classes of being. Do you, Theaetetus, still feel any doubt of this?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"None whatever."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Do you observe that our scepticism has carried us beyond the range of Parmenides' prohibition?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"In what?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We have advanced to a further point, and shown him more than he forbad us to investigate."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How is that?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Why, because he says-- 'Not-being never is, and do thou keep thy thoughts from this way of enquiry.'"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, he says so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Whereas, we have not only proved that things which are not are, but we have shown what form of being not-being is; for we have shown that the nature of the other is, and is distributed over all things in their relations to one another, and whatever part of the other is contrasted with being, this is precisely what we have ventured to call not-being."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"And surely, Stranger, we were quite right."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let not any one say, then, that while affirming the opposition of not-being to being, we still assert the being of not-being; for as to whether there is an opposite of being, to that enquiry we have long said good-bye--it may or may not be, and may or may not be capable of definition. But as touching our present account of not-being, let a man either convince us of error, or, so long as he cannot, he too must say, as we are saying, that there is a communion of classes, and that being, and difference or other, traverse all things and mutually interpenetrate, so that the other partakes of being, and by reason of this participation is, and yet is not that of which it partakes, but other, and being other than being, it is clearly a necessity that not-being should be. And again, being, through partaking of the other, becomes a class other than the remaining classes, and being other than all of them, is not each one of them, and is not all the rest, so that undoubtedly there are thousands upon thousands of cases in which being is not, and all other things, whether regarded individually or collectively, in many respects are, and in many respects are not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And he who is sceptical of this contradiction, must think how he can find something better to say; or if he sees a puzzle, and his pleasure is to drag words this way and that, the argument will prove to him, that he is not making a worthy use of his faculties; for there is no charm in such puzzles, and there is no difficulty in detecting them; but we can tell him of something else the pursuit of which is noble and also difficult."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"A thing of which I have already spoken;--letting alone these puzzles as involving no difficulty, he should be able to follow and criticize in detail every argument, and when a man says that the same is in a manner other, or that other is the same, to understand and refute him from his own point of view, and in the same respect in which he asserts either of these affections. But to show that somehow and in some sense the same is other, or the other same, or the great small, or the like unlike; and to delight in always bringing forward such contradictions, is no real refutation, but is clearly the new-born babe of some one who is only beginning to approach the problem of being."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"For certainly, my friend, the attempt to separate all existences from one another is a barbarism and utterly unworthy of an educated or philosophical mind."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Why so?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The attempt at universal separation is the final annihilation of all reasoning; for only by the union of conceptions with one another do we attain to discourse of reason."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And, observe that we were only just in time in making a resistance to such separatists, and compelling them to admit that one thing mingles with another."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Why so?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Why, that we might be able to assert discourse to be a kind of being; for if we could not, the worst of all consequences would follow; we should have no philosophy. Moreover, the necessity for determining the nature of discourse presses upon us at this moment; if utterly deprived of it, we could no more hold discourse; and deprived of it we should be if we admitted that there was no admixture of natures at all."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true. But I do not understand why at this moment we must determine the nature of discourse."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Perhaps you will see more clearly by the help of the following explanation."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What explanation?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Not-being has been acknowledged by us to be one among many classes diffused over all being."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And thence arises the question, whether not-being mingles with opinion and language."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"If not-being has no part in the proposition, then all things must be true; but if not-being has a part, then false opinion and false speech are possible, for to think or to say what is not--is falsehood, which thus arises in the region of thought and in speech."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And where there is falsehood surely there must be deceit."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And if there is deceit, then all things must be full of idols and images and fancies."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Into that region the Sophist, as we said, made his escape, and, when he had got there, denied the very possibility of falsehood; no one, he argued, either conceived or uttered falsehood, inasmuch as not-being did not in any way partake of being."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now, not-being has been shown to partake of being, and therefore he will not continue fighting in this direction, but he will probably say that some ideas partake of not-being, and some not, and that language and opinion are of the non-partaking class; and he will still fight to the death against the existence of the image-making and phantastic art, in which we have placed him, because, as he will say, opinion and language do not partake of not-being, and unless this participation exists, there can be no such thing as falsehood. And, with the view of meeting this evasion, we must begin by enquiring into the nature of language, opinion, and imagination, in order that when we find them we may find also that they have communion with not-being, and, having made out the connexion of them, may thus prove that falsehood exists; and therein we will imprison the Sophist, if he deserves it, or, if not, we will let him go again and look for him in another class."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly, Stranger, there appears to be truth in what was said about the Sophist at first, that he was of a class not easily caught, for he seems to have abundance of defences, which he throws up, and which must every one of them be stormed before we can reach the man himself. And even now, we have with difficulty got through his first defence, which is the not-being of not-being, and lo! here is another; for we have still to show that falsehood exists in the sphere of language and opinion, and there will be another and another line of defence without end."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Any one, Theaetetus, who is able to advance even a little ought to be of good cheer, for what would he who is dispirited at a little progress do, if he were making none at all, or even undergoing a repulse? Such a faint heart, as the proverb says, will never take a city: but now that we have succeeded thus far, the citadel is ours, and what remains is easier."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, as I was saying, let us first of all obtain a conception of language and opinion, in order that we may have clearer grounds for determining, whether not-being has any concern with them, or whether they are both always true, and neither of them ever false."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, now, let us speak of names, as before we were speaking of ideas and letters; for that is the direction in which the answer may be expected."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"And what is the question at issue about names?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The question at issue is whether all names may be connected with one another, or none, or only some of them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly the last is true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I understand you to say that words which have a meaning when in sequence may be connected, but that words which have no meaning when in sequence cannot be connected?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are you saying?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"What I thought that you intended when you gave your assent; for there are two sorts of intimation of being which are given by the voice."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"One of them is called nouns, and the other verbs."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Describe them."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"That which denotes action we call a verb."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the other, which is an articulate mark set on those who do the actions, we call a noun."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"A succession of nouns only is not a sentence, any more than of verbs without nouns."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do not understand you."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I see that when you gave your assent you had something else in your mind. But what I intended to say was, that a mere succession of nouns or of verbs is not discourse."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I mean that words like 'walks,' 'runs,' 'sleeps,' or any other words which denote action, however many of them you string together, do not make discourse."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How can they?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Or, again, when you say 'lion,' 'stag,' 'horse,' or any other words which denote agents--neither in this way of stringing words together do you attain to discourse; for there is no expression of action or inaction, or of the existence of existence or non-existence indicated by the sounds, until verbs are mingled with nouns; then the words fit, and the smallest combination of them forms language, and is the simplest and least form of discourse."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Again I ask, What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When any one says 'A man learns,' should you not call this the simplest and least of sentences?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Yes, for he now arrives at the point of giving an intimation about something which is, or is becoming, or has become, or will be. And he not only names, but he does something, by connecting verbs with nouns; and therefore we say that he discourses, and to this connexion of words we give the name of discourse."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And as there are some things which fit one another, and other things which do not fit, so there are some vocal signs which do, and others which do not, combine and form discourse."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is another small matter."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"A sentence must and cannot help having a subject."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And must be of a certain quality."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now let us mind what we are about."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"We must do so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I will repeat a sentence to you in which a thing and an action are combined, by the help of a noun and a verb; and you shall tell me of whom the sentence speaks."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I will, to the best of my power."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"'Theaetetus sits'--not a very long sentence."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Not very."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Of whom does the sentence speak, and who is the subject? that is what you have to tell."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of me; I am the subject."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Or this sentence, again--"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What sentence?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"'Theaetetus, with whom I am now speaking, is flying.'"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That also is a sentence which will be admitted by every one to speak of me, and to apply to me."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We agreed that every sentence must necessarily have a certain quality."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And what is the quality of each of these two sentences?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"The one, as I imagine, is false, and the other true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The true says what is true about you?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the false says what is other than true?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And therefore speaks of things which are not as if they were?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And say that things are real of you which are not; for, as we were saying, in regard to each thing or person, there is much that is and much that is not."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The second of the two sentences which related to you was first of all an example of the shortest form consistent with our definition."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, this was implied in recent admission."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And, in the second place, it related to a subject?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Who must be you, and can be nobody else?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Unquestionably."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And it would be no sentence at all if there were no subject, for, as we proved, a sentence which has no subject is impossible."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When other, then, is asserted of you as the same, and not-being as being, such a combination of nouns and verbs is really and truly false discourse."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And therefore thought, opinion, and imagination are now proved to exist in our minds both as true and false."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You will know better if you first gain a knowledge of what they are, and in what they severally differ from one another."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Give me the knowledge which you would wish me to gain."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Are not thought and speech the same, with this exception, that what is called thought is the unuttered conversation of the soul with herself?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But the stream of thought which flows through the lips and is audible is called speech?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And we know that there exists in speech..."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What exists?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Affirmation."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, we know it."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When the affirmation or denial takes Place in silence and in the mind only, have you any other name by which to call it but opinion?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"There can be no other name."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And when opinion is presented, not simply, but in some form of sense, would you not call it imagination?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And seeing that language is true and false, and that thought is the conversation of the soul with herself, and opinion is the end of thinking, and imagination or phantasy is the union of sense and opinion, the inference is that some of them, since they are akin to language, should have an element of falsehood as well as of truth?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Do you perceive, then, that false opinion and speech have been discovered sooner than we expected?--For just now we seemed to be undertaking a task which would never be accomplished."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I perceive."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then let us not be discouraged about the future; but now having made this discovery, let us go back to our previous classification."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What classification?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"We divided image-making into two sorts; the one likeness-making, the other imaginative or phantastic."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And we said that we were uncertain in which we should place the Sophist."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"We did say so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And our heads began to go round more and more when it was asserted that there is no such thing as an image or idol or appearance, because in no manner or time or place can there ever be such a thing as falsehood."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And now, since there has been shown to be false speech and false opinion, there may be imitations of real existences, and out of this condition of the mind an art of deception may arise."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite possible."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And we have already admitted, in what preceded, that the Sophist was lurking in one of the divisions of the likeness-making art?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us, then, renew the attempt, and in dividing any class, always take the part to the right, holding fast to that which holds the Sophist, until we have stripped him of all his common properties, and reached his difference or peculiar. Then we may exhibit him in his true nature, first to ourselves and then to kindred dialectical spirits."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"You may remember that all art was originally divided by us into creative and acquisitive."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And the Sophist was flitting before us in the acquisitive class, in the subdivisions of hunting, contests, merchandize, and the like."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"But now that the imitative art has enclosed him, it is clear that we must begin by dividing the art of creation; for imitation is a kind of creation--of images, however, as we affirm, and not of real things."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"In the first place, there are two kinds of creation."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"One of them is human and the other divine."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do not follow."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Every power, as you may remember our saying originally, which causes things to exist, not previously existing, was defined by us as creative."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I remember."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Looking, now, at the world and all the animals and plants, at things which grow upon the earth from seeds and roots, as well as at inanimate substances which are formed within the earth, fusile or non-fusile, shall we say that they come into existence--not having existed previously--by the creation of God, or shall we agree with vulgar opinion about them?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The opinion that nature brings them into being from some spontaneous and unintelligent cause. Or shall we say that they are created by a divine reason and a knowledge which comes from God?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I dare say that, owing to my youth, I may often waver in my view, but now when I look at you and see that you incline to refer them to God, I defer to your authority."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Nobly said, Theaetetus, and if I thought that you were one of those who would hereafter change your mind, I would have gently argued with you, and forced you to assent; but as I perceive that you will come of yourself and without any argument of mine, to that belief which, as you say, attracts you, I will not forestall the work of time. Let me suppose, then, that things which are said to be made by nature are the work of divine art, and that things which are made by man out of these are works of human art. And so there are two kinds of making and production, the one human and the other divine."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, now, subdivide each of the two sections which we have already."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I mean to say that you should make a vertical division of production or invention, as you have already made a lateral one."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I have done so."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, now, there are in all four parts or segments--two of them have reference to us and are human, and two of them have reference to the gods and are divine."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And, again, in the division which was supposed to be made in the other way, one part in each subdivision is the making of the things themselves, but the two remaining parts may be called the making of likenesses; and so the productive art is again divided into two parts."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Tell me the divisions once more."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"I suppose that we, and the other animals, and the elements out of which things are made--fire, water, and the like--are known by us to be each and all the creation and work of God."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And there are images of them, which are not them, but which correspond to them; and these are also the creation of a wonderful skill."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The appearances which spring up of themselves in sleep or by day, such as a shadow when darkness arises in a fire, or the reflection which is produced when the light in bright and smooth objects meets on their surface with an external light, and creates a perception the opposite of our ordinary sight."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes; and the images as well as the creation are equally the work of a divine hand."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And what shall we say of human art? Do we not make one house by the art of building, and another by the art of drawing, which is a sort of dream created by man for those who are awake?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And other products of human creation are also twofold and go in pairs; there is the thing, with which the art of making the thing is concerned, and the image, with which imitation is concerned."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Now I begin to understand, and am ready to acknowledge that there are two kinds of production, and each of them twofold; in the lateral division there is both a divine and a human production; in the vertical there are realities and a creation of a kind of similitudes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And let us not forget that of the imitative class the one part was to have been likeness-making, and the other phantastic, if it could be shown that falsehood is a reality and belongs to the class of real being."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And this appeared to be the case; and therefore now, without hesitation, we shall number the different kinds as two."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Then, now, let us again divide the phantastic art."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Where shall we make the division?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is one kind which is produced by an instrument, and another in which the creator of the appearance is himself the instrument."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"When any one makes himself appear like another in his figure or his voice, imitation is the name for this part of the phantastic art."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let this, then, be named the art of mimicry, and this the province assigned to it; as for the other division, we are weary and will give that up, leaving to some one else the duty of making the class and giving it a suitable name."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Let us do as you say--assign a sphere to the one and leave the other."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There is a further distinction, Theaetetus, which is worthy of our consideration, and for a reason which I will tell you."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Let me hear."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"There are some who imitate, knowing what they imitate, and some who do not know. And what line of distinction can there possibly be greater than that which divides ignorance from knowledge?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"There can be no greater."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Was not the sort of imitation of which we spoke just now the imitation of those who know? For he who would imitate you would surely know you and your figure?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Naturally."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And what would you say of the figure or form of justice or of virtue in general? Are we not well aware that many, having no knowledge of either, but only a sort of opinion, do their best to show that this opinion is really entertained by them, by expressing it, as far as they can, in word and deed?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is very common."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And do they always fail in their attempt to be thought just, when they are not? Or is not the very opposite true?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"The very opposite."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Such a one, then, should be described as an imitator--to be distinguished from the other, as he who is ignorant is distinguished from him who knows?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Can we find a suitable name for each of them? This is clearly not an easy task; for among the ancients there was some confusion of ideas, which prevented them from attempting to divide genera into species; wherefore there is no great abundance of names. Yet, for the sake of distinctness, I will make bold to call the imitation which coexists with opinion, the imitation of appearance--that which coexists with science, a scientific or learned imitation."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Granted."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"The former is our present concern, for the Sophist was classed with imitators indeed, but not among those who have knowledge."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Let us, then, examine our imitator of appearance, and see whether he is sound, like a piece of iron, or whether there is still some crack in him."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Let us examine him."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Indeed there is a very considerable crack; for if you look, you find that one of the two classes of imitators is a simple creature, who thinks that he knows that which he only fancies; the other sort has knocked about among arguments, until he suspects and fears that he is ignorant of that which to the many he pretends to know."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"There are certainly the two kinds which you describe."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Shall we regard one as the simple imitator--the other as the dissembling or ironical imitator?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And shall we further speak of this latter class as having one or two divisions?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Answer yourself."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Upon consideration, then, there appear to me to be two; there is the dissembler, who harangues a multitude in public in a long speech, and the dissembler, who in private and in short speeches compels the person who is conversing with him to contradict himself."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What you say is most true."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And who is the maker of the longer speeches? Is he the statesman or the popular orator?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"The latter."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"And what shall we call the other? Is he the philosopher or the Sophist?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"The philosopher he cannot be, for upon our view he is ignorant; but since he is an imitator of the wise he will have a name which is formed by an adaptation of the word sophos. What shall we name him? I am pretty sure that I cannot be mistaken in terming him the true and very Sophist."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"Shall we bind up his name as we did before, making a chain from one end of his genealogy to the other?"}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"STRANGER","Dialogue":"He, then, who traces the pedigree of his art as follows--who, belonging to the conscious or dissembling section of the art of causing self-contradiction, is an imitator of appearance, and is separated from the class of phantastic which is a branch of image-making into that further division of creation, the juggling of words, a creation human, and not divine--any one who affirms the real Sophist to be of this blood and lineage will say the very truth."}
{"Book":"sophist","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Undoubtedly. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOPHIST *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"charmides","Speaker":"SCENE","Dialogue":"The Palaestra of Taureas, which is near the Porch of the King Archon. Yesterday evening I returned from the army at Potidaea, and having been a good while away, I thought that I should like to go and look at my old haunts. So I went into the palaestra of Taureas, which is over against the temple adjoining the porch of the King Archon, and there I found a number of persons, most of whom I knew, but not all. My visit was unexpected, and no sooner did they see me entering than they saluted me from afar on all sides; and Chaerephon, who is a kind of madman, started up and ran to me, seizing my hand, and saying, How did you escape, Socrates?--(I should explain that an engagement had taken place at Potidaea not long before we came away, of which the news had only just reached Athens.) You see, I replied, that here I am. There was a report, he said, that the engagement was very severe, and that many of our acquaintance had fallen. That, I replied, was not far from the truth. I suppose, he said, that you were present. I was. Then sit down, and tell us the whole story, which as yet we have only heard imperfectly. I took the place which he assigned to me, by the side of Critias the son of Callaeschrus, and when I had saluted him and the rest of the company, I told them the news from the army, and answered their several enquiries. Then, when there had been enough of this, I, in my turn, began to make enquiries about matters at home--about the present state of philosophy, and about the youth. I asked whether any of them were remarkable for wisdom or beauty, or both. Critias, glancing at the door, invited my attention to some youths who were coming in, and talking noisily to one another, followed by a crowd. Of the beauties, Socrates, he said, I fancy that you will soon be able to form a judgment. For those who are just entering are the advanced guard of the great beauty, as he is thought to be, of the day, and he is likely to be not far off himself. Who is he, I said; and who is his father? Charmides, he replied, is his name; he is my cousin, and the son of my uncle Glaucon: I rather think that you know him too, although he was not grown up at the time of your departure. Certainly, I know him, I said, for he was remarkable even then when he was still a child, and I should imagine that by this time he must be almost a young man. You will see, he said, in a moment what progress he has made and what he is like. He had scarcely said the word, when Charmides entered. Now you know, my friend, that I cannot measure anything, and of the beautiful, I am simply such a measure as a white line is of chalk; for almost all young persons appear to be beautiful in my eyes. But at that moment, when I saw him coming in, I confess that I was quite astonished at his beauty and stature; all the world seemed to be enamoured of him; amazement and confusion reigned when he entered; and a troop of lovers followed him. That grown-up men like ourselves should have been affected in this way was not surprising, but I observed that there was the same feeling among the boys; all of them, down to the very least child, turned and looked at him, as if he had been a statue. Chaerephon called me and said: What do you think of him, Socrates? Has he not a beautiful face? Most beautiful, I said. But you would think nothing of his face, he replied, if you could see his naked form: he is absolutely perfect. And to this they all agreed. By Heracles, I said, there never was such a paragon, if he has only one other slight addition. What is that? said Critias. If he has a noble soul; and being of your house, Critias, he may be expected to have this. He is as fair and good within, as he is without, replied Critias. Then, before we see his body, should we not ask him to show us his soul, naked and undisguised? he is just of an age at which he will like to talk. That he will, said Critias, and I can tell you that he is a philosopher already, and also a considerable poet, not in his own opinion only, but in that of others. That, my dear Critias, I replied, is a distinction which has long been in your family, and is inherited by you from Solon. But why do you not call him, and show him to us? for even if he were younger than he is, there could be no impropriety in his talking to us in the presence of you, who are his guardian and cousin. Very well, he said; then I will call him; and turning to the attendant, he said, Call Charmides, and tell him that I want him to come and see a physician about the illness of which he spoke to me the day before yesterday. Then again addressing me, he added: He has been complaining lately of having a headache when he rises in the morning: now why should you not make him believe that you know a cure for the headache? Why not, I said; but will he come? He will be sure to come, he replied. He came as he was bidden, and sat down between Critias and me. Great amusement was occasioned by every one pushing with might and main at his neighbour in order to make a place for him next to themselves, until at the two ends of the row one had to get up and the other was rolled over sideways. Now I, my friend, was beginning to feel awkward; my former bold belief in my powers of conversing with him had vanished. And when Critias told him that I was the person who had the cure, he looked at me in such an indescribable manner, and was just going to ask a question. And at that moment all the people in the palaestra crowded about us, and, O rare! I caught a sight of the inwards of his garment, and took the flame. Then I could no longer contain myself. I thought how well Cydias understood the nature of love, when, in speaking of a fair youth, he warns some one 'not to bring the fawn in the sight of the lion to be devoured by him,' for I felt that I had been overcome by a sort of wild-beast appetite. But I controlled myself, and when he asked me if I knew the cure of the headache, I answered, but with an effort, that I did know. And what is it? he said. I replied that it was a kind of leaf, which required to be accompanied by a charm, and if a person would repeat the charm at the same time that he used the cure, he would be made whole; but that without the charm the leaf would be of no avail. Then I will write out the charm from your dictation, he said. With my consent? I said, or without my consent? With your consent, Socrates, he said, laughing. Very good, I said; and are you quite sure that you know my name? I ought to know you, he replied, for there is a great deal said about you among my companions; and I remember when I was a child seeing you in company with my cousin Critias. I am glad to find that you remember me, I said; for I shall now be more at home with you and shall be better able to explain the nature of the charm, about which I felt a difficulty before. For the charm will do more, Charmides, than only cure the headache. I dare say that you have heard eminent physicians say to a patient who comes to them with bad eyes, that they cannot cure his eyes by themselves, but that if his eyes are to be cured, his head must be treated; and then again they say that to think of curing the head alone, and not the rest of the body also, is the height of folly. And arguing in this way they apply their methods to the whole body, and try to treat and heal the whole and the part together. Did you ever observe that this is what they say? Yes, he said. And they are right, and you would agree with them? Yes, he said, certainly I should. His approving answers reassured me, and I began by degrees to regain confidence, and the vital heat returned. Such, Charmides, I said, is the nature of the charm, which I learned when serving with the army from one of the physicians of the Thracian king Zamolxis, who are said to be so skilful that they can even give immortality. This Thracian told me that in these notions of theirs, which I was just now mentioning, the Greek physicians are quite right as far as they go; but Zamolxis, he added, our king, who is also a god, says further, 'that as you ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul; and this,' he said, 'is the reason why the cure of many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas, because they are ignorant of the whole, which ought to be studied also; for the part can never be well unless the whole is well.' For all good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates, as he declared, in the soul, and overflows from thence, as if from the head into the eyes. And therefore if the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul; that is the first thing. And the cure, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use of certain charms, and these charms are fair words; and by them temperance is implanted in the soul, and where temperance is, there health is speedily imparted, not only to the head, but to the whole body. And he who taught me the cure and the charm at the same time added a special direction: 'Let no one,' he said, 'persuade you to cure the head, until he has first given you his soul to be cured by the charm. For this,' he said, 'is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the soul from the body.' And he added with emphasis, at the same time making me swear to his words, 'Let no one, however rich, or noble, or fair, persuade you to give him the cure, without the charm.' Now I have sworn, and I must keep my oath, and therefore if you will allow me to apply the Thracian charm first to your soul, as the stranger directed, I will afterwards proceed to apply the cure to your head. But if not, I do not know what I am to do with you, my dear Charmides. Critias, when he heard this, said: The headache will be an unexpected gain to my young relation, if the pain in his head compels him to improve his mind: and I can tell you, Socrates, that Charmides is not only pre-eminent in beauty among his equals, but also in that quality which is given by the charm; and this, as you say, is temperance? Yes, I said. Then let me tell you that he is the most temperate of human beings, and for his age inferior to none in any quality. Yes, I said, Charmides; and indeed I think that you ought to excel others in all good qualities; for if I am not mistaken there is no one present who could easily point out two Athenian houses, whose union would be likely to produce a better or nobler scion than the two from which you are sprung. There is your father's house, which is descended from Critias the son of Dropidas, whose family has been commemorated in the panegyrical verses of Anacreon, Solon, and many other poets, as famous for beauty and virtue and all other high fortune: and your mother's house is equally distinguished; for your maternal uncle, Pyrilampes, is reputed never to have found his equal, in Persia at the court of the great king, or on the continent of Asia, in all the places to which he went as ambassador, for stature and beauty; that whole family is not a whit inferior to the other. Having such ancestors you ought to be first in all things, and, sweet son of Glaucon, your outward form is no dishonour to any of them. If to beauty you add temperance, and if in other respects you are what Critias declares you to be, then, dear Charmides, blessed art thou, in being the son of thy mother. And here lies the point; for if, as he declares, you have this gift of temperance already, and are temperate enough, in that case you have no need of any charms, whether of Zamolxis or of Abaris the Hyperborean, and I may as well let you have the cure of the head at once; but if you have not yet acquired this quality, I must use the charm before I give you the medicine. Please, therefore, to inform me whether you admit the truth of what Critias has been saying;--have you or have you not this quality of temperance? Charmides blushed, and the blush heightened his beauty, for modesty is becoming in youth; he then said very ingenuously, that he really could not at once answer, either yes, or no, to the question which I had asked: For, said he, if I affirm that I am not temperate, that would be a strange thing for me to say of myself, and also I should give the lie to Critias, and many others who think as he tells you, that I am temperate: but, on the other hand, if I say that I am, I shall have to praise myself, which would be ill manners; and therefore I do not know how to answer you. I said to him: That is a natural reply, Charmides, and I think that you and I ought together to enquire whether you have this quality about which I am asking or not; and then you will not be compelled to say what you do not like; neither shall I be a rash practitioner of medicine: therefore, if you please, I will share the enquiry with you, but I will not press you if you would rather not. There is nothing which I should like better, he said; and as far as I am concerned you may proceed in the way which you think best. I think, I said, that I had better begin by asking you a question; for if temperance abides in you, you must have an opinion about her; she must give some intimation of her nature and qualities, which may enable you to form a notion of her. Is not that true? Yes, he said, that I think is true. You know your native language, I said, and therefore you must be able to tell what you feel about this. Certainly, he said. In order, then, that I may form a conjecture whether you have temperance abiding in you or not, tell me, I said, what, in your opinion, is Temperance? At first he hesitated, and was very unwilling to answer: then he said that he thought temperance was doing things orderly and quietly, such things for example as walking in the streets, and talking, or anything else of that nature. In a word, he said, I should answer that, in my opinion, temperance is quietness. Are you right, Charmides? I said. No doubt some would affirm that the quiet are the temperate; but let us see whether these words have any meaning; and first tell me whether you would not acknowledge temperance to be of the class of the noble and good? Yes. But which is best when you are at the writing-master's, to write the same letters quickly or quietly? Quickly. And to read quickly or slowly? Quickly again. And in playing the lyre, or wrestling, quickness or sharpness are far better than quietness and slowness? Yes. And the same holds in boxing and in the pancratium? Certainly. And in leaping and running and in bodily exercises generally, quickness and agility are good; slowness, and inactivity, and quietness, are bad? That is evident. Then, I said, in all bodily actions, not quietness, but the greatest agility and quickness, is noblest and best? Yes, certainly. And is temperance a good? Yes. Then, in reference to the body, not quietness, but quickness will be the higher degree of temperance, if temperance is a good? True, he said. And which, I said, is better--facility in learning, or difficulty in learning? Facility. Yes, I said; and facility in learning is learning quickly, and difficulty in learning is learning quietly and slowly? True. And is it not better to teach another quickly and energetically, rather than quietly and slowly? Yes. And which is better, to call to mind, and to remember, quickly and readily, or quietly and slowly? The former. And is not shrewdness a quickness or cleverness of the soul, and not a quietness? True. And is it not best to understand what is said, whether at the writing-master's or the music-master's, or anywhere else, not as quietly as possible, but as quickly as possible? Yes. And in the searchings or deliberations of the soul, not the quietest, as I imagine, and he who with difficulty deliberates and discovers, is thought worthy of praise, but he who does so most easily and quickly? Quite true, he said. And in all that concerns either body or soul, swiftness and activity are clearly better than slowness and quietness? Clearly they are. Then temperance is not quietness, nor is the temperate life quiet,--certainly not upon this view; for the life which is temperate is supposed to be the good. And of two things, one is true,--either never, or very seldom, do the quiet actions in life appear to be better than the quick and energetic ones; or supposing that of the nobler actions, there are as many quiet, as quick and vehement: still, even if we grant this, temperance will not be acting quietly any more than acting quickly and energetically, either in walking or talking or in anything else; nor will the quiet life be more temperate than the unquiet, seeing that temperance is admitted by us to be a good and noble thing, and the quick have been shown to be as good as the quiet. I think, he said, Socrates, that you are right. Then once more, Charmides, I said, fix your attention, and look within; consider the effect which temperance has upon yourself, and the nature of that which has the effect. Think over all this, and, like a brave youth, tell me--What is temperance? After a moment's pause, in which he made a real manly effort to think, he said: My opinion is, Socrates, that temperance makes a man ashamed or modest, and that temperance is the same as modesty. Very good, I said; and did you not admit, just now, that temperance is noble? Yes, certainly, he said. And the temperate are also good? Yes. And can that be good which does not make men good? Certainly not. And you would infer that temperance is not only noble, but also good? That is my opinion. Well, I said; but surely you would agree with Homer when he says, 'Modesty is not good for a needy man'? Yes, he said; I agree. Then I suppose that modesty is and is not good? Clearly. But temperance, whose presence makes men only good, and not bad, is always good? That appears to me to be as you say. And the inference is that temperance cannot be modesty--if temperance is a good, and if modesty is as much an evil as a good? All that, Socrates, appears to me to be true; but I should like to know what you think about another definition of temperance, which I just now remember to have heard from some one, who said, 'That temperance is doing our own business.' Was he right who affirmed that? You monster! I said; this is what Critias, or some philosopher has told you. Some one else, then, said Critias; for certainly I have not. But what matter, said Charmides, from whom I heard this? No matter at all, I replied; for the point is not who said the words, but whether they are true or not. There you are in the right, Socrates, he replied. To be sure, I said; yet I doubt whether we shall ever be able to discover their truth or falsehood; for they are a kind of riddle. What makes you think so? he said. Because, I said, he who uttered them seems to me to have meant one thing, and said another. Is the scribe, for example, to be regarded as doing nothing when he reads or writes? I should rather think that he was doing something. And does the scribe write or read, or teach you boys to write or read, your own names only, or did you write your enemies' names as well as your own and your friends'? As much one as the other. And was there anything meddling or intemperate in this? Certainly not. And yet if reading and writing are the same as doing, you were doing what was not your own business? But they are the same as doing. And the healing art, my friend, and building, and weaving, and doing anything whatever which is done by art,--these all clearly come under the head of doing? Certainly. And do you think that a state would be well ordered by a law which compelled every man to weave and wash his own coat, and make his own shoes, and his own flask and strigil, and other implements, on this principle of every one doing and performing his own, and abstaining from what is not his own? I think not, he said. But, I said, a temperate state will be a well-ordered state. Of course, he replied. Then temperance, I said, will not be doing one's own business; not at least in this way, or doing things of this sort? Clearly not. Then, as I was just now saying, he who declared that temperance is a man doing his own business had another and a hidden meaning; for I do not think that he could have been such a fool as to mean this. Was he a fool who told you, Charmides? Nay, he replied, I certainly thought him a very wise man. Then I am quite certain that he put forth his definition as a riddle, thinking that no one would know the meaning of the words 'doing his own business.' I dare say, he replied. And what is the meaning of a man doing his own business? Can you tell me? Indeed, I cannot; and I should not wonder if the man himself who used this phrase did not understand what he was saying. Whereupon he laughed slyly, and looked at Critias. Critias had long been showing uneasiness, for he felt that he had a reputation to maintain with Charmides and the rest of the company. He had, however, hitherto managed to restrain himself; but now he could no longer forbear, and I am convinced of the truth of the suspicion which I entertained at the time, that Charmides had heard this answer about temperance from Critias. And Charmides, who did not want to answer himself, but to make Critias answer, tried to stir him up. He went on pointing out that he had been refuted, at which Critias grew angry, and appeared, as I thought, inclined to quarrel with him; just as a poet might quarrel with an actor who spoiled his poems in repeating them; so he looked hard at him and said-- Do you imagine, Charmides, that the author of this definition of temperance did not understand the meaning of his own words, because you do not understand them? Why, at his age, I said, most excellent Critias, he can hardly be expected to understand; but you, who are older, and have studied, may well be assumed to know the meaning of them; and therefore, if you agree with him, and accept his definition of temperance, I would much rather argue with you than with him about the truth or falsehood of the definition. I entirely agree, said Critias, and accept the definition. Very good, I said; and now let me repeat my question--Do you admit, as I was just now saying, that all craftsmen make or do something? I do. And do they make or do their own business only, or that of others also? They make or do that of others also. And are they temperate, seeing that they make not for themselves or their own business only? Why not? he said. No objection on my part, I said, but there may be a difficulty on his who proposes as a definition of temperance, 'doing one's own business,' and then says that there is no reason why those who do the business of others should not be temperate. Nay (The English reader has to observe that the word 'make' (Greek), in Greek, has also the sense of 'do' (Greek).), said he; did I ever acknowledge that those who do the business of others are temperate? I said, those who make, not those who do. What! I asked; do you mean to say that doing and making are not the same? No more, he replied, than making or working are the same; thus much I have learned from Hesiod, who says that 'work is no disgrace.' Now do you imagine that if he had meant by working and doing such things as you were describing, he would have said that there was no disgrace in them--for example, in the manufacture of shoes, or in selling pickles, or sitting for hire in a house of ill-fame? That, Socrates, is not to be supposed: but I conceive him to have distinguished making from doing and work; and, while admitting that the making anything might sometimes become a disgrace, when the employment was not honourable, to have thought that work was never any disgrace at all. For things nobly and usefully made he called works; and such makings he called workings, and doings; and he must be supposed to have called such things only man's proper business, and what is hurtful, not his business: and in that sense Hesiod, and any other wise man, may be reasonably supposed to call him wise who does his own work. O Critias, I said, no sooner had you opened your mouth, than I pretty well knew that you would call that which is proper to a man, and that which is his own, good; and that the makings (Greek) of the good you would call doings (Greek), for I am no stranger to the endless distinctions which Prodicus draws about names. Now I have no objection to your giving names any signification which you please, if you will only tell me what you mean by them. Please then to begin again, and be a little plainer. Do you mean that this doing or making, or whatever is the word which you would use, of good actions, is temperance? I do, he said. Then not he who does evil, but he who does good, is temperate? Yes, he said; and you, friend, would agree. No matter whether I should or not; just now, not what I think, but what you are saying, is the point at issue. Well, he answered; I mean to say, that he who does evil, and not good, is not temperate; and that he is temperate who does good, and not evil: for temperance I define in plain words to be the doing of good actions. And you may be very likely right in what you are saying; but I am curious to know whether you imagine that temperate men are ignorant of their own temperance? I do not think so, he said. And yet were you not saying, just now, that craftsmen might be temperate in doing another's work, as well as in doing their own? I was, he replied; but what is your drift? I have no particular drift, but I wish that you would tell me whether a physician who cures a patient may do good to himself and good to another also? I think that he may. And he who does so does his duty? Yes. And does not he who does his duty act temperately or wisely? Yes, he acts wisely. But must the physician necessarily know when his treatment is likely to prove beneficial, and when not? or must the craftsman necessarily know when he is likely to be benefited, and when not to be benefited, by the work which he is doing? I suppose not. Then, I said, he may sometimes do good or harm, and not know what he is himself doing, and yet, in doing good, as you say, he has done temperately or wisely. Was not that your statement? Yes. Then, as would seem, in doing good, he may act wisely or temperately, and be wise or temperate, but not know his own wisdom or temperance? But that, Socrates, he said, is impossible; and therefore if this is, as you imply, the necessary consequence of any of my previous admissions, I will withdraw them, rather than admit that a man can be temperate or wise who does not know himself; and I am not ashamed to confess that I was in error. For self-knowledge would certainly be maintained by me to be the very essence of knowledge, and in this I agree with him who dedicated the inscription, 'Know thyself!' at Delphi. That word, if I am not mistaken, is put there as a sort of salutation which the god addresses to those who enter the temple; as much as to say that the ordinary salutation of 'Hail!' is not right, and that the exhortation 'Be temperate!' would be a far better way of saluting one another. The notion of him who dedicated the inscription was, as I believe, that the god speaks to those who enter his temple, not as men speak; but, when a worshipper enters, the first word which he hears is 'Be temperate!' This, however, like a prophet he expresses in a sort of riddle, for 'Know thyself!' and 'Be temperate!' are the same, as I maintain, and as the letters imply (Greek), and yet they may be easily misunderstood; and succeeding sages who added 'Never too much,' or, 'Give a pledge, and evil is nigh at hand,' would appear to have so misunderstood them; for they imagined that 'Know thyself!' was a piece of advice which the god gave, and not his salutation of the worshippers at their first coming in; and they dedicated their own inscription under the idea that they too would give equally useful pieces of advice. Shall I tell you, Socrates, why I say all this? My object is to leave the previous discussion (in which I know not whether you or I are more right, but, at any rate, no clear result was attained), and to raise a new one in which I will attempt to prove, if you deny, that temperance is self-knowledge. Yes, I said, Critias; but you come to me as though I professed to know about the questions which I ask, and as though I could, if I only would, agree with you. Whereas the fact is that I enquire with you into the truth of that which is advanced from time to time, just because I do not know; and when I have enquired, I will say whether I agree with you or not. Please then to allow me time to reflect. Reflect, he said. I am reflecting, I replied, and discover that temperance, or wisdom, if implying a knowledge of anything, must be a science, and a science of something. Yes, he said; the science of itself. Is not medicine, I said, the science of health? True. And suppose, I said, that I were asked by you what is the use or effect of medicine, which is this science of health, I should answer that medicine is of very great use in producing health, which, as you will admit, is an excellent effect. Granted. And if you were to ask me, what is the result or effect of architecture, which is the science of building, I should say houses, and so of other arts, which all have their different results. Now I want you, Critias, to answer a similar question about temperance, or wisdom, which, according to you, is the science of itself. Admitting this view, I ask of you, what good work, worthy of the name wise, does temperance or wisdom, which is the science of itself, effect? Answer me. That is not the true way of pursuing the enquiry, Socrates, he said; for wisdom is not like the other sciences, any more than they are like one another: but you proceed as if they were alike. For tell me, he said, what result is there of computation or geometry, in the same sense as a house is the result of building, or a garment of weaving, or any other work of any other art? Can you show me any such result of them? You cannot. That is true, I said; but still each of these sciences has a subject which is different from the science. I can show you that the art of computation has to do with odd and even numbers in their numerical relations to themselves and to each other. Is not that true? Yes, he said. And the odd and even numbers are not the same with the art of computation? They are not. The art of weighing, again, has to do with lighter and heavier; but the art of weighing is one thing, and the heavy and the light another. Do you admit that? Yes. Now, I want to know, what is that which is not wisdom, and of which wisdom is the science? You are just falling into the old error, Socrates, he said. You come asking in what wisdom or temperance differs from the other sciences, and then you try to discover some respect in which they are alike; but they are not, for all the other sciences are of something else, and not of themselves; wisdom alone is a science of other sciences, and of itself. And of this, as I believe, you are very well aware: and that you are only doing what you denied that you were doing just now, trying to refute me, instead of pursuing the argument. And what if I am? How can you think that I have any other motive in refuting you but what I should have in examining into myself? which motive would be just a fear of my unconsciously fancying that I knew something of which I was ignorant. And at this moment I pursue the argument chiefly for my own sake, and perhaps in some degree also for the sake of my other friends. For is not the discovery of things as they truly are, a good common to all mankind? Yes, certainly, Socrates, he said. Then, I said, be cheerful, sweet sir, and give your opinion in answer to the question which I asked, never minding whether Critias or Socrates is the person refuted; attend only to the argument, and see what will come of the refutation. I think that you are right, he replied; and I will do as you say. Tell me, then, I said, what you mean to affirm about wisdom. I mean to say that wisdom is the only science which is the science of itself as well as of the other sciences. But the science of science, I said, will also be the science of the absence of science. Very true, he said. Then the wise or temperate man, and he only, will know himself, and be able to examine what he knows or does not know, and to see what others know and think that they know and do really know; and what they do not know, and fancy that they know, when they do not. No other person will be able to do this. And this is wisdom and temperance and self-knowledge--for a man to know what he knows, and what he does not know. That is your meaning? Yes, he said. Now then, I said, making an offering of the third or last argument to Zeus the Saviour, let us begin again, and ask, in the first place, whether it is or is not possible for a person to know that he knows and does not know what he knows and does not know; and in the second place, whether, if perfectly possible, such knowledge is of any use. That is what we have to consider, he said. And here, Critias, I said, I hope that you will find a way out of a difficulty into which I have got myself. Shall I tell you the nature of the difficulty? By all means, he replied. Does not what you have been saying, if true, amount to this: that there must be a single science which is wholly a science of itself and of other sciences, and that the same is also the science of the absence of science? Yes. But consider how monstrous this proposition is, my friend: in any parallel case, the impossibility will be transparent to you. How is that? and in what cases do you mean? In such cases as this: Suppose that there is a kind of vision which is not like ordinary vision, but a vision of itself and of other sorts of vision, and of the defect of them, which in seeing sees no colour, but only itself and other sorts of vision: Do you think that there is such a kind of vision? Certainly not. Or is there a kind of hearing which hears no sound at all, but only itself and other sorts of hearing, or the defects of them? There is not. Or take all the senses: can you imagine that there is any sense of itself and of other senses, but which is incapable of perceiving the objects of the senses? I think not. Could there be any desire which is not the desire of any pleasure, but of itself, and of all other desires? Certainly not. Or can you imagine a wish which wishes for no good, but only for itself and all other wishes? I should answer, No. Or would you say that there is a love which is not the love of beauty, but of itself and of other loves? I should not. Or did you ever know of a fear which fears itself or other fears, but has no object of fear? I never did, he said. Or of an opinion which is an opinion of itself and of other opinions, and which has no opinion on the subjects of opinion in general? Certainly not. But surely we are assuming a science of this kind, which, having no subject-matter, is a science of itself and of the other sciences? Yes, that is what is affirmed. But how strange is this, if it be indeed true: we must not however as yet absolutely deny the possibility of such a science; let us rather consider the matter. You are quite right. Well then, this science of which we are speaking is a science of something, and is of a nature to be a science of something? Yes. Just as that which is greater is of a nature to be greater than something else? (Socrates is intending to show that science differs from the object of science, as any other relative differs from the object of relation. But where there is comparison--greater, less, heavier, lighter, and the like--a relation to self as well as to other things involves an absolute contradiction; and in other cases, as in the case of the senses, is hardly conceivable. The use of the genitive after the comparative in Greek, (Greek), creates an unavoidable obscurity in the translation.) Yes. Which is less, if the other is conceived to be greater? To be sure. And if we could find something which is at once greater than itself, and greater than other great things, but not greater than those things in comparison of which the others are greater, then that thing would have the property of being greater and also less than itself? That, Socrates, he said, is the inevitable inference. Or if there be a double which is double of itself and of other doubles, these will be halves; for the double is relative to the half? That is true. And that which is greater than itself will also be less, and that which is heavier will also be lighter, and that which is older will also be younger: and the same of other things; that which has a nature relative to self will retain also the nature of its object: I mean to say, for example, that hearing is, as we say, of sound or voice. Is that true? Yes. Then if hearing hears itself, it must hear a voice; for there is no other way of hearing. Certainly. And sight also, my excellent friend, if it sees itself must see a colour, for sight cannot see that which has no colour. No. Do you remark, Critias, that in several of the examples which have been recited the notion of a relation to self is altogether inadmissible, and in other cases hardly credible--inadmissible, for example, in the case of magnitudes, numbers, and the like? Very true. But in the case of hearing and sight, or in the power of self-motion, and the power of heat to burn, this relation to self will be regarded as incredible by some, but perhaps not by others. And some great man, my friend, is wanted, who will satisfactorily determine for us, whether there is nothing which has an inherent property of relation to self, or some things only and not others; and whether in this class of self-related things, if there be such a class, that science which is called wisdom or temperance is included. I altogether distrust my own power of determining these matters: I am not certain whether there is such a science of science at all; and even if there be, I should not acknowledge this to be wisdom or temperance, until I can also see whether such a science would or would not do us any good; for I have an impression that temperance is a benefit and a good. And therefore, O son of Callaeschrus, as you maintain that temperance or wisdom is a science of science, and also of the absence of science, I will request you to show in the first place, as I was saying before, the possibility, and in the second place, the advantage, of such a science; and then perhaps you may satisfy me that you are right in your view of temperance. Critias heard me say this, and saw that I was in a difficulty; and as one person when another yawns in his presence catches the infection of yawning from him, so did he seem to be driven into a difficulty by my difficulty. But as he had a reputation to maintain, he was ashamed to admit before the company that he could not answer my challenge or determine the question at issue; and he made an unintelligible attempt to hide his perplexity. In order that the argument might proceed, I said to him, Well then Critias, if you like, let us assume that there is this science of science; whether the assumption is right or wrong may hereafter be investigated. Admitting the existence of it, will you tell me how such a science enables us to distinguish what we know or do not know, which, as we were saying, is self-knowledge or wisdom: so we were saying? Yes, Socrates, he said; and that I think is certainly true: for he who has this science or knowledge which knows itself will become like the knowledge which he has, in the same way that he who has swiftness will be swift, and he who has beauty will be beautiful, and he who has knowledge will know. In the same way he who has that knowledge which is self-knowing, will know himself. I do not doubt, I said, that a man will know himself, when he possesses that which has self-knowledge: but what necessity is there that, having this, he should know what he knows and what he does not know? Because, Socrates, they are the same. Very likely, I said; but I remain as stupid as ever; for still I fail to comprehend how this knowing what you know and do not know is the same as the knowledge of self. What do you mean? he said. This is what I mean, I replied: I will admit that there is a science of science;--can this do more than determine that of two things one is and the other is not science or knowledge? No, just that. But is knowledge or want of knowledge of health the same as knowledge or want of knowledge of justice? Certainly not. The one is medicine, and the other is politics; whereas that of which we are speaking is knowledge pure and simple. Very true. And if a man knows only, and has only knowledge of knowledge, and has no further knowledge of health and justice, the probability is that he will only know that he knows something, and has a certain knowledge, whether concerning himself or other men. True. Then how will this knowledge or science teach him to know what he knows? Say that he knows health;--not wisdom or temperance, but the art of medicine has taught it to him;--and he has learned harmony from the art of music, and building from the art of building,--neither, from wisdom or temperance: and the same of other things. That is evident. How will wisdom, regarded only as a knowledge of knowledge or science of science, ever teach him that he knows health, or that he knows building? It is impossible. Then he who is ignorant of these things will only know that he knows, but not what he knows? True. Then wisdom or being wise appears to be not the knowledge of the things which we do or do not know, but only the knowledge that we know or do not know? That is the inference. Then he who has this knowledge will not be able to examine whether a pretender knows or does not know that which he says that he knows: he will only know that he has a knowledge of some kind; but wisdom will not show him of what the knowledge is? Plainly not. Neither will he be able to distinguish the pretender in medicine from the true physician, nor between any other true and false professor of knowledge. Let us consider the matter in this way: If the wise man or any other man wants to distinguish the true physician from the false, how will he proceed? He will not talk to him about medicine; and that, as we were saying, is the only thing which the physician understands. True. And, on the other hand, the physician knows nothing of science, for this has been assumed to be the province of wisdom. True. And further, since medicine is science, we must infer that he does not know anything of medicine. Exactly. Then the wise man may indeed know that the physician has some kind of science or knowledge; but when he wants to discover the nature of this he will ask, What is the subject-matter? For the several sciences are distinguished not by the mere fact that they are sciences, but by the nature of their subjects. Is not that true? Quite true. And medicine is distinguished from other sciences as having the subject-matter of health and disease? Yes. And he who would enquire into the nature of medicine must pursue the enquiry into health and disease, and not into what is extraneous? True. And he who judges rightly will judge of the physician as a physician in what relates to these? He will. He will consider whether what he says is true, and whether what he does is right, in relation to health and disease? He will. But can any one attain the knowledge of either unless he have a knowledge of medicine? He cannot. No one at all, it would seem, except the physician can have this knowledge; and therefore not the wise man; he would have to be a physician as well as a wise man. Very true. Then, assuredly, wisdom or temperance, if only a science of science, and of the absence of science or knowledge, will not be able to distinguish the physician who knows from one who does not know but pretends or thinks that he knows, or any other professor of anything at all; like any other artist, he will only know his fellow in art or wisdom, and no one else. That is evident, he said. But then what profit, Critias, I said, is there any longer in wisdom or temperance which yet remains, if this is wisdom? If, indeed, as we were supposing at first, the wise man had been able to distinguish what he knew and did not know, and that he knew the one and did not know the other, and to recognize a similar faculty of discernment in others, there would certainly have been a great advantage in being wise; for then we should never have made a mistake, but have passed through life the unerring guides of ourselves and of those who are under us; and we should not have attempted to do what we did not know, but we should have found out those who knew, and have handed the business over to them and trusted in them; nor should we have allowed those who were under us to do anything which they were not likely to do well; and they would be likely to do well just that of which they had knowledge; and the house or state which was ordered or administered under the guidance of wisdom, and everything else of which wisdom was the lord, would have been well ordered; for truth guiding, and error having been eliminated, in all their doings, men would have done well, and would have been happy. Was not this, Critias, what we spoke of as the great advantage of wisdom--to know what is known and what is unknown to us? Very true, he said. And now you perceive, I said, that no such science is to be found anywhere. I perceive, he said. May we assume then, I said, that wisdom, viewed in this new light merely as a knowledge of knowledge and ignorance, has this advantage:--that he who possesses such knowledge will more easily learn anything which he learns; and that everything will be clearer to him, because, in addition to the knowledge of individuals, he sees the science, and this also will better enable him to test the knowledge which others have of what he knows himself; whereas the enquirer who is without this knowledge may be supposed to have a feebler and weaker insight? Are not these, my friend, the real advantages which are to be gained from wisdom? And are not we looking and seeking after something more than is to be found in her? That is very likely, he said. That is very likely, I said; and very likely, too, we have been enquiring to no purpose; as I am led to infer, because I observe that if this is wisdom, some strange consequences would follow. Let us, if you please, assume the possibility of this science of sciences, and further admit and allow, as was originally suggested, that wisdom is the knowledge of what we know and do not know. Assuming all this, still, upon further consideration, I am doubtful, Critias, whether wisdom, such as this, would do us much good. For we were wrong, I think, in supposing, as we were saying just now, that such wisdom ordering the government of house or state would be a great benefit. How so? he said. Why, I said, we were far too ready to admit the great benefits which mankind would obtain from their severally doing the things which they knew, and committing the things of which they are ignorant to those who were better acquainted with them. Were we not right in making that admission? I think not. How very strange, Socrates! By the dog of Egypt, I said, there I agree with you; and I was thinking as much just now when I said that strange consequences would follow, and that I was afraid we were on the wrong track; for however ready we may be to admit that this is wisdom, I certainly cannot make out what good this sort of thing does to us. What do you mean? he said; I wish that you could make me understand what you mean. I dare say that what I am saying is nonsense, I replied; and yet if a man has any feeling of what is due to himself, he cannot let the thought which comes into his mind pass away unheeded and unexamined. I like that, he said. Hear, then, I said, my own dream; whether coming through the horn or the ivory gate, I cannot tell. The dream is this: Let us suppose that wisdom is such as we are now defining, and that she has absolute sway over us; then each action will be done according to the arts or sciences, and no one professing to be a pilot when he is not, or any physician or general, or any one else pretending to know matters of which he is ignorant, will deceive or elude us; our health will be improved; our safety at sea, and also in battle, will be assured; our coats and shoes, and all other instruments and implements will be skilfully made, because the workmen will be good and true. Aye, and if you please, you may suppose that prophecy, which is the knowledge of the future, will be under the control of wisdom, and that she will deter deceivers and set up the true prophets in their place as the revealers of the future. Now I quite agree that mankind, thus provided, would live and act according to knowledge, for wisdom would watch and prevent ignorance from intruding on us. But whether by acting according to knowledge we shall act well and be happy, my dear Critias,--this is a point which we have not yet been able to determine. Yet I think, he replied, that if you discard knowledge, you will hardly find the crown of happiness in anything else. But of what is this knowledge? I said. Just answer me that small question. Do you mean a knowledge of shoemaking? God forbid. Or of working in brass? Certainly not. Or in wool, or wood, or anything of that sort? No, I do not. Then, I said, we are giving up the doctrine that he who lives according to knowledge is happy, for these live according to knowledge, and yet they are not allowed by you to be happy; but I think that you mean to confine happiness to particular individuals who live according to knowledge, such for example as the prophet, who, as I was saying, knows the future. Is it of him you are speaking or of some one else? Yes, I mean him, but there are others as well. Yes, I said, some one who knows the past and present as well as the future, and is ignorant of nothing. Let us suppose that there is such a person, and if there is, you will allow that he is the most knowing of all living men. Certainly he is. Yet I should like to know one thing more: which of the different kinds of knowledge makes him happy? or do all equally make him happy? Not all equally, he replied. But which most tends to make him happy? the knowledge of what past, present, or future thing? May I infer this to be the knowledge of the game of draughts? Nonsense about the game of draughts. Or of computation? No. Or of health? That is nearer the truth, he said. And that knowledge which is nearest of all, I said, is the knowledge of what? The knowledge with which he discerns good and evil. Monster! I said; you have been carrying me round in a circle, and all this time hiding from me the fact that the life according to knowledge is not that which makes men act rightly and be happy, not even if knowledge include all the sciences, but one science only, that of good and evil. For, let me ask you, Critias, whether, if you take away this, medicine will not equally give health, and shoemaking equally produce shoes, and the art of the weaver clothes?--whether the art of the pilot will not equally save our lives at sea, and the art of the general in war? Quite so. And yet, my dear Critias, none of these things will be well or beneficially done, if the science of the good be wanting. True. But that science is not wisdom or temperance, but a science of human advantage; not a science of other sciences, or of ignorance, but of good and evil: and if this be of use, then wisdom or temperance will not be of use. And why, he replied, will not wisdom be of use? For, however much we assume that wisdom is a science of sciences, and has a sway over other sciences, surely she will have this particular science of the good under her control, and in this way will benefit us. And will wisdom give health? I said; is not this rather the effect of medicine? Or does wisdom do the work of any of the other arts,--do they not each of them do their own work? Have we not long ago asseverated that wisdom is only the knowledge of knowledge and of ignorance, and of nothing else? That is obvious. Then wisdom will not be the producer of health. Certainly not. The art of health is different. Yes, different. Nor does wisdom give advantage, my good friend; for that again we have just now been attributing to another art. Very true. How then can wisdom be advantageous, when giving no advantage? That, Socrates, is certainly inconceivable. You see then, Critias, that I was not far wrong in fearing that I could have no sound notion about wisdom; I was quite right in depreciating myself; for that which is admitted to be the best of all things would never have seemed to us useless, if I had been good for anything at an enquiry. But now I have been utterly defeated, and have failed to discover what that is to which the imposer of names gave this name of temperance or wisdom. And yet many more admissions were made by us than could be fairly granted; for we admitted that there was a science of science, although the argument said No, and protested against us; and we admitted further, that this science knew the works of the other sciences (although this too was denied by the argument), because we wanted to show that the wise man had knowledge of what he knew and did not know; also we nobly disregarded, and never even considered, the impossibility of a man knowing in a sort of way that which he does not know at all; for our assumption was, that he knows that which he does not know; than which nothing, as I think, can be more irrational. And yet, after finding us so easy and good-natured, the enquiry is still unable to discover the truth; but mocks us to a degree, and has gone out of its way to prove the inutility of that which we admitted only by a sort of supposition and fiction to be the true definition of temperance or wisdom: which result, as far as I am concerned, is not so much to be lamented, I said. But for your sake, Charmides, I am very sorry--that you, having such beauty and such wisdom and temperance of soul, should have no profit or good in life from your wisdom and temperance. And still more am I grieved about the charm which I learned with so much pain, and to so little profit, from the Thracian, for the sake of a thing which is nothing worth. I think indeed that there is a mistake, and that I must be a bad enquirer, for wisdom or temperance I believe to be really a great good; and happy are you, Charmides, if you certainly possess it. Wherefore examine yourself, and see whether you have this gift and can do without the charm; for if you can, I would rather advise you to regard me simply as a fool who is never able to reason out anything; and to rest assured that the more wise and temperate you are, the happier you will be. Charmides said: I am sure that I do not know, Socrates, whether I have or have not this gift of wisdom and temperance; for how can I know whether I have a thing, of which even you and Critias are, as you say, unable to discover the nature?--(not that I believe you.) And further, I am sure, Socrates, that I do need the charm, and as far as I am concerned, I shall be willing to be charmed by you daily, until you say that I have had enough. Very good, Charmides, said Critias; if you do this I shall have a proof of your temperance, that is, if you allow yourself to be charmed by Socrates, and never desert him at all. You may depend on my following and not deserting him, said Charmides: if you who are my guardian command me, I should be very wrong not to obey you. And I do command you, he said. Then I will do as you say, and begin this very day. You sirs, I said, what are you conspiring about? We are not conspiring, said Charmides, we have conspired already. And are you about to use violence, without even going through the forms of justice? Yes, I shall use violence, he replied, since he orders me; and therefore you had better consider well. But the time for consideration has passed, I said, when violence is employed; and you, when you are determined on anything, and in the mood of violence, are irresistible. Do not you resist me then, he said. I will not resist you, I replied. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHARMIDES *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. 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{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"EUCLID","Dialogue":"Have you only just arrived from the country, Terpsion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"TERPSION","Dialogue":"No, I came some time ago: and I have been in the Agora looking for you, and wondering that I could not find you."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"EUCLID","Dialogue":"But I was not in the city."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"TERPSION","Dialogue":"Where then?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"EUCLID","Dialogue":"As I was going down to the harbour, I met Theaetetus--he was being carried up to Athens from the army at Corinth."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"TERPSION","Dialogue":"Was he alive or dead?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"EUCLID","Dialogue":"He was scarcely alive, for he has been badly wounded; but he was suffering even more from the sickness which has broken out in the army."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"TERPSION","Dialogue":"The dysentery, you mean?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"EUCLID","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"TERPSION","Dialogue":"Alas! what a loss he will be!"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"EUCLID","Dialogue":"Yes, Terpsion, he is a noble fellow; only to-day I heard some people highly praising his behaviour in this very battle."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"TERPSION","Dialogue":"No wonder; I should rather be surprised at hearing anything else of him. But why did he go on, instead of stopping at Megara?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"EUCLID","Dialogue":"He wanted to get home: although I entreated and advised him to remain, he would not listen to me; so I set him on his way, and turned back, and then I remembered what Socrates had said of him, and thought how remarkably this, like all his predictions, had been fulfilled. I believe that he had seen him a little before his own death, when Theaetetus was a youth, and he had a memorable conversation with him, which he repeated to me when I came to Athens; he was full of admiration of his genius, and said that he would most certainly be a great man, if he lived."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"TERPSION","Dialogue":"The prophecy has certainly been fulfilled; but what was the conversation? can you tell me?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"EUCLID","Dialogue":"No, indeed, not offhand; but I took notes of it as soon as I got home; these I filled up from memory, writing them out at leisure; and whenever I went to Athens, I asked Socrates about any point which I had forgotten, and on my return I made corrections; thus I have nearly the whole conversation written down."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"TERPSION","Dialogue":"I remember--you told me; and I have always been intending to ask you to show me the writing, but have put off doing so; and now, why should we not read it through?--having just come from the country, I should greatly like to rest."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"EUCLID","Dialogue":"I too shall be very glad of a rest, for I went with Theaetetus as far as Erineum. Let us go in, then, and, while we are reposing, the servant shall read to us."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"TERPSION","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"EUCLID","Dialogue":"Here is the roll, Terpsion; I may observe that I have introduced Socrates, not as narrating to me, but as actually conversing with the persons whom he mentioned--these were, Theodorus the geometrician (of Cyrene), and Theaetetus. I have omitted, for the sake of convenience, the interlocutory words 'I said,' 'I remarked,' which he used when he spoke of himself, and again, 'he agreed,' or 'disagreed,' in the answer, lest the repetition of them should be troublesome."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"TERPSION","Dialogue":"Quite right, Euclid."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"EUCLID","Dialogue":"And now, boy, you may take the roll and read. EUCLID'S SERVANT READS."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If I cared enough about the Cyrenians, Theodorus, I would ask you whether there are any rising geometricians or philosophers in that part of the world. But I am more interested in our own Athenian youth, and I would rather know who among them are likely to do well. I observe them as far as I can myself, and I enquire of any one whom they follow, and I see that a great many of them follow you, in which they are quite right, considering your eminence in geometry and in other ways. Tell me then, if you have met with any one who is good for anything."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, I have become acquainted with one very remarkable Athenian youth, whom I commend to you as well worthy of your attention. If he had been a beauty I should have been afraid to praise him, lest you should suppose that I was in love with him; but he is no beauty, and you must not be offended if I say that he is very like you; for he has a snub nose and projecting eyes, although these features are less marked in him than in you. Seeing, then, that he has no personal attractions, I may freely say, that in all my acquaintance, which is very large, I never knew any one who was his equal in natural gifts: for he has a quickness of apprehension which is almost unrivalled, and he is exceedingly gentle, and also the most courageous of men; there is a union of qualities in him such as I have never seen in any other, and should scarcely have thought possible; for those who, like him, have quick and ready and retentive wits, have generally also quick tempers; they are ships without ballast, and go darting about, and are mad rather than courageous; and the steadier sort, when they have to face study, prove stupid and cannot remember. Whereas he moves surely and smoothly and successfully in the path of knowledge and enquiry; and he is full of gentleness, flowing on silently like a river of oil; at his age, it is wonderful."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is good news; whose son is he?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"The name of his father I have forgotten, but the youth himself is the middle one of those who are approaching us; he and his companions have been anointing themselves in the outer court, and now they seem to have finished, and are coming towards us. Look and see whether you know him."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I know the youth, but I do not know his name; he is the son of Euphronius the Sunian, who was himself an eminent man, and such another as his son is, according to your account of him; I believe that he left a considerable fortune."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Theaetetus, Socrates, is his name; but I rather think that the property disappeared in the hands of trustees; notwithstanding which he is wonderfully liberal."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He must be a fine fellow; tell him to come and sit by me."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"I will. Come hither, Theaetetus, and sit by Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"By all means, Theaetetus, in order that I may see the reflection of myself in your face, for Theodorus says that we are alike; and yet if each of us held in his hands a lyre, and he said that they were tuned alike, should we at once take his word, or should we ask whether he who said so was or was not a musician?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"We should ask."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if we found that he was, we should take his word; and if not, not?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if this supposed likeness of our faces is a matter of any interest to us, we should enquire whether he who says that we are alike is a painter or not?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly we should."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is Theodorus a painter?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I never heard that he was."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is he a geometrician?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course he is, Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is he an astronomer and calculator and musician, and in general an educated man?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I think so."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If, then, he remarks on a similarity in our persons, either by way of praise or blame, there is no particular reason why we should attend to him."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should say not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if he praises the virtue or wisdom which are the mental endowments of either of us, then he who hears the praises will naturally desire to examine him who is praised: and he again should be willing to exhibit himself."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now is the time, my dear Theaetetus, for me to examine, and for you to exhibit; since although Theodorus has praised many a citizen and stranger in my hearing, never did I hear him praise any one as he has been praising you."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I am glad to hear it, Socrates; but what if he was only in jest?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nay, Theodorus is not given to jesting; and I cannot allow you to retract your consent on any such pretence as that. If you do, he will have to swear to his words; and we are perfectly sure that no one will be found to impugn him. Do not be shy then, but stand to your word."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I suppose I must, if you wish it."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the first place, I should like to ask what you learn of Theodorus: something of geometry, perhaps?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And astronomy and harmony and calculation?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do my best."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my boy, and so do I; and my desire is to learn of him, or of anybody who seems to understand these things. And I get on pretty well in general; but there is a little difficulty which I want you and the company to aid me in investigating. Will you answer me a question: 'Is not learning growing wiser about that which you learn?'"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And by wisdom the wise are wise?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is that different in any way from knowledge?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Wisdom; are not men wise in that which they know?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly they are."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then wisdom and knowledge are the same?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Herein lies the difficulty which I can never solve to my satisfaction--What is knowledge? Can we answer that question? What say you? which of us will speak first? whoever misses shall sit down, as at a game of ball, and shall be donkey, as the boys say; he who lasts out his competitors in the game without missing, shall be our king, and shall have the right of putting to us any questions which he pleases...Why is there no reply? I hope, Theodorus, that I am not betrayed into rudeness by my love of conversation? I only want to make us talk and be friendly and sociable."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"The reverse of rudeness, Socrates: but I would rather that you would ask one of the young fellows; for the truth is, that I am unused to your game of question and answer, and I am too old to learn; the young will be more suitable, and they will improve more than I shall, for youth is always able to improve. And so having made a beginning with Theaetetus, I would advise you to go on with him and not let him off."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you hear, Theaetetus, what Theodorus says? The philosopher, whom you would not like to disobey, and whose word ought to be a command to a young man, bids me interrogate you. Take courage, then, and nobly say what you think that knowledge is."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Well, Socrates, I will answer as you and he bid me; and if I make a mistake, you will doubtless correct me."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We will, if we can."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Then, I think that the sciences which I learn from Theodorus--geometry, and those which you just now mentioned--are knowledge; and I would include the art of the cobbler and other craftsmen; these, each and all of, them, are knowledge."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Too much, Theaetetus, too much; the nobility and liberality of your nature make you give many and diverse things, when I am asking for one simple thing."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Perhaps nothing. I will endeavour, however, to explain what I believe to be my meaning: When you speak of cobbling, you mean the art or science of making shoes?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Just so."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when you speak of carpentering, you mean the art of making wooden implements?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In both cases you define the subject matter of each of the two arts?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But that, Theaetetus, was not the point of my question: we wanted to know not the subjects, nor yet the number of the arts or sciences, for we were not going to count them, but we wanted to know the nature of knowledge in the abstract. Am I not right?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Perfectly right."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me offer an illustration: Suppose that a person were to ask about some very trivial and obvious thing--for example, What is clay? and we were to reply, that there is a clay of potters, there is a clay of oven-makers, there is a clay of brick-makers; would not the answer be ridiculous?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Truly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the first place, there would be an absurdity in assuming that he who asked the question would understand from our answer the nature of 'clay,' merely because we added 'of the image-makers,' or of any other workers. How can a man understand the name of anything, when he does not know the nature of it?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"He cannot."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who does not know what science or knowledge is, has no knowledge of the art or science of making shoes?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"None."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor of any other science?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when a man is asked what science or knowledge is, to give in answer the name of some art or science is ridiculous; for the question is, 'What is knowledge?' and he replies, 'A knowledge of this or that.'"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Moreover, he might answer shortly and simply, but he makes an enormous circuit. For example, when asked about the clay, he might have said simply, that clay is moistened earth--what sort of clay is not to the point."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, there is no difficulty as you put the question. You mean, if I am not mistaken, something like what occurred to me and to my friend here, your namesake Socrates, in a recent discussion."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What was that, Theaetetus?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Theodorus was writing out for us something about roots, such as the roots of three or five, showing that they are incommensurable by the unit: he selected other examples up to seventeen--there he stopped. Now as there are innumerable roots, the notion occurred to us of attempting to include them all under one name or class."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And did you find such a class?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I think that we did; but I should like to have your opinion."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me hear."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"We divided all numbers into two classes: those which are made up of equal factors multiplying into one another, which we compared to square figures and called square or equilateral numbers;--that was one class."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"The intermediate numbers, such as three and five, and every other number which is made up of unequal factors, either of a greater multiplied by a less, or of a less multiplied by a greater, and when regarded as a figure, is contained in unequal sides;--all these we compared to oblong figures, and called them oblong numbers."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Capital; and what followed?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"The lines, or sides, which have for their squares the equilateral plane numbers, were called by us lengths or magnitudes; and the lines which are the roots of (or whose squares are equal to) the oblong numbers, were called powers or roots; the reason of this latter name being, that they are commensurable with the former [i.e., with the so-called lengths or magnitudes] not in linear measurement, but in the value of the superficial content of their squares; and the same about solids."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Excellent, my boys; I think that you fully justify the praises of Theodorus, and that he will not be found guilty of false witness."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"But I am unable, Socrates, to give you a similar answer about knowledge, which is what you appear to want; and therefore Theodorus is a deceiver after all."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but if some one were to praise you for running, and to say that he never met your equal among boys, and afterwards you were beaten in a race by a grown-up man, who was a great runner--would the praise be any the less true?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is the discovery of the nature of knowledge so small a matter, as just now said? Is it not one which would task the powers of men perfect in every way?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"By heaven, they should be the top of all perfection!"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, be of good cheer; do not say that Theodorus was mistaken about you, but do your best to ascertain the true nature of knowledge, as well as of other things."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I am eager enough, Socrates, if that would bring to light the truth."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Come, you made a good beginning just now; let your own answer about roots be your model, and as you comprehended them all in one class, try and bring the many sorts of knowledge under one definition."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I can assure you, Socrates, that I have tried very often, when the report of questions asked by you was brought to me; but I can neither persuade myself that I have a satisfactory answer to give, nor hear of any one who answers as you would have him; and I cannot shake off a feeling of anxiety."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"These are the pangs of labour, my dear Theaetetus; you have something within you which you are bringing to the birth."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do not know, Socrates; I only say what I feel."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And have you never heard, simpleton, that I am the son of a midwife, brave and burly, whose name was Phaenarete?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I have."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that I myself practise midwifery?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No, never."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me tell you that I do though, my friend: but you must not reveal the secret, as the world in general have not found me out; and therefore they only say of me, that I am the strangest of mortals and drive men to their wits' end. Did you ever hear that too?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall I tell you the reason?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Bear in mind the whole business of the midwives, and then you will see my meaning better:--No woman, as you are probably aware, who is still able to conceive and bear, attends other women, but only those who are past bearing."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I know."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The reason of this is said to be that Artemis--the goddess of childbirth--is not a mother, and she honours those who are like herself; but she could not allow the barren to be midwives, because human nature cannot know the mystery of an art without experience; and therefore she assigned this office to those who are too old to bear."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I dare say."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I dare say too, or rather I am absolutely certain, that the midwives know better than others who is pregnant and who is not?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And by the use of potions and incantations they are able to arouse the pangs and to soothe them at will; they can make those bear who have a difficulty in bearing, and if they think fit they can smother the embryo in the womb."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"They can."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Did you ever remark that they are also most cunning matchmakers, and have a thorough knowledge of what unions are likely to produce a brave brood?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No, never."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let me tell you that this is their greatest pride, more than cutting the umbilical cord. And if you reflect, you will see that the same art which cultivates and gathers in the fruits of the earth, will be most likely to know in what soils the several plants or seeds should be deposited."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, the same art."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you suppose that with women the case is otherwise?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should think not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Certainly not; but midwives are respectable women who have a character to lose, and they avoid this department of their profession, because they are afraid of being called procuresses, which is a name given to those who join together man and woman in an unlawful and unscientific way; and yet the true midwife is also the true and only matchmaker."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Such are the midwives, whose task is a very important one, but not so important as mine; for women do not bring into the world at one time real children, and at another time counterfeits which are with difficulty distinguished from them; if they did, then the discernment of the true and false birth would be the crowning achievement of the art of midwifery--you would think so?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Indeed I should."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, my art of midwifery is in most respects like theirs; but differs, in that I attend men and not women; and look after their souls when they are in labour, and not after their bodies: and the triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man brings forth is a false idol or a noble and true birth. And like the midwives, I am barren, and the reproach which is often made against me, that I ask questions of others and have not the wit to answer them myself, is very just--the reason is, that the god compels me to be a midwife, but does not allow me to bring forth. And therefore I am not myself at all wise, nor have I anything to show which is the invention or birth of my own soul, but those who converse with me profit. Some of them appear dull enough at first, but afterwards, as our acquaintance ripens, if the god is gracious to them, they all make astonishing progress; and this in the opinion of others as well as in their own. It is quite clear that they never learned anything from me; the many fine discoveries to which they cling are of their own making. But to me and the god they owe their delivery. And the proof of my words is, that many of them in their ignorance, either in their self-conceit despising me, or falling under the influence of others, have gone away too soon; and have not only lost the children of whom I had previously delivered them by an ill bringing up, but have stifled whatever else they had in them by evil communications, being fonder of lies and shams than of the truth; and they have at last ended by seeing themselves, as others see them, to be great fools. Aristeides, the son of Lysimachus, is one of them, and there are many others. The truants often return to me, and beg that I would consort with them again--they are ready to go to me on their knees--and then, if my familiar allows, which is not always the case, I receive them, and they begin to grow again. Dire are the pangs which my art is able to arouse and to allay in those who consort with me, just like the pangs of women in childbirth; night and day they are full of perplexity and travail which is even worse than that of the women. So much for them. And there are others, Theaetetus, who come to me apparently having nothing in them; and as I know that they have no need of my art, I coax them into marrying some one, and by the grace of God I can generally tell who is likely to do them good. Many of them I have given away to Prodicus, and many to other inspired sages. I tell you this long story, friend Theaetetus, because I suspect, as indeed you seem to think yourself, that you are in labour--great with some conception. Come then to me, who am a midwife's son and myself a midwife, and do your best to answer the questions which I will ask you. And if I abstract and expose your first-born, because I discover upon inspection that the conception which you have formed is a vain shadow, do not quarrel with me on that account, as the manner of women is when their first children are taken from them. For I have actually known some who were ready to bite me when I deprived them of a darling folly; they did not perceive that I acted from goodwill, not knowing that no god is the enemy of man--that was not within the range of their ideas; neither am I their enemy in all this, but it would be wrong for me to admit falsehood, or to stifle the truth. Once more, then, Theaetetus, I repeat my old question, 'What is knowledge?'--and do not say that you cannot tell; but quit yourself like a man, and by the help of God you will be able to tell."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"At any rate, Socrates, after such an exhortation I should be ashamed of not trying to do my best. Now he who knows perceives what he knows, and, as far as I can see at present, knowledge is perception."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Bravely said, boy; that is the way in which you should express your opinion. And now, let us examine together this conception of yours, and see whether it is a true birth or a mere wind-egg:--You say that knowledge is perception?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, you have delivered yourself of a very important doctrine about knowledge; it is indeed the opinion of Protagoras, who has another way of expressing it. Man, he says, is the measure of all things, of the existence of things that are, and of the non-existence of things that are not:--You have read him?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"O yes, again and again."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Does he not say that things are to you such as they appear to you, and to me such as they appear to me, and that you and I are men?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, he says so."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A wise man is not likely to talk nonsense. Let us try to understand him: the same wind is blowing, and yet one of us may be cold and the other not, or one may be slightly and the other very cold?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now is the wind, regarded not in relation to us but absolutely, cold or not; or are we to say, with Protagoras, that the wind is cold to him who is cold, and not to him who is not?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I suppose the last."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then it must appear so to each of them?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And 'appears to him' means the same as 'he perceives.'"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then appearing and perceiving coincide in the case of hot and cold, and in similar instances; for things appear, or may be supposed to be, to each one such as he perceives them?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then perception is always of existence, and being the same as knowledge is unerring?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the name of the Graces, what an almighty wise man Protagoras must have been! He spoke these things in a parable to the common herd, like you and me, but told the truth, 'his Truth,' (In allusion to a book of Protagoras' which bore this title.) in secret to his own disciples."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am about to speak of a high argument, in which all things are said to be relative; you cannot rightly call anything by any name, such as great or small, heavy or light, for the great will be small and the heavy light--there is no single thing or quality, but out of motion and change and admixture all things are becoming relatively to one another, which 'becoming' is by us incorrectly called being, but is really becoming, for nothing ever is, but all things are becoming. Summon all philosophers--Protagoras, Heracleitus, Empedocles, and the rest of them, one after another, and with the exception of Parmenides they will agree with you in this. Summon the great masters of either kind of poetry--Epicharmus, the prince of Comedy, and Homer of Tragedy; when the latter sings of 'Ocean whence sprang the gods, and mother Tethys,' does he not mean that all things are the offspring, of flux and motion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I think so."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And who could take up arms against such a great army having Homer for its general, and not appear ridiculous? (Compare Cratylus.)"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Who indeed, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Theaetetus; and there are plenty of other proofs which will show that motion is the source of what is called being and becoming, and inactivity of not-being and destruction; for fire and warmth, which are supposed to be the parent and guardian of all other things, are born of movement and of friction, which is a kind of motion;--is not this the origin of fire?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"It is."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the race of animals is generated in the same way?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not the bodily habit spoiled by rest and idleness, but preserved for a long time by motion and exercise?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what of the mental habit? Is not the soul informed, and improved, and preserved by study and attention, which are motions; but when at rest, which in the soul only means want of attention and study, is uninformed, and speedily forgets whatever she has learned?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then motion is a good, and rest an evil, to the soul as well as to the body?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I may add, that breathless calm, stillness and the like waste and impair, while wind and storm preserve; and the palmary argument of all, which I strongly urge, is the golden chain in Homer, by which he means the sun, thereby indicating that so long as the sun and the heavens go round in their orbits, all things human and divine are and are preserved, but if they were chained up and their motions ceased, then all things would be destroyed, and, as the saying is, turned upside down."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I believe, Socrates, that you have truly explained his meaning."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now apply his doctrine to perception, my good friend, and first of all to vision; that which you call white colour is not in your eyes, and is not a distinct thing which exists out of them. And you must not assign any place to it: for if it had position it would be, and be at rest, and there would be no process of becoming."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Then what is colour?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us carry the principle which has just been affirmed, that nothing is self-existent, and then we shall see that white, black, and every other colour, arises out of the eye meeting the appropriate motion, and that what we call a colour is in each case neither the active nor the passive element, but something which passes between them, and is peculiar to each percipient; are you quite certain that the several colours appear to a dog or to any animal whatever as they appear to you?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Far from it."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or that anything appears the same to you as to another man? Are you so profoundly convinced of this? Rather would it not be true that it never appears exactly the same to you, because you are never exactly the same?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"The latter."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if that with which I compare myself in size, or which I apprehend by touch, were great or white or hot, it could not become different by mere contact with another unless it actually changed; nor again, if the comparing or apprehending subject were great or white or hot, could this, when unchanged from within, become changed by any approximation or affection of any other thing. The fact is that in our ordinary way of speaking we allow ourselves to be driven into most ridiculous and wonderful contradictions, as Protagoras and all who take his line of argument would remark."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How? and of what sort do you mean?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A little instance will sufficiently explain my meaning: Here are six dice, which are more by a half when compared with four, and fewer by a half than twelve--they are more and also fewer. How can you or any one maintain the contrary?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, suppose that Protagoras or some one asks whether anything can become greater or more if not by increasing, how would you answer him, Theaetetus?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should say 'No,' Socrates, if I were to speak my mind in reference to this last question, and if I were not afraid of contradicting my former answer."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Capital! excellent! spoken like an oracle, my boy! And if you reply 'Yes,' there will be a case for Euripides; for our tongue will be unconvinced, but not our mind. (In allusion to the well-known line of Euripides, Hippol.: e gloss omomoch e de thren anomotos.)"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The thoroughbred Sophists, who know all that can be known about the mind, and argue only out of the superfluity of their wits, would have had a regular sparring-match over this, and would have knocked their arguments together finely. But you and I, who have no professional aims, only desire to see what is the mutual relation of these principles,--whether they are consistent with each or not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that would be my desire."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And mine too. But since this is our feeling, and there is plenty of time, why should we not calmly and patiently review our own thoughts, and thoroughly examine and see what these appearances in us really are? If I am not mistaken, they will be described by us as follows:--first, that nothing can become greater or less, either in number or magnitude, while remaining equal to itself--you would agree?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Secondly, that without addition or subtraction there is no increase or diminution of anything, but only equality."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Thirdly, that what was not before cannot be afterwards, without becoming and having become."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, truly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"These three axioms, if I am not mistaken, are fighting with one another in our minds in the case of the dice, or, again, in such a case as this--if I were to say that I, who am of a certain height and taller than you, may within a year, without gaining or losing in height, be not so tall--not that I should have lost, but that you would have increased. In such a case, I am afterwards what I once was not, and yet I have not become; for I could not have become without becoming, neither could I have become less without losing somewhat of my height; and I could give you ten thousand examples of similar contradictions, if we admit them at all. I believe that you follow me, Theaetetus; for I suspect that you have thought of these questions before now."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, and I am amazed when I think of them; by the Gods I am! and I want to know what on earth they mean; and there are times when my head quite swims with the contemplation of them."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris (the messenger of heaven) is the child of Thaumas (wonder). But do you begin to see what is the explanation of this perplexity on the hypothesis which we attribute to Protagoras?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Not as yet."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you will be obliged to me if I help you to unearth the hidden 'truth' of a famous man or school."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure, I shall be very much obliged."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Take a look round, then, and see that none of the uninitiated are listening. Now by the uninitiated I mean the people who believe in nothing but what they can grasp in their hands, and who will not allow that action or generation or anything invisible can have real existence."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed, Socrates, they are very hard and impenetrable mortals."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my boy, outer barbarians. Far more ingenious are the brethren whose mysteries I am about to reveal to you. Their first principle is, that all is motion, and upon this all the affections of which we were just now speaking are supposed to depend: there is nothing but motion, which has two forms, one active and the other passive, both in endless number; and out of the union and friction of them there is generated a progeny endless in number, having two forms, sense and the object of sense, which are ever breaking forth and coming to the birth at the same moment. The senses are variously named hearing, seeing, smelling; there is the sense of heat, cold, pleasure, pain, desire, fear, and many more which have names, as well as innumerable others which are without them; each has its kindred object,--each variety of colour has a corresponding variety of sight, and so with sound and hearing, and with the rest of the senses and the objects akin to them. Do you see, Theaetetus, the bearings of this tale on the preceding argument?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Indeed I do not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then attend, and I will try to finish the story. The purport is that all these things are in motion, as I was saying, and that this motion is of two kinds, a slower and a quicker; and the slower elements have their motions in the same place and with reference to things near them, and so they beget; but what is begotten is swifter, for it is carried to fro, and moves from place to place. Apply this to sense:--When the eye and the appropriate object meet together and give birth to whiteness and the sensation connatural with it, which could not have been given by either of them going elsewhere, then, while the sight is flowing from the eye, whiteness proceeds from the object which combines in producing the colour; and so the eye is fulfilled with sight, and really sees, and becomes, not sight, but a seeing eye; and the object which combined to form the colour is fulfilled with whiteness, and becomes not whiteness but a white thing, whether wood or stone or whatever the object may be which happens to be coloured white. And this is true of all sensible objects, hard, warm, and the like, which are similarly to be regarded, as I was saying before, not as having any absolute existence, but as being all of them of whatever kind generated by motion in their intercourse with one another; for of the agent and patient, as existing in separation, no trustworthy conception, as they say, can be formed, for the agent has no existence until united with the patient, and the patient has no existence until united with the agent; and that which by uniting with something becomes an agent, by meeting with some other thing is converted into a patient. And from all these considerations, as I said at first, there arises a general reflection, that there is no one self-existent thing, but everything is becoming and in relation; and being must be altogether abolished, although from habit and ignorance we are compelled even in this discussion to retain the use of the term. But great philosophers tell us that we are not to allow either the word 'something,' or 'belonging to something,' or 'to me,' or 'this,' or 'that,' or any other detaining name to be used, in the language of nature all things are being created and destroyed, coming into being and passing into new forms; nor can any name fix or detain them; he who attempts to fix them is easily refuted. And this should be the way of speaking, not only of particulars but of aggregates; such aggregates as are expressed in the word 'man,' or 'stone,' or any name of an animal or of a class. O Theaetetus, are not these speculations sweet as honey? And do you not like the taste of them in the mouth?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do not know what to say, Socrates; for, indeed, I cannot make out whether you are giving your own opinion or only wanting to draw me out."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You forget, my friend, that I neither know, nor profess to know, anything of these matters; you are the person who is in labour, I am the barren midwife; and this is why I soothe you, and offer you one good thing after another, that you may taste them. And I hope that I may at last help to bring your own opinion into the light of day: when this has been accomplished, then we will determine whether what you have brought forth is only a wind-egg or a real and genuine birth. Therefore, keep up your spirits, and answer like a man what you think."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Ask me."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then once more: Is it your opinion that nothing is but what becomes?--the good and the noble, as well as all the other things which we were just now mentioning?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"When I hear you discoursing in this style, I think that there is a great deal in what you say, and I am very ready to assent."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us not leave the argument unfinished, then; for there still remains to be considered an objection which may be raised about dreams and diseases, in particular about madness, and the various illusions of hearing and sight, or of other senses. For you know that in all these cases the esse-percipi theory appears to be unmistakably refuted, since in dreams and illusions we certainly have false perceptions; and far from saying that everything is which appears, we should rather say that nothing is which appears."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But then, my boy, how can any one contend that knowledge is perception, or that to every man what appears is?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I am afraid to say, Socrates, that I have nothing to answer, because you rebuked me just now for making this excuse; but I certainly cannot undertake to argue that madmen or dreamers think truly, when they imagine, some of them that they are gods, and others that they can fly, and are flying in their sleep."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you see another question which can be raised about these phenomena, notably about dreaming and waking?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What question?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A question which I think that you must often have heard persons ask:--How can you determine whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Indeed, Socrates, I do not know how to prove the one any more than the other, for in both cases the facts precisely correspond;--and there is no difficulty in supposing that during all this discussion we have been talking to one another in a dream; and when in a dream we seem to be narrating dreams, the resemblance of the two states is quite astonishing."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You see, then, that a doubt about the reality of sense is easily raised, since there may even be a doubt whether we are awake or in a dream. And as our time is equally divided between sleeping and waking, in either sphere of existence the soul contends that the thoughts which are present to our minds at the time are true; and during one half of our lives we affirm the truth of the one, and, during the other half, of the other; and are equally confident of both."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And may not the same be said of madness and other disorders? the difference is only that the times are not equal."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is truth or falsehood to be determined by duration of time?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That would be in many ways ridiculous."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But can you certainly determine by any other means which of these opinions is true?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do not think that I can."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Listen, then, to a statement of the other side of the argument, which is made by the champions of appearance. They would say, as I imagine--Can that which is wholly other than something, have the same quality as that from which it differs? and observe, Theaetetus, that the word 'other' means not 'partially,' but 'wholly other.'"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly, putting the question as you do, that which is wholly other cannot either potentially or in any other way be the same."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And must therefore be admitted to be unlike?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If, then, anything happens to become like or unlike itself or another, when it becomes like we call it the same--when unlike, other?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Were we not saying that there are agents many and infinite, and patients many and infinite?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And also that different combinations will produce results which are not the same, but different?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us take you and me, or anything as an example:--There is Socrates in health, and Socrates sick--Are they like or unlike?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"You mean to compare Socrates in health as a whole, and Socrates in sickness as a whole?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Exactly; that is my meaning."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I answer, they are unlike."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if unlike, they are other?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you not say the same of Socrates sleeping and waking, or in any of the states which we were mentioning?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"All agents have a different patient in Socrates, accordingly as he is well or ill."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I who am the patient, and that which is the agent, will produce something different in each of the two cases?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The wine which I drink when I am in health, appears sweet and pleasant to me?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"For, as has been already acknowledged, the patient and agent meet together and produce sweetness and a perception of sweetness, which are in simultaneous motion, and the perception which comes from the patient makes the tongue percipient, and the quality of sweetness which arises out of and is moving about the wine, makes the wine both to be and to appear sweet to the healthy tongue."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly; that has been already acknowledged."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But when I am sick, the wine really acts upon another and a different person?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The combination of the draught of wine, and the Socrates who is sick, produces quite another result; which is the sensation of bitterness in the tongue, and the motion and creation of bitterness in and about the wine, which becomes not bitterness but something bitter; as I myself become not perception but percipient?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is no other object of which I shall ever have the same perception, for another object would give another perception, and would make the percipient other and different; nor can that object which affects me, meeting another subject, produce the same, or become similar, for that too would produce another result from another subject, and become different."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Neither can I by myself, have this sensation, nor the object by itself, this quality."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When I perceive I must become percipient of something--there can be no such thing as perceiving and perceiving nothing; the object, whether it become sweet, bitter, or of any other quality, must have relation to a percipient; nothing can become sweet which is sweet to no one."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the inference is, that we (the agent and patient) are or become in relation to one another; there is a law which binds us one to the other, but not to any other existence, nor each of us to himself; and therefore we can only be bound to one another; so that whether a person says that a thing is or becomes, he must say that it is or becomes to or of or in relation to something else; but he must not say or allow any one else to say that anything is or becomes absolutely:--such is our conclusion."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, if that which acts upon me has relation to me and to no other, I and no other am the percipient of it?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then my perception is true to me, being inseparable from my own being; and, as Protagoras says, to myself I am judge of what is and what is not to me."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I suppose so."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How then, if I never err, and if my mind never trips in the conception of being or becoming, can I fail of knowing that which I perceive?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"You cannot."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you were quite right in affirming that knowledge is only perception; and the meaning turns out to be the same, whether with Homer and Heracleitus, and all that company, you say that all is motion and flux, or with the great sage Protagoras, that man is the measure of all things; or with Theaetetus, that, given these premises, perception is knowledge. Am I not right, Theaetetus, and is not this your new-born child, of which I have delivered you? What say you?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I cannot but agree, Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then this is the child, however he may turn out, which you and I have with difficulty brought into the world. And now that he is born, we must run round the hearth with him, and see whether he is worth rearing, or is only a wind-egg and a sham. Is he to be reared in any case, and not exposed? or will you bear to see him rejected, and not get into a passion if I take away your first-born?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Theaetetus will not be angry, for he is very good-natured. But tell me, Socrates, in heaven's name, is this, after all, not the truth?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You, Theodorus, are a lover of theories, and now you innocently fancy that I am a bag full of them, and can easily pull one out which will overthrow its predecessor. But you do not see that in reality none of these theories come from me; they all come from him who talks with me. I only know just enough to extract them from the wisdom of another, and to receive them in a spirit of fairness. And now I shall say nothing myself, but shall endeavour to elicit something from our young friend."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Do as you say, Socrates; you are quite right."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall I tell you, Theodorus, what amazes me in your acquaintance Protagoras?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am charmed with his doctrine, that what appears is to each one, but I wonder that he did not begin his book on Truth with a declaration that a pig or a dog-faced baboon, or some other yet stranger monster which has sensation, is the measure of all things; then he might have shown a magnificent contempt for our opinion of him by informing us at the outset that while we were reverencing him like a God for his wisdom he was no better than a tadpole, not to speak of his fellow-men--would not this have produced an overpowering effect? For if truth is only sensation, and no man can discern another's feelings better than he, or has any superior right to determine whether his opinion is true or false, but each, as we have several times repeated, is to himself the sole judge, and everything that he judges is true and right, why, my friend, should Protagoras be preferred to the place of wisdom and instruction, and deserve to be well paid, and we poor ignoramuses have to go to him, if each one is the measure of his own wisdom? Must he not be talking 'ad captandum' in all this? I say nothing of the ridiculous predicament in which my own midwifery and the whole art of dialectic is placed; for the attempt to supervise or refute the notions or opinions of others would be a tedious and enormous piece of folly, if to each man his own are right; and this must be the case if Protagoras' Truth is the real truth, and the philosopher is not merely amusing himself by giving oracles out of the shrine of his book."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"He was a friend of mine, Socrates, as you were saying, and therefore I cannot have him refuted by my lips, nor can I oppose you when I agree with you; please, then, to take Theaetetus again; he seemed to answer very nicely."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If you were to go into a Lacedaemonian palestra, Theodorus, would you have a right to look on at the naked wrestlers, some of them making a poor figure, if you did not strip and give them an opportunity of judging of your own person?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Why not, Socrates, if they would allow me, as I think you will, in consideration of my age and stiffness; let some more supple youth try a fall with you, and do not drag me into the gymnasium."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Your will is my will, Theodorus, as the proverbial philosophers say, and therefore I will return to the sage Theaetetus: Tell me, Theaetetus, in reference to what I was saying, are you not lost in wonder, like myself, when you find that all of a sudden you are raised to the level of the wisest of men, or indeed of the gods?--for you would assume the measure of Protagoras to apply to the gods as well as men?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly I should, and I confess to you that I am lost in wonder. At first hearing, I was quite satisfied with the doctrine, that whatever appears is to each one, but now the face of things has changed."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, my dear boy, you are young, and therefore your ear is quickly caught and your mind influenced by popular arguments. Protagoras, or some one speaking on his behalf, will doubtless say in reply,--Good people, young and old, you meet and harangue, and bring in the gods, whose existence or non-existence I banish from writing and speech, or you talk about the reason of man being degraded to the level of the brutes, which is a telling argument with the multitude, but not one word of proof or demonstration do you offer. All is probability with you, and yet surely you and Theodorus had better reflect whether you are disposed to admit of probability and figures of speech in matters of such importance. He or any other mathematician who argued from probabilities and likelihoods in geometry, would not be worth an ace."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"But neither you nor we, Socrates, would be satisfied with such arguments."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you and Theodorus mean to say that we must look at the matter in some other way?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, in quite another way."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the way will be to ask whether perception is or is not the same as knowledge; for this was the real point of our argument, and with a view to this we raised (did we not?) those many strange questions."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall we say that we know every thing which we see and hear? for example, shall we say that not having learned, we do not hear the language of foreigners when they speak to us? or shall we say that we not only hear, but know what they are saying? Or again, if we see letters which we do not understand, shall we say that we do not see them? or shall we aver that, seeing them, we must know them?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"We shall say, Socrates, that we know what we actually see and hear of them--that is to say, we see and know the figure and colour of the letters, and we hear and know the elevation or depression of the sound of them; but we do not perceive by sight and hearing, or know, that which grammarians and interpreters teach about them."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Capital, Theaetetus; and about this there shall be no dispute, because I want you to grow; but there is another difficulty coming, which you will also have to repulse."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Some one will say, Can a man who has ever known anything, and still has and preserves a memory of that which he knows, not know that which he remembers at the time when he remembers? I have, I fear, a tedious way of putting a simple question, which is only, whether a man who has learned, and remembers, can fail to know?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Impossible, Socrates; the supposition is monstrous."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Am I talking nonsense, then? Think: is not seeing perceiving, and is not sight perception?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if our recent definition holds, every man knows that which he has seen?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you would admit that there is such a thing as memory?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is memory of something or of nothing?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of something, surely."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Of things learned and perceived, that is?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Often a man remembers that which he has seen?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he closed his eyes, would he forget?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Who, Socrates, would dare to say so?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But we must say so, if the previous argument is to be maintained."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean? I am not quite sure that I understand you, though I have a strong suspicion that you are right."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"As thus: he who sees knows, as we say, that which he sees; for perception and sight and knowledge are admitted to be the same."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But he who saw, and has knowledge of that which he saw, remembers, when he closes his eyes, that which he no longer sees."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And seeing is knowing, and therefore not-seeing is not-knowing?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the inference is, that a man may have attained the knowledge of something, which he may remember and yet not know, because he does not see; and this has been affirmed by us to be a monstrous supposition."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Thus, then, the assertion that knowledge and perception are one, involves a manifest impossibility?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then they must be distinguished?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I suppose that they must."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Once more we shall have to begin, and ask 'What is knowledge?' and yet, Theaetetus, what are we going to do?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"About what?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Like a good-for-nothing cock, without having won the victory, we walk away from the argument and crow."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"After the manner of disputers (Lys.; Phaedo; Republic), we were satisfied with mere verbal consistency, and were well pleased if in this way we could gain an advantage. Although professing not to be mere Eristics, but philosophers, I suspect that we have unconsciously fallen into the error of that ingenious class of persons."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do not as yet understand you."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I will try to explain myself: just now we asked the question, whether a man who had learned and remembered could fail to know, and we showed that a person who had seen might remember when he had his eyes shut and could not see, and then he would at the same time remember and not know. But this was an impossibility. And so the Protagorean fable came to nought, and yours also, who maintained that knowledge is the same as perception."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet, my friend, I rather suspect that the result would have been different if Protagoras, who was the father of the first of the two brats, had been alive; he would have had a great deal to say on their behalf. But he is dead, and we insult over his orphan child; and even the guardians whom he left, and of whom our friend Theodorus is one, are unwilling to give any help, and therefore I suppose that I must take up his cause myself, and see justice done?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Not I, Socrates, but rather Callias, the son of Hipponicus, is guardian of his orphans. I was too soon diverted from the abstractions of dialectic to geometry. Nevertheless, I shall be grateful to you if you assist him."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good, Theodorus; you shall see how I will come to the rescue. If a person does not attend to the meaning of terms as they are commonly used in argument, he may be involved even in greater paradoxes than these. Shall I explain this matter to you or to Theaetetus?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"To both of us, and let the younger answer; he will incur less disgrace if he is discomfited."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now let me ask the awful question, which is this:--Can a man know and also not know that which he knows?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"How shall we answer, Theaetetus?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"He cannot, I should say."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He can, if you maintain that seeing is knowing. When you are imprisoned in a well, as the saying is, and the self-assured adversary closes one of your eyes with his hand, and asks whether you can see his cloak with the eye which he has closed, how will you answer the inevitable man?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should answer, 'Not with that eye but with the other.'"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then you see and do not see the same thing at the same time."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, in a certain sense."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"None of that, he will reply; I do not ask or bid you answer in what sense you know, but only whether you know that which you do not know. You have been proved to see that which you do not see; and you have already admitted that seeing is knowing, and that not-seeing is not-knowing: I leave you to draw the inference."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes; the inference is the contradictory of my assertion."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my marvel, and there might have been yet worse things in store for you, if an opponent had gone on to ask whether you can have a sharp and also a dull knowledge, and whether you can know near, but not at a distance, or know the same thing with more or less intensity, and so on without end. Such questions might have been put to you by a light-armed mercenary, who argued for pay. He would have lain in wait for you, and when you took up the position, that sense is knowledge, he would have made an assault upon hearing, smelling, and the other senses;--he would have shown you no mercy; and while you were lost in envy and admiration of his wisdom, he would have got you into his net, out of which you would not have escaped until you had come to an understanding about the sum to be paid for your release. Well, you ask, and how will Protagoras reinforce his position? Shall I answer for him?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He will repeat all those things which we have been urging on his behalf, and then he will close with us in disdain, and say:--The worthy Socrates asked a little boy, whether the same man could remember and not know the same thing, and the boy said No, because he was frightened, and could not see what was coming, and then Socrates made fun of poor me. The truth is, O slatternly Socrates, that when you ask questions about any assertion of mine, and the person asked is found tripping, if he has answered as I should have answered, then I am refuted, but if he answers something else, then he is refuted and not I. For do you really suppose that any one would admit the memory which a man has of an impression which has passed away to be the same with that which he experienced at the time? Assuredly not. Or would he hesitate to acknowledge that the same man may know and not know the same thing? Or, if he is afraid of making this admission, would he ever grant that one who has become unlike is the same as before he became unlike? Or would he admit that a man is one at all, and not rather many and infinite as the changes which take place in him? I speak by the card in order to avoid entanglements of words. But, O my good sir, he will say, come to the argument in a more generous spirit; and either show, if you can, that our sensations are not relative and individual, or, if you admit them to be so, prove that this does not involve the consequence that the appearance becomes, or, if you will have the word, is, to the individual only. As to your talk about pigs and baboons, you are yourself behaving like a pig, and you teach your hearers to make sport of my writings in the same ignorant manner; but this is not to your credit. For I declare that the truth is as I have written, and that each of us is a measure of existence and of non-existence. Yet one man may be a thousand times better than another in proportion as different things are and appear to him. And I am far from saying that wisdom and the wise man have no existence; but I say that the wise man is he who makes the evils which appear and are to a man, into goods which are and appear to him. And I would beg you not to press my words in the letter, but to take the meaning of them as I will explain them. Remember what has been already said,--that to the sick man his food appears to be and is bitter, and to the man in health the opposite of bitter. Now I cannot conceive that one of these men can be or ought to be made wiser than the other: nor can you assert that the sick man because he has one impression is foolish, and the healthy man because he has another is wise; but the one state requires to be changed into the other, the worse into the better. As in education, a change of state has to be effected, and the sophist accomplishes by words the change which the physician works by the aid of drugs. Not that any one ever made another think truly, who previously thought falsely. For no one can think what is not, or, think anything different from that which he feels; and this is always true. But as the inferior habit of mind has thoughts of kindred nature, so I conceive that a good mind causes men to have good thoughts; and these which the inexperienced call true, I maintain to be only better, and not truer than others. And, O my dear Socrates, I do not call wise men tadpoles: far from it; I say that they are the physicians of the human body, and the husbandmen of plants--for the husbandmen also take away the evil and disordered sensations of plants, and infuse into them good and healthy sensations--aye and true ones; and the wise and good rhetoricians make the good instead of the evil to seem just to states; for whatever appears to a state to be just and fair, so long as it is regarded as such, is just and fair to it; but the teacher of wisdom causes the good to take the place of the evil, both in appearance and in reality. And in like manner the Sophist who is able to train his pupils in this spirit is a wise man, and deserves to be well paid by them. And so one man is wiser than another; and no one thinks falsely, and you, whether you will or not, must endure to be a measure. On these foundations the argument stands firm, which you, Socrates, may, if you please, overthrow by an opposite argument, or if you like you may put questions to me--a method to which no intelligent person will object, quite the reverse. But I must beg you to put fair questions: for there is great inconsistency in saying that you have a zeal for virtue, and then always behaving unfairly in argument. The unfairness of which I complain is that you do not distinguish between mere disputation and dialectic: the disputer may trip up his opponent as often as he likes, and make fun; but the dialectician will be in earnest, and only correct his adversary when necessary, telling him the errors into which he has fallen through his own fault, or that of the company which he has previously kept. If you do so, your adversary will lay the blame of his own confusion and perplexity on himself, and not on you. He will follow and love you, and will hate himself, and escape from himself into philosophy, in order that he may become different from what he was. But the other mode of arguing, which is practised by the many, will have just the opposite effect upon him; and as he grows older, instead of turning philosopher, he will come to hate philosophy. I would recommend you, therefore, as I said before, not to encourage yourself in this polemical and controversial temper, but to find out, in a friendly and congenial spirit, what we really mean when we say that all things are in motion, and that to every individual and state what appears, is. In this manner you will consider whether knowledge and sensation are the same or different, but you will not argue, as you were just now doing, from the customary use of names and words, which the vulgar pervert in all sorts of ways, causing infinite perplexity to one another. Such, Theodorus, is the very slight help which I am able to offer to your old friend; had he been living, he would have helped himself in a far more gloriose style."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"You are jesting, Socrates; indeed, your defence of him has been most valorous."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Thank you, friend; and I hope that you observed Protagoras bidding us be serious, as the text, 'Man is the measure of all things,' was a solemn one; and he reproached us with making a boy the medium of discourse, and said that the boy's timidity was made to tell against his argument; he also declared that we made a joke of him."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"How could I fail to observe all that, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and shall we do as he says?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if his wishes are to be regarded, you and I must take up the argument, and in all seriousness, and ask and answer one another, for you see that the rest of us are nothing but boys. In no other way can we escape the imputation, that in our fresh analysis of his thesis we are making fun with boys."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Well, but is not Theaetetus better able to follow a philosophical enquiry than a great many men who have long beards?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Theodorus, but not better than you; and therefore please not to imagine that I am to defend by every means in my power your departed friend; and that you are to defend nothing and nobody. At any rate, my good man, do not sheer off until we know whether you are a true measure of diagrams, or whether all men are equally measures and sufficient for themselves in astronomy and geometry, and the other branches of knowledge in which you are supposed to excel them."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"He who is sitting by you, Socrates, will not easily avoid being drawn into an argument; and when I said just now that you would excuse me, and not, like the Lacedaemonians, compel me to strip and fight, I was talking nonsense--I should rather compare you to Scirrhon, who threw travellers from the rocks; for the Lacedaemonian rule is 'strip or depart,' but you seem to go about your work more after the fashion of Antaeus: you will not allow any one who approaches you to depart until you have stripped him, and he has been compelled to try a fall with you in argument."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There, Theodorus, you have hit off precisely the nature of my complaint; but I am even more pugnacious than the giants of old, for I have met with no end of heroes; many a Heracles, many a Theseus, mighty in words, has broken my head; nevertheless I am always at this rough exercise, which inspires me like a passion. Please, then, to try a fall with me, whereby you will do yourself good as well as me."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"I consent; lead me whither you will, for I know that you are like destiny; no man can escape from any argument which you may weave for him. But I am not disposed to go further than you suggest."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Once will be enough; and now take particular care that we do not again unwittingly expose ourselves to the reproach of talking childishly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"I will do my best to avoid that error."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the first place, let us return to our old objection, and see whether we were right in blaming and taking offence at Protagoras on the ground that he assumed all to be equal and sufficient in wisdom; although he admitted that there was a better and worse, and that in respect of this, some who as he said were the wise excelled others."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Had Protagoras been living and answered for himself, instead of our answering for him, there would have been no need of our reviewing or reinforcing the argument. But as he is not here, and some one may accuse us of speaking without authority on his behalf, had we not better come to a clearer agreement about his meaning, for a great deal may be at stake?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then let us obtain, not through any third person, but from his own statement and in the fewest words possible, the basis of agreement."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"In what way?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In this way:--His words are, 'What seems to a man, is to him.'"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Yes, so he says."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are not we, Protagoras, uttering the opinion of man, or rather of all mankind, when we say that every one thinks himself wiser than other men in some things, and their inferior in others? In the hour of danger, when they are in perils of war, or of the sea, or of sickness, do they not look up to their commanders as if they were gods, and expect salvation from them, only because they excel them in knowledge? Is not the world full of men in their several employments, who are looking for teachers and rulers of themselves and of the animals? and there are plenty who think that they are able to teach and able to rule. Now, in all this is implied that ignorance and wisdom exist among them, at least in their own opinion."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And wisdom is assumed by them to be true thought, and ignorance to be false opinion."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How then, Protagoras, would you have us treat the argument? Shall we say that the opinions of men are always true, or sometimes true and sometimes false? In either case, the result is the same, and their opinions are not always true, but sometimes true and sometimes false. For tell me, Theodorus, do you suppose that you yourself, or any other follower of Protagoras, would contend that no one deems another ignorant or mistaken in his opinion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"The thing is incredible, Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet that absurdity is necessarily involved in the thesis which declares man to be the measure of all things."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, suppose that you determine in your own mind something to be true, and declare your opinion to me; let us assume, as he argues, that this is true to you. Now, if so, you must either say that the rest of us are not the judges of this opinion or judgment of yours, or that we judge you always to have a true opinion? But are there not thousands upon thousands who, whenever you form a judgment, take up arms against you and are of an opposite judgment and opinion, deeming that you judge falsely?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed, Socrates, thousands and tens of thousands, as Homer says, who give me a world of trouble."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but are we to assert that what you think is true to you and false to the ten thousand others?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"No other inference seems to be possible."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how about Protagoras himself? If neither he nor the multitude thought, as indeed they do not think, that man is the measure of all things, must it not follow that the truth of which Protagoras wrote would be true to no one? But if you suppose that he himself thought this, and that the multitude does not agree with him, you must begin by allowing that in whatever proportion the many are more than one, in that proportion his truth is more untrue than true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"That would follow if the truth is supposed to vary with individual opinion."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the best of the joke is, that he acknowledges the truth of their opinion who believe his own opinion to be false; for he admits that the opinions of all men are true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does he not allow that his own opinion is false, if he admits that the opinion of those who think him false is true?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Whereas the other side do not admit that they speak falsely?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"They do not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he, as may be inferred from his writings, agrees that this opinion is also true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then all mankind, beginning with Protagoras, will contend, or rather, I should say that he will allow, when he concedes that his adversary has a true opinion--Protagoras, I say, will himself allow that neither a dog nor any ordinary man is the measure of anything which he has not learned--am I not right?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the truth of Protagoras being doubted by all, will be true neither to himself to any one else?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"I think, Socrates, that we are running my old friend too hard."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But I do not know that we are going beyond the truth. Doubtless, as he is older, he may be expected to be wiser than we are. And if he could only just get his head out of the world below, he would have overthrown both of us again and again, me for talking nonsense and you for assenting to me, and have been off and underground in a trice. But as he is not within call, we must make the best use of our own faculties, such as they are, and speak out what appears to us to be true. And one thing which no one will deny is, that there are great differences in the understandings of men."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"In that opinion I quite agree."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is there not most likely to be firm ground in the distinction which we were indicating on behalf of Protagoras, viz. that most things, and all immediate sensations, such as hot, dry, sweet, are only such as they appear; if however difference of opinion is to be allowed at all, surely we must allow it in respect of health or disease? for every woman, child, or living creature has not such a knowledge of what conduces to health as to enable them to cure themselves."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"I quite agree."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or again, in politics, while affirming that just and unjust, honourable and disgraceful, holy and unholy, are in reality to each state such as the state thinks and makes lawful, and that in determining these matters no individual or state is wiser than another, still the followers of Protagoras will not deny that in determining what is or is not expedient for the community one state is wiser and one counsellor better than another--they will scarcely venture to maintain, that what a city enacts in the belief that it is expedient will always be really expedient. But in the other case, I mean when they speak of justice and injustice, piety and impiety, they are confident that in nature these have no existence or essence of their own--the truth is that which is agreed on at the time of the agreement, and as long as the agreement lasts; and this is the philosophy of many who do not altogether go along with Protagoras. Here arises a new question, Theodorus, which threatens to be more serious than the last."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Well, Socrates, we have plenty of leisure."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is true, and your remark recalls to my mind an observation which I have often made, that those who have passed their days in the pursuit of philosophy are ridiculously at fault when they have to appear and speak in court. How natural is this!"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean to say, that those who have been trained in philosophy and liberal pursuits are as unlike those who from their youth upwards have been knocking about in the courts and such places, as a freeman is in breeding unlike a slave."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"In what is the difference seen?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the leisure spoken of by you, which a freeman can always command: he has his talk out in peace, and, like ourselves, he wanders at will from one subject to another, and from a second to a third,--if the fancy takes him, he begins again, as we are doing now, caring not whether his words are many or few; his only aim is to attain the truth. But the lawyer is always in a hurry; there is the water of the clepsydra driving him on, and not allowing him to expatiate at will: and there is his adversary standing over him, enforcing his rights; the indictment, which in their phraseology is termed the affidavit, is recited at the time: and from this he must not deviate. He is a servant, and is continually disputing about a fellow-servant before his master, who is seated, and has the cause in his hands; the trial is never about some indifferent matter, but always concerns himself; and often the race is for his life. The consequence has been, that he has become keen and shrewd; he has learned how to flatter his master in word and indulge him in deed; but his soul is small and unrighteous. His condition, which has been that of a slave from his youth upwards, has deprived him of growth and uprightness and independence; dangers and fears, which were too much for his truth and honesty, came upon him in early years, when the tenderness of youth was unequal to them, and he has been driven into crooked ways; from the first he has practised deception and retaliation, and has become stunted and warped. And so he has passed out of youth into manhood, having no soundness in him; and is now, as he thinks, a master in wisdom. Such is the lawyer, Theodorus. Will you have the companion picture of the philosopher, who is of our brotherhood; or shall we return to the argument? Do not let us abuse the freedom of digression which we claim."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Nay, Socrates, not until we have finished what we are about; for you truly said that we belong to a brotherhood which is free, and are not the servants of the argument; but the argument is our servant, and must wait our leisure. Who is our judge? Or where is the spectator having any right to censure or control us, as he might the poets?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, as this is your wish, I will describe the leaders; for there is no use in talking about the inferior sort. In the first place, the lords of philosophy have never, from their youth upwards, known their way to the Agora, or the dicastery, or the council, or any other political assembly; they neither see nor hear the laws or decrees, as they are called, of the state written or recited; the eagerness of political societies in the attainment of offices--clubs, and banquets, and revels, and singing-maidens,--do not enter even into their dreams. Whether any event has turned out well or ill in the city, what disgrace may have descended to any one from his ancestors, male or female, are matters of which the philosopher no more knows than he can tell, as they say, how many pints are contained in the ocean. Neither is he conscious of his ignorance. For he does not hold aloof in order that he may gain a reputation; but the truth is, that the outer form of him only is in the city: his mind, disdaining the littlenesses and nothingnesses of human things, is 'flying all abroad' as Pindar says, measuring earth and heaven and the things which are under and on the earth and above the heaven, interrogating the whole nature of each and all in their entirety, but not condescending to anything which is within reach."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will illustrate my meaning, Theodorus, by the jest which the clever witty Thracian handmaid is said to have made about Thales, when he fell into a well as he was looking up at the stars. She said, that he was so eager to know what was going on in heaven, that he could not see what was before his feet. This is a jest which is equally applicable to all philosophers. For the philosopher is wholly unacquainted with his next-door neighbour; he is ignorant, not only of what he is doing, but he hardly knows whether he is a man or an animal; he is searching into the essence of man, and busy in enquiring what belongs to such a nature to do or suffer different from any other;--I think that you understand me, Theodorus?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"I do, and what you say is true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And thus, my friend, on every occasion, private as well as public, as I said at first, when he appears in a law-court, or in any place in which he has to speak of things which are at his feet and before his eyes, he is the jest, not only of Thracian handmaids but of the general herd, tumbling into wells and every sort of disaster through his inexperience. His awkwardness is fearful, and gives the impression of imbecility. When he is reviled, he has nothing personal to say in answer to the civilities of his adversaries, for he knows no scandals of any one, and they do not interest him; and therefore he is laughed at for his sheepishness; and when others are being praised and glorified, in the simplicity of his heart he cannot help going into fits of laughter, so that he seems to be a downright idiot. When he hears a tyrant or king eulogized, he fancies that he is listening to the praises of some keeper of cattle--a swineherd, or shepherd, or perhaps a cowherd, who is congratulated on the quantity of milk which he squeezes from them; and he remarks that the creature whom they tend, and out of whom they squeeze the wealth, is of a less tractable and more insidious nature. Then, again, he observes that the great man is of necessity as ill-mannered and uneducated as any shepherd--for he has no leisure, and he is surrounded by a wall, which is his mountain-pen. Hearing of enormous landed proprietors of ten thousand acres and more, our philosopher deems this to be a trifle, because he has been accustomed to think of the whole earth; and when they sing the praises of family, and say that some one is a gentleman because he can show seven generations of wealthy ancestors, he thinks that their sentiments only betray a dull and narrow vision in those who utter them, and who are not educated enough to look at the whole, nor to consider that every man has had thousands and ten thousands of progenitors, and among them have been rich and poor, kings and slaves, Hellenes and barbarians, innumerable. And when people pride themselves on having a pedigree of twenty-five ancestors, which goes back to Heracles, the son of Amphitryon, he cannot understand their poverty of ideas. Why are they unable to calculate that Amphitryon had a twenty-fifth ancestor, who might have been anybody, and was such as fortune made him, and he had a fiftieth, and so on? He amuses himself with the notion that they cannot count, and thinks that a little arithmetic would have got rid of their senseless vanity. Now, in all these cases our philosopher is derided by the vulgar, partly because he is thought to despise them, and also because he is ignorant of what is before him, and always at a loss."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"That is very true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But, O my friend, when he draws the other into upper air, and gets him out of his pleas and rejoinders into the contemplation of justice and injustice in their own nature and in their difference from one another and from all other things; or from the commonplaces about the happiness of a king or of a rich man to the consideration of government, and of human happiness and misery in general--what they are, and how a man is to attain the one and avoid the other--when that narrow, keen, little legal mind is called to account about all this, he gives the philosopher his revenge; for dizzied by the height at which he is hanging, whence he looks down into space, which is a strange experience to him, he being dismayed, and lost, and stammering broken words, is laughed at, not by Thracian handmaidens or any other uneducated persons, for they have no eye for the situation, but by every man who has not been brought up a slave. Such are the two characters, Theodorus: the one of the freeman, who has been trained in liberty and leisure, whom you call the philosopher,--him we cannot blame because he appears simple and of no account when he has to perform some menial task, such as packing up bed-clothes, or flavouring a sauce or fawning speech; the other character is that of the man who is able to do all this kind of service smartly and neatly, but knows not how to wear his cloak like a gentleman; still less with the music of discourse can he hymn the true life aright which is lived by immortals or men blessed of heaven."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"If you could only persuade everybody, Socrates, as you do me, of the truth of your words, there would be more peace and fewer evils among men."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Evils, Theodorus, can never pass away; for there must always remain something which is antagonistic to good. Having no place among the gods in heaven, of necessity they hover around the mortal nature, and this earthly sphere. Wherefore we ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him, is to become holy, just, and wise. But, O my friend, you cannot easily convince mankind that they should pursue virtue or avoid vice, not merely in order that a man may seem to be good, which is the reason given by the world, and in my judgment is only a repetition of an old wives' fable. Whereas, the truth is that God is never in any way unrighteous--he is perfect righteousness; and he of us who is the most righteous is most like him. Herein is seen the true cleverness of a man, and also his nothingness and want of manhood. For to know this is true wisdom and virtue, and ignorance of this is manifest folly and vice. All other kinds of wisdom or cleverness, which seem only, such as the wisdom of politicians, or the wisdom of the arts, are coarse and vulgar. The unrighteous man, or the sayer and doer of unholy things, had far better not be encouraged in the illusion that his roguery is clever; for men glory in their shame--they fancy that they hear others saying of them, 'These are not mere good-for-nothing persons, mere burdens of the earth, but such as men should be who mean to dwell safely in a state.' Let us tell them that they are all the more truly what they do not think they are because they do not know it; for they do not know the penalty of injustice, which above all things they ought to know--not stripes and death, as they suppose, which evil-doers often escape, but a penalty which cannot be escaped."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"What is that?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There are two patterns eternally set before them; the one blessed and divine, the other godless and wretched: but they do not see them, or perceive that in their utter folly and infatuation they are growing like the one and unlike the other, by reason of their evil deeds; and the penalty is, that they lead a life answering to the pattern which they are growing like. And if we tell them, that unless they depart from their cunning, the place of innocence will not receive them after death; and that here on earth, they will live ever in the likeness of their own evil selves, and with evil friends--when they hear this they in their superior cunning will seem to be listening to the talk of idiots."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Very true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Too true, my friend, as I well know; there is, however, one peculiarity in their case: when they begin to reason in private about their dislike of philosophy, if they have the courage to hear the argument out, and do not run away, they grow at last strangely discontented with themselves; their rhetoric fades away, and they become helpless as children. These however are digressions from which we must now desist, or they will overflow, and drown the original argument; to which, if you please, we will now return."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"For my part, Socrates, I would rather have the digressions, for at my age I find them easier to follow; but if you wish, let us go back to the argument."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Had we not reached the point at which the partisans of the perpetual flux, who say that things are as they seem to each one, were confidently maintaining that the ordinances which the state commanded and thought just, were just to the state which imposed them, while they were in force; this was especially asserted of justice; but as to the good, no one had any longer the hardihood to contend of any ordinances which the state thought and enacted to be good that these, while they were in force, were really good;--he who said so would be playing with the name 'good,' and would not touch the real question--it would be a mockery, would it not?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Certainly it would."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He ought not to speak of the name, but of the thing which is contemplated under the name."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Right."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Whatever be the term used, the good or expedient is the aim of legislation, and as far as she has an opinion, the state imposes all laws with a view to the greatest expediency; can legislation have any other aim?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But is the aim attained always? do not mistakes often happen?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I think that there are mistakes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The possibility of error will be more distinctly recognised, if we put the question in reference to the whole class under which the good or expedient falls. That whole class has to do with the future, and laws are passed under the idea that they will be useful in after-time; which, in other words, is the future."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Suppose now, that we ask Protagoras, or one of his disciples, a question:--O, Protagoras, we will say to him, Man is, as you declare, the measure of all things--white, heavy, light: of all such things he is the judge; for he has the criterion of them in himself, and when he thinks that things are such as he experiences them to be, he thinks what is and is true to himself. Is it not so?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you extend your doctrine, Protagoras (as we shall further say), to the future as well as to the present; and has he the criterion not only of what in his opinion is but of what will be, and do things always happen to him as he expected? For example, take the case of heat:--When an ordinary man thinks that he is going to have a fever, and that this kind of heat is coming on, and another person, who is a physician, thinks the contrary, whose opinion is likely to prove right? Or are they both right?--he will have a heat and fever in his own judgment, and not have a fever in the physician's judgment?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"How ludicrous!"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the vinegrower, if I am not mistaken, is a better judge of the sweetness or dryness of the vintage which is not yet gathered than the harp-player?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in musical composition the musician will know better than the training master what the training master himself will hereafter think harmonious or the reverse?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the cook will be a better judge than the guest, who is not a cook, of the pleasure to be derived from the dinner which is in preparation; for of present or past pleasure we are not as yet arguing; but can we say that every one will be to himself the best judge of the pleasure which will seem to be and will be to him in the future?--nay, would not you, Protagoras, better guess which arguments in a court would convince any one of us than the ordinary man?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Certainly, Socrates, he used to profess in the strongest manner that he was the superior of all men in this respect."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"To be sure, friend: who would have paid a large sum for the privilege of talking to him, if he had really persuaded his visitors that neither a prophet nor any other man was better able to judge what will be and seem to be in the future than every one could for himself?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Who indeed?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And legislation and expediency are all concerned with the future; and every one will admit that states, in passing laws, must often fail of their highest interests?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we may fairly argue against your master, that he must admit one man to be wiser than another, and that the wiser is a measure: but I, who know nothing, am not at all obliged to accept the honour which the advocate of Protagoras was just now forcing upon me, whether I would or not, of being a measure of anything."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"That is the best refutation of him, Socrates; although he is also caught when he ascribes truth to the opinions of others, who give the lie direct to his own opinion."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There are many ways, Theodorus, in which the doctrine that every opinion of every man is true may be refuted; but there is more difficulty in proving that states of feeling, which are present to a man, and out of which arise sensations and opinions in accordance with them, are also untrue. And very likely I have been talking nonsense about them; for they may be unassailable, and those who say that there is clear evidence of them, and that they are matters of knowledge, may probably be right; in which case our friend Theaetetus was not so far from the mark when he identified perception and knowledge. And therefore let us draw nearer, as the advocate of Protagoras desires; and give the truth of the universal flux a ring: is the theory sound or not? at any rate, no small war is raging about it, and there are combination not a few."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"No small, war, indeed, for in Ionia the sect makes rapid strides; the disciples of Heracleitus are most energetic upholders of the doctrine."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we are the more bound, my dear Theodorus, to examine the question from the foundation as it is set forth by themselves."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Certainly we are. About these speculations of Heracleitus, which, as you say, are as old as Homer, or even older still, the Ephesians themselves, who profess to know them, are downright mad, and you cannot talk with them on the subject. For, in accordance with their text-books, they are always in motion; but as for dwelling upon an argument or a question, and quietly asking and answering in turn, they can no more do so than they can fly; or rather, the determination of these fellows not to have a particle of rest in them is more than the utmost powers of negation can express. If you ask any of them a question, he will produce, as from a quiver, sayings brief and dark, and shoot them at you; and if you inquire the reason of what he has said, you will be hit by some other new-fangled word, and will make no way with any of them, nor they with one another; their great care is, not to allow of any settled principle either in their arguments or in their minds, conceiving, as I imagine, that any such principle would be stationary; for they are at war with the stationary, and do what they can to drive it out everywhere."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I suppose, Theodorus, that you have only seen them when they were fighting, and have never stayed with them in time of peace, for they are no friends of yours; and their peace doctrines are only communicated by them at leisure, as I imagine, to those disciples of theirs whom they want to make like themselves."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Disciples! my good sir, they have none; men of their sort are not one another's disciples, but they grow up at their own sweet will, and get their inspiration anywhere, each of them saying of his neighbour that he knows nothing. From these men, then, as I was going to remark, you will never get a reason, whether with their will or without their will; we must take the question out of their hands, and make the analysis ourselves, as if we were doing geometrical problem."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Quite right too; but as touching the aforesaid problem, have we not heard from the ancients, who concealed their wisdom from the many in poetical figures, that Oceanus and Tethys, the origin of all things, are streams, and that nothing is at rest? And now the moderns, in their superior wisdom, have declared the same openly, that the cobbler too may hear and learn of them, and no longer foolishly imagine that some things are at rest and others in motion--having learned that all is motion, he will duly honour his teachers. I had almost forgotten the opposite doctrine, Theodorus, 'Alone Being remains unmoved, which is the name for the all.' This is the language of Parmenides, Melissus, and their followers, who stoutly maintain that all being is one and self-contained, and has no place in which to move. What shall we do, friend, with all these people; for, advancing step by step, we have imperceptibly got between the combatants, and, unless we can protect our retreat, we shall pay the penalty of our rashness--like the players in the palaestra who are caught upon the line, and are dragged different ways by the two parties. Therefore I think that we had better begin by considering those whom we first accosted, 'the river-gods,' and, if we find any truth in them, we will help them to pull us over, and try to get away from the others. But if the partisans of 'the whole' appear to speak more truly, we will fly off from the party which would move the immovable, to them. And if I find that neither of them have anything reasonable to say, we shall be in a ridiculous position, having so great a conceit of our own poor opinion and rejecting that of ancient and famous men. O Theodorus, do you think that there is any use in proceeding when the danger is so great?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Nay, Socrates, not to examine thoroughly what the two parties have to say would be quite intolerable."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then examine we must, since you, who were so reluctant to begin, are so eager to proceed. The nature of motion appears to be the question with which we begin. What do they mean when they say that all things are in motion? Is there only one kind of motion, or, as I rather incline to think, two? I should like to have your opinion upon this point in addition to my own, that I may err, if I must err, in your company; tell me, then, when a thing changes from one place to another, or goes round in the same place, is not that what is called motion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Here then we have one kind of motion. But when a thing, remaining on the same spot, grows old, or becomes black from being white, or hard from being soft, or undergoes any other change, may not this be properly called motion of another kind?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"I think so."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Say rather that it must be so. Of motion then there are these two kinds, 'change,' and 'motion in place.'"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"You are right."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, having made this distinction, let us address ourselves to those who say that all is motion, and ask them whether all things according to them have the two kinds of motion, and are changed as well as move in place, or is one thing moved in both ways, and another in one only?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Indeed, I do not know what to answer; but I think they would say that all things are moved in both ways."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, comrade; for, if not, they would have to say that the same things are in motion and at rest, and there would be no more truth in saying that all things are in motion, than that all things are at rest."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if they are to be in motion, and nothing is to be devoid of motion, all things must always have every sort of motion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Consider a further point: did we not understand them to explain the generation of heat, whiteness, or anything else, in some such manner as the following:--were they not saying that each of them is moving between the agent and the patient, together with a perception, and that the patient ceases to be a perceiving power and becomes a percipient, and the agent a quale instead of a quality? I suspect that quality may appear a strange and uncouth term to you, and that you do not understand the abstract expression. Then I will take concrete instances: I mean to say that the producing power or agent becomes neither heat nor whiteness but hot and white, and the like of other things. For I must repeat what I said before, that neither the agent nor patient have any absolute existence, but when they come together and generate sensations and their objects, the one becomes a thing of a certain quality, and the other a percipient. You remember?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We may leave the details of their theory unexamined, but we must not forget to ask them the only question with which we are concerned: Are all things in motion and flux?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Yes, they will reply."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And they are moved in both those ways which we distinguished, that is to say, they move in place and are also changed?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Of course, if the motion is to be perfect."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If they only moved in place and were not changed, we should be able to say what is the nature of the things which are in motion and flux?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But now, since not even white continues to flow white, and whiteness itself is a flux or change which is passing into another colour, and is never to be caught standing still, can the name of any colour be rightly used at all?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"How is that possible, Socrates, either in the case of this or of any other quality--if while we are using the word the object is escaping in the flux?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what would you say of perceptions, such as sight and hearing, or any other kind of perception? Is there any stopping in the act of seeing and hearing?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not, if all things are in motion."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we must not speak of seeing any more than of not-seeing, nor of any other perception more than of any non-perception, if all things partake of every kind of motion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yet perception is knowledge: so at least Theaetetus and I were saying."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then when we were asked what is knowledge, we no more answered what is knowledge than what is not knowledge?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"I suppose not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Here, then, is a fine result: we corrected our first answer in our eagerness to prove that nothing is at rest. But if nothing is at rest, every answer upon whatever subject is equally right: you may say that a thing is or is not thus; or, if you prefer, 'becomes' thus; and if we say 'becomes,' we shall not then hamper them with words expressive of rest."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Theodorus, except in saying 'thus' and 'not thus.' But you ought not to use the word 'thus,' for there is no motion in 'thus' or in 'not thus.' The maintainers of the doctrine have as yet no words in which to express themselves, and must get a new language. I know of no word that will suit them, except perhaps 'no how,' which is perfectly indefinite."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is a manner of speaking in which they will be quite at home."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And so, Theodorus, we have got rid of your friend without assenting to his doctrine, that every man is the measure of all things--a wise man only is a measure; neither can we allow that knowledge is perception, certainly not on the hypothesis of a perpetual flux, unless perchance our friend Theaetetus is able to convince us that it is."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Very good, Socrates; and now that the argument about the doctrine of Protagoras has been completed, I am absolved from answering; for this was the agreement."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Not, Theodorus, until you and Socrates have discussed the doctrine of those who say that all things are at rest, as you were proposing."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"You, Theaetetus, who are a young rogue, must not instigate your elders to a breach of faith, but should prepare to answer Socrates in the remainder of the argument."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, if he wishes; but I would rather have heard about the doctrine of rest."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Invite Socrates to an argument--invite horsemen to the open plain; do but ask him, and he will answer."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nevertheless, Theodorus, I am afraid that I shall not be able to comply with the request of Theaetetus."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEODORUS","Dialogue":"Not comply! for what reason?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"My reason is that I have a kind of reverence; not so much for Melissus and the others, who say that 'All is one and at rest,' as for the great leader himself, Parmenides, venerable and awful, as in Homeric language he may be called;--him I should be ashamed to approach in a spirit unworthy of him. I met him when he was an old man, and I was a mere youth, and he appeared to me to have a glorious depth of mind. And I am afraid that we may not understand his words, and may be still further from understanding his meaning; above all I fear that the nature of knowledge, which is the main subject of our discussion, may be thrust out of sight by the unbidden guests who will come pouring in upon our feast of discourse, if we let them in--besides, the question which is now stirring is of immense extent, and will be treated unfairly if only considered by the way; or if treated adequately and at length, will put into the shade the other question of knowledge. Neither the one nor the other can be allowed; but I must try by my art of midwifery to deliver Theaetetus of his conceptions about knowledge."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very well; do so if you will."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now, Theaetetus, take another view of the subject: you answered that knowledge is perception?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I did."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if any one were to ask you: With what does a man see black and white colours? and with what does he hear high and low sounds?--you would say, if I am not mistaken, 'With the eyes and with the ears.'"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The free use of words and phrases, rather than minute precision, is generally characteristic of a liberal education, and the opposite is pedantic; but sometimes precision is necessary, and I believe that the answer which you have just given is open to the charge of incorrectness; for which is more correct, to say that we see or hear with the eyes and with the ears, or through the eyes and through the ears."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should say 'through,' Socrates, rather than 'with.'"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my boy, for no one can suppose that in each of us, as in a sort of Trojan horse, there are perched a number of unconnected senses, which do not all meet in some one nature, the mind, or whatever we please to call it, of which they are the instruments, and with which through them we perceive objects of sense."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I agree with you in that opinion."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The reason why I am thus precise is, because I want to know whether, when we perceive black and white through the eyes, and again, other qualities through other organs, we do not perceive them with one and the same part of ourselves, and, if you were asked, you might refer all such perceptions to the body. Perhaps, however, I had better allow you to answer for yourself and not interfere. Tell me, then, are not the organs through which you perceive warm and hard and light and sweet, organs of the body?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of the body, certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you would admit that what you perceive through one faculty you cannot perceive through another; the objects of hearing, for example, cannot be perceived through sight, or the objects of sight through hearing?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If you have any thought about both of them, this common perception cannot come to you, either through the one or the other organ?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"It cannot."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How about sounds and colours: in the first place you would admit that they both exist?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that either of them is different from the other, and the same with itself?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that both are two and each of them one?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You can further observe whether they are like or unlike one another?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I dare say."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But through what do you perceive all this about them? for neither through hearing nor yet through seeing can you apprehend that which they have in common. Let me give you an illustration of the point at issue:--If there were any meaning in asking whether sounds and colours are saline or not, you would be able to tell me what faculty would consider the question. It would not be sight or hearing, but some other."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly; the faculty of taste."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good; and now tell me what is the power which discerns, not only in sensible objects, but in all things, universal notions, such as those which are called being and not-being, and those others about which we were just asking--what organs will you assign for the perception of these notions?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"You are thinking of being and not being, likeness and unlikeness, sameness and difference, and also of unity and other numbers which are applied to objects of sense; and you mean to ask, through what bodily organ the soul perceives odd and even numbers and other arithmetical conceptions."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You follow me excellently, Theaetetus; that is precisely what I am asking."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Indeed, Socrates, I cannot answer; my only notion is, that these, unlike objects of sense, have no separate organ, but that the mind, by a power of her own, contemplates the universals in all things."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You are a beauty, Theaetetus, and not ugly, as Theodorus was saying; for he who utters the beautiful is himself beautiful and good. And besides being beautiful, you have done me a kindness in releasing me from a very long discussion, if you are clear that the soul views some things by herself and others through the bodily organs. For that was my own opinion, and I wanted you to agree with me."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I am quite clear."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And to which class would you refer being or essence; for this, of all our notions, is the most universal?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should say, to that class which the soul aspires to know of herself."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you say this also of like and unlike, same and other?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you say the same of the noble and base, and of good and evil?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"These I conceive to be notions which are essentially relative, and which the soul also perceives by comparing in herself things past and present with the future."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does she not perceive the hardness of that which is hard by the touch, and the softness of that which is soft equally by the touch?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But their essence and what they are, and their opposition to one another, and the essential nature of this opposition, the soul herself endeavours to decide for us by the review and comparison of them?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The simple sensations which reach the soul through the body are given at birth to men and animals by nature, but their reflections on the being and use of them are slowly and hardly gained, if they are ever gained, by education and long experience."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Assuredly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can a man attain truth who fails of attaining being?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can he who misses the truth of anything, have a knowledge of that thing?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"He cannot."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then knowledge does not consist in impressions of sense, but in reasoning about them; in that only, and not in the mere impression, truth and being can be attained?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you call the two processes by the same name, when there is so great a difference between them?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That would certainly not be right."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what name would you give to seeing, hearing, smelling, being cold and being hot?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should call all of them perceiving--what other name could be given to them?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Perception would be the collective name of them?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Which, as we say, has no part in the attainment of truth any more than of being?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And therefore not in science or knowledge?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then perception, Theaetetus, can never be the same as knowledge or science?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly not, Socrates; and knowledge has now been most distinctly proved to be different from perception."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But the original aim of our discussion was to find out rather what knowledge is than what it is not; at the same time we have made some progress, for we no longer seek for knowledge in perception at all, but in that other process, however called, in which the mind is alone and engaged with being."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"You mean, Socrates, if I am not mistaken, what is called thinking or opining."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You conceive truly. And now, my friend, please to begin again at this point; and having wiped out of your memory all that has preceded, see if you have arrived at any clearer view, and once more say what is knowledge."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I cannot say, Socrates, that all opinion is knowledge, because there may be a false opinion; but I will venture to assert, that knowledge is true opinion: let this then be my reply; and if this is hereafter disproved, I must try to find another."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is the way in which you ought to answer, Theaetetus, and not in your former hesitating strain, for if we are bold we shall gain one of two advantages; either we shall find what we seek, or we shall be less likely to think that we know what we do not know--in either case we shall be richly rewarded. And now, what are you saying?--Are there two sorts of opinion, one true and the other false; and do you define knowledge to be the true?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, according to my present view."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is it still worth our while to resume the discussion touching opinion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To what are you alluding?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is a point which often troubles me, and is a great perplexity to me, both in regard to myself and others. I cannot make out the nature or origin of the mental experience to which I refer."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Pray what is it?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How there can be false opinion--that difficulty still troubles the eye of my mind; and I am uncertain whether I shall leave the question, or begin over again in a new way."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Begin again, Socrates,--at least if you think that there is the slightest necessity for doing so. Were not you and Theodorus just now remarking very truly, that in discussions of this kind we may take our own time?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You are quite right, and perhaps there will be no harm in retracing our steps and beginning again. Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and what is the difficulty? Do we not speak of false opinion, and say that one man holds a false and another a true opinion, as though there were some natural distinction between them?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"We certainly say so."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"All things and everything are either known or not known. I leave out of view the intermediate conceptions of learning and forgetting, because they have nothing to do with our present question."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"There can be no doubt, Socrates, if you exclude these, that there is no other alternative but knowing or not knowing a thing."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That point being now determined, must we not say that he who has an opinion, must have an opinion about something which he knows or does not know?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"He must."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He who knows, cannot but know; and he who does not know, cannot know?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What shall we say then? When a man has a false opinion does he think that which he knows to be some other thing which he knows, and knowing both, is he at the same time ignorant of both?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That, Socrates, is impossible."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But perhaps he thinks of something which he does not know as some other thing which he does not know; for example, he knows neither Theaetetus nor Socrates, and yet he fancies that Theaetetus is Socrates, or Socrates Theaetetus?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How can he?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But surely he cannot suppose what he knows to be what he does not know, or what he does not know to be what he knows?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That would be monstrous."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Where, then, is false opinion? For if all things are either known or unknown, there can be no opinion which is not comprehended under this alternative, and so false opinion is excluded."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Suppose that we remove the question out of the sphere of knowing or not knowing, into that of being and not-being."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"May we not suspect the simple truth to be that he who thinks about anything, that which is not, will necessarily think what is false, whatever in other respects may be the state of his mind?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That, again, is not unlikely, Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then suppose some one to say to us, Theaetetus:--Is it possible for any man to think that which is not, either as a self-existent substance or as a predicate of something else? And suppose that we answer, 'Yes, he can, when he thinks what is not true.'--That will be our answer?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But is there any parallel to this?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Can a man see something and yet see nothing?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Impossible."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if he sees any one thing, he sees something that exists. Do you suppose that what is one is ever to be found among non-existing things?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He then who sees some one thing, sees something which is?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who hears anything, hears some one thing, and hears that which is?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who touches anything, touches something which is one and therefore is?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That again is true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does not he who thinks, think some one thing?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does not he who thinks some one thing, think something which is?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who thinks of that which is not, thinks of nothing?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who thinks of nothing, does not think at all?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Obviously."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then no one can think that which is not, either as a self-existent substance or as a predicate of something else?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then to think falsely is different from thinking that which is not?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"It would seem so."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then false opinion has no existence in us, either in the sphere of being or of knowledge?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But may not the following be the description of what we express by this name?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"May we not suppose that false opinion or thought is a sort of heterodoxy; a person may make an exchange in his mind, and say that one real object is another real object. For thus he always thinks that which is, but he puts one thing in place of another; and missing the aim of his thoughts, he may be truly said to have false opinion."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Now you appear to me to have spoken the exact truth: when a man puts the base in the place of the noble, or the noble in the place of the base, then he has truly false opinion."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I see, Theaetetus, that your fear has disappeared, and that you are beginning to despise me."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What makes you say so?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You think, if I am not mistaken, that your 'truly false' is safe from censure, and that I shall never ask whether there can be a swift which is slow, or a heavy which is light, or any other self-contradictory thing, which works, not according to its own nature, but according to that of its opposite. But I will not insist upon this, for I do not wish needlessly to discourage you. And so you are satisfied that false opinion is heterodoxy, or the thought of something else?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I am."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"It is possible then upon your view for the mind to conceive of one thing as another?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But must not the mind, or thinking power, which misplaces them, have a conception either of both objects or of one of them?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Either together or in succession?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you mean by conceiving, the same which I mean?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is that?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean the conversation which the soul holds with herself in considering of anything. I speak of what I scarcely understand; but the soul when thinking appears to me to be just talking--asking questions of herself and answering them, affirming and denying. And when she has arrived at a decision, either gradually or by a sudden impulse, and has at last agreed, and does not doubt, this is called her opinion. I say, then, that to form an opinion is to speak, and opinion is a word spoken,--I mean, to oneself and in silence, not aloud or to another: What think you?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then when any one thinks of one thing as another, he is saying to himself that one thing is another?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But do you ever remember saying to yourself that the noble is certainly base, or the unjust just; or, best of all--have you ever attempted to convince yourself that one thing is another? Nay, not even in sleep, did you ever venture to say to yourself that odd is even, or anything of the kind?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Never."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you suppose that any other man, either in his senses or out of them, ever seriously tried to persuade himself that an ox is a horse, or that two are one?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if thinking is talking to oneself, no one speaking and thinking of two objects, and apprehending them both in his soul, will say and think that the one is the other of them, and I must add, that even you, lover of dispute as you are, had better let the word 'other' alone (i.e. not insist that 'one' and 'other' are the same (Both words in Greek are called eteron: compare Parmen.; Euthyd.)). I mean to say, that no one thinks the noble to be base, or anything of the kind."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I will give up the word 'other,' Socrates; and I agree to what you say."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If a man has both of them in his thoughts, he cannot think that the one of them is the other?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Neither, if he has one of them only in his mind and not the other, can he think that one is the other?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True; for we should have to suppose that he apprehends that which is not in his thoughts at all."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then no one who has either both or only one of the two objects in his mind can think that the one is the other. And therefore, he who maintains that false opinion is heterodoxy is talking nonsense; for neither in this, any more than in the previous way, can false opinion exist in us."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if, Theaetetus, this is not admitted, we shall be driven into many absurdities."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will not tell you until I have endeavoured to consider the matter from every point of view. For I should be ashamed of us if we were driven in our perplexity to admit the absurd consequences of which I speak. But if we find the solution, and get away from them, we may regard them only as the difficulties of others, and the ridicule will not attach to us. On the other hand, if we utterly fail, I suppose that we must be humble, and allow the argument to trample us under foot, as the sea-sick passenger is trampled upon by the sailor, and to do anything to us. Listen, then, while I tell you how I hope to find a way out of our difficulty."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Let me hear."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think that we were wrong in denying that a man could think what he knew to be what he did not know; and that there is a way in which such a deception is possible."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"You mean to say, as I suspected at the time, that I may know Socrates, and at a distance see some one who is unknown to me, and whom I mistake for him--then the deception will occur?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But has not that position been relinquished by us, because involving the absurdity that we should know and not know the things which we know?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us make the assertion in another form, which may or may not have a favourable issue; but as we are in a great strait, every argument should be turned over and tested. Tell me, then, whether I am right in saying that you may learn a thing which at one time you did not know?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly you may."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And another and another?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I would have you imagine, then, that there exists in the mind of man a block of wax, which is of different sizes in different men; harder, moister, and having more or less of purity in one than another, and in some of an intermediate quality."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I see."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us say that this tablet is a gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses; and that when we wish to remember anything which we have seen, or heard, or thought in our own minds, we hold the wax to the perceptions and thoughts, and in that material receive the impression of them as from the seal of a ring; and that we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be taken, then we forget and do not know."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now, when a person has this knowledge, and is considering something which he sees or hears, may not false opinion arise in the following manner?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"In what manner?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When he thinks what he knows, sometimes to be what he knows, and sometimes to be what he does not know. We were wrong before in denying the possibility of this."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"And how would you amend the former statement?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should begin by making a list of the impossible cases which must be excluded. (1) No one can think one thing to be another when he does not perceive either of them, but has the memorial or seal of both of them in his mind; nor can any mistaking of one thing for another occur, when he only knows one, and does not know, and has no impression of the other; nor can he think that one thing which he does not know is another thing which he does not know, or that what he does not know is what he knows; nor (2) that one thing which he perceives is another thing which he perceives, or that something which he perceives is something which he does not perceive; or that something which he does not perceive is something else which he does not perceive; or that something which he does not perceive is something which he perceives; nor again (3) can he think that something which he knows and perceives, and of which he has the impression coinciding with sense, is something else which he knows and perceives, and of which he has the impression coinciding with sense;--this last case, if possible, is still more inconceivable than the others; nor (4) can he think that something which he knows and perceives, and of which he has the memorial coinciding with sense, is something else which he knows; nor so long as these agree, can he think that a thing which he knows and perceives is another thing which he perceives; or that a thing which he does not know and does not perceive, is the same as another thing which he does not know and does not perceive;--nor again, can he suppose that a thing which he does not know and does not perceive is the same as another thing which he does not know; or that a thing which he does not know and does not perceive is another thing which he does not perceive:--All these utterly and absolutely exclude the possibility of false opinion. The only cases, if any, which remain, are the following."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they? If you tell me, I may perhaps understand you better; but at present I am unable to follow you."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A person may think that some things which he knows, or which he perceives and does not know, are some other things which he knows and perceives; or that some things which he knows and perceives, are other things which he knows and perceives."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I understand you less than ever now."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Hear me once more, then:--I, knowing Theodorus, and remembering in my own mind what sort of person he is, and also what sort of person Theaetetus is, at one time see them, and at another time do not see them, and sometimes I touch them, and at another time not, or at one time I may hear them or perceive them in some other way, and at another time not perceive them, but still I remember them, and know them in my own mind."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, first of all, I want you to understand that a man may or may not perceive sensibly that which he knows."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that which he does not know will sometimes not be perceived by him and sometimes will be perceived and only perceived?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is also true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"See whether you can follow me better now: Socrates can recognize Theodorus and Theaetetus, but he sees neither of them, nor does he perceive them in any other way; he cannot then by any possibility imagine in his own mind that Theaetetus is Theodorus. Am I not right?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"You are quite right."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then that was the first case of which I spoke."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The second case was, that I, knowing one of you and not knowing the other, and perceiving neither, can never think him whom I know to be him whom I do not know."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the third case, not knowing and not perceiving either of you, I cannot think that one of you whom I do not know is the other whom I do not know. I need not again go over the catalogue of excluded cases, in which I cannot form a false opinion about you and Theodorus, either when I know both or when I am in ignorance of both, or when I know one and not the other. And the same of perceiving: do you understand me?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The only possibility of erroneous opinion is, when knowing you and Theodorus, and having on the waxen block the impression of both of you given as by a seal, but seeing you imperfectly and at a distance, I try to assign the right impression of memory to the right visual impression, and to fit this into its own print: if I succeed, recognition will take place; but if I fail and transpose them, putting the foot into the wrong shoe--that is to say, putting the vision of either of you on to the wrong impression, or if my mind, like the sight in a mirror, which is transferred from right to left, err by reason of some similar affection, then 'heterodoxy' and false opinion ensues."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, you have described the nature of opinion with wonderful exactness."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or again, when I know both of you, and perceive as well as know one of you, but not the other, and my knowledge of him does not accord with perception--that was the case put by me just now which you did not understand."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No, I did not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I meant to say, that when a person knows and perceives one of you, his knowledge coincides with his perception, he will never think him to be some other person, whom he knows and perceives, and the knowledge of whom coincides with his perception--for that also was a case supposed."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But there was an omission of the further case, in which, as we now say, false opinion may arise, when knowing both, and seeing, or having some other sensible perception of both, I fail in holding the seal over against the corresponding sensation; like a bad archer, I miss and fall wide of the mark--and this is called falsehood."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes; it is rightly so called."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When, therefore, perception is present to one of the seals or impressions but not to the other, and the mind fits the seal of the absent perception on the one which is present, in any case of this sort the mind is deceived; in a word, if our view is sound, there can be no error or deception about things which a man does not know and has never perceived, but only in things which are known and perceived; in these alone opinion turns and twists about, and becomes alternately true and false;--true when the seals and impressions of sense meet straight and opposite--false when they go awry and crooked."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"And is not that, Socrates, nobly said?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nobly! yes; but wait a little and hear the explanation, and then you will say so with more reason; for to think truly is noble and to be deceived is base."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Undoubtedly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the origin of truth and error is as follows:--When the wax in the soul of any one is deep and abundant, and smooth and perfectly tempered, then the impressions which pass through the senses and sink into the heart of the soul, as Homer says in a parable, meaning to indicate the likeness of the soul to wax (Kerh Kerhos); these, I say, being pure and clear, and having a sufficient depth of wax, are also lasting, and minds, such as these, easily learn and easily retain, and are not liable to confusion, but have true thoughts, for they have plenty of room, and having clear impressions of things, as we term them, quickly distribute them into their proper places on the block. And such men are called wise. Do you agree?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Entirely."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But when the heart of any one is shaggy--a quality which the all-wise poet commends, or muddy and of impure wax, or very soft, or very hard, then there is a corresponding defect in the mind--the soft are good at learning, but apt to forget; and the hard are the reverse; the shaggy and rugged and gritty, or those who have an admixture of earth or dung in their composition, have the impressions indistinct, as also the hard, for there is no depth in them; and the soft too are indistinct, for their impressions are easily confused and effaced. Yet greater is the indistinctness when they are all jostled together in a little soul, which has no room. These are the natures which have false opinion; for when they see or hear or think of anything, they are slow in assigning the right objects to the right impressions--in their stupidity they confuse them, and are apt to see and hear and think amiss--and such men are said to be deceived in their knowledge of objects, and ignorant."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No man, Socrates, can say anything truer than that."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then now we may admit the existence of false opinion in us?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And of true opinion also?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We have at length satisfactorily proven beyond a doubt there are these two sorts of opinion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Undoubtedly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Alas, Theaetetus, what a tiresome creature is a man who is fond of talking!"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What makes you say so?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because I am disheartened at my own stupidity and tiresome garrulity; for what other term will describe the habit of a man who is always arguing on all sides of a question; whose dulness cannot be convinced, and who will never leave off?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"But what puts you out of heart?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am not only out of heart, but in positive despair; for I do not know what to answer if any one were to ask me:--O Socrates, have you indeed discovered that false opinion arises neither in the comparison of perceptions with one another nor yet in thought, but in union of thought and perception? Yes, I shall say, with the complacence of one who thinks that he has made a noble discovery."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I see no reason why we should be ashamed of our demonstration, Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He will say: You mean to argue that the man whom we only think of and do not see, cannot be confused with the horse which we do not see or touch, but only think of and do not perceive? That I believe to be my meaning, I shall reply."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Quite right."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, then, he will say, according to that argument, the number eleven, which is only thought, can never be mistaken for twelve, which is only thought: How would you answer him?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should say that a mistake may very likely arise between the eleven or twelve which are seen or handled, but that no similar mistake can arise between the eleven and twelve which are in the mind."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but do you think that no one ever put before his own mind five and seven,--I do not mean five or seven men or horses, but five or seven in the abstract, which, as we say, are recorded on the waxen block, and in which false opinion is held to be impossible; did no man ever ask himself how many these numbers make when added together, and answer that they are eleven, while another thinks that they are twelve, or would all agree in thinking and saying that they are twelve?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not; many would think that they are eleven, and in the higher numbers the chance of error is greater still; for I assume you to be speaking of numbers in general."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Exactly; and I want you to consider whether this does not imply that the twelve in the waxen block are supposed to be eleven?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that seems to be the case."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then do we not come back to the old difficulty? For he who makes such a mistake does think one thing which he knows to be another thing which he knows; but this, as we said, was impossible, and afforded an irresistible proof of the non-existence of false opinion, because otherwise the same person would inevitably know and not know the same thing at the same time."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then false opinion cannot be explained as a confusion of thought and sense, for in that case we could not have been mistaken about pure conceptions of thought; and thus we are obliged to say, either that false opinion does not exist, or that a man may not know that which he knows;--which alternative do you prefer?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"It is hard to determine, Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet the argument will scarcely admit of both. But, as we are at our wits' end, suppose that we do a shameless thing?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us attempt to explain the verb 'to know.'"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"And why should that be shameless?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You seem not to be aware that the whole of our discussion from the very beginning has been a search after knowledge, of which we are assumed not to know the nature."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Nay, but I am well aware."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is it not shameless when we do not know what knowledge is, to be explaining the verb 'to know'? The truth is, Theaetetus, that we have long been infected with logical impurity. Thousands of times have we repeated the words 'we know,' and 'do not know,' and 'we have or have not science or knowledge,' as if we could understand what we are saying to one another, so long as we remain ignorant about knowledge; and at this moment we are using the words 'we understand,' 'we are ignorant,' as though we could still employ them when deprived of knowledge or science."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"But if you avoid these expressions, Socrates, how will you ever argue at all?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I could not, being the man I am. The case would be different if I were a true hero of dialectic: and O that such an one were present! for he would have told us to avoid the use of these terms; at the same time he would not have spared in you and me the faults which I have noted. But, seeing that we are no great wits, shall I venture to say what knowing is? for I think that the attempt may be worth making."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Then by all means venture, and no one shall find fault with you for using the forbidden terms."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You have heard the common explanation of the verb 'to know'?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I think so, but I do not remember it at the moment."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"They explain the word 'to know' as meaning 'to have knowledge.'"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should like to make a slight change, and say 'to possess' knowledge."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How do the two expressions differ?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Perhaps there may be no difference; but still I should like you to hear my view, that you may help me to test it."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I will, if I can."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should distinguish 'having' from 'possessing': for example, a man may buy and keep under his control a garment which he does not wear; and then we should say, not that he has, but that he possesses the garment."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"It would be the correct expression."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, may not a man 'possess' and yet not 'have' knowledge in the sense of which I am speaking? As you may suppose a man to have caught wild birds--doves or any other birds--and to be keeping them in an aviary which he has constructed at home; we might say of him in one sense, that he always has them because he possesses them, might we not?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet, in another sense, he has none of them; but they are in his power, and he has got them under his hand in an enclosure of his own, and can take and have them whenever he likes;--he can catch any which he likes, and let the bird go again, and he may do so as often as he pleases."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Once more, then, as in what preceded we made a sort of waxen figment in the mind, so let us now suppose that in the mind of each man there is an aviary of all sorts of birds--some flocking together apart from the rest, others in small groups, others solitary, flying anywhere and everywhere."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Let us imagine such an aviary--and what is to follow?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We may suppose that the birds are kinds of knowledge, and that when we were children, this receptacle was empty; whenever a man has gotten and detained in the enclosure a kind of knowledge, he may be said to have learned or discovered the thing which is the subject of the knowledge: and this is to know."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Granted."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And further, when any one wishes to catch any of these knowledges or sciences, and having taken, to hold it, and again to let them go, how will he express himself?--will he describe the 'catching' of them and the original 'possession' in the same words? I will make my meaning clearer by an example:--You admit that there is an art of arithmetic?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Conceive this under the form of a hunt after the science of odd and even in general."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I follow."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Having the use of the art, the arithmetician, if I am not mistaken, has the conceptions of number under his hand, and can transmit them to another."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when transmitting them he may be said to teach them, and when receiving to learn them, and when receiving to learn them, and when having them in possession in the aforesaid aviary he may be said to know them."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Attend to what follows: must not the perfect arithmetician know all numbers, for he has the science of all numbers in his mind?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he can reckon abstract numbers in his head, or things about him which are numerable?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course he can."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And to reckon is simply to consider how much such and such a number amounts to?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And so he appears to be searching into something which he knows, as if he did not know it, for we have already admitted that he knows all numbers;--you have heard these perplexing questions raised?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I have."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"May we not pursue the image of the doves, and say that the chase after knowledge is of two kinds? one kind is prior to possession and for the sake of possession, and the other for the sake of taking and holding in the hands that which is possessed already. And thus, when a man has learned and known something long ago, he may resume and get hold of the knowledge which he has long possessed, but has not at hand in his mind."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That was my reason for asking how we ought to speak when an arithmetician sets about numbering, or a grammarian about reading? Shall we say, that although he knows, he comes back to himself to learn what he already knows?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"It would be too absurd, Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall we say then that he is going to read or number what he does not know, although we have admitted that he knows all letters and all numbers?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That, again, would be an absurdity."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then shall we say that about names we care nothing?--any one may twist and turn the words 'knowing' and 'learning' in any way which he likes, but since we have determined that the possession of knowledge is not the having or using it, we do assert that a man cannot not possess that which he possesses; and, therefore, in no case can a man not know that which he knows, but he may get a false opinion about it; for he may have the knowledge, not of this particular thing, but of some other;--when the various numbers and forms of knowledge are flying about in the aviary, and wishing to capture a certain sort of knowledge out of the general store, he takes the wrong one by mistake, that is to say, when he thought eleven to be twelve, he got hold of the ring-dove which he had in his mind, when he wanted the pigeon."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"A very rational explanation."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But when he catches the one which he wants, then he is not deceived, and has an opinion of what is, and thus false and true opinion may exist, and the difficulties which were previously raised disappear. I dare say that you agree with me, do you not?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And so we are rid of the difficulty of a man's not knowing what he knows, for we are not driven to the inference that he does not possess what he possesses, whether he be or be not deceived. And yet I fear that a greater difficulty is looking in at the window."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What is it?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How can the exchange of one knowledge for another ever become false opinion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the first place, how can a man who has the knowledge of anything be ignorant of that which he knows, not by reason of ignorance, but by reason of his own knowledge? And, again, is it not an extreme absurdity that he should suppose another thing to be this, and this to be another thing;--that, having knowledge present with him in his mind, he should still know nothing and be ignorant of all things?--you might as well argue that ignorance may make a man know, and blindness make him see, as that knowledge can make him ignorant."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Perhaps, Socrates, we may have been wrong in making only forms of knowledge our birds: whereas there ought to have been forms of ignorance as well, flying about together in the mind, and then he who sought to take one of them might sometimes catch a form of knowledge, and sometimes a form of ignorance; and thus he would have a false opinion from ignorance, but a true one from knowledge, about the same thing."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I cannot help praising you, Theaetetus, and yet I must beg you to reconsider your words. Let us grant what you say--then, according to you, he who takes ignorance will have a false opinion--am I right?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He will certainly not think that he has a false opinion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He will think that his opinion is true, and he will fancy that he knows the things about which he has been deceived?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he will think that he has captured knowledge and not ignorance?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And thus, after going a long way round, we are once more face to face with our original difficulty. The hero of dialectic will retort upon us:--'O my excellent friends, he will say, laughing, if a man knows the form of ignorance and the form of knowledge, can he think that one of them which he knows is the other which he knows? or, if he knows neither of them, can he think that the one which he knows not is another which he knows not? or, if he knows one and not the other, can he think the one which he knows to be the one which he does not know? or the one which he does not know to be the one which he knows? or will you tell me that there are other forms of knowledge which distinguish the right and wrong birds, and which the owner keeps in some other aviaries or graven on waxen blocks according to your foolish images, and which he may be said to know while he possesses them, even though he have them not at hand in his mind? And thus, in a perpetual circle, you will be compelled to go round and round, and you will make no progress.' What are we to say in reply, Theaetetus?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Indeed, Socrates, I do not know what we are to say."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Are not his reproaches just, and does not the argument truly show that we are wrong in seeking for false opinion until we know what knowledge is; that must be first ascertained; then, the nature of false opinion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I cannot but agree with you, Socrates, so far as we have yet gone."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, once more, what shall we say that knowledge is?--for we are not going to lose heart as yet."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly, I shall not lose heart, if you do not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What definition will be most consistent with our former views?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I cannot think of any but our old one, Socrates."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What was it?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Knowledge was said by us to be true opinion; and true opinion is surely unerring, and the results which follow from it are all noble and good."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He who led the way into the river, Theaetetus, said 'The experiment will show;' and perhaps if we go forward in the search, we may stumble upon the thing which we are looking for; but if we stay where we are, nothing will come to light."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true; let us go forward and try."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The trail soon comes to an end, for a whole profession is against us."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How is that, and what profession do you mean?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The profession of the great wise ones who are called orators and lawyers; for these persuade men by their art and make them think whatever they like, but they do not teach them. Do you imagine that there are any teachers in the world so clever as to be able to convince others of the truth about acts of robbery or violence, of which they were not eye-witnesses, while a little water is flowing in the clepsydra?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not, they can only persuade them."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you not say that persuading them is making them have an opinion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When, therefore, judges are justly persuaded about matters which you can know only by seeing them, and not in any other way, and when thus judging of them from report they attain a true opinion about them, they judge without knowledge, and yet are rightly persuaded, if they have judged well."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet, O my friend, if true opinion in law courts and knowledge are the same, the perfect judge could not have judged rightly without knowledge; and therefore I must infer that they are not the same."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is a distinction, Socrates, which I have heard made by some one else, but I had forgotten it. He said that true opinion, combined with reason, was knowledge, but that the opinion which had no reason was out of the sphere of knowledge; and that things of which there is no rational account are not knowable--such was the singular expression which he used--and that things which have a reason or explanation are knowable."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Excellent; but then, how did he distinguish between things which are and are not 'knowable'? I wish that you would repeat to me what he said, and then I shall know whether you and I have heard the same tale."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I do not know whether I can recall it; but if another person would tell me, I think that I could follow him."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me give you, then, a dream in return for a dream:--Methought that I too had a dream, and I heard in my dream that the primeval letters or elements out of which you and I and all other things are compounded, have no reason or explanation; you can only name them, but no predicate can be either affirmed or denied of them, for in the one case existence, in the other non-existence is already implied, neither of which must be added, if you mean to speak of this or that thing by itself alone. It should not be called itself, or that, or each, or alone, or this, or the like; for these go about everywhere and are applied to all things, but are distinct from them; whereas, if the first elements could be described, and had a definition of their own, they would be spoken of apart from all else. But none of these primeval elements can be defined; they can only be named, for they have nothing but a name, and the things which are compounded of them, as they are complex, are expressed by a combination of names, for the combination of names is the essence of a definition. Thus, then, the elements or letters are only objects of perception, and cannot be defined or known; but the syllables or combinations of them are known and expressed, and are apprehended by true opinion. When, therefore, any one forms the true opinion of anything without rational explanation, you may say that his mind is truly exercised, but has no knowledge; for he who cannot give and receive a reason for a thing, has no knowledge of that thing; but when he adds rational explanation, then, he is perfected in knowledge and may be all that I have been denying of him. Was that the form in which the dream appeared to you?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Precisely."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you allow and maintain that true opinion, combined with definition or rational explanation, is knowledge?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then may we assume, Theaetetus, that to-day, and in this casual manner, we have found a truth which in former times many wise men have grown old and have not found?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"At any rate, Socrates, I am satisfied with the present statement."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Which is probably correct--for how can there be knowledge apart from definition and true opinion? And yet there is one point in what has been said which does not quite satisfy me."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What was it?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What might seem to be the most ingenious notion of all:--That the elements or letters are unknown, but the combination or syllables known."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"And was that wrong?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We shall soon know; for we have as hostages the instances which the author of the argument himself used."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What hostages?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The letters, which are the clements; and the syllables, which are the combinations;--he reasoned, did he not, from the letters of the alphabet?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes; he did."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us take them and put them to the test, or rather, test ourselves:--What was the way in which we learned letters? and, first of all, are we right in saying that syllables have a definition, but that letters have no definition?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I think so."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think so too; for, suppose that some one asks you to spell the first syllable of my name:--Theaetetus, he says, what is SO?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should reply S and O."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is the definition which you would give of the syllable?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I wish that you would give me a similar definition of the S."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"But how can any one, Socrates, tell the elements of an element? I can only reply, that S is a consonant, a mere noise, as of the tongue hissing; B, and most other letters, again, are neither vowel-sounds nor noises. Thus letters may be most truly said to be undefined; for even the most distinct of them, which are the seven vowels, have a sound only, but no definition at all."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, I suppose, my friend, that we have been so far right in our idea about knowledge?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes; I think that we have."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but have we been right in maintaining that the syllables can be known, but not the letters?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I think so."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do we mean by a syllable two letters, or if there are more, all of them, or a single idea which arises out of the combination of them?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should say that we mean all the letters."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Take the case of the two letters S and O, which form the first syllable of my own name; must not he who knows the syllable, know both of them?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He knows, that is, the S and O?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But can he be ignorant of either singly and yet know both together?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Such a supposition, Socrates, is monstrous and unmeaning."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if he cannot know both without knowing each, then if he is ever to know the syllable, he must know the letters first; and thus the fine theory has again taken wings and departed."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, with wonderful celerity."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, we did not keep watch properly. Perhaps we ought to have maintained that a syllable is not the letters, but rather one single idea framed out of them, having a separate form distinct from them."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true; and a more likely notion than the other."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Take care; let us not be cowards and betray a great and imposing theory."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No, indeed."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us assume then, as we now say, that the syllable is a simple form arising out of the several combinations of harmonious elements--of letters or of any other elements."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And it must have no parts."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Why?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because that which has parts must be a whole of all the parts. Or would you say that a whole, although formed out of the parts, is a single notion different from all the parts?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And would you say that all and the whole are the same, or different?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I am not certain; but, as you like me to answer at once, I shall hazard the reply, that they are different."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I approve of your readiness, Theaetetus, but I must take time to think whether I equally approve of your answer."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes; the answer is the point."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"According to this new view, the whole is supposed to differ from all?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but is there any difference between all (in the plural) and the all (in the singular)? Take the case of number:--When we say one, two, three, four, five, six; or when we say twice three, or three times two, or four and two, or three and two and one, are we speaking of the same or of different numbers?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of the same."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is of six?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in each form of expression we spoke of all the six?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Again, in speaking of all (in the plural) is there not one thing which we express?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Of course there is."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that is six?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then in predicating the word 'all' of things measured by number, we predicate at the same time a singular and a plural?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly we do."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Again, the number of the acre and the acre are the same; are they not?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the number of the stadium in like manner is the stadium?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the army is the number of the army; and in all similar cases, the entire number of anything is the entire thing?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the number of each is the parts of each?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then as many things as have parts are made up of parts?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But all the parts are admitted to be the all, if the entire number is the all?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the whole is not made up of parts, for it would be the all, if consisting of all the parts?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That is the inference."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But is a part a part of anything but the whole?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes, of the all."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You make a valiant defence, Theaetetus. And yet is not the all that of which nothing is wanting?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not a whole likewise that from which nothing is absent? but that from which anything is absent is neither a whole nor all;--if wanting in anything, both equally lose their entirety of nature."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I now think that there is no difference between a whole and all."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But were we not saying that when a thing has parts, all the parts will be a whole and all?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, as I was saying before, must not the alternative be that either the syllable is not the letters, and then the letters are not parts of the syllable, or that the syllable will be the same with the letters, and will therefore be equally known with them?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"You are right."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And, in order to avoid this, we suppose it to be different from them?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if letters are not parts of syllables, can you tell me of any other parts of syllables, which are not letters?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No, indeed, Socrates; for if I admit the existence of parts in a syllable, it would be ridiculous in me to give up letters and seek for other parts."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Quite true, Theaetetus, and therefore, according to our present view, a syllable must surely be some indivisible form?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But do you remember, my friend, that only a little while ago we admitted and approved the statement, that of the first elements out of which all other things are compounded there could be no definition, because each of them when taken by itself is uncompounded; nor can one rightly attribute to them the words 'being' or 'this,' because they are alien and inappropriate words, and for this reason the letters or elements were indefinable and unknown?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I remember."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not this also the reason why they are simple and indivisible? I can see no other."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"No other reason can be given."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then is not the syllable in the same case as the elements or letters, if it has no parts and is one form?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If, then, a syllable is a whole, and has many parts or letters, the letters as well as the syllable must be intelligible and expressible, since all the parts are acknowledged to be the same as the whole?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if it be one and indivisible, then the syllables and the letters are alike undefined and unknown, and for the same reason?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I cannot deny that."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We cannot, therefore, agree in the opinion of him who says that the syllable can be known and expressed, but not the letters."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not; if we may trust the argument."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but will you not be equally inclined to disagree with him, when you remember your own experience in learning to read?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What experience?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, that in learning you were kept trying to distinguish the separate letters both by the eye and by the ear, in order that, when you heard them spoken or saw them written, you might not be confused by their position."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is the education of the harp-player complete unless he can tell what string answers to a particular note; the notes, as every one would allow, are the elements or letters of music?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, if we argue from the letters and syllables which we know to other simples and compounds, we shall say that the letters or simple elements as a class are much more certainly known than the syllables, and much more indispensable to a perfect knowledge of any subject; and if some one says that the syllable is known and the letter unknown, we shall consider that either intentionally or unintentionally he is talking nonsense?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there might be given other proofs of this belief, if I am not mistaken. But do not let us in looking for them lose sight of the question before us, which is the meaning of the statement, that right opinion with rational definition or explanation is the most perfect form of knowledge."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"We must not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and what is the meaning of the term 'explanation'? I think that we have a choice of three meanings."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the first place, the meaning may be, manifesting one's thought by the voice with verbs and nouns, imaging an opinion in the stream which flows from the lips, as in a mirror or water. Does not explanation appear to be of this nature?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly; he who so manifests his thought, is said to explain himself."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And every one who is not born deaf or dumb is able sooner or later to manifest what he thinks of anything; and if so, all those who have a right opinion about anything will also have right explanation; nor will right opinion be anywhere found to exist apart from knowledge."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us not, therefore, hastily charge him who gave this account of knowledge with uttering an unmeaning word; for perhaps he only intended to say, that when a person was asked what was the nature of anything, he should be able to answer his questioner by giving the elements of the thing."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"As for example, Socrates...?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"As, for example, when Hesiod says that a waggon is made up of a hundred planks. Now, neither you nor I could describe all of them individually; but if any one asked what is a waggon, we should be content to answer, that a waggon consists of wheels, axle, body, rims, yoke."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And our opponent will probably laugh at us, just as he would if we professed to be grammarians and to give a grammatical account of the name of Theaetetus, and yet could only tell the syllables and not the letters of your name--that would be true opinion, and not knowledge; for knowledge, as has been already remarked, is not attained until, combined with true opinion, there is an enumeration of the elements out of which anything is composed."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In the same general way, we might also have true opinion about a waggon; but he who can describe its essence by an enumeration of the hundred planks, adds rational explanation to true opinion, and instead of opinion has art and knowledge of the nature of a waggon, in that he attains to the whole through the elements."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"And do you not agree in that view, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If you do, my friend; but I want to know first, whether you admit the resolution of all things into their elements to be a rational explanation of them, and the consideration of them in syllables or larger combinations of them to be irrational--is this your view?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Precisely."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and do you conceive that a man has knowledge of any element who at one time affirms and at another time denies that element of something, or thinks that the same thing is composed of different elements at different times?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Assuredly not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you not remember that in your case and in that of others this often occurred in the process of learning to read?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"You mean that I mistook the letters and misspelt the syllables?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"To be sure; I perfectly remember, and I am very far from supposing that they who are in this condition have knowledge."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When a person at the time of learning writes the name of Theaetetus, and thinks that he ought to write and does write Th and e; but, again, meaning to write the name of Theododorus, thinks that he ought to write and does write T and e--can we suppose that he knows the first syllables of your two names?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"We have already admitted that such a one has not yet attained knowledge."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in like manner be may enumerate without knowing them the second and third and fourth syllables of your name?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"He may."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And in that case, when he knows the order of the letters and can write them out correctly, he has right opinion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But although we admit that he has right opinion, he will still be without knowledge?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet he will have explanation, as well as right opinion, for he knew the order of the letters when he wrote; and this we admit to be explanation."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, my friend, there is such a thing as right opinion united with definition or explanation, which does not as yet attain to the exactness of knowledge."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"It would seem so."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what we fancied to be a perfect definition of knowledge is a dream only. But perhaps we had better not say so as yet, for were there not three explanations of knowledge, one of which must, as we said, be adopted by him who maintains knowledge to be true opinion combined with rational explanation? And very likely there may be found some one who will not prefer this but the third."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"You are quite right; there is still one remaining. The first was the image or expression of the mind in speech; the second, which has just been mentioned, is a way of reaching the whole by an enumeration of the elements. But what is the third definition?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is, further, the popular notion of telling the mark or sign of difference which distinguishes the thing in question from all others."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Can you give me any example of such a definition?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"As, for example, in the case of the sun, I think that you would be contented with the statement that the sun is the brightest of the heavenly bodies which revolve about the earth."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Understand why:--the reason is, as I was just now saying, that if you get at the difference and distinguishing characteristic of each thing, then, as many persons affirm, you will get at the definition or explanation of it; but while you lay hold only of the common and not of the characteristic notion, you will only have the definition of those things to which this common quality belongs."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I understand you, and your account of definition is in my judgment correct."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But he, who having right opinion about anything, can find out the difference which distinguishes it from other things will know that of which before he had only an opinion."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes; that is what we are maintaining."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nevertheless, Theaetetus, on a nearer view, I find myself quite disappointed; the picture, which at a distance was not so bad, has now become altogether unintelligible."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will endeavour to explain: I will suppose myself to have true opinion of you, and if to this I add your definition, then I have knowledge, but if not, opinion only."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The definition was assumed to be the interpretation of your difference."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But when I had only opinion, I had no conception of your distinguishing characteristics."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I suppose not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I must have conceived of some general or common nature which no more belonged to you than to another."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Tell me, now--How in that case could I have formed a judgment of you any more than of any one else? Suppose that I imagine Theaetetus to be a man who has nose, eyes, and mouth, and every other member complete; how would that enable me to distinguish Theaetetus from Theodorus, or from some outer barbarian?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How could it?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or if I had further conceived of you, not only as having nose and eyes, but as having a snub nose and prominent eyes, should I have any more notion of you than of myself and others who resemble me?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Surely I can have no conception of Theaetetus until your snub-nosedness has left an impression on my mind different from the snub-nosedness of all others whom I have ever seen, and until your other peculiarities have a like distinctness; and so when I meet you to-morrow the right opinion will be re-called?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then right opinion implies the perception of differences?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What, then, shall we say of adding reason or explanation to right opinion? If the meaning is, that we should form an opinion of the way in which something differs from another thing, the proposal is ridiculous."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We are supposed to acquire a right opinion of the differences which distinguish one thing from another when we have already a right opinion of them, and so we go round and round:--the revolution of the scytal, or pestle, or any other rotatory machine, in the same circles, is as nothing compared with such a requirement; and we may be truly described as the blind directing the blind; for to add those things which we already have, in order that we may learn what we already think, is like a soul utterly benighted."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Tell me; what were you going to say just now, when you asked the question?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"If, my boy, the argument, in speaking of adding the definition, had used the word to 'know,' and not merely 'have an opinion' of the difference, this which is the most promising of all the definitions of knowledge would have come to a pretty end, for to know is surely to acquire knowledge."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And so, when the question is asked, What is knowledge? this fair argument will answer 'Right opinion with knowledge,'--knowledge, that is, of difference, for this, as the said argument maintains, is adding the definition."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"That seems to be true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But how utterly foolish, when we are asking what is knowledge, that the reply should only be, right opinion with knowledge of difference or of anything! And so, Theaetetus, knowledge is neither sensation nor true opinion, nor yet definition and explanation accompanying and added to true opinion?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I suppose not."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are you still in labour and travail, my dear friend, or have you brought all that you have to say about knowledge to the birth?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"I am sure, Socrates, that you have elicited from me a good deal more than ever was in me."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does not my art show that you have brought forth wind, and that the offspring of your brain are not worth bringing up?"}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"THEAETETUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"theaetetus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if, Theaetetus, you should ever conceive afresh, you will be all the better for the present investigation, and if not, you will be soberer and humbler and gentler to other men, and will be too modest to fancy that you know what you do not know. These are the limits of my art; I can no further go, nor do I know aught of the things which great and famous men know or have known in this or former ages. The office of a midwife I, like my mother, have received from God; she delivered women, I deliver men; but they must be young and noble and fair. And now I have to go to the porch of the King Archon, where I am to meet Meletus and his indictment. To-morrow morning, Theodorus, I shall hope to see you again at this place. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEAETETUS *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"SCENE","Dialogue":"The Prison of Socrates. PLACE OF THE NARRATION: Phlius."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"Were you yourself, Phaedo, in the prison with Socrates on the day when he drank the poison?"}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"Yes, Echecrates, I was."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"I should so like to hear about his death. What did he say in his last hours? We were informed that he died by taking poison, but no one knew anything more; for no Phliasian ever goes to Athens now, and it is a long time since any stranger from Athens has found his way hither; so that we had no clear account."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"Did you not hear of the proceedings at the trial?"}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"Yes; some one told us about the trial, and we could not understand why, having been condemned, he should have been put to death, not at the time, but long afterwards. What was the reason of this?"}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"An accident, Echecrates: the stern of the ship which the Athenians send to Delos happened to have been crowned on the day before he was tried."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"What is this ship?"}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"It is the ship in which, according to Athenian tradition, Theseus went to Crete when he took with him the fourteen youths, and was the saviour of them and of himself. And they were said to have vowed to Apollo at the time, that if they were saved they would send a yearly mission to Delos. Now this custom still continues, and the whole period of the voyage to and from Delos, beginning when the priest of Apollo crowns the stern of the ship, is a holy season, during which the city is not allowed to be polluted by public executions; and when the vessel is detained by contrary winds, the time spent in going and returning is very considerable. As I was saying, the ship was crowned on the day before the trial, and this was the reason why Socrates lay in prison and was not put to death until long after he was condemned."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"What was the manner of his death, Phaedo? What was said or done? And which of his friends were with him? Or did the authorities forbid them to be present--so that he had no friends near him when he died?"}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"No; there were several of them with him."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"If you have nothing to do, I wish that you would tell me what passed, as exactly as you can."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"I have nothing at all to do, and will try to gratify your wish. To be reminded of Socrates is always the greatest delight to me, whether I speak myself or hear another speak of him."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"You will have listeners who are of the same mind with you, and I hope that you will be as exact as you can."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"I had a singular feeling at being in his company. For I could hardly believe that I was present at the death of a friend, and therefore I did not pity him, Echecrates; he died so fearlessly, and his words and bearing were so noble and gracious, that to me he appeared blessed. I thought that in going to the other world he could not be without a divine call, and that he would be happy, if any man ever was, when he arrived there, and therefore I did not pity him as might have seemed natural at such an hour. But I had not the pleasure which I usually feel in philosophical discourse (for philosophy was the theme of which we spoke). I was pleased, but in the pleasure there was also a strange admixture of pain; for I reflected that he was soon to die, and this double feeling was shared by us all; we were laughing and weeping by turns, especially the excitable Apollodorus--you know the sort of man?"}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"He was quite beside himself; and I and all of us were greatly moved."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"Who were present?"}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"Of native Athenians there were, besides Apollodorus, Critobulus and his father Crito, Hermogenes, Epigenes, Aeschines, Antisthenes; likewise Ctesippus of the deme of Paeania, Menexenus, and some others; Plato, if I am not mistaken, was ill."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"Were there any strangers?"}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"Yes, there were; Simmias the Theban, and Cebes, and Phaedondes; Euclid and Terpison, who came from Megara."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"And was Aristippus there, and Cleombrotus?"}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"No, they were said to be in Aegina."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"Any one else?"}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"I think that these were nearly all."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and what did you talk about?"}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"I will begin at the beginning, and endeavour to repeat the entire conversation. On the previous days we had been in the habit of assembling early in the morning at the court in which the trial took place, and which is not far from the prison. There we used to wait talking with one another until the opening of the doors (for they were not opened very early); then we went in and generally passed the day with Socrates. On the last morning we assembled sooner than usual, having heard on the day before when we quitted the prison in the evening that the sacred ship had come from Delos, and so we arranged to meet very early at the accustomed place. On our arrival the jailer who answered the door, instead of admitting us, came out and told us to stay until he called us. 'For the Eleven,' he said, 'are now with Socrates; they are taking off his chains, and giving orders that he is to die to-day.' He soon returned and said that we might come in. On entering we found Socrates just released from chains, and Xanthippe, whom you know, sitting by him, and holding his child in her arms. When she saw us she uttered a cry and said, as women will: 'O Socrates, this is the last time that either you will converse with your friends, or they with you.' Socrates turned to Crito and said: 'Crito, let some one take her home.' Some of Crito's people accordingly led her away, crying out and beating herself. And when she was gone, Socrates, sitting up on the couch, bent and rubbed his leg, saying, as he was rubbing: How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it; for they are never present to a man at the same instant, and yet he who pursues either is generally compelled to take the other; their bodies are two, but they are joined by a single head. And I cannot help thinking that if Aesop had remembered them, he would have made a fable about God trying to reconcile their strife, and how, when he could not, he fastened their heads together; and this is the reason why when one comes the other follows, as I know by my own experience now, when after the pain in my leg which was caused by the chain pleasure appears to succeed. Upon this Cebes said: I am glad, Socrates, that you have mentioned the name of Aesop. For it reminds me of a question which has been asked by many, and was asked of me only the day before yesterday by Evenus the poet--he will be sure to ask it again, and therefore if you would like me to have an answer ready for him, you may as well tell me what I should say to him:--he wanted to know why you, who never before wrote a line of poetry, now that you are in prison are turning Aesop's fables into verse, and also composing that hymn in honour of Apollo. Tell him, Cebes, he replied, what is the truth--that I had no idea of rivalling him or his poems; to do so, as I knew, would be no easy task. But I wanted to see whether I could purge away a scruple which I felt about the meaning of certain dreams. In the course of my life I have often had intimations in dreams 'that I should compose music.' The same dream came to me sometimes in one form, and sometimes in another, but always saying the same or nearly the same words: 'Cultivate and make music,' said the dream. And hitherto I had imagined that this was only intended to exhort and encourage me in the study of philosophy, which has been the pursuit of my life, and is the noblest and best of music. The dream was bidding me do what I was already doing, in the same way that the competitor in a race is bidden by the spectators to run when he is already running. But I was not certain of this, for the dream might have meant music in the popular sense of the word, and being under sentence of death, and the festival giving me a respite, I thought that it would be safer for me to satisfy the scruple, and, in obedience to the dream, to compose a few verses before I departed. And first I made a hymn in honour of the god of the festival, and then considering that a poet, if he is really to be a poet, should not only put together words, but should invent stories, and that I have no invention, I took some fables of Aesop, which I had ready at hand and which I knew--they were the first I came upon--and turned them into verse. Tell this to Evenus, Cebes, and bid him be of good cheer; say that I would have him come after me if he be a wise man, and not tarry; and that to-day I am likely to be going, for the Athenians say that I must. Simmias said: What a message for such a man! having been a frequent companion of his I should say that, as far as I know him, he will never take your advice unless he is obliged. Why, said Socrates,--is not Evenus a philosopher? I think that he is, said Simmias. Then he, or any man who has the spirit of philosophy, will be willing to die, but he will not take his own life, for that is held to be unlawful. Here he changed his position, and put his legs off the couch on to the ground, and during the rest of the conversation he remained sitting. Why do you say, enquired Cebes, that a man ought not to take his own life, but that the philosopher will be ready to follow the dying? Socrates replied: And have you, Cebes and Simmias, who are the disciples of Philolaus, never heard him speak of this? Yes, but his language was obscure, Socrates. My words, too, are only an echo; but there is no reason why I should not repeat what I have heard: and indeed, as I am going to another place, it is very meet for me to be thinking and talking of the nature of the pilgrimage which I am about to make. What can I do better in the interval between this and the setting of the sun? Then tell me, Socrates, why is suicide held to be unlawful? as I have certainly heard Philolaus, about whom you were just now asking, affirm when he was staying with us at Thebes: and there are others who say the same, although I have never understood what was meant by any of them. Do not lose heart, replied Socrates, and the day may come when you will understand. I suppose that you wonder why, when other things which are evil may be good at certain times and to certain persons, death is to be the only exception, and why, when a man is better dead, he is not permitted to be his own benefactor, but must wait for the hand of another. Very true, said Cebes, laughing gently and speaking in his native Boeotian. I admit the appearance of inconsistency in what I am saying; but there may not be any real inconsistency after all. There is a doctrine whispered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand. Yet I too believe that the gods are our guardians, and that we are a possession of theirs. Do you not agree? Yes, I quite agree, said Cebes. And if one of your own possessions, an ox or an ass, for example, took the liberty of putting himself out of the way when you had given no intimation of your wish that he should die, would you not be angry with him, and would you not punish him if you could? Certainly, replied Cebes. Then, if we look at the matter thus, there may be reason in saying that a man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him, as he is now summoning me. Yes, Socrates, said Cebes, there seems to be truth in what you say. And yet how can you reconcile this seemingly true belief that God is our guardian and we his possessions, with the willingness to die which we were just now attributing to the philosopher? That the wisest of men should be willing to leave a service in which they are ruled by the gods who are the best of rulers, is not reasonable; for surely no wise man thinks that when set at liberty he can take better care of himself than the gods take of him. A fool may perhaps think so--he may argue that he had better run away from his master, not considering that his duty is to remain to the end, and not to run away from the good, and that there would be no sense in his running away. The wise man will want to be ever with him who is better than himself. Now this, Socrates, is the reverse of what was just now said; for upon this view the wise man should sorrow and the fool rejoice at passing out of life. The earnestness of Cebes seemed to please Socrates. Here, said he, turning to us, is a man who is always inquiring, and is not so easily convinced by the first thing which he hears. And certainly, added Simmias, the objection which he is now making does appear to me to have some force. For what can be the meaning of a truly wise man wanting to fly away and lightly leave a master who is better than himself? And I rather imagine that Cebes is referring to you; he thinks that you are too ready to leave us, and too ready to leave the gods whom you acknowledge to be our good masters. Yes, replied Socrates; there is reason in what you say. And so you think that I ought to answer your indictment as if I were in a court? We should like you to do so, said Simmias. Then I must try to make a more successful defence before you than I did when before the judges. For I am quite ready to admit, Simmias and Cebes, that I ought to be grieved at death, if I were not persuaded in the first place that I am going to other gods who are wise and good (of which I am as certain as I can be of any such matters), and secondly (though I am not so sure of this last) to men departed, better than those whom I leave behind; and therefore I do not grieve as I might have done, for I have good hope that there is yet something remaining for the dead, and as has been said of old, some far better thing for the good than for the evil. But do you mean to take away your thoughts with you, Socrates? said Simmias. Will you not impart them to us?--for they are a benefit in which we too are entitled to share. Moreover, if you succeed in convincing us, that will be an answer to the charge against yourself. I will do my best, replied Socrates. But you must first let me hear what Crito wants; he has long been wishing to say something to me. Only this, Socrates, replied Crito:--the attendant who is to give you the poison has been telling me, and he wants me to tell you, that you are not to talk much, talking, he says, increases heat, and this is apt to interfere with the action of the poison; persons who excite themselves are sometimes obliged to take a second or even a third dose. Then, said Socrates, let him mind his business and be prepared to give the poison twice or even thrice if necessary; that is all. I knew quite well what you would say, replied Crito; but I was obliged to satisfy him. Never mind him, he said. And now, O my judges, I desire to prove to you that the real philosopher has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after death he may hope to obtain the greatest good in the other world. And how this may be, Simmias and Cebes, I will endeavour to explain. For I deem that the true votary of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is always pursuing death and dying; and if this be so, and he has had the desire of death all his life long, why when his time comes should he repine at that which he has been always pursuing and desiring? Simmias said laughingly: Though not in a laughing humour, you have made me laugh, Socrates; for I cannot help thinking that the many when they hear your words will say how truly you have described philosophers, and our people at home will likewise say that the life which philosophers desire is in reality death, and that they have found them out to be deserving of the death which they desire. And they are right, Simmias, in thinking so, with the exception of the words 'they have found them out'; for they have not found out either what is the nature of that death which the true philosopher deserves, or how he deserves or desires death. But enough of them:--let us discuss the matter among ourselves: Do we believe that there is such a thing as death? To be sure, replied Simmias. Is it not the separation of soul and body? And to be dead is the completion of this; when the soul exists in herself, and is released from the body and the body is released from the soul, what is this but death? Just so, he replied. There is another question, which will probably throw light on our present inquiry if you and I can agree about it:--Ought the philosopher to care about the pleasures--if they are to be called pleasures--of eating and drinking? Certainly not, answered Simmias. And what about the pleasures of love--should he care for them? By no means. And will he think much of the other ways of indulging the body, for example, the acquisition of costly raiment, or sandals, or other adornments of the body? Instead of caring about them, does he not rather despise anything more than nature needs? What do you say? I should say that the true philosopher would despise them. Would you not say that he is entirely concerned with the soul and not with the body? He would like, as far as he can, to get away from the body and to turn to the soul. Quite true. In matters of this sort philosophers, above all other men, may be observed in every sort of way to dissever the soul from the communion of the body. Very true. Whereas, Simmias, the rest of the world are of opinion that to him who has no sense of pleasure and no part in bodily pleasure, life is not worth having; and that he who is indifferent about them is as good as dead. That is also true. What again shall we say of the actual acquirement of knowledge?--is the body, if invited to share in the enquiry, a hinderer or a helper? I mean to say, have sight and hearing any truth in them? Are they not, as the poets are always telling us, inaccurate witnesses? and yet, if even they are inaccurate and indistinct, what is to be said of the other senses?--for you will allow that they are the best of them? Certainly, he replied. Then when does the soul attain truth?--for in attempting to consider anything in company with the body she is obviously deceived. True. Then must not true existence be revealed to her in thought, if at all? Yes. And thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself and none of these things trouble her--neither sounds nor sights nor pain nor any pleasure,--when she takes leave of the body, and has as little as possible to do with it, when she has no bodily sense or desire, but is aspiring after true being? Certainly. And in this the philosopher dishonours the body; his soul runs away from his body and desires to be alone and by herself? That is true. Well, but there is another thing, Simmias: Is there or is there not an absolute justice? Assuredly there is. And an absolute beauty and absolute good? Of course. But did you ever behold any of them with your eyes? Certainly not. Or did you ever reach them with any other bodily sense?--and I speak not of these alone, but of absolute greatness, and health, and strength, and of the essence or true nature of everything. Has the reality of them ever been perceived by you through the bodily organs? or rather, is not the nearest approach to the knowledge of their several natures made by him who so orders his intellectual vision as to have the most exact conception of the essence of each thing which he considers? Certainly. And he attains to the purest knowledge of them who goes to each with the mind alone, not introducing or intruding in the act of thought sight or any other sense together with reason, but with the very light of the mind in her own clearness searches into the very truth of each; he who has got rid, as far as he can, of eyes and ears and, so to speak, of the whole body, these being in his opinion distracting elements which when they infect the soul hinder her from acquiring truth and knowledge--who, if not he, is likely to attain the knowledge of true being? What you say has a wonderful truth in it, Socrates, replied Simmias. And when real philosophers consider all these things, will they not be led to make a reflection which they will express in words something like the following? 'Have we not found,' they will say, 'a path of thought which seems to bring us and our argument to the conclusion, that while we are in the body, and while the soul is infected with the evils of the body, our desire will not be satisfied? and our desire is of the truth. For the body is a source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food; and is liable also to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search after true being: it fills us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and in fact, as men say, takes away from us the power of thinking at all. Whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body; and by reason of all these impediments we have no time to give to philosophy; and, last and worst of all, even if we are at leisure and betake ourselves to some speculation, the body is always breaking in upon us, causing turmoil and confusion in our enquiries, and so amazing us that we are prevented from seeing the truth. It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body--the soul in herself must behold things in themselves: and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire, and of which we say that we are lovers, not while we live, but after death; for if while in company with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things follows--either knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, after death. For then, and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone. In this present life, I reckon that we make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible intercourse or communion with the body, and are not surfeited with the bodily nature, but keep ourselves pure until the hour when God himself is pleased to release us. And thus having got rid of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and hold converse with the pure, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth.' For the impure are not permitted to approach the pure. These are the sort of words, Simmias, which the true lovers of knowledge cannot help saying to one another, and thinking. You would agree; would you not? Undoubtedly, Socrates. But, O my friend, if this is true, there is great reason to hope that, going whither I go, when I have come to the end of my journey, I shall attain that which has been the pursuit of my life. And therefore I go on my way rejoicing, and not I only, but every other man who believes that his mind has been made ready and that he is in a manner purified. Certainly, replied Simmias. And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body, as I was saying before; the habit of the soul gathering and collecting herself into herself from all sides out of the body; the dwelling in her own place alone, as in another life, so also in this, as far as she can;--the release of the soul from the chains of the body? Very true, he said. And this separation and release of the soul from the body is termed death? To be sure, he said. And the true philosophers, and they only, are ever seeking to release the soul. Is not the separation and release of the soul from the body their especial study? That is true. And, as I was saying at first, there would be a ridiculous contradiction in men studying to live as nearly as they can in a state of death, and yet repining when it comes upon them. Clearly. And the true philosophers, Simmias, are always occupied in the practice of dying, wherefore also to them least of all men is death terrible. Look at the matter thus:--if they have been in every way the enemies of the body, and are wanting to be alone with the soul, when this desire of theirs is granted, how inconsistent would they be if they trembled and repined, instead of rejoicing at their departure to that place where, when they arrive, they hope to gain that which in life they desired--and this was wisdom--and at the same time to be rid of the company of their enemy. Many a man has been willing to go to the world below animated by the hope of seeing there an earthly love, or wife, or son, and conversing with them. And will he who is a true lover of wisdom, and is strongly persuaded in like manner that only in the world below he can worthily enjoy her, still repine at death? Will he not depart with joy? Surely he will, O my friend, if he be a true philosopher. For he will have a firm conviction that there and there only, he can find wisdom in her purity. And if this be true, he would be very absurd, as I was saying, if he were afraid of death. He would, indeed, replied Simmias. And when you see a man who is repining at the approach of death, is not his reluctance a sufficient proof that he is not a lover of wisdom, but a lover of the body, and probably at the same time a lover of either money or power, or both? Quite so, he replied. And is not courage, Simmias, a quality which is specially characteristic of the philosopher? Certainly. There is temperance again, which even by the vulgar is supposed to consist in the control and regulation of the passions, and in the sense of superiority to them--is not temperance a virtue belonging to those only who despise the body, and who pass their lives in philosophy? Most assuredly. For the courage and temperance of other men, if you will consider them, are really a contradiction. How so? Well, he said, you are aware that death is regarded by men in general as a great evil. Very true, he said. And do not courageous men face death because they are afraid of yet greater evils? That is quite true. Then all but the philosophers are courageous only from fear, and because they are afraid; and yet that a man should be courageous from fear, and because he is a coward, is surely a strange thing. Very true. And are not the temperate exactly in the same case? They are temperate because they are intemperate--which might seem to be a contradiction, but is nevertheless the sort of thing which happens with this foolish temperance. For there are pleasures which they are afraid of losing; and in their desire to keep them, they abstain from some pleasures, because they are overcome by others; and although to be conquered by pleasure is called by men intemperance, to them the conquest of pleasure consists in being conquered by pleasure. And that is what I mean by saying that, in a sense, they are made temperate through intemperance. Such appears to be the case. Yet the exchange of one fear or pleasure or pain for another fear or pleasure or pain, and of the greater for the less, as if they were coins, is not the exchange of virtue. O my blessed Simmias, is there not one true coin for which all things ought to be exchanged?--and that is wisdom; and only in exchange for this, and in company with this, is anything truly bought or sold, whether courage or temperance or justice. And is not all true virtue the companion of wisdom, no matter what fears or pleasures or other similar goods or evils may or may not attend her? But the virtue which is made up of these goods, when they are severed from wisdom and exchanged with one another, is a shadow of virtue only, nor is there any freedom or health or truth in her; but in the true exchange there is a purging away of all these things, and temperance, and justice, and courage, and wisdom herself are the purgation of them. The founders of the mysteries would appear to have had a real meaning, and were not talking nonsense when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will lie in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods. For 'many,' as they say in the mysteries, 'are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics,'--meaning, as I interpret the words, 'the true philosophers.' In the number of whom, during my whole life, I have been seeking, according to my ability, to find a place;--whether I have sought in a right way or not, and whether I have succeeded or not, I shall truly know in a little while, if God will, when I myself arrive in the other world--such is my belief. And therefore I maintain that I am right, Simmias and Cebes, in not grieving or repining at parting from you and my masters in this world, for I believe that I shall equally find good masters and friends in another world. But most men do not believe this saying; if then I succeed in convincing you by my defence better than I did the Athenian judges, it will be well. Cebes answered: I agree, Socrates, in the greater part of what you say. But in what concerns the soul, men are apt to be incredulous; they fear that when she has left the body her place may be nowhere, and that on the very day of death she may perish and come to an end--immediately on her release from the body, issuing forth dispersed like smoke or air and in her flight vanishing away into nothingness. If she could only be collected into herself after she has obtained release from the evils of which you are speaking, there would be good reason to hope, Socrates, that what you say is true. But surely it requires a great deal of argument and many proofs to show that when the man is dead his soul yet exists, and has any force or intelligence. True, Cebes, said Socrates; and shall I suggest that we converse a little of the probabilities of these things? I am sure, said Cebes, that I should greatly like to know your opinion about them. I reckon, said Socrates, that no one who heard me now, not even if he were one of my old enemies, the Comic poets, could accuse me of idle talking about matters in which I have no concern:--If you please, then, we will proceed with the inquiry. Suppose we consider the question whether the souls of men after death are or are not in the world below. There comes into my mind an ancient doctrine which affirms that they go from hence into the other world, and returning hither, are born again from the dead. Now if it be true that the living come from the dead, then our souls must exist in the other world, for if not, how could they have been born again? And this would be conclusive, if there were any real evidence that the living are only born from the dead; but if this is not so, then other arguments will have to be adduced. Very true, replied Cebes. Then let us consider the whole question, not in relation to man only, but in relation to animals generally, and to plants, and to everything of which there is generation, and the proof will be easier. Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites? I mean such things as good and evil, just and unjust--and there are innumerable other opposites which are generated out of opposites. And I want to show that in all opposites there is of necessity a similar alternation; I mean to say, for example, that anything which becomes greater must become greater after being less. True. And that which becomes less must have been once greater and then have become less. Yes. And the weaker is generated from the stronger, and the swifter from the slower. Very true. And the worse is from the better, and the more just is from the more unjust. Of course. And is this true of all opposites? and are we convinced that all of them are generated out of opposites? Yes. And in this universal opposition of all things, are there not also two intermediate processes which are ever going on, from one to the other opposite, and back again; where there is a greater and a less there is also an intermediate process of increase and diminution, and that which grows is said to wax, and that which decays to wane? Yes, he said. And there are many other processes, such as division and composition, cooling and heating, which equally involve a passage into and out of one another. And this necessarily holds of all opposites, even though not always expressed in words--they are really generated out of one another, and there is a passing or process from one to the other of them? Very true, he replied. Well, and is there not an opposite of life, as sleep is the opposite of waking? True, he said. And what is it? Death, he answered. And these, if they are opposites, are generated the one from the other, and have there their two intermediate processes also? Of course. Now, said Socrates, I will analyze one of the two pairs of opposites which I have mentioned to you, and also its intermediate processes, and you shall analyze the other to me. One of them I term sleep, the other waking. The state of sleep is opposed to the state of waking, and out of sleeping waking is generated, and out of waking, sleeping; and the process of generation is in the one case falling asleep, and in the other waking up. Do you agree? I entirely agree. Then, suppose that you analyze life and death to me in the same manner. Is not death opposed to life? Yes. And they are generated one from the other? Yes. What is generated from the living? The dead. And what from the dead? I can only say in answer--the living. Then the living, whether things or persons, Cebes, are generated from the dead? That is clear, he replied. Then the inference is that our souls exist in the world below? That is true. And one of the two processes or generations is visible--for surely the act of dying is visible? Surely, he said. What then is to be the result? Shall we exclude the opposite process? And shall we suppose nature to walk on one leg only? Must we not rather assign to death some corresponding process of generation? Certainly, he replied. And what is that process? Return to life. And return to life, if there be such a thing, is the birth of the dead into the world of the living? Quite true. Then here is a new way by which we arrive at the conclusion that the living come from the dead, just as the dead come from the living; and this, if true, affords a most certain proof that the souls of the dead exist in some place out of which they come again. Yes, Socrates, he said; the conclusion seems to flow necessarily out of our previous admissions. And that these admissions were not unfair, Cebes, he said, may be shown, I think, as follows: If generation were in a straight line only, and there were no compensation or circle in nature, no turn or return of elements into their opposites, then you know that all things would at last have the same form and pass into the same state, and there would be no more generation of them. What do you mean? he said. A simple thing enough, which I will illustrate by the case of sleep, he replied. You know that if there were no alternation of sleeping and waking, the tale of the sleeping Endymion would in the end have no meaning, because all other things would be asleep, too, and he would not be distinguishable from the rest. Or if there were composition only, and no division of substances, then the chaos of Anaxagoras would come again. And in like manner, my dear Cebes, if all things which partook of life were to die, and after they were dead remained in the form of death, and did not come to life again, all would at last die, and nothing would be alive--what other result could there be? For if the living spring from any other things, and they too die, must not all things at last be swallowed up in death? (But compare Republic.) There is no escape, Socrates, said Cebes; and to me your argument seems to be absolutely true. Yes, he said, Cebes, it is and must be so, in my opinion; and we have not been deluded in making these admissions; but I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence, and that the good souls have a better portion than the evil. Cebes added: Your favorite doctrine, Socrates, that knowledge is simply recollection, if true, also necessarily implies a previous time in which we have learned that which we now recollect. But this would be impossible unless our soul had been in some place before existing in the form of man; here then is another proof of the soul's immortality. But tell me, Cebes, said Simmias, interposing, what arguments are urged in favour of this doctrine of recollection. I am not very sure at the moment that I remember them. One excellent proof, said Cebes, is afforded by questions. If you put a question to a person in a right way, he will give a true answer of himself, but how could he do this unless there were knowledge and right reason already in him? And this is most clearly shown when he is taken to a diagram or to anything of that sort. (Compare Meno.) But if, said Socrates, you are still incredulous, Simmias, I would ask you whether you may not agree with me when you look at the matter in another way;--I mean, if you are still incredulous as to whether knowledge is recollection. Incredulous, I am not, said Simmias; but I want to have this doctrine of recollection brought to my own recollection, and, from what Cebes has said, I am beginning to recollect and be convinced; but I should still like to hear what you were going to say. This is what I would say, he replied:--We should agree, if I am not mistaken, that what a man recollects he must have known at some previous time. Very true. And what is the nature of this knowledge or recollection? I mean to ask, Whether a person who, having seen or heard or in any way perceived anything, knows not only that, but has a conception of something else which is the subject, not of the same but of some other kind of knowledge, may not be fairly said to recollect that of which he has the conception? What do you mean? I mean what I may illustrate by the following instance:--The knowledge of a lyre is not the same as the knowledge of a man? True. And yet what is the feeling of lovers when they recognize a lyre, or a garment, or anything else which the beloved has been in the habit of using? Do not they, from knowing the lyre, form in the mind's eye an image of the youth to whom the lyre belongs? And this is recollection. In like manner any one who sees Simmias may remember Cebes; and there are endless examples of the same thing. Endless, indeed, replied Simmias. And recollection is most commonly a process of recovering that which has been already forgotten through time and inattention. Very true, he said. Well; and may you not also from seeing the picture of a horse or a lyre remember a man? and from the picture of Simmias, you may be led to remember Cebes? True. Or you may also be led to the recollection of Simmias himself? Quite so. And in all these cases, the recollection may be derived from things either like or unlike? It may be. And when the recollection is derived from like things, then another consideration is sure to arise, which is--whether the likeness in any degree falls short or not of that which is recollected? Very true, he said. And shall we proceed a step further, and affirm that there is such a thing as equality, not of one piece of wood or stone with another, but that, over and above this, there is absolute equality? Shall we say so? Say so, yes, replied Simmias, and swear to it, with all the confidence in life. And do we know the nature of this absolute essence? To be sure, he said. And whence did we obtain our knowledge? Did we not see equalities of material things, such as pieces of wood and stones, and gather from them the idea of an equality which is different from them? For you will acknowledge that there is a difference. Or look at the matter in another way:--Do not the same pieces of wood or stone appear at one time equal, and at another time unequal? That is certain. But are real equals ever unequal? or is the idea of equality the same as of inequality? Impossible, Socrates. Then these (so-called) equals are not the same with the idea of equality? I should say, clearly not, Socrates. And yet from these equals, although differing from the idea of equality, you conceived and attained that idea? Very true, he said. Which might be like, or might be unlike them? Yes. But that makes no difference; whenever from seeing one thing you conceived another, whether like or unlike, there must surely have been an act of recollection? Very true. But what would you say of equal portions of wood and stone, or other material equals? and what is the impression produced by them? Are they equals in the same sense in which absolute equality is equal? or do they fall short of this perfect equality in a measure? Yes, he said, in a very great measure too. And must we not allow, that when I or any one, looking at any object, observes that the thing which he sees aims at being some other thing, but falls short of, and cannot be, that other thing, but is inferior, he who makes this observation must have had a previous knowledge of that to which the other, although similar, was inferior? Certainly. And has not this been our own case in the matter of equals and of absolute equality? Precisely. Then we must have known equality previously to the time when we first saw the material equals, and reflected that all these apparent equals strive to attain absolute equality, but fall short of it? Very true. And we recognize also that this absolute equality has only been known, and can only be known, through the medium of sight or touch, or of some other of the senses, which are all alike in this respect? Yes, Socrates, as far as the argument is concerned, one of them is the same as the other. From the senses then is derived the knowledge that all sensible things aim at an absolute equality of which they fall short? Yes. Then before we began to see or hear or perceive in any way, we must have had a knowledge of absolute equality, or we could not have referred to that standard the equals which are derived from the senses?--for to that they all aspire, and of that they fall short. No other inference can be drawn from the previous statements. And did we not see and hear and have the use of our other senses as soon as we were born? Certainly. Then we must have acquired the knowledge of equality at some previous time? Yes. That is to say, before we were born, I suppose? True. And if we acquired this knowledge before we were born, and were born having the use of it, then we also knew before we were born and at the instant of birth not only the equal or the greater or the less, but all other ideas; for we are not speaking only of equality, but of beauty, goodness, justice, holiness, and of all which we stamp with the name of essence in the dialectical process, both when we ask and when we answer questions. Of all this we may certainly affirm that we acquired the knowledge before birth? We may. But if, after having acquired, we have not forgotten what in each case we acquired, then we must always have come into life having knowledge, and shall always continue to know as long as life lasts--for knowing is the acquiring and retaining knowledge and not forgetting. Is not forgetting, Simmias, just the losing of knowledge? Quite true, Socrates. But if the knowledge which we acquired before birth was lost by us at birth, and if afterwards by the use of the senses we recovered what we previously knew, will not the process which we call learning be a recovering of the knowledge which is natural to us, and may not this be rightly termed recollection? Very true. So much is clear--that when we perceive something, either by the help of sight, or hearing, or some other sense, from that perception we are able to obtain a notion of some other thing like or unlike which is associated with it but has been forgotten. Whence, as I was saying, one of two alternatives follows:--either we had this knowledge at birth, and continued to know through life; or, after birth, those who are said to learn only remember, and learning is simply recollection. Yes, that is quite true, Socrates. And which alternative, Simmias, do you prefer? Had we the knowledge at our birth, or did we recollect the things which we knew previously to our birth? I cannot decide at the moment. At any rate you can decide whether he who has knowledge will or will not be able to render an account of his knowledge? What do you say? Certainly, he will. But do you think that every man is able to give an account of these very matters about which we are speaking? Would that they could, Socrates, but I rather fear that to-morrow, at this time, there will no longer be any one alive who is able to give an account of them such as ought to be given. Then you are not of opinion, Simmias, that all men know these things? Certainly not. They are in process of recollecting that which they learned before? Certainly. But when did our souls acquire this knowledge?--not since we were born as men? Certainly not. And therefore, previously? Yes. Then, Simmias, our souls must also have existed without bodies before they were in the form of man, and must have had intelligence. Unless indeed you suppose, Socrates, that these notions are given us at the very moment of birth; for this is the only time which remains. Yes, my friend, but if so, when do we lose them? for they are not in us when we are born--that is admitted. Do we lose them at the moment of receiving them, or if not at what other time? No, Socrates, I perceive that I was unconsciously talking nonsense. Then may we not say, Simmias, that if, as we are always repeating, there is an absolute beauty, and goodness, and an absolute essence of all things; and if to this, which is now discovered to have existed in our former state, we refer all our sensations, and with this compare them, finding these ideas to be pre-existent and our inborn possession--then our souls must have had a prior existence, but if not, there would be no force in the argument? There is the same proof that these ideas must have existed before we were born, as that our souls existed before we were born; and if not the ideas, then not the souls. Yes, Socrates; I am convinced that there is precisely the same necessity for the one as for the other; and the argument retreats successfully to the position that the existence of the soul before birth cannot be separated from the existence of the essence of which you speak. For there is nothing which to my mind is so patent as that beauty, goodness, and the other notions of which you were just now speaking, have a most real and absolute existence; and I am satisfied with the proof. Well, but is Cebes equally satisfied? for I must convince him too. I think, said Simmias, that Cebes is satisfied: although he is the most incredulous of mortals, yet I believe that he is sufficiently convinced of the existence of the soul before birth. But that after death the soul will continue to exist is not yet proven even to my own satisfaction. I cannot get rid of the feeling of the many to which Cebes was referring--the feeling that when the man dies the soul will be dispersed, and that this may be the extinction of her. For admitting that she may have been born elsewhere, and framed out of other elements, and was in existence before entering the human body, why after having entered in and gone out again may she not herself be destroyed and come to an end? Very true, Simmias, said Cebes; about half of what was required has been proven; to wit, that our souls existed before we were born:--that the soul will exist after death as well as before birth is the other half of which the proof is still wanting, and has to be supplied; when that is given the demonstration will be complete. But that proof, Simmias and Cebes, has been already given, said Socrates, if you put the two arguments together--I mean this and the former one, in which we admitted that everything living is born of the dead. For if the soul exists before birth, and in coming to life and being born can be born only from death and dying, must she not after death continue to exist, since she has to be born again?--Surely the proof which you desire has been already furnished. Still I suspect that you and Simmias would be glad to probe the argument further. Like children, you are haunted with a fear that when the soul leaves the body, the wind may really blow her away and scatter her; especially if a man should happen to die in a great storm and not when the sky is calm. Cebes answered with a smile: Then, Socrates, you must argue us out of our fears--and yet, strictly speaking, they are not our fears, but there is a child within us to whom death is a sort of hobgoblin; him too we must persuade not to be afraid when he is alone in the dark. Socrates said: Let the voice of the charmer be applied daily until you have charmed away the fear. And where shall we find a good charmer of our fears, Socrates, when you are gone? Hellas, he replied, is a large place, Cebes, and has many good men, and there are barbarous races not a few: seek for him among them all, far and wide, sparing neither pains nor money; for there is no better way of spending your money. And you must seek among yourselves too; for you will not find others better able to make the search. The search, replied Cebes, shall certainly be made. And now, if you please, let us return to the point of the argument at which we digressed. By all means, replied Socrates; what else should I please? Very good. Must we not, said Socrates, ask ourselves what that is which, as we imagine, is liable to be scattered, and about which we fear? and what again is that about which we have no fear? And then we may proceed further to enquire whether that which suffers dispersion is or is not of the nature of soul--our hopes and fears as to our own souls will turn upon the answers to these questions. Very true, he said. Now the compound or composite may be supposed to be naturally capable, as of being compounded, so also of being dissolved; but that which is uncompounded, and that only, must be, if anything is, indissoluble. Yes; I should imagine so, said Cebes. And the uncompounded may be assumed to be the same and unchanging, whereas the compound is always changing and never the same. I agree, he said. Then now let us return to the previous discussion. Is that idea or essence, which in the dialectical process we define as essence or true existence--whether essence of equality, beauty, or anything else--are these essences, I say, liable at times to some degree of change? or are they each of them always what they are, having the same simple self-existent and unchanging forms, not admitting of variation at all, or in any way, or at any time? They must be always the same, Socrates, replied Cebes. And what would you say of the many beautiful--whether men or horses or garments or any other things which are named by the same names and may be called equal or beautiful,--are they all unchanging and the same always, or quite the reverse? May they not rather be described as almost always changing and hardly ever the same, either with themselves or with one another? The latter, replied Cebes; they are always in a state of change. And these you can touch and see and perceive with the senses, but the unchanging things you can only perceive with the mind--they are invisible and are not seen? That is very true, he said. Well, then, added Socrates, let us suppose that there are two sorts of existences--one seen, the other unseen. Let us suppose them. The seen is the changing, and the unseen is the unchanging? That may be also supposed. And, further, is not one part of us body, another part soul? To be sure. And to which class is the body more alike and akin? Clearly to the seen--no one can doubt that. And is the soul seen or not seen? Not by man, Socrates. And what we mean by 'seen' and 'not seen' is that which is or is not visible to the eye of man? Yes, to the eye of man. And is the soul seen or not seen? Not seen. Unseen then? Yes. Then the soul is more like to the unseen, and the body to the seen? That follows necessarily, Socrates. And were we not saying long ago that the soul when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses)--were we not saying that the soul too is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard, when she touches change? Very true. But when returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the other world, the region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom? That is well and truly said, Socrates, he replied. And to which class is the soul more nearly alike and akin, as far as may be inferred from this argument, as well as from the preceding one? I think, Socrates, that, in the opinion of every one who follows the argument, the soul will be infinitely more like the unchangeable--even the most stupid person will not deny that. And the body is more like the changing? Yes. Yet once more consider the matter in another light: When the soul and the body are united, then nature orders the soul to rule and govern, and the body to obey and serve. Now which of these two functions is akin to the divine? and which to the mortal? Does not the divine appear to you to be that which naturally orders and rules, and the mortal to be that which is subject and servant? True. And which does the soul resemble? The soul resembles the divine, and the body the mortal--there can be no doubt of that, Socrates. Then reflect, Cebes: of all which has been said is not this the conclusion?--that the soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and immortal, and intellectual, and uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable; and that the body is in the very likeness of the human, and mortal, and unintellectual, and multiform, and dissoluble, and changeable. Can this, my dear Cebes, be denied? It cannot. But if it be true, then is not the body liable to speedy dissolution? and is not the soul almost or altogether indissoluble? Certainly. And do you further observe, that after a man is dead, the body, or visible part of him, which is lying in the visible world, and is called a corpse, and would naturally be dissolved and decomposed and dissipated, is not dissolved or decomposed at once, but may remain for a for some time, nay even for a long time, if the constitution be sound at the time of death, and the season of the year favourable? For the body when shrunk and embalmed, as the manner is in Egypt, may remain almost entire through infinite ages; and even in decay, there are still some portions, such as the bones and ligaments, which are practically indestructible:--Do you agree? Yes. And is it likely that the soul, which is invisible, in passing to the place of the true Hades, which like her is invisible, and pure, and noble, and on her way to the good and wise God, whither, if God will, my soul is also soon to go,--that the soul, I repeat, if this be her nature and origin, will be blown away and destroyed immediately on quitting the body, as the many say? That can never be, my dear Simmias and Cebes. The truth rather is, that the soul which is pure at departing and draws after her no bodily taint, having never voluntarily during life had connection with the body, which she is ever avoiding, herself gathered into herself;--and making such abstraction her perpetual study--which means that she has been a true disciple of philosophy; and therefore has in fact been always engaged in the practice of dying? For is not philosophy the practice of death?-- Certainly-- That soul, I say, herself invisible, departs to the invisible world--to the divine and immortal and rational: thither arriving, she is secure of bliss and is released from the error and folly of men, their fears and wild passions and all other human ills, and for ever dwells, as they say of the initiated, in company with the gods (compare Apol.). Is not this true, Cebes? Yes, said Cebes, beyond a doubt. But the soul which has been polluted, and is impure at the time of her departure, and is the companion and servant of the body always, and is in love with and fascinated by the body and by the desires and pleasures of the body, until she is led to believe that the truth only exists in a bodily form, which a man may touch and see and taste, and use for the purposes of his lusts,--the soul, I mean, accustomed to hate and fear and avoid the intellectual principle, which to the bodily eye is dark and invisible, and can be attained only by philosophy;--do you suppose that such a soul will depart pure and unalloyed? Impossible, he replied. She is held fast by the corporeal, which the continual association and constant care of the body have wrought into her nature. Very true. And this corporeal element, my friend, is heavy and weighty and earthy, and is that element of sight by which a soul is depressed and dragged down again into the visible world, because she is afraid of the invisible and of the world below--prowling about tombs and sepulchres, near which, as they tell us, are seen certain ghostly apparitions of souls which have not departed pure, but are cloyed with sight and therefore visible. (Compare Milton, Comus:-- 'But when lust, By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk, But most by lewd and lavish act of sin, Lets in defilement to the inward parts, The soul grows clotted by contagion, Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose, The divine property of her first being. Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres, Lingering, and sitting by a new made grave, As loath to leave the body that it lov'd, And linked itself by carnal sensuality To a degenerate and degraded state.') That is very likely, Socrates. Yes, that is very likely, Cebes; and these must be the souls, not of the good, but of the evil, which are compelled to wander about such places in payment of the penalty of their former evil way of life; and they continue to wander until through the craving after the corporeal which never leaves them, they are imprisoned finally in another body. And they may be supposed to find their prisons in the same natures which they have had in their former lives. What natures do you mean, Socrates? What I mean is that men who have followed after gluttony, and wantonness, and drunkenness, and have had no thought of avoiding them, would pass into asses and animals of that sort. What do you think? I think such an opinion to be exceedingly probable. And those who have chosen the portion of injustice, and tyranny, and violence, will pass into wolves, or into hawks and kites;--whither else can we suppose them to go? Yes, said Cebes; with such natures, beyond question. And there is no difficulty, he said, in assigning to all of them places answering to their several natures and propensities? There is not, he said. Some are happier than others; and the happiest both in themselves and in the place to which they go are those who have practised the civil and social virtues which are called temperance and justice, and are acquired by habit and attention without philosophy and mind. (Compare Republic.) Why are they the happiest? Because they may be expected to pass into some gentle and social kind which is like their own, such as bees or wasps or ants, or back again into the form of man, and just and moderate men may be supposed to spring from them. Very likely. No one who has not studied philosophy and who is not entirely pure at the time of his departure is allowed to enter the company of the Gods, but the lover of knowledge only. And this is the reason, Simmias and Cebes, why the true votaries of philosophy abstain from all fleshly lusts, and hold out against them and refuse to give themselves up to them,--not because they fear poverty or the ruin of their families, like the lovers of money, and the world in general; nor like the lovers of power and honour, because they dread the dishonour or disgrace of evil deeds. No, Socrates, that would not become them, said Cebes. No indeed, he replied; and therefore they who have any care of their own souls, and do not merely live moulding and fashioning the body, say farewell to all this; they will not walk in the ways of the blind: and when philosophy offers them purification and release from evil, they feel that they ought not to resist her influence, and whither she leads they turn and follow. What do you mean, Socrates? I will tell you, he said. The lovers of knowledge are conscious that the soul was simply fastened and glued to the body--until philosophy received her, she could only view real existence through the bars of a prison, not in and through herself; she was wallowing in the mire of every sort of ignorance; and by reason of lust had become the principal accomplice in her own captivity. This was her original state; and then, as I was saying, and as the lovers of knowledge are well aware, philosophy, seeing how terrible was her confinement, of which she was to herself the cause, received and gently comforted her and sought to release her, pointing out that the eye and the ear and the other senses are full of deception, and persuading her to retire from them, and abstain from all but the necessary use of them, and be gathered up and collected into herself, bidding her trust in herself and her own pure apprehension of pure existence, and to mistrust whatever comes to her through other channels and is subject to variation; for such things are visible and tangible, but what she sees in her own nature is intelligible and invisible. And the soul of the true philosopher thinks that she ought not to resist this deliverance, and therefore abstains from pleasures and desires and pains and fears, as far as she is able; reflecting that when a man has great joys or sorrows or fears or desires, he suffers from them, not merely the sort of evil which might be anticipated--as for example, the loss of his health or property which he has sacrificed to his lusts--but an evil greater far, which is the greatest and worst of all evils, and one of which he never thinks. What is it, Socrates? said Cebes. The evil is that when the feeling of pleasure or pain is most intense, every soul of man imagines the objects of this intense feeling to be then plainest and truest: but this is not so, they are really the things of sight. Very true. And is not this the state in which the soul is most enthralled by the body? How so? Why, because each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, until she becomes like the body, and believes that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to have the same habits and haunts, and is not likely ever to be pure at her departure to the world below, but is always infected by the body; and so she sinks into another body and there germinates and grows, and has therefore no part in the communion of the divine and pure and simple. Most true, Socrates, answered Cebes. And this, Cebes, is the reason why the true lovers of knowledge are temperate and brave; and not for the reason which the world gives. Certainly not. Certainly not! The soul of a philosopher will reason in quite another way; she will not ask philosophy to release her in order that when released she may deliver herself up again to the thraldom of pleasures and pains, doing a work only to be undone again, weaving instead of unweaving her Penelope's web. But she will calm passion, and follow reason, and dwell in the contemplation of her, beholding the true and divine (which is not matter of opinion), and thence deriving nourishment. Thus she seeks to live while she lives, and after death she hopes to go to her own kindred and to that which is like her, and to be freed from human ills. Never fear, Simmias and Cebes, that a soul which has been thus nurtured and has had these pursuits, will at her departure from the body be scattered and blown away by the winds and be nowhere and nothing. When Socrates had done speaking, for a considerable time there was silence; he himself appeared to be meditating, as most of us were, on what had been said; only Cebes and Simmias spoke a few words to one another. And Socrates observing them asked what they thought of the argument, and whether there was anything wanting? For, said he, there are many points still open to suspicion and attack, if any one were disposed to sift the matter thoroughly. Should you be considering some other matter I say no more, but if you are still in doubt do not hesitate to say exactly what you think, and let us have anything better which you can suggest; and if you think that I can be of any use, allow me to help you. Simmias said: I must confess, Socrates, that doubts did arise in our minds, and each of us was urging and inciting the other to put the question which we wanted to have answered and which neither of us liked to ask, fearing that our importunity might be troublesome under present at such a time. Socrates replied with a smile: O Simmias, what are you saying? I am not very likely to persuade other men that I do not regard my present situation as a misfortune, if I cannot even persuade you that I am no worse off now than at any other time in my life. Will you not allow that I have as much of the spirit of prophecy in me as the swans? For they, when they perceive that they must die, having sung all their life long, do then sing more lustily than ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are about to go away to the god whose ministers they are. But men, because they are themselves afraid of death, slanderously affirm of the swans that they sing a lament at the last, not considering that no bird sings when cold, or hungry, or in pain, not even the nightingale, nor the swallow, nor yet the hoopoe; which are said indeed to tune a lay of sorrow, although I do not believe this to be true of them any more than of the swans. But because they are sacred to Apollo, they have the gift of prophecy, and anticipate the good things of another world, wherefore they sing and rejoice in that day more than they ever did before. And I too, believing myself to be the consecrated servant of the same God, and the fellow-servant of the swans, and thinking that I have received from my master gifts of prophecy which are not inferior to theirs, would not go out of life less merrily than the swans. Never mind then, if this be your only objection, but speak and ask anything which you like, while the eleven magistrates of Athens allow. Very good, Socrates, said Simmias; then I will tell you my difficulty, and Cebes will tell you his. I feel myself, (and I daresay that you have the same feeling), how hard or rather impossible is the attainment of any certainty about questions such as these in the present life. And yet I should deem him a coward who did not prove what is said about them to the uttermost, or whose heart failed him before he had examined them on every side. For he should persevere until he has achieved one of two things: either he should discover, or be taught the truth about them; or, if this be impossible, I would have him take the best and most irrefragable of human theories, and let this be the raft upon which he sails through life--not without risk, as I admit, if he cannot find some word of God which will more surely and safely carry him. And now, as you bid me, I will venture to question you, and then I shall not have to reproach myself hereafter with not having said at the time what I think. For when I consider the matter, either alone or with Cebes, the argument does certainly appear to me, Socrates, to be not sufficient. Socrates answered: I dare say, my friend, that you may be right, but I should like to know in what respect the argument is insufficient. In this respect, replied Simmias:--Suppose a person to use the same argument about harmony and the lyre--might he not say that harmony is a thing invisible, incorporeal, perfect, divine, existing in the lyre which is harmonized, but that the lyre and the strings are matter and material, composite, earthy, and akin to mortality? And when some one breaks the lyre, or cuts and rends the strings, then he who takes this view would argue as you do, and on the same analogy, that the harmony survives and has not perished--you cannot imagine, he would say, that the lyre without the strings, and the broken strings themselves which are mortal remain, and yet that the harmony, which is of heavenly and immortal nature and kindred, has perished--perished before the mortal. The harmony must still be somewhere, and the wood and strings will decay before anything can happen to that. The thought, Socrates, must have occurred to your own mind that such is our conception of the soul; and that when the body is in a manner strung and held together by the elements of hot and cold, wet and dry, then the soul is the harmony or due proportionate admixture of them. But if so, whenever the strings of the body are unduly loosened or overstrained through disease or other injury, then the soul, though most divine, like other harmonies of music or of works of art, of course perishes at once, although the material remains of the body may last for a considerable time, until they are either decayed or burnt. And if any one maintains that the soul, being the harmony of the elements of the body, is first to perish in that which is called death, how shall we answer him? Socrates looked fixedly at us as his manner was, and said with a smile: Simmias has reason on his side; and why does not some one of you who is better able than myself answer him? for there is force in his attack upon me. But perhaps, before we answer him, we had better also hear what Cebes has to say that we may gain time for reflection, and when they have both spoken, we may either assent to them, if there is truth in what they say, or if not, we will maintain our position. Please to tell me then, Cebes, he said, what was the difficulty which troubled you? Cebes said: I will tell you. My feeling is that the argument is where it was, and open to the same objections which were urged before; for I am ready to admit that the existence of the soul before entering into the bodily form has been very ingeniously, and, if I may say so, quite sufficiently proven; but the existence of the soul after death is still, in my judgment, unproven. Now my objection is not the same as that of Simmias; for I am not disposed to deny that the soul is stronger and more lasting than the body, being of opinion that in all such respects the soul very far excels the body. Well, then, says the argument to me, why do you remain unconvinced?--When you see that the weaker continues in existence after the man is dead, will you not admit that the more lasting must also survive during the same period of time? Now I will ask you to consider whether the objection, which, like Simmias, I will express in a figure, is of any weight. The analogy which I will adduce is that of an old weaver, who dies, and after his death somebody says:--He is not dead, he must be alive;--see, there is the coat which he himself wove and wore, and which remains whole and undecayed. And then he proceeds to ask of some one who is incredulous, whether a man lasts longer, or the coat which is in use and wear; and when he is answered that a man lasts far longer, thinks that he has thus certainly demonstrated the survival of the man, who is the more lasting, because the less lasting remains. But that, Simmias, as I would beg you to remark, is a mistake; any one can see that he who talks thus is talking nonsense. For the truth is, that the weaver aforesaid, having woven and worn many such coats, outlived several of them, and was outlived by the last; but a man is not therefore proved to be slighter and weaker than a coat. Now the relation of the body to the soul may be expressed in a similar figure; and any one may very fairly say in like manner that the soul is lasting, and the body weak and shortlived in comparison. He may argue in like manner that every soul wears out many bodies, especially if a man live many years. While he is alive the body deliquesces and decays, and the soul always weaves another garment and repairs the waste. But of course, whenever the soul perishes, she must have on her last garment, and this will survive her; and then at length, when the soul is dead, the body will show its native weakness, and quickly decompose and pass away. I would therefore rather not rely on the argument from superior strength to prove the continued existence of the soul after death. For granting even more than you affirm to be possible, and acknowledging not only that the soul existed before birth, but also that the souls of some exist, and will continue to exist after death, and will be born and die again and again, and that there is a natural strength in the soul which will hold out and be born many times--nevertheless, we may be still inclined to think that she will weary in the labours of successive births, and may at last succumb in one of her deaths and utterly perish; and this death and dissolution of the body which brings destruction to the soul may be unknown to any of us, for no one of us can have had any experience of it: and if so, then I maintain that he who is confident about death has but a foolish confidence, unless he is able to prove that the soul is altogether immortal and imperishable. But if he cannot prove the soul's immortality, he who is about to die will always have reason to fear that when the body is disunited, the soul also may utterly perish. All of us, as we afterwards remarked to one another, had an unpleasant feeling at hearing what they said. When we had been so firmly convinced before, now to have our faith shaken seemed to introduce a confusion and uncertainty, not only into the previous argument, but into any future one; either we were incapable of forming a judgment, or there were no grounds of belief."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"There I feel with you--by heaven I do, Phaedo, and when you were speaking, I was beginning to ask myself the same question: What argument can I ever trust again? For what could be more convincing than the argument of Socrates, which has now fallen into discredit? That the soul is a harmony is a doctrine which has always had a wonderful attraction for me, and, when mentioned, came back to me at once, as my own original conviction. And now I must begin again and find another argument which will assure me that when the man is dead the soul survives. Tell me, I implore you, how did Socrates proceed? Did he appear to share the unpleasant feeling which you mention? or did he calmly meet the attack? And did he answer forcibly or feebly? Narrate what passed as exactly as you can."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"Often, Echecrates, I have wondered at Socrates, but never more than on that occasion. That he should be able to answer was nothing, but what astonished me was, first, the gentle and pleasant and approving manner in which he received the words of the young men, and then his quick sense of the wound which had been inflicted by the argument, and the readiness with which he healed it. He might be compared to a general rallying his defeated and broken army, urging them to accompany him and return to the field of argument."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"What followed?"}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"You shall hear, for I was close to him on his right hand, seated on a sort of stool, and he on a couch which was a good deal higher. He stroked my head, and pressed the hair upon my neck--he had a way of playing with my hair; and then he said: To-morrow, Phaedo, I suppose that these fair locks of yours will be severed. Yes, Socrates, I suppose that they will, I replied. Not so, if you will take my advice. What shall I do with them? I said. To-day, he replied, and not to-morrow, if this argument dies and we cannot bring it to life again, you and I will both shave our locks; and if I were you, and the argument got away from me, and I could not hold my ground against Simmias and Cebes, I would myself take an oath, like the Argives, not to wear hair any more until I had renewed the conflict and defeated them. Yes, I said, but Heracles himself is said not to be a match for two. Summon me then, he said, and I will be your Iolaus until the sun goes down. I summon you rather, I rejoined, not as Heracles summoning Iolaus, but as Iolaus might summon Heracles. That will do as well, he said. But first let us take care that we avoid a danger. Of what nature? I said. Lest we become misologists, he replied, no worse thing can happen to a man than this. For as there are misanthropists or haters of men, there are also misologists or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same cause, which is ignorance of the world. Misanthropy arises out of the too great confidence of inexperience;--you trust a man and think him altogether true and sound and faithful, and then in a little while he turns out to be false and knavish; and then another and another, and when this has happened several times to a man, especially when it happens among those whom he deems to be his own most trusted and familiar friends, and he has often quarreled with them, he at last hates all men, and believes that no one has any good in him at all. You must have observed this trait of character? I have. And is not the feeling discreditable? Is it not obvious that such an one having to deal with other men, was clearly without any experience of human nature; for experience would have taught him the true state of the case, that few are the good and few the evil, and that the great majority are in the interval between them. What do you mean? I said. I mean, he replied, as you might say of the very large and very small, that nothing is more uncommon than a very large or very small man; and this applies generally to all extremes, whether of great and small, or swift and slow, or fair and foul, or black and white: and whether the instances you select be men or dogs or anything else, few are the extremes, but many are in the mean between them. Did you never observe this? Yes, I said, I have. And do you not imagine, he said, that if there were a competition in evil, the worst would be found to be very few? Yes, that is very likely, I said. Yes, that is very likely, he replied; although in this respect arguments are unlike men--there I was led on by you to say more than I had intended; but the point of comparison was, that when a simple man who has no skill in dialectics believes an argument to be true which he afterwards imagines to be false, whether really false or not, and then another and another, he has no longer any faith left, and great disputers, as you know, come to think at last that they have grown to be the wisest of mankind; for they alone perceive the utter unsoundness and instability of all arguments, or indeed, of all things, which, like the currents in the Euripus, are going up and down in never-ceasing ebb and flow. That is quite true, I said. Yes, Phaedo, he replied, and how melancholy, if there be such a thing as truth or certainty or possibility of knowledge--that a man should have lighted upon some argument or other which at first seemed true and then turned out to be false, and instead of blaming himself and his own want of wit, because he is annoyed, should at last be too glad to transfer the blame from himself to arguments in general: and for ever afterwards should hate and revile them, and lose truth and the knowledge of realities. Yes, indeed, I said; that is very melancholy. Let us then, in the first place, he said, be careful of allowing or of admitting into our souls the notion that there is no health or soundness in any arguments at all. Rather say that we have not yet attained to soundness in ourselves, and that we must struggle manfully and do our best to gain health of mind--you and all other men having regard to the whole of your future life, and I myself in the prospect of death. For at this moment I am sensible that I have not the temper of a philosopher; like the vulgar, I am only a partisan. Now the partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions. And the difference between him and me at the present moment is merely this--that whereas he seeks to convince his hearers that what he says is true, I am rather seeking to convince myself; to convince my hearers is a secondary matter with me. And do but see how much I gain by the argument. For if what I say is true, then I do well to be persuaded of the truth, but if there be nothing after death, still, during the short time that remains, I shall not distress my friends with lamentations, and my ignorance will not last, but will die with me, and therefore no harm will be done. This is the state of mind, Simmias and Cebes, in which I approach the argument. And I would ask you to be thinking of the truth and not of Socrates: agree with me, if I seem to you to be speaking the truth; or if not, withstand me might and main, that I may not deceive you as well as myself in my enthusiasm, and like the bee, leave my sting in you before I die. And now let us proceed, he said. And first of all let me be sure that I have in my mind what you were saying. Simmias, if I remember rightly, has fears and misgivings whether the soul, although a fairer and diviner thing than the body, being as she is in the form of harmony, may not perish first. On the other hand, Cebes appeared to grant that the soul was more lasting than the body, but he said that no one could know whether the soul, after having worn out many bodies, might not perish herself and leave her last body behind her; and that this is death, which is the destruction not of the body but of the soul, for in the body the work of destruction is ever going on. Are not these, Simmias and Cebes, the points which we have to consider? They both agreed to this statement of them. He proceeded: And did you deny the force of the whole preceding argument, or of a part only? Of a part only, they replied. And what did you think, he said, of that part of the argument in which we said that knowledge was recollection, and hence inferred that the soul must have previously existed somewhere else before she was enclosed in the body? Cebes said that he had been wonderfully impressed by that part of the argument, and that his conviction remained absolutely unshaken. Simmias agreed, and added that he himself could hardly imagine the possibility of his ever thinking differently. But, rejoined Socrates, you will have to think differently, my Theban friend, if you still maintain that harmony is a compound, and that the soul is a harmony which is made out of strings set in the frame of the body; for you will surely never allow yourself to say that a harmony is prior to the elements which compose it. Never, Socrates. But do you not see that this is what you imply when you say that the soul existed before she took the form and body of man, and was made up of elements which as yet had no existence? For harmony is not like the soul, as you suppose; but first the lyre, and the strings, and the sounds exist in a state of discord, and then harmony is made last of all, and perishes first. And how can such a notion of the soul as this agree with the other? Not at all, replied Simmias. And yet, he said, there surely ought to be harmony in a discourse of which harmony is the theme. There ought, replied Simmias. But there is no harmony, he said, in the two propositions that knowledge is recollection, and that the soul is a harmony. Which of them will you retain? I think, he replied, that I have a much stronger faith, Socrates, in the first of the two, which has been fully demonstrated to me, than in the latter, which has not been demonstrated at all, but rests only on probable and plausible grounds; and is therefore believed by the many. I know too well that these arguments from probabilities are impostors, and unless great caution is observed in the use of them, they are apt to be deceptive--in geometry, and in other things too. But the doctrine of knowledge and recollection has been proven to me on trustworthy grounds; and the proof was that the soul must have existed before she came into the body, because to her belongs the essence of which the very name implies existence. Having, as I am convinced, rightly accepted this conclusion, and on sufficient grounds, I must, as I suppose, cease to argue or allow others to argue that the soul is a harmony. Let me put the matter, Simmias, he said, in another point of view: Do you imagine that a harmony or any other composition can be in a state other than that of the elements, out of which it is compounded? Certainly not. Or do or suffer anything other than they do or suffer? He agreed. Then a harmony does not, properly speaking, lead the parts or elements which make up the harmony, but only follows them. He assented. For harmony cannot possibly have any motion, or sound, or other quality which is opposed to its parts. That would be impossible, he replied. And does not the nature of every harmony depend upon the manner in which the elements are harmonized? I do not understand you, he said. I mean to say that a harmony admits of degrees, and is more of a harmony, and more completely a harmony, when more truly and fully harmonized, to any extent which is possible; and less of a harmony, and less completely a harmony, when less truly and fully harmonized. True. But does the soul admit of degrees? or is one soul in the very least degree more or less, or more or less completely, a soul than another? Not in the least. Yet surely of two souls, one is said to have intelligence and virtue, and to be good, and the other to have folly and vice, and to be an evil soul: and this is said truly? Yes, truly. But what will those who maintain the soul to be a harmony say of this presence of virtue and vice in the soul?--will they say that here is another harmony, and another discord, and that the virtuous soul is harmonized, and herself being a harmony has another harmony within her, and that the vicious soul is inharmonical and has no harmony within her? I cannot tell, replied Simmias; but I suppose that something of the sort would be asserted by those who say that the soul is a harmony. And we have already admitted that no soul is more a soul than another; which is equivalent to admitting that harmony is not more or less harmony, or more or less completely a harmony? Quite true. And that which is not more or less a harmony is not more or less harmonized? True. And that which is not more or less harmonized cannot have more or less of harmony, but only an equal harmony? Yes, an equal harmony. Then one soul not being more or less absolutely a soul than another, is not more or less harmonized? Exactly. And therefore has neither more nor less of discord, nor yet of harmony? She has not. And having neither more nor less of harmony or of discord, one soul has no more vice or virtue than another, if vice be discord and virtue harmony? Not at all more. Or speaking more correctly, Simmias, the soul, if she is a harmony, will never have any vice; because a harmony, being absolutely a harmony, has no part in the inharmonical. No. And therefore a soul which is absolutely a soul has no vice? How can she have, if the previous argument holds? Then, if all souls are equally by their nature souls, all souls of all living creatures will be equally good? I agree with you, Socrates, he said. And can all this be true, think you? he said; for these are the consequences which seem to follow from the assumption that the soul is a harmony? It cannot be true. Once more, he said, what ruler is there of the elements of human nature other than the soul, and especially the wise soul? Do you know of any? Indeed, I do not. And is the soul in agreement with the affections of the body? or is she at variance with them? For example, when the body is hot and thirsty, does not the soul incline us against drinking? and when the body is hungry, against eating? And this is only one instance out of ten thousand of the opposition of the soul to the things of the body. Very true. But we have already acknowledged that the soul, being a harmony, can never utter a note at variance with the tensions and relaxations and vibrations and other affections of the strings out of which she is composed; she can only follow, she cannot lead them? It must be so, he replied. And yet do we not now discover the soul to be doing the exact opposite--leading the elements of which she is believed to be composed; almost always opposing and coercing them in all sorts of ways throughout life, sometimes more violently with the pains of medicine and gymnastic; then again more gently; now threatening, now admonishing the desires, passions, fears, as if talking to a thing which is not herself, as Homer in the Odyssee represents Odysseus doing in the words-- 'He beat his breast, and thus reproached his heart: Endure, my heart; far worse hast thou endured!' Do you think that Homer wrote this under the idea that the soul is a harmony capable of being led by the affections of the body, and not rather of a nature which should lead and master them--herself a far diviner thing than any harmony? Yes, Socrates, I quite think so. Then, my friend, we can never be right in saying that the soul is a harmony, for we should contradict the divine Homer, and contradict ourselves. True, he said. Thus much, said Socrates, of Harmonia, your Theban goddess, who has graciously yielded to us; but what shall I say, Cebes, to her husband Cadmus, and how shall I make peace with him? I think that you will discover a way of propitiating him, said Cebes; I am sure that you have put the argument with Harmonia in a manner that I could never have expected. For when Simmias was mentioning his difficulty, I quite imagined that no answer could be given to him, and therefore I was surprised at finding that his argument could not sustain the first onset of yours, and not impossibly the other, whom you call Cadmus, may share a similar fate. Nay, my good friend, said Socrates, let us not boast, lest some evil eye should put to flight the word which I am about to speak. That, however, may be left in the hands of those above, while I draw near in Homeric fashion, and try the mettle of your words. Here lies the point:--You want to have it proven to you that the soul is imperishable and immortal, and the philosopher who is confident in death appears to you to have but a vain and foolish confidence, if he believes that he will fare better in the world below than one who has led another sort of life, unless he can prove this; and you say that the demonstration of the strength and divinity of the soul, and of her existence prior to our becoming men, does not necessarily imply her immortality. Admitting the soul to be longlived, and to have known and done much in a former state, still she is not on that account immortal; and her entrance into the human form may be a sort of disease which is the beginning of dissolution, and may at last, after the toils of life are over, end in that which is called death. And whether the soul enters into the body once only or many times, does not, as you say, make any difference in the fears of individuals. For any man, who is not devoid of sense, must fear, if he has no knowledge and can give no account of the soul's immortality. This, or something like this, I suspect to be your notion, Cebes; and I designedly recur to it in order that nothing may escape us, and that you may, if you wish, add or subtract anything. But, said Cebes, as far as I see at present, I have nothing to add or subtract: I mean what you say that I mean. Socrates paused awhile, and seemed to be absorbed in reflection. At length he said: You are raising a tremendous question, Cebes, involving the whole nature of generation and corruption, about which, if you like, I will give you my own experience; and if anything which I say is likely to avail towards the solution of your difficulty you may make use of it. I should very much like, said Cebes, to hear what you have to say. Then I will tell you, said Socrates. When I was young, Cebes, I had a prodigious desire to know that department of philosophy which is called the investigation of nature; to know the causes of things, and why a thing is and is created or destroyed appeared to me to be a lofty profession; and I was always agitating myself with the consideration of questions such as these:--Is the growth of animals the result of some decay which the hot and cold principle contracts, as some have said? Is the blood the element with which we think, or the air, or the fire? or perhaps nothing of the kind--but the brain may be the originating power of the perceptions of hearing and sight and smell, and memory and opinion may come from them, and science may be based on memory and opinion when they have attained fixity. And then I went on to examine the corruption of them, and then to the things of heaven and earth, and at last I concluded myself to be utterly and absolutely incapable of these enquiries, as I will satisfactorily prove to you. For I was fascinated by them to such a degree that my eyes grew blind to things which I had seemed to myself, and also to others, to know quite well; I forgot what I had before thought self-evident truths; e.g. such a fact as that the growth of man is the result of eating and drinking; for when by the digestion of food flesh is added to flesh and bone to bone, and whenever there is an aggregation of congenial elements, the lesser bulk becomes larger and the small man great. Was not that a reasonable notion? Yes, said Cebes, I think so. Well; but let me tell you something more. There was a time when I thought that I understood the meaning of greater and less pretty well; and when I saw a great man standing by a little one, I fancied that one was taller than the other by a head; or one horse would appear to be greater than another horse: and still more clearly did I seem to perceive that ten is two more than eight, and that two cubits are more than one, because two is the double of one. And what is now your notion of such matters? said Cebes. I should be far enough from imagining, he replied, that I knew the cause of any of them, by heaven I should; for I cannot satisfy myself that, when one is added to one, the one to which the addition is made becomes two, or that the two units added together make two by reason of the addition. I cannot understand how, when separated from the other, each of them was one and not two, and now, when they are brought together, the mere juxtaposition or meeting of them should be the cause of their becoming two: neither can I understand how the division of one is the way to make two; for then a different cause would produce the same effect,--as in the former instance the addition and juxtaposition of one to one was the cause of two, in this the separation and subtraction of one from the other would be the cause. Nor am I any longer satisfied that I understand the reason why one or anything else is either generated or destroyed or is at all, but I have in my mind some confused notion of a new method, and can never admit the other. Then I heard some one reading, as he said, from a book of Anaxagoras, that mind was the disposer and cause of all, and I was delighted at this notion, which appeared quite admirable, and I said to myself: If mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all for the best, and put each particular in the best place; and I argued that if any one desired to find out the cause of the generation or destruction or existence of anything, he must find out what state of being or doing or suffering was best for that thing, and therefore a man had only to consider the best for himself and others, and then he would also know the worse, since the same science comprehended both. And I rejoiced to think that I had found in Anaxagoras a teacher of the causes of existence such as I desired, and I imagined that he would tell me first whether the earth is flat or round; and whichever was true, he would proceed to explain the cause and the necessity of this being so, and then he would teach me the nature of the best and show that this was best; and if he said that the earth was in the centre, he would further explain that this position was the best, and I should be satisfied with the explanation given, and not want any other sort of cause. And I thought that I would then go on and ask him about the sun and moon and stars, and that he would explain to me their comparative swiftness, and their returnings and various states, active and passive, and how all of them were for the best. For I could not imagine that when he spoke of mind as the disposer of them, he would give any other account of their being as they are, except that this was best; and I thought that when he had explained to me in detail the cause of each and the cause of all, he would go on to explain to me what was best for each and what was good for all. These hopes I would not have sold for a large sum of money, and I seized the books and read them as fast as I could in my eagerness to know the better and the worse. What expectations I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed! As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person who began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when he endeavoured to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have joints which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture--that is what he would say, and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is, that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia--by the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, of enduring any punishment which the state inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the condition, which the many, feeling about in the dark, are always mistaking and misnaming. And thus one man makes a vortex all round and steadies the earth by the heaven; another gives the air as a support to the earth, which is a sort of broad trough. Any power which in arranging them as they are arranges them for the best never enters into their minds; and instead of finding any superior strength in it, they rather expect to discover another Atlas of the world who is stronger and more everlasting and more containing than the good;--of the obligatory and containing power of the good they think nothing; and yet this is the principle which I would fain learn if any one would teach me. But as I have failed either to discover myself, or to learn of any one else, the nature of the best, I will exhibit to you, if you like, what I have found to be the second best mode of enquiring into the cause. I should very much like to hear, he replied. Socrates proceeded:--I thought that as I had failed in the contemplation of true existence, I ought to be careful that I did not lose the eye of my soul; as people may injure their bodily eye by observing and gazing on the sun during an eclipse, unless they take the precaution of only looking at the image reflected in the water, or in some similar medium. So in my own case, I was afraid that my soul might be blinded altogether if I looked at things with my eyes or tried to apprehend them by the help of the senses. And I thought that I had better have recourse to the world of mind and seek there the truth of existence. I dare say that the simile is not perfect--for I am very far from admitting that he who contemplates existences through the medium of thought, sees them only 'through a glass darkly,' any more than he who considers them in action and operation. However, this was the method which I adopted: I first assumed some principle which I judged to be the strongest, and then I affirmed as true whatever seemed to agree with this, whether relating to the cause or to anything else; and that which disagreed I regarded as untrue. But I should like to explain my meaning more clearly, as I do not think that you as yet understand me. No indeed, replied Cebes, not very well. There is nothing new, he said, in what I am about to tell you; but only what I have been always and everywhere repeating in the previous discussion and on other occasions: I want to show you the nature of that cause which has occupied my thoughts. I shall have to go back to those familiar words which are in the mouth of every one, and first of all assume that there is an absolute beauty and goodness and greatness, and the like; grant me this, and I hope to be able to show you the nature of the cause, and to prove the immortality of the soul. Cebes said: You may proceed at once with the proof, for I grant you this. Well, he said, then I should like to know whether you agree with me in the next step; for I cannot help thinking, if there be anything beautiful other than absolute beauty should there be such, that it can be beautiful only in as far as it partakes of absolute beauty--and I should say the same of everything. Do you agree in this notion of the cause? Yes, he said, I agree. He proceeded: I know nothing and can understand nothing of any other of those wise causes which are alleged; and if a person says to me that the bloom of colour, or form, or any such thing is a source of beauty, I leave all that, which is only confusing to me, and simply and singly, and perhaps foolishly, hold and am assured in my own mind that nothing makes a thing beautiful but the presence and participation of beauty in whatever way or manner obtained; for as to the manner I am uncertain, but I stoutly contend that by beauty all beautiful things become beautiful. This appears to me to be the safest answer which I can give, either to myself or to another, and to this I cling, in the persuasion that this principle will never be overthrown, and that to myself or to any one who asks the question, I may safely reply, That by beauty beautiful things become beautiful. Do you not agree with me? I do. And that by greatness only great things become great and greater greater, and by smallness the less become less? True. Then if a person were to remark that A is taller by a head than B, and B less by a head than A, you would refuse to admit his statement, and would stoutly contend that what you mean is only that the greater is greater by, and by reason of, greatness, and the less is less only by, and by reason of, smallness; and thus you would avoid the danger of saying that the greater is greater and the less less by the measure of the head, which is the same in both, and would also avoid the monstrous absurdity of supposing that the greater man is greater by reason of the head, which is small. You would be afraid to draw such an inference, would you not? Indeed, I should, said Cebes, laughing. In like manner you would be afraid to say that ten exceeded eight by, and by reason of, two; but would say by, and by reason of, number; or you would say that two cubits exceed one cubit not by a half, but by magnitude?-for there is the same liability to error in all these cases. Very true, he said. Again, would you not be cautious of affirming that the addition of one to one, or the division of one, is the cause of two? And you would loudly asseverate that you know of no way in which anything comes into existence except by participation in its own proper essence, and consequently, as far as you know, the only cause of two is the participation in duality--this is the way to make two, and the participation in one is the way to make one. You would say: I will let alone puzzles of division and addition--wiser heads than mine may answer them; inexperienced as I am, and ready to start, as the proverb says, at my own shadow, I cannot afford to give up the sure ground of a principle. And if any one assails you there, you would not mind him, or answer him, until you had seen whether the consequences which follow agree with one another or not, and when you are further required to give an explanation of this principle, you would go on to assume a higher principle, and a higher, until you found a resting-place in the best of the higher; but you would not confuse the principle and the consequences in your reasoning, like the Eristics--at least if you wanted to discover real existence. Not that this confusion signifies to them, who never care or think about the matter at all, for they have the wit to be well pleased with themselves however great may be the turmoil of their ideas. But you, if you are a philosopher, will certainly do as I say. What you say is most true, said Simmias and Cebes, both speaking at once."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, Phaedo; and I do not wonder at their assenting. Any one who has the least sense will acknowledge the wonderful clearness of Socrates' reasoning."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"Certainly, Echecrates; and such was the feeling of the whole company at the time."}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"ECHECRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, and equally of ourselves, who were not of the company, and are now listening to your recital. But what followed?"}
{"Book":"phaedo","Speaker":"PHAEDO","Dialogue":"After all this had been admitted, and they had that ideas exist, and that other things participate in them and derive their names from them, Socrates, if I remember rightly, said:-- This is your way of speaking; and yet when you say that Simmias is greater than Socrates and less than Phaedo, do you not predicate of Simmias both greatness and smallness? Yes, I do. But still you allow that Simmias does not really exceed Socrates, as the words may seem to imply, because he is Simmias, but by reason of the size which he has; just as Simmias does not exceed Socrates because he is Simmias, any more than because Socrates is Socrates, but because he has smallness when compared with the greatness of Simmias? True. And if Phaedo exceeds him in size, this is not because Phaedo is Phaedo, but because Phaedo has greatness relatively to Simmias, who is comparatively smaller? That is true. And therefore Simmias is said to be great, and is also said to be small, because he is in a mean between them, exceeding the smallness of the one by his greatness, and allowing the greatness of the other to exceed his smallness. He added, laughing, I am speaking like a book, but I believe that what I am saying is true. Simmias assented. I speak as I do because I want you to agree with me in thinking, not only that absolute greatness will never be great and also small, but that greatness in us or in the concrete will never admit the small or admit of being exceeded: instead of this, one of two things will happen, either the greater will fly or retire before the opposite, which is the less, or at the approach of the less has already ceased to exist; but will not, if allowing or admitting of smallness, be changed by that; even as I, having received and admitted smallness when compared with Simmias, remain just as I was, and am the same small person. And as the idea of greatness cannot condescend ever to be or become small, in like manner the smallness in us cannot be or become great; nor can any other opposite which remains the same ever be or become its own opposite, but either passes away or perishes in the change. That, replied Cebes, is quite my notion. Hereupon one of the company, though I do not exactly remember which of them, said: In heaven's name, is not this the direct contrary of what was admitted before--that out of the greater came the less and out of the less the greater, and that opposites were simply generated from opposites; but now this principle seems to be utterly denied. Socrates inclined his head to the speaker and listened. I like your courage, he said, in reminding us of this. But you do not observe that there is a difference in the two cases. For then we were speaking of opposites in the concrete, and now of the essential opposite which, as is affirmed, neither in us nor in nature can ever be at variance with itself: then, my friend, we were speaking of things in which opposites are inherent and which are called after them, but now about the opposites which are inherent in them and which give their name to them; and these essential opposites will never, as we maintain, admit of generation into or out of one another. At the same time, turning to Cebes, he said: Are you at all disconcerted, Cebes, at our friend's objection? No, I do not feel so, said Cebes; and yet I cannot deny that I am often disturbed by objections. Then we are agreed after all, said Socrates, that the opposite will never in any case be opposed to itself? To that we are quite agreed, he replied. Yet once more let me ask you to consider the question from another point of view, and see whether you agree with me:--There is a thing which you term heat, and another thing which you term cold? Certainly. But are they the same as fire and snow? Most assuredly not. Heat is a thing different from fire, and cold is not the same with snow? Yes. And yet you will surely admit, that when snow, as was before said, is under the influence of heat, they will not remain snow and heat; but at the advance of the heat, the snow will either retire or perish? Very true, he replied. And the fire too at the advance of the cold will either retire or perish; and when the fire is under the influence of the cold, they will not remain as before, fire and cold. That is true, he said. And in some cases the name of the idea is not only attached to the idea in an eternal connection, but anything else which, not being the idea, exists only in the form of the idea, may also lay claim to it. I will try to make this clearer by an example:--The odd number is always called by the name of odd? Very true. But is this the only thing which is called odd? Are there not other things which have their own name, and yet are called odd, because, although not the same as oddness, they are never without oddness?--that is what I mean to ask--whether numbers such as the number three are not of the class of odd. And there are many other examples: would you not say, for example, that three may be called by its proper name, and also be called odd, which is not the same with three? and this may be said not only of three but also of five, and of every alternate number--each of them without being oddness is odd, and in the same way two and four, and the other series of alternate numbers, has every number even, without being evenness. Do you agree? Of course. Then now mark the point at which I am aiming:--not only do essential opposites exclude one another, but also concrete things, which, although not in themselves opposed, contain opposites; these, I say, likewise reject the idea which is opposed to that which is contained in them, and when it approaches them they either perish or withdraw. For example; Will not the number three endure annihilation or anything sooner than be converted into an even number, while remaining three? Very true, said Cebes. And yet, he said, the number two is certainly not opposed to the number three? It is not. Then not only do opposite ideas repel the advance of one another, but also there are other natures which repel the approach of opposites. Very true, he said. Suppose, he said, that we endeavour, if possible, to determine what these are. By all means. Are they not, Cebes, such as compel the things of which they have possession, not only to take their own form, but also the form of some opposite? What do you mean? I mean, as I was just now saying, and as I am sure that you know, that those things which are possessed by the number three must not only be three in number, but must also be odd. Quite true. And on this oddness, of which the number three has the impress, the opposite idea will never intrude? No. And this impress was given by the odd principle? Yes. And to the odd is opposed the even? True. Then the idea of the even number will never arrive at three? No. Then three has no part in the even? None. Then the triad or number three is uneven? Very true. To return then to my distinction of natures which are not opposed, and yet do not admit opposites--as, in the instance given, three, although not opposed to the even, does not any the more admit of the even, but always brings the opposite into play on the other side; or as two does not receive the odd, or fire the cold--from these examples (and there are many more of them) perhaps you may be able to arrive at the general conclusion, that not only opposites will not receive opposites, but also that nothing which brings the opposite will admit the opposite of that which it brings, in that to which it is brought. And here let me recapitulate--for there is no harm in repetition. The number five will not admit the nature of the even, any more than ten, which is the double of five, will admit the nature of the odd. The double has another opposite, and is not strictly opposed to the odd, but nevertheless rejects the odd altogether. Nor again will parts in the ratio 3:2, nor any fraction in which there is a half, nor again in which there is a third, admit the notion of the whole, although they are not opposed to the whole: You will agree? Yes, he said, I entirely agree and go along with you in that. And now, he said, let us begin again; and do not you answer my question in the words in which I ask it: let me have not the old safe answer of which I spoke at first, but another equally safe, of which the truth will be inferred by you from what has been just said. I mean that if any one asks you 'what that is, of which the inherence makes the body hot,' you will reply not heat (this is what I call the safe and stupid answer), but fire, a far superior answer, which we are now in a condition to give. Or if any one asks you 'why a body is diseased,' you will not say from disease, but from fever; and instead of saying that oddness is the cause of odd numbers, you will say that the monad is the cause of them: and so of things in general, as I dare say that you will understand sufficiently without my adducing any further examples. Yes, he said, I quite understand you. Tell me, then, what is that of which the inherence will render the body alive? The soul, he replied. And is this always the case? Yes, he said, of course. Then whatever the soul possesses, to that she comes bearing life? Yes, certainly. And is there any opposite to life? There is, he said. And what is that? Death. Then the soul, as has been acknowledged, will never receive the opposite of what she brings. Impossible, replied Cebes. And now, he said, what did we just now call that principle which repels the even? The odd. And that principle which repels the musical, or the just? The unmusical, he said, and the unjust. And what do we call the principle which does not admit of death? The immortal, he said. And does the soul admit of death? No. Then the soul is immortal? Yes, he said. And may we say that this has been proven? Yes, abundantly proven, Socrates, he replied. Supposing that the odd were imperishable, must not three be imperishable? Of course. And if that which is cold were imperishable, when the warm principle came attacking the snow, must not the snow have retired whole and unmelted--for it could never have perished, nor could it have remained and admitted the heat? True, he said. Again, if the uncooling or warm principle were imperishable, the fire when assailed by cold would not have perished or have been extinguished, but would have gone away unaffected? Certainly, he said. And the same may be said of the immortal: if the immortal is also imperishable, the soul when attacked by death cannot perish; for the preceding argument shows that the soul will not admit of death, or ever be dead, any more than three or the odd number will admit of the even, or fire or the heat in the fire, of the cold. Yet a person may say: 'But although the odd will not become even at the approach of the even, why may not the odd perish and the even take the place of the odd?' Now to him who makes this objection, we cannot answer that the odd principle is imperishable; for this has not been acknowledged, but if this had been acknowledged, there would have been no difficulty in contending that at the approach of the even the odd principle and the number three took their departure; and the same argument would have held good of fire and heat and any other thing. Very true. And the same may be said of the immortal: if the immortal is also imperishable, then the soul will be imperishable as well as immortal; but if not, some other proof of her imperishableness will have to be given. No other proof is needed, he said; for if the immortal, being eternal, is liable to perish, then nothing is imperishable. Yes, replied Socrates, and yet all men will agree that God, and the essential form of life, and the immortal in general, will never perish. Yes, all men, he said--that is true; and what is more, gods, if I am not mistaken, as well as men. Seeing then that the immortal is indestructible, must not the soul, if she is immortal, be also imperishable? Most certainly. Then when death attacks a man, the mortal portion of him may be supposed to die, but the immortal retires at the approach of death and is preserved safe and sound? True. Then, Cebes, beyond question, the soul is immortal and imperishable, and our souls will truly exist in another world! I am convinced, Socrates, said Cebes, and have nothing more to object; but if my friend Simmias, or any one else, has any further objection to make, he had better speak out, and not keep silence, since I do not know to what other season he can defer the discussion, if there is anything which he wants to say or to have said. But I have nothing more to say, replied Simmias; nor can I see any reason for doubt after what has been said. But I still feel and cannot help feeling uncertain in my own mind, when I think of the greatness of the subject and the feebleness of man. Yes, Simmias, replied Socrates, that is well said: and I may add that first principles, even if they appear certain, should be carefully considered; and when they are satisfactorily ascertained, then, with a sort of hesitating confidence in human reason, you may, I think, follow the course of the argument; and if that be plain and clear, there will be no need for any further enquiry. Very true. But then, O my friends, he said, if the soul is really immortal, what care should be taken of her, not only in respect of the portion of time which is called life, but of eternity! And the danger of neglecting her from this point of view does indeed appear to be awful. If death had only been the end of all, the wicked would have had a good bargain in dying, for they would have been happily quit not only of their body, but of their own evil together with their souls. But now, inasmuch as the soul is manifestly immortal, there is no release or salvation from evil except the attainment of the highest virtue and wisdom. For the soul when on her progress to the world below takes nothing with her but nurture and education; and these are said greatly to benefit or greatly to injure the departed, at the very beginning of his journey thither. For after death, as they say, the genius of each individual, to whom he belonged in life, leads him to a certain place in which the dead are gathered together, whence after judgment has been given they pass into the world below, following the guide, who is appointed to conduct them from this world to the other: and when they have there received their due and remained their time, another guide brings them back again after many revolutions of ages. Now this way to the other world is not, as Aeschylus says in the Telephus, a single and straight path--if that were so no guide would be needed, for no one could miss it; but there are many partings of the road, and windings, as I infer from the rites and sacrifices which are offered to the gods below in places where three ways meet on earth. The wise and orderly soul follows in the straight path and is conscious of her surroundings; but the soul which desires the body, and which, as I was relating before, has long been fluttering about the lifeless frame and the world of sight, is after many struggles and many sufferings hardly and with violence carried away by her attendant genius, and when she arrives at the place where the other souls are gathered, if she be impure and have done impure deeds, whether foul murders or other crimes which are the brothers of these, and the works of brothers in crime--from that soul every one flees and turns away; no one will be her companion, no one her guide, but alone she wanders in extremity of evil until certain times are fulfilled, and when they are fulfilled, she is borne irresistibly to her own fitting habitation; as every pure and just soul which has passed through life in the company and under the guidance of the gods has also her own proper home. Now the earth has divers wonderful regions, and is indeed in nature and extent very unlike the notions of geographers, as I believe on the authority of one who shall be nameless. What do you mean, Socrates? said Simmias. I have myself heard many descriptions of the earth, but I do not know, and I should very much like to know, in which of these you put faith. And I, Simmias, replied Socrates, if I had the art of Glaucus would tell you; although I know not that the art of Glaucus could prove the truth of my tale, which I myself should never be able to prove, and even if I could, I fear, Simmias, that my life would come to an end before the argument was completed. I may describe to you, however, the form and regions of the earth according to my conception of them. That, said Simmias, will be enough. Well, then, he said, my conviction is, that the earth is a round body in the centre of the heavens, and therefore has no need of air or any similar force to be a support, but is kept there and hindered from falling or inclining any way by the equability of the surrounding heaven and by her own equipoise. For that which, being in equipoise, is in the centre of that which is equably diffused, will not incline any way in any degree, but will always remain in the same state and not deviate. And this is my first notion. Which is surely a correct one, said Simmias. Also I believe that the earth is very vast, and that we who dwell in the region extending from the river Phasis to the Pillars of Heracles inhabit a small portion only about the sea, like ants or frogs about a marsh, and that there are other inhabitants of many other like places; for everywhere on the face of the earth there are hollows of various forms and sizes, into which the water and the mist and the lower air collect. But the true earth is pure and situated in the pure heaven--there are the stars also; and it is the heaven which is commonly spoken of by us as the ether, and of which our own earth is the sediment gathering in the hollows beneath. But we who live in these hollows are deceived into the notion that we are dwelling above on the surface of the earth; which is just as if a creature who was at the bottom of the sea were to fancy that he was on the surface of the water, and that the sea was the heaven through which he saw the sun and the other stars, he having never come to the surface by reason of his feebleness and sluggishness, and having never lifted up his head and seen, nor ever heard from one who had seen, how much purer and fairer the world above is than his own. And such is exactly our case: for we are dwelling in a hollow of the earth, and fancy that we are on the surface; and the air we call the heaven, in which we imagine that the stars move. But the fact is, that owing to our feebleness and sluggishness we are prevented from reaching the surface of the air: for if any man could arrive at the exterior limit, or take the wings of a bird and come to the top, then like a fish who puts his head out of the water and sees this world, he would see a world beyond; and, if the nature of man could sustain the sight, he would acknowledge that this other world was the place of the true heaven and the true light and the true earth. For our earth, and the stones, and the entire region which surrounds us, are spoilt and corroded, as in the sea all things are corroded by the brine, neither is there any noble or perfect growth, but caverns only, and sand, and an endless slough of mud: and even the shore is not to be compared to the fairer sights of this world. And still less is this our world to be compared with the other. Of that upper earth which is under the heaven, I can tell you a charming tale, Simmias, which is well worth hearing. And we, Socrates, replied Simmias, shall be charmed to listen to you. The tale, my friend, he said, is as follows:--In the first place, the earth, when looked at from above, is in appearance streaked like one of those balls which have leather coverings in twelve pieces, and is decked with various colours, of which the colours used by painters on earth are in a manner samples. But there the whole earth is made up of them, and they are brighter far and clearer than ours; there is a purple of wonderful lustre, also the radiance of gold, and the white which is in the earth is whiter than any chalk or snow. Of these and other colours the earth is made up, and they are more in number and fairer than the eye of man has ever seen; the very hollows (of which I was speaking) filled with air and water have a colour of their own, and are seen like light gleaming amid the diversity of the other colours, so that the whole presents a single and continuous appearance of variety in unity. And in this fair region everything that grows--trees, and flowers, and fruits--are in a like degree fairer than any here; and there are hills, having stones in them in a like degree smoother, and more transparent, and fairer in colour than our highly-valued emeralds and sardonyxes and jaspers, and other gems, which are but minute fragments of them: for there all the stones are like our precious stones, and fairer still (compare Republic). The reason is, that they are pure, and not, like our precious stones, infected or corroded by the corrupt briny elements which coagulate among us, and which breed foulness and disease both in earth and stones, as well as in animals and plants. They are the jewels of the upper earth, which also shines with gold and silver and the like, and they are set in the light of day and are large and abundant and in all places, making the earth a sight to gladden the beholder's eye. And there are animals and men, some in a middle region, others dwelling about the air as we dwell about the sea; others in islands which the air flows round, near the continent: and in a word, the air is used by them as the water and the sea are by us, and the ether is to them what the air is to us. Moreover, the temperament of their seasons is such that they have no disease, and live much longer than we do, and have sight and hearing and smell, and all the other senses, in far greater perfection, in the same proportion that air is purer than water or the ether than air. Also they have temples and sacred places in which the gods really dwell, and they hear their voices and receive their answers, and are conscious of them and hold converse with them, and they see the sun, moon, and stars as they truly are, and their other blessedness is of a piece with this. Such is the nature of the whole earth, and of the things which are around the earth; and there are divers regions in the hollows on the face of the globe everywhere, some of them deeper and more extended than that which we inhabit, others deeper but with a narrower opening than ours, and some are shallower and also wider. All have numerous perforations, and there are passages broad and narrow in the interior of the earth, connecting them with one another; and there flows out of and into them, as into basins, a vast tide of water, and huge subterranean streams of perennial rivers, and springs hot and cold, and a great fire, and great rivers of fire, and streams of liquid mud, thin or thick (like the rivers of mud in Sicily, and the lava streams which follow them), and the regions about which they happen to flow are filled up with them. And there is a swinging or see-saw in the interior of the earth which moves all this up and down, and is due to the following cause:--There is a chasm which is the vastest of them all, and pierces right through the whole earth; this is that chasm which Homer describes in the words,-- 'Far off, where is the inmost depth beneath the earth;' and which he in other places, and many other poets, have called Tartarus. And the see-saw is caused by the streams flowing into and out of this chasm, and they each have the nature of the soil through which they flow. And the reason why the streams are always flowing in and out, is that the watery element has no bed or bottom, but is swinging and surging up and down, and the surrounding wind and air do the same; they follow the water up and down, hither and thither, over the earth--just as in the act of respiration the air is always in process of inhalation and exhalation;--and the wind swinging with the water in and out produces fearful and irresistible blasts: when the waters retire with a rush into the lower parts of the earth, as they are called, they flow through the earth in those regions, and fill them up like water raised by a pump, and then when they leave those regions and rush back hither, they again fill the hollows here, and when these are filled, flow through subterranean channels and find their way to their several places, forming seas, and lakes, and rivers, and springs. Thence they again enter the earth, some of them making a long circuit into many lands, others going to a few places and not so distant; and again fall into Tartarus, some at a point a good deal lower than that at which they rose, and others not much lower, but all in some degree lower than the point from which they came. And some burst forth again on the opposite side, and some on the same side, and some wind round the earth with one or many folds like the coils of a serpent, and descend as far as they can, but always return and fall into the chasm. The rivers flowing in either direction can descend only to the centre and no further, for opposite to the rivers is a precipice. Now these rivers are many, and mighty, and diverse, and there are four principal ones, of which the greatest and outermost is that called Oceanus, which flows round the earth in a circle; and in the opposite direction flows Acheron, which passes under the earth through desert places into the Acherusian lake: this is the lake to the shores of which the souls of the many go when they are dead, and after waiting an appointed time, which is to some a longer and to some a shorter time, they are sent back to be born again as animals. The third river passes out between the two, and near the place of outlet pours into a vast region of fire, and forms a lake larger than the Mediterranean Sea, boiling with water and mud; and proceeding muddy and turbid, and winding about the earth, comes, among other places, to the extremities of the Acherusian Lake, but mingles not with the waters of the lake, and after making many coils about the earth plunges into Tartarus at a deeper level. This is that Pyriphlegethon, as the stream is called, which throws up jets of fire in different parts of the earth. The fourth river goes out on the opposite side, and falls first of all into a wild and savage region, which is all of a dark-blue colour, like lapis lazuli; and this is that river which is called the Stygian river, and falls into and forms the Lake Styx, and after falling into the lake and receiving strange powers in the waters, passes under the earth, winding round in the opposite direction, and comes near the Acherusian lake from the opposite side to Pyriphlegethon. And the water of this river too mingles with no other, but flows round in a circle and falls into Tartarus over against Pyriphlegethon; and the name of the river, as the poets say, is Cocytus. Such is the nature of the other world; and when the dead arrive at the place to which the genius of each severally guides them, first of all, they have sentence passed upon them, as they have lived well and piously or not. And those who appear to have lived neither well nor ill, go to the river Acheron, and embarking in any vessels which they may find, are carried in them to the lake, and there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds, and having suffered the penalty of the wrongs which they have done to others, they are absolved, and receive the rewards of their good deeds, each of them according to his deserts. But those who appear to be incurable by reason of the greatness of their crimes--who have committed many and terrible deeds of sacrilege, murders foul and violent, or the like--such are hurled into Tartarus which is their suitable destiny, and they never come out. Those again who have committed crimes, which, although great, are not irremediable--who in a moment of anger, for example, have done violence to a father or a mother, and have repented for the remainder of their lives, or, who have taken the life of another under the like extenuating circumstances--these are plunged into Tartarus, the pains of which they are compelled to undergo for a year, but at the end of the year the wave casts them forth--mere homicides by way of Cocytus, parricides and matricides by Pyriphlegethon--and they are borne to the Acherusian lake, and there they lift up their voices and call upon the victims whom they have slain or wronged, to have pity on them, and to be kind to them, and let them come out into the lake. And if they prevail, then they come forth and cease from their troubles; but if not, they are carried back again into Tartarus and from thence into the rivers unceasingly, until they obtain mercy from those whom they have wronged: for that is the sentence inflicted upon them by their judges. Those too who have been pre-eminent for holiness of life are released from this earthly prison, and go to their pure home which is above, and dwell in the purer earth; and of these, such as have duly purified themselves with philosophy live henceforth altogether without the body, in mansions fairer still which may not be described, and of which the time would fail me to tell. Wherefore, Simmias, seeing all these things, what ought not we to do that we may obtain virtue and wisdom in this life? Fair is the prize, and the hope great! A man of sense ought not to say, nor will I be very confident, that the description which I have given of the soul and her mansions is exactly true. But I do say that, inasmuch as the soul is shown to be immortal, he may venture to think, not improperly or unworthily, that something of the kind is true. The venture is a glorious one, and he ought to comfort himself with words like these, which is the reason why I lengthen out the tale. Wherefore, I say, let a man be of good cheer about his soul, who having cast away the pleasures and ornaments of the body as alien to him and working harm rather than good, has sought after the pleasures of knowledge; and has arrayed the soul, not in some foreign attire, but in her own proper jewels, temperance, and justice, and courage, and nobility, and truth--in these adorned she is ready to go on her journey to the world below, when her hour comes. You, Simmias and Cebes, and all other men, will depart at some time or other. Me already, as the tragic poet would say, the voice of fate calls. Soon I must drink the poison; and I think that I had better repair to the bath first, in order that the women may not have the trouble of washing my body after I am dead. When he had done speaking, Crito said: And have you any commands for us, Socrates--anything to say about your children, or any other matter in which we can serve you? Nothing particular, Crito, he replied: only, as I have always told you, take care of yourselves; that is a service which you may be ever rendering to me and mine and to all of us, whether you promise to do so or not. But if you have no thought for yourselves, and care not to walk according to the rule which I have prescribed for you, not now for the first time, however much you may profess or promise at the moment, it will be of no avail. We will do our best, said Crito: And in what way shall we bury you? In any way that you like; but you must get hold of me, and take care that I do not run away from you. Then he turned to us, and added with a smile:--I cannot make Crito believe that I am the same Socrates who have been talking and conducting the argument; he fancies that I am the other Socrates whom he will soon see, a dead body--and he asks, How shall he bury me? And though I have spoken many words in the endeavour to show that when I have drunk the poison I shall leave you and go to the joys of the blessed,--these words of mine, with which I was comforting you and myself, have had, as I perceive, no effect upon Crito. And therefore I want you to be surety for me to him now, as at the trial he was surety to the judges for me: but let the promise be of another sort; for he was surety for me to the judges that I would remain, and you must be my surety to him that I shall not remain, but go away and depart; and then he will suffer less at my death, and not be grieved when he sees my body being burned or buried. I would not have him sorrow at my hard lot, or say at the burial, Thus we lay out Socrates, or, Thus we follow him to the grave or bury him; for false words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. Be of good cheer, then, my dear Crito, and say that you are burying my body only, and do with that whatever is usual, and what you think best. When he had spoken these words, he arose and went into a chamber to bathe; Crito followed him and told us to wait. So we remained behind, talking and thinking of the subject of discourse, and also of the greatness of our sorrow; he was like a father of whom we were being bereaved, and we were about to pass the rest of our lives as orphans. When he had taken the bath his children were brought to him--(he had two young sons and an elder one); and the women of his family also came, and he talked to them and gave them a few directions in the presence of Crito; then he dismissed them and returned to us. Now the hour of sunset was near, for a good deal of time had passed while he was within. When he came out, he sat down with us again after his bath, but not much was said. Soon the jailer, who was the servant of the Eleven, entered and stood by him, saying:--To you, Socrates, whom I know to be the noblest and gentlest and best of all who ever came to this place, I will not impute the angry feelings of other men, who rage and swear at me, when, in obedience to the authorities, I bid them drink the poison--indeed, I am sure that you will not be angry with me; for others, as you are aware, and not I, are to blame. And so fare you well, and try to bear lightly what must needs be--you know my errand. Then bursting into tears he turned away and went out. Socrates looked at him and said: I return your good wishes, and will do as you bid. Then turning to us, he said, How charming the man is: since I have been in prison he has always been coming to see me, and at times he would talk to me, and was as good to me as could be, and now see how generously he sorrows on my account. We must do as he says, Crito; and therefore let the cup be brought, if the poison is prepared: if not, let the attendant prepare some. Yet, said Crito, the sun is still upon the hill-tops, and I know that many a one has taken the draught late, and after the announcement has been made to him, he has eaten and drunk, and enjoyed the society of his beloved; do not hurry--there is time enough. Socrates said: Yes, Crito, and they of whom you speak are right in so acting, for they think that they will be gainers by the delay; but I am right in not following their example, for I do not think that I should gain anything by drinking the poison a little later; I should only be ridiculous in my own eyes for sparing and saving a life which is already forfeit. Please then to do as I say, and not to refuse me. Crito made a sign to the servant, who was standing by; and he went out, and having been absent for some time, returned with the jailer carrying the cup of poison. Socrates said: You, my good friend, who are experienced in these matters, shall give me directions how I am to proceed. The man answered: You have only to walk about until your legs are heavy, and then to lie down, and the poison will act. At the same time he handed the cup to Socrates, who in the easiest and gentlest manner, without the least fear or change of colour or feature, looking at the man with all his eyes, Echecrates, as his manner was, took the cup and said: What do you say about making a libation out of this cup to any god? May I, or not? The man answered: We only prepare, Socrates, just so much as we deem enough. I understand, he said: but I may and must ask the gods to prosper my journey from this to the other world--even so--and so be it according to my prayer. Then raising the cup to his lips, quite readily and cheerfully he drank off the poison. And hitherto most of us had been able to control our sorrow; but now when we saw him drinking, and saw too that he had finished the draught, we could no longer forbear, and in spite of myself my own tears were flowing fast; so that I covered my face and wept, not for him, but at the thought of my own calamity in having to part from such a friend. Nor was I the first; for Crito, when he found himself unable to restrain his tears, had got up, and I followed; and at that moment, Apollodorus, who had been weeping all the time, broke out in a loud and passionate cry which made cowards of us all. Socrates alone retained his calmness: What is this strange outcry? he said. I sent away the women mainly in order that they might not misbehave in this way, for I have been told that a man should die in peace. Be quiet, then, and have patience. When we heard his words we were ashamed, and refrained our tears; and he walked about until, as he said, his legs began to fail, and then he lay on his back, according to the directions, and the man who gave him the poison now and then looked at his feet and legs; and after a while he pressed his foot hard, and asked him if he could feel; and he said, No; and then his leg, and so upwards and upwards, and showed us that he was cold and stiff. And he felt them himself, and said: When the poison reaches the heart, that will be the end. He was beginning to grow cold about the groin, when he uncovered his face, for he had covered himself up, and said--they were his last words--he said: Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt? The debt shall be paid, said Crito; is there anything else? There was no answer to this question; but in a minute or two a movement was heard, and the attendants uncovered him; his eyes were set, and Crito closed his eyes and mouth. Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend; concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PHAEDO *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SCENE","Dialogue":"The Porch of the King Archon."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Why have you left the Lyceum, Socrates? and what are you doing in the Porch of the King Archon? Surely you cannot be concerned in a suit before the King, like myself?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Not in a suit, Euthyphro; impeachment is the word which the Athenians use."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"What! I suppose that some one has been prosecuting you, for I cannot believe that you are the prosecutor of another."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Then some one else has been prosecuting you?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"And who is he?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A young man who is little known, Euthyphro; and I hardly know him: his name is Meletus, and he is of the deme of Pitthis. Perhaps you may remember his appearance; he has a beak, and long straight hair, and a beard which is ill grown."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"No, I do not remember him, Socrates. But what is the charge which he brings against you?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What is the charge? Well, a very serious charge, which shows a good deal of character in the young man, and for which he is certainly not to be despised. He says he knows how the youth are corrupted and who are their corruptors. I fancy that he must be a wise man, and seeing that I am the reverse of a wise man, he has found me out, and is going to accuse me of corrupting his young friends. And of this our mother the state is to be the judge. Of all our political men he is the only one who seems to me to begin in the right way, with the cultivation of virtue in youth; like a good husbandman, he makes the young shoots his first care, and clears away us who are the destroyers of them. This is only the first step; he will afterwards attend to the elder branches; and if he goes on as he has begun, he will be a very great public benefactor."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I hope that he may; but I rather fear, Socrates, that the opposite will turn out to be the truth. My opinion is that in attacking you he is simply aiming a blow at the foundation of the state. But in what way does he say that you corrupt the young?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He brings a wonderful accusation against me, which at first hearing excites surprise: he says that I am a poet or maker of gods, and that I invent new gods and deny the existence of old ones; this is the ground of his indictment."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I understand, Socrates; he means to attack you about the familiar sign which occasionally, as you say, comes to you. He thinks that you are a neologian, and he is going to have you up before the court for this. He knows that such a charge is readily received by the world, as I myself know too well; for when I speak in the assembly about divine things, and foretell the future to them, they laugh at me and think me a madman. Yet every word that I say is true. But they are jealous of us all; and we must be brave and go at them."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Their laughter, friend Euthyphro, is not a matter of much consequence. For a man may be thought wise; but the Athenians, I suspect, do not much trouble themselves about him until he begins to impart his wisdom to others, and then for some reason or other, perhaps, as you say, from jealousy, they are angry."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I am never likely to try their temper in this way."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I dare say not, for you are reserved in your behaviour, and seldom impart your wisdom. But I have a benevolent habit of pouring out myself to everybody, and would even pay for a listener, and I am afraid that the Athenians may think me too talkative. Now if, as I was saying, they would only laugh at me, as you say that they laugh at you, the time might pass gaily enough in the court; but perhaps they may be in earnest, and then what the end will be you soothsayers only can predict."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I dare say that the affair will end in nothing, Socrates, and that you will win your cause; and I think that I shall win my own."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what is your suit, Euthyphro? are you the pursuer or the defendant?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I am the pursuer."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Of whom?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"You will think me mad when I tell you."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, has the fugitive wings?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Nay, he is not very volatile at his time of life."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Who is he?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"My father."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Your father! my good man?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And of what is he accused?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Of murder, Socrates."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"By the powers, Euthyphro! how little does the common herd know of the nature of right and truth. A man must be an extraordinary man, and have made great strides in wisdom, before he could have seen his way to bring such an action."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Indeed, Socrates, he must."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I suppose that the man whom your father murdered was one of your relatives--clearly he was; for if he had been a stranger you would never have thought of prosecuting him."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I am amused, Socrates, at your making a distinction between one who is a relation and one who is not a relation; for surely the pollution is the same in either case, if you knowingly associate with the murderer when you ought to clear yourself and him by proceeding against him. The real question is whether the murdered man has been justly slain. If justly, then your duty is to let the matter alone; but if unjustly, then even if the murderer lives under the same roof with you and eats at the same table, proceed against him. Now the man who is dead was a poor dependant of mine who worked for us as a field labourer on our farm in Naxos, and one day in a fit of drunken passion he got into a quarrel with one of our domestic servants and slew him. My father bound him hand and foot and threw him into a ditch, and then sent to Athens to ask of a diviner what he should do with him. Meanwhile he never attended to him and took no care about him, for he regarded him as a murderer; and thought that no great harm would be done even if he did die. Now this was just what happened. For such was the effect of cold and hunger and chains upon him, that before the messenger returned from the diviner, he was dead. And my father and family are angry with me for taking the part of the murderer and prosecuting my father. They say that he did not kill him, and that if he did, the dead man was but a murderer, and I ought not to take any notice, for that a son is impious who prosecutes a father. Which shows, Socrates, how little they know what the gods think about piety and impiety."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Good heavens, Euthyphro! and is your knowledge of religion and of things pious and impious so very exact, that, supposing the circumstances to be as you state them, you are not afraid lest you too may be doing an impious thing in bringing an action against your father?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"The best of Euthyphro, and that which distinguishes him, Socrates, from other men, is his exact knowledge of all such matters. What should I be good for without it?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Rare friend! I think that I cannot do better than be your disciple. Then before the trial with Meletus comes on I shall challenge him, and say that I have always had a great interest in religious questions, and now, as he charges me with rash imaginations and innovations in religion, I have become your disciple. You, Meletus, as I shall say to him, acknowledge Euthyphro to be a great theologian, and sound in his opinions; and if you approve of him you ought to approve of me, and not have me into court; but if you disapprove, you should begin by indicting him who is my teacher, and who will be the ruin, not of the young, but of the old; that is to say, of myself whom he instructs, and of his old father whom he admonishes and chastises. And if Meletus refuses to listen to me, but will go on, and will not shift the indictment from me to you, I cannot do better than repeat this challenge in the court."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed, Socrates; and if he attempts to indict me I am mistaken if I do not find a flaw in him; the court shall have a great deal more to say to him than to me."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I, my dear friend, knowing this, am desirous of becoming your disciple. For I observe that no one appears to notice you--not even this Meletus; but his sharp eyes have found me out at once, and he has indicted me for impiety. And therefore, I adjure you to tell me the nature of piety and impiety, which you said that you knew so well, and of murder, and of other offences against the gods. What are they? Is not piety in every action always the same? and impiety, again--is it not always the opposite of piety, and also the same with itself, having, as impiety, one notion which includes whatever is impious?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"To be sure, Socrates."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what is piety, and what is impiety?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Piety is doing as I am doing; that is to say, prosecuting any one who is guilty of murder, sacrilege, or of any similar crime--whether he be your father or mother, or whoever he may be--that makes no difference; and not to prosecute them is impiety. And please to consider, Socrates, what a notable proof I will give you of the truth of my words, a proof which I have already given to others:--of the principle, I mean, that the impious, whoever he may be, ought not to go unpunished. For do not men regard Zeus as the best and most righteous of the gods?--and yet they admit that he bound his father (Cronos) because he wickedly devoured his sons, and that he too had punished his own father (Uranus) for a similar reason, in a nameless manner. And yet when I proceed against my father, they are angry with me. So inconsistent are they in their way of talking when the gods are concerned, and when I am concerned."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"May not this be the reason, Euthyphro, why I am charged with impiety--that I cannot away with these stories about the gods? and therefore I suppose that people think me wrong. But, as you who are well informed about them approve of them, I cannot do better than assent to your superior wisdom. What else can I say, confessing as I do, that I know nothing about them? Tell me, for the love of Zeus, whether you really believe that they are true."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; and things more wonderful still, of which the world is in ignorance."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you really believe that the gods fought with one another, and had dire quarrels, battles, and the like, as the poets say, and as you may see represented in the works of great artists? The temples are full of them; and notably the robe of Athene, which is carried up to the Acropolis at the great Panathenaea, is embroidered with them. Are all these tales of the gods true, Euthyphro?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; and, as I was saying, I can tell you, if you would like to hear them, many other things about the gods which would quite amaze you."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I dare say; and you shall tell me them at some other time when I have leisure. But just at present I would rather hear from you a more precise answer, which you have not as yet given, my friend, to the question, What is 'piety'? When asked, you only replied, Doing as you do, charging your father with murder."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"And what I said was true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No doubt, Euthyphro; but you would admit that there are many other pious acts?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"There are."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Remember that I did not ask you to give me two or three examples of piety, but to explain the general idea which makes all pious things to be pious. Do you not recollect that there was one idea which made the impious impious, and the pious pious?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I remember."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Tell me what is the nature of this idea, and then I shall have a standard to which I may look, and by which I may measure actions, whether yours or those of any one else, and then I shall be able to say that such and such an action is pious, such another impious."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I will tell you, if you like."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should very much like."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good, Euthyphro; you have now given me the sort of answer which I wanted. But whether what you say is true or not I cannot as yet tell, although I make no doubt that you will prove the truth of your words."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Come, then, and let us examine what we are saying. That thing or person which is dear to the gods is pious, and that thing or person which is hateful to the gods is impious, these two being the extreme opposites of one another. Was not that said?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"It was."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And well said?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, I thought so; it was certainly said."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And further, Euthyphro, the gods were admitted to have enmities and hatreds and differences?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes, that was also said."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what sort of difference creates enmity and anger? Suppose for example that you and I, my good friend, differ about a number; do differences of this sort make us enemies and set us at variance with one another? Do we not go at once to arithmetic, and put an end to them by a sum?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Or suppose that we differ about magnitudes, do we not quickly end the differences by measuring?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And we end a controversy about heavy and light by resorting to a weighing machine?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"To be sure."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But what differences are there which cannot be thus decided, and which therefore make us angry and set us at enmity with one another? I dare say the answer does not occur to you at the moment, and therefore I will suggest that these enmities arise when the matters of difference are the just and unjust, good and evil, honourable and dishonourable. Are not these the points about which men differ, and about which when we are unable satisfactorily to decide our differences, you and I and all of us quarrel, when we do quarrel? (Compare Alcib.)"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, the nature of the differences about which we quarrel is such as you describe."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the quarrels of the gods, noble Euthyphro, when they occur, are of a like nature?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Certainly they are."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"They have differences of opinion, as you say, about good and evil, just and unjust, honourable and dishonourable: there would have been no quarrels among them, if there had been no such differences--would there now?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"You are quite right."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Does not every man love that which he deems noble and just and good, and hate the opposite of them?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But, as you say, people regard the same things, some as just and others as unjust,--about these they dispute; and so there arise wars and fightings among them."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the same things are hated by the gods and loved by the gods, and are both hateful and dear to them?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And upon this view the same things, Euthyphro, will be pious and also impious?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"So I should suppose."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, my friend, I remark with surprise that you have not answered the question which I asked. For I certainly did not ask you to tell me what action is both pious and impious: but now it would seem that what is loved by the gods is also hated by them. And therefore, Euthyphro, in thus chastising your father you may very likely be doing what is agreeable to Zeus but disagreeable to Cronos or Uranus, and what is acceptable to Hephaestus but unacceptable to Here, and there may be other gods who have similar differences of opinion."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"But I believe, Socrates, that all the gods would be agreed as to the propriety of punishing a murderer: there would be no difference of opinion about that."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but speaking of men, Euthyphro, did you ever hear any one arguing that a murderer or any sort of evil-doer ought to be let off?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I should rather say that these are the questions which they are always arguing, especially in courts of law: they commit all sorts of crimes, and there is nothing which they will not do or say in their own defence."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But do they admit their guilt, Euthyphro, and yet say that they ought not to be punished?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"No; they do not."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then there are some things which they do not venture to say and do: for they do not venture to argue that the guilty are to be unpunished, but they deny their guilt, do they not?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then they do not argue that the evil-doer should not be punished, but they argue about the fact of who the evil-doer is, and what he did and when?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the gods are in the same case, if as you assert they quarrel about just and unjust, and some of them say while others deny that injustice is done among them. For surely neither God nor man will ever venture to say that the doer of injustice is not to be punished?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"That is true, Socrates, in the main."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But they join issue about the particulars--gods and men alike; and, if they dispute at all, they dispute about some act which is called in question, and which by some is affirmed to be just, by others to be unjust. Is not that true?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well then, my dear friend Euthyphro, do tell me, for my better instruction and information, what proof have you that in the opinion of all the gods a servant who is guilty of murder, and is put in chains by the master of the dead man, and dies because he is put in chains before he who bound him can learn from the interpreters of the gods what he ought to do with him, dies unjustly; and that on behalf of such an one a son ought to proceed against his father and accuse him of murder. How would you show that all the gods absolutely agree in approving of his act? Prove to me that they do, and I will applaud your wisdom as long as I live."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"It will be a difficult task; but I could make the matter very clear indeed to you."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I understand; you mean to say that I am not so quick of apprehension as the judges: for to them you will be sure to prove that the act is unjust, and hateful to the gods."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes indeed, Socrates; at least if they will listen to me."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But they will be sure to listen if they find that you are a good speaker. There was a notion that came into my mind while you were speaking; I said to myself: 'Well, and what if Euthyphro does prove to me that all the gods regarded the death of the serf as unjust, how do I know anything more of the nature of piety and impiety? for granting that this action may be hateful to the gods, still piety and impiety are not adequately defined by these distinctions, for that which is hateful to the gods has been shown to be also pleasing and dear to them.' And therefore, Euthyphro, I do not ask you to prove this; I will suppose, if you like, that all the gods condemn and abominate such an action. But I will amend the definition so far as to say that what all the gods hate is impious, and what they love pious or holy; and what some of them love and others hate is both or neither. Shall this be our definition of piety and impiety?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Why not, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why not! certainly, as far as I am concerned, Euthyphro, there is no reason why not. But whether this admission will greatly assist you in the task of instructing me as you promised, is a matter for you to consider."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes, I should say that what all the gods love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all hate, impious."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Ought we to enquire into the truth of this, Euthyphro, or simply to accept the mere statement on our own authority and that of others? What do you say?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"We should enquire; and I believe that the statement will stand the test of enquiry."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We shall know better, my good friend, in a little while. The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I do not understand your meaning, Socrates."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will endeavour to explain: we, speak of carrying and we speak of being carried, of leading and being led, seeing and being seen. You know that in all such cases there is a difference, and you know also in what the difference lies?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I think that I understand."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not that which is beloved distinct from that which loves?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well; and now tell me, is that which is carried in this state of carrying because it is carried, or for some other reason?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"No; that is the reason."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same is true of what is led and of what is seen?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And a thing is not seen because it is visible, but conversely, visible because it is seen; nor is a thing led because it is in the state of being led, or carried because it is in the state of being carried, but the converse of this. And now I think, Euthyphro, that my meaning will be intelligible; and my meaning is, that any state of action or passion implies previous action or passion. It does not become because it is becoming, but it is in a state of becoming because it becomes; neither does it suffer because it is in a state of suffering, but it is in a state of suffering because it suffers. Do you not agree?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is not that which is loved in some state either of becoming or suffering?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the same holds as in the previous instances; the state of being loved follows the act of being loved, and not the act the state."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what do you say of piety, Euthyphro: is not piety, according to your definition, loved by all the gods?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Because it is pious or holy, or for some other reason?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"No, that is the reason."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"It is loved because it is holy, not holy because it is loved?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And that which is dear to the gods is loved by them, and is in a state to be loved of them because it is loved of them?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then that which is dear to the gods, Euthyphro, is not holy, nor is that which is holy loved of God, as you affirm; but they are two different things."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"How do you mean, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean to say that the holy has been acknowledged by us to be loved of God because it is holy, not to be holy because it is loved."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But that which is dear to the gods is dear to them because it is loved by them, not loved by them because it is dear to them."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But, friend Euthyphro, if that which is holy is the same with that which is dear to God, and is loved because it is holy, then that which is dear to God would have been loved as being dear to God; but if that which is dear to God is dear to him because loved by him, then that which is holy would have been holy because loved by him. But now you see that the reverse is the case, and that they are quite different from one another. For one (theophiles) is of a kind to be loved cause it is loved, and the other (osion) is loved because it is of a kind to be loved. Thus you appear to me, Euthyphro, when I ask you what is the essence of holiness, to offer an attribute only, and not the essence--the attribute of being loved by all the gods. But you still refuse to explain to me the nature of holiness. And therefore, if you please, I will ask you not to hide your treasure, but to tell me once more what holiness or piety really is, whether dear to the gods or not (for that is a matter about which we will not quarrel); and what is impiety?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I really do not know, Socrates, how to express what I mean. For somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Your words, Euthyphro, are like the handiwork of my ancestor Daedalus; and if I were the sayer or propounder of them, you might say that my arguments walk away and will not remain fixed where they are placed because I am a descendant of his. But now, since these notions are your own, you must find some other gibe, for they certainly, as you yourself allow, show an inclination to be on the move."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Nay, Socrates, I shall still say that you are the Daedalus who sets arguments in motion; not I, certainly, but you make them move or go round, for they would never have stirred, as far as I am concerned."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I must be a greater than Daedalus: for whereas he only made his own inventions to move, I move those of other people as well. And the beauty of it is, that I would rather not. For I would give the wisdom of Daedalus, and the wealth of Tantalus, to be able to detain them and keep them fixed. But enough of this. As I perceive that you are lazy, I will myself endeavour to show you how you might instruct me in the nature of piety; and I hope that you will not grudge your labour. Tell me, then--Is not that which is pious necessarily just?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is, then, all which is just pious? or, is that which is pious all just, but that which is just, only in part and not all, pious?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I do not understand you, Socrates."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And yet I know that you are as much wiser than I am, as you are younger. But, as I was saying, revered friend, the abundance of your wisdom makes you lazy. Please to exert yourself, for there is no real difficulty in understanding me. What I mean I may explain by an illustration of what I do not mean. The poet (Stasinus) sings-- 'Of Zeus, the author and creator of all these things, You will not tell: for where there is fear there is also reverence.' Now I disagree with this poet. Shall I tell you in what respect?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should not say that where there is fear there is also reverence; for I am sure that many persons fear poverty and disease, and the like evils, but I do not perceive that they reverence the objects of their fear."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But where reverence is, there is fear; for he who has a feeling of reverence and shame about the commission of any action, fears and is afraid of an ill reputation."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"No doubt."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we are wrong in saying that where there is fear there is also reverence; and we should say, where there is reverence there is also fear. But there is not always reverence where there is fear; for fear is a more extended notion, and reverence is a part of fear, just as the odd is a part of number, and number is a more extended notion than the odd. I suppose that you follow me now?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Quite well."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That was the sort of question which I meant to raise when I asked whether the just is always the pious, or the pious always the just; and whether there may not be justice where there is not piety; for justice is the more extended notion of which piety is only a part. Do you dissent?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"No, I think that you are quite right."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, if piety is a part of justice, I suppose that we should enquire what part? If you had pursued the enquiry in the previous cases; for instance, if you had asked me what is an even number, and what part of number the even is, I should have had no difficulty in replying, a number which represents a figure having two equal sides. Do you not agree?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes, I quite agree."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In like manner, I want you to tell me what part of justice is piety or holiness, that I may be able to tell Meletus not to do me injustice, or indict me for impiety, as I am now adequately instructed by you in the nature of piety or holiness, and their opposites."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Piety or holiness, Socrates, appears to me to be that part of justice which attends to the gods, as there is the other part of justice which attends to men."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That is good, Euthyphro; yet still there is a little point about which I should like to have further information, What is the meaning of 'attention'? For attention can hardly be used in the same sense when applied to the gods as when applied to other things. For instance, horses are said to require attention, and not every person is able to attend to them, but only a person skilled in horsemanship. Is it not so?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should suppose that the art of horsemanship is the art of attending to horses?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Nor is every one qualified to attend to dogs, but only the huntsman?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I should also conceive that the art of the huntsman is the art of attending to dogs?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"As the art of the oxherd is the art of attending to oxen?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In like manner holiness or piety is the art of attending to the gods?--that would be your meaning, Euthyphro?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And is not attention always designed for the good or benefit of that to which the attention is given? As in the case of horses, you may observe that when attended to by the horseman's art they are benefited and improved, are they not?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"As the dogs are benefited by the huntsman's art, and the oxen by the art of the oxherd, and all other things are tended or attended for their good and not for their hurt?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Certainly, not for their hurt."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But for their good?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And does piety or holiness, which has been defined to be the art of attending to the gods, benefit or improve them? Would you say that when you do a holy act you make any of the gods better?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"No, no; that was certainly not what I meant."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And I, Euthyphro, never supposed that you did. I asked you the question about the nature of the attention, because I thought that you did not."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"You do me justice, Socrates; that is not the sort of attention which I mean."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Good: but I must still ask what is this attention to the gods which is called piety?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"It is such, Socrates, as servants show to their masters."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I understand--a sort of ministration to the gods."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Medicine is also a sort of ministration or service, having in view the attainment of some object--would you not say of health?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I should."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Again, there is an art which ministers to the ship-builder with a view to the attainment of some result?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, with a view to the building of a ship."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"As there is an art which ministers to the house-builder with a view to the building of a house?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now tell me, my good friend, about the art which ministers to the gods: what work does that help to accomplish? For you must surely know if, as you say, you are of all men living the one who is best instructed in religion."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"And I speak the truth, Socrates."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Tell me then, oh tell me--what is that fair work which the gods do by the help of our ministrations?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Many and fair, Socrates, are the works which they do."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, my friend, and so are those of a general. But the chief of them is easily told. Would you not say that victory in war is the chief of them?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Many and fair, too, are the works of the husbandman, if I am not mistaken; but his chief work is the production of food from the earth?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And of the many and fair things done by the gods, which is the chief or principal one?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I have told you already, Socrates, that to learn all these things accurately will be very tiresome. Let me simply say that piety or holiness is learning how to please the gods in word and deed, by prayers and sacrifices. Such piety is the salvation of families and states, just as the impious, which is unpleasing to the gods, is their ruin and destruction."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think that you could have answered in much fewer words the chief question which I asked, Euthyphro, if you had chosen. But I see plainly that you are not disposed to instruct me--clearly not: else why, when we reached the point, did you turn aside? Had you only answered me I should have truly learned of you by this time the nature of piety. Now, as the asker of a question is necessarily dependent on the answerer, whither he leads I must follow; and can only ask again, what is the pious, and what is piety? Do you mean that they are a sort of science of praying and sacrificing?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes, I do."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And sacrificing is giving to the gods, and prayer is asking of the gods?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Upon this view, then, piety is a science of asking and giving?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"You understand me capitally, Socrates."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my friend; the reason is that I am a votary of your science, and give my mind to it, and therefore nothing which you say will be thrown away upon me. Please then to tell me, what is the nature of this service to the gods? Do you mean that we prefer requests and give gifts to them?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Yes, I do."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is not the right way of asking to ask of them what we want?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And the right way of giving is to give to them in return what they want of us. There would be no meaning in an art which gives to any one that which he does not want."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Very true, Socrates."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then piety, Euthyphro, is an art which gods and men have of doing business with one another?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"That is an expression which you may use, if you like."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But I have no particular liking for anything but the truth. I wish, however, that you would tell me what benefit accrues to the gods from our gifts. There is no doubt about what they give to us; for there is no good thing which they do not give; but how we can give any good thing to them in return is far from being equally clear. If they give everything and we give nothing, that must be an affair of business in which we have very greatly the advantage of them."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"And do you imagine, Socrates, that any benefit accrues to the gods from our gifts?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But if not, Euthyphro, what is the meaning of gifts which are conferred by us upon the gods?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"What else, but tributes of honour; and, as I was just now saying, what pleases them?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Piety, then, is pleasing to the gods, but not beneficial or dear to them?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I should say that nothing could be dearer."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then once more the assertion is repeated that piety is dear to the gods?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when you say this, can you wonder at your words not standing firm, but walking away? Will you accuse me of being the Daedalus who makes them walk away, not perceiving that there is another and far greater artist than Daedalus who makes them go round in a circle, and he is yourself; for the argument, as you will perceive, comes round to the same point. Were we not saying that the holy or pious was not the same with that which is loved of the gods? Have you forgotten?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"I quite remember."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And are you not saying that what is loved of the gods is holy; and is not this the same as what is dear to them--do you see?"}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then either we were wrong in our former assertion; or, if we were right then, we are wrong now."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"One of the two must be true."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then we must begin again and ask, What is piety? That is an enquiry which I shall never be weary of pursuing as far as in me lies; and I entreat you not to scorn me, but to apply your mind to the utmost, and tell me the truth. For, if any man knows, you are he; and therefore I must detain you, like Proteus, until you tell. If you had not certainly known the nature of piety and impiety, I am confident that you would never, on behalf of a serf, have charged your aged father with murder. You would not have run such a risk of doing wrong in the sight of the gods, and you would have had too much respect for the opinions of men. I am sure, therefore, that you know the nature of piety and impiety. Speak out then, my dear Euthyphro, and do not hide your knowledge."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"EUTHYPHRO","Dialogue":"Another time, Socrates; for I am in a hurry, and must go now."}
{"Book":"euthyphro","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Alas! my companion, and will you leave me in despair? I was hoping that you would instruct me in the nature of piety and impiety; and then I might have cleared myself of Meletus and his indictment. I would have told him that I had been enlightened by Euthyphro, and had given up rash innovations and speculations, in which I indulged only through ignorance, and that now I am about to lead a better life. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUTHYPHRO *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SCENE","Dialogue":"Under a plane-tree, by the banks of the Ilissus."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"My dear Phaedrus, whence come you, and whither are you going?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I come from Lysias the son of Cephalus, and I am going to take a walk outside the wall, for I have been sitting with him the whole morning; and our common friend Acumenus tells me that it is much more refreshing to walk in the open air than to be shut up in a cloister."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There he is right. Lysias then, I suppose, was in the town?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes, he was staying with Epicrates, here at the house of Morychus; that house which is near the temple of Olympian Zeus."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And how did he entertain you? Can I be wrong in supposing that Lysias gave you a feast of discourse?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"You shall hear, if you can spare time to accompany me."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And should I not deem the conversation of you and Lysias 'a thing of higher import,' as I may say in the words of Pindar, 'than any business'?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Will you go on?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will you go on with the narration?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"My tale, Socrates, is one of your sort, for love was the theme which occupied us--love after a fashion: Lysias has been writing about a fair youth who was being tempted, but not by a lover; and this was the point: he ingeniously proved that the non-lover should be accepted rather than the lover."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"O that is noble of him! I wish that he would say the poor man rather than the rich, and the old man rather than the young one;--then he would meet the case of me and of many a man; his words would be quite refreshing, and he would be a public benefactor. For my part, I do so long to hear his speech, that if you walk all the way to Megara, and when you have reached the wall come back, as Herodicus recommends, without going in, I will keep you company."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean, my good Socrates? How can you imagine that my unpractised memory can do justice to an elaborate work, which the greatest rhetorician of the age spent a long time in composing. Indeed, I cannot; I would give a great deal if I could."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I believe that I know Phaedrus about as well as I know myself, and I am very sure that the speech of Lysias was repeated to him, not once only, but again and again;--he insisted on hearing it many times over and Lysias was very willing to gratify him; at last, when nothing else would do, he got hold of the book, and looked at what he most wanted to see,--this occupied him during the whole morning;--and then when he was tired with sitting, he went out to take a walk, not until, by the dog, as I believe, he had simply learned by heart the entire discourse, unless it was unusually long, and he went to a place outside the wall that he might practise his lesson. There he saw a certain lover of discourse who had a similar weakness;--he saw and rejoiced; now thought he, 'I shall have a partner in my revels.' And he invited him to come and walk with him. But when the lover of discourse begged that he would repeat the tale, he gave himself airs and said, 'No I cannot,' as if he were indisposed; although, if the hearer had refused, he would sooner or later have been compelled by him to listen whether he would or no. Therefore, Phaedrus, bid him do at once what he will soon do whether bidden or not."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I see that you will not let me off until I speak in some fashion or other; verily therefore my best plan is to speak as I best can."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A very true remark, that of yours."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I will do as I say; but believe me, Socrates, I did not learn the very words--O no; nevertheless I have a general notion of what he said, and will give you a summary of the points in which the lover differed from the non-lover. Let me begin at the beginning."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, my sweet one; but you must first of all show what you have in your left hand under your cloak, for that roll, as I suspect, is the actual discourse. Now, much as I love you, I would not have you suppose that I am going to have your memory exercised at my expense, if you have Lysias himself here."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Enough; I see that I have no hope of practising my art upon you. But if I am to read, where would you please to sit?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us turn aside and go by the Ilissus; we will sit down at some quiet spot."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I am fortunate in not having my sandals, and as you never have any, I think that we may go along the brook and cool our feet in the water; this will be the easiest way, and at midday and in the summer is far from being unpleasant."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Lead on, and look out for a place in which we can sit down."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Do you see the tallest plane-tree in the distance?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"There are shade and gentle breezes, and grass on which we may either sit or lie down."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Move forward."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I should like to know, Socrates, whether the place is not somewhere here at which Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia from the banks of the Ilissus?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Such is the tradition."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"And is this the exact spot? The little stream is delightfully clear and bright; I can fancy that there might be maidens playing near."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I believe that the spot is not exactly here, but about a quarter of a mile lower down, where you cross to the temple of Artemis, and there is, I think, some sort of an altar of Boreas at the place."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I have never noticed it; but I beseech you to tell me, Socrates, do you believe this tale?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The wise are doubtful, and I should not be singular if, like them, I too doubted. I might have a rational explanation that Orithyia was playing with Pharmacia, when a northern gust carried her over the neighbouring rocks; and this being the manner of her death, she was said to have been carried away by Boreas. There is a discrepancy, however, about the locality; according to another version of the story she was taken from Areopagus, and not from this place. Now I quite acknowledge that these allegories are very nice, but he is not to be envied who has to invent them; much labour and ingenuity will be required of him; and when he has once begun, he must go on and rehabilitate Hippocentaurs and chimeras dire. Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace, and numberless other inconceivable and portentous natures. And if he is sceptical about them, and would fain reduce them one after another to the rules of probability, this sort of crude philosophy will take up a great deal of time. Now I have no leisure for such enquiries; shall I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny? But let me ask you, friend: have we not reached the plane-tree to which you were conducting us?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes, this is the tree."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"By Here, a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents. Here is this lofty and spreading plane-tree, and the agnus castus high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatest fragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane-tree is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images, this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delightful is the breeze:--so very sweet; and there is a sound in the air shrill and summerlike which makes answer to the chorus of the cicadae. But the greatest charm of all is the grass, like a pillow gently sloping to the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What an incomprehensible being you are, Socrates: when you are in the country, as you say, you really are like some stranger who is led about by a guide. Do you ever cross the border? I rather think that you never venture even outside the gates."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very true, my good friend; and I hope that you will excuse me when you hear the reason, which is, that I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country. Though I do indeed believe that you have found a spell with which to draw me out of the city into the country, like a hungry cow before whom a bough or a bunch of fruit is waved. For only hold up before me in like manner a book, and you may lead me all round Attica, and over the wide world. And now having arrived, I intend to lie down, and do you choose any posture in which you can read best. Begin."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Listen. You know how matters stand with me; and how, as I conceive, this affair may be arranged for the advantage of both of us. And I maintain that I ought not to fail in my suit, because I am not your lover: for lovers repent of the kindnesses which they have shown when their passion ceases, but to the non-lovers who are free and not under any compulsion, no time of repentance ever comes; for they confer their benefits according to the measure of their ability, in the way which is most conducive to their own interest. Then again, lovers consider how by reason of their love they have neglected their own concerns and rendered service to others: and when to these benefits conferred they add on the troubles which they have endured, they think that they have long ago made to the beloved a very ample return. But the non-lover has no such tormenting recollections; he has never neglected his affairs or quarrelled with his relations; he has no troubles to add up or excuses to invent; and being well rid of all these evils, why should he not freely do what will gratify the beloved? If you say that the lover is more to be esteemed, because his love is thought to be greater; for he is willing to say and do what is hateful to other men, in order to please his beloved;--that, if true, is only a proof that he will prefer any future love to his present, and will injure his old love at the pleasure of the new. And how, in a matter of such infinite importance, can a man be right in trusting himself to one who is afflicted with a malady which no experienced person would attempt to cure, for the patient himself admits that he is not in his right mind, and acknowledges that he is wrong in his mind, but says that he is unable to control himself? And if he came to his right mind, would he ever imagine that the desires were good which he conceived when in his wrong mind? Once more, there are many more non-lovers than lovers; and if you choose the best of the lovers, you will not have many to choose from; but if from the non-lovers, the choice will be larger, and you will be far more likely to find among them a person who is worthy of your friendship. If public opinion be your dread, and you would avoid reproach, in all probability the lover, who is always thinking that other men are as emulous of him as he is of them, will boast to some one of his successes, and make a show of them openly in the pride of his heart;--he wants others to know that his labour has not been lost; but the non-lover is more his own master, and is desirous of solid good, and not of the opinion of mankind. Again, the lover may be generally noted or seen following the beloved (this is his regular occupation), and whenever they are observed to exchange two words they are supposed to meet about some affair of love either past or in contemplation; but when non-lovers meet, no one asks the reason why, because people know that talking to another is natural, whether friendship or mere pleasure be the motive. Once more, if you fear the fickleness of friendship, consider that in any other case a quarrel might be a mutual calamity; but now, when you have given up what is most precious to you, you will be the greater loser, and therefore, you will have more reason in being afraid of the lover, for his vexations are many, and he is always fancying that every one is leagued against him. Wherefore also he debars his beloved from society; he will not have you intimate with the wealthy, lest they should exceed him in wealth, or with men of education, lest they should be his superiors in understanding; and he is equally afraid of anybody's influence who has any other advantage over himself. If he can persuade you to break with them, you are left without a friend in the world; or if, out of a regard to your own interest, you have more sense than to comply with his desire, you will have to quarrel with him. But those who are non-lovers, and whose success in love is the reward of their merit, will not be jealous of the companions of their beloved, and will rather hate those who refuse to be his associates, thinking that their favourite is slighted by the latter and benefited by the former; for more love than hatred may be expected to come to him out of his friendship with others. Many lovers too have loved the person of a youth before they knew his character or his belongings; so that when their passion has passed away, there is no knowing whether they will continue to be his friends; whereas, in the case of non-lovers who were always friends, the friendship is not lessened by the favours granted; but the recollection of these remains with them, and is an earnest of good things to come. Further, I say that you are likely to be improved by me, whereas the lover will spoil you. For they praise your words and actions in a wrong way; partly, because they are afraid of offending you, and also, their judgment is weakened by passion. Such are the feats which love exhibits; he makes things painful to the disappointed which give no pain to others; he compels the successful lover to praise what ought not to give him pleasure, and therefore the beloved is to be pitied rather than envied. But if you listen to me, in the first place, I, in my intercourse with you, shall not merely regard present enjoyment, but also future advantage, being not mastered by love, but my own master; nor for small causes taking violent dislikes, but even when the cause is great, slowly laying up little wrath--unintentional offences I shall forgive, and intentional ones I shall try to prevent; and these are the marks of a friendship which will last. Do you think that a lover only can be a firm friend? reflect:--if this were true, we should set small value on sons, or fathers, or mothers; nor should we ever have loyal friends, for our love of them arises not from passion, but from other associations. Further, if we ought to shower favours on those who are the most eager suitors,--on that principle, we ought always to do good, not to the most virtuous, but to the most needy; for they are the persons who will be most relieved, and will therefore be the most grateful; and when you make a feast you should invite not your friend, but the beggar and the empty soul; for they will love you, and attend you, and come about your doors, and will be the best pleased, and the most grateful, and will invoke many a blessing on your head. Yet surely you ought not to be granting favours to those who besiege you with prayer, but to those who are best able to reward you; nor to the lover only, but to those who are worthy of love; nor to those who will enjoy the bloom of your youth, but to those who will share their possessions with you in age; nor to those who, having succeeded, will glory in their success to others, but to those who will be modest and tell no tales; nor to those who care about you for a moment only, but to those who will continue your friends through life; nor to those who, when their passion is over, will pick a quarrel with you, but rather to those who, when the charm of youth has left you, will show their own virtue. Remember what I have said; and consider yet this further point: friends admonish the lover under the idea that his way of life is bad, but no one of his kindred ever yet censured the non-lover, or thought that he was ill-advised about his own interests. 'Perhaps you will ask me whether I propose that you should indulge every non-lover. To which I reply that not even the lover would advise you to indulge all lovers, for the indiscriminate favour is less esteemed by the rational recipient, and less easily hidden by him who would escape the censure of the world. Now love ought to be for the advantage of both parties, and for the injury of neither. 'I believe that I have said enough; but if there is anything more which you desire or which in your opinion needs to be supplied, ask and I will answer.' Now, Socrates, what do you think? Is not the discourse excellent, more especially in the matter of the language?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, quite admirable; the effect on me was ravishing. And this I owe to you, Phaedrus, for I observed you while reading to be in an ecstasy, and thinking that you are more experienced in these matters than I am, I followed your example, and, like you, my divine darling, I became inspired with a phrenzy."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Indeed, you are pleased to be merry."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you mean that I am not in earnest?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Now don't talk in that way, Socrates, but let me have your real opinion; I adjure you, by Zeus, the god of friendship, to tell me whether you think that any Hellene could have said more or spoken better on the same subject."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, but are you and I expected to praise the sentiments of the author, or only the clearness, and roundness, and finish, and tournure of the language? As to the first I willingly submit to your better judgment, for I am not worthy to form an opinion, having only attended to the rhetorical manner; and I was doubting whether this could have been defended even by Lysias himself; I thought, though I speak under correction, that he repeated himself two or three times, either from want of words or from want of pains; and also, he appeared to me ostentatiously to exult in showing how well he could say the same thing in two or three ways."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Nonsense, Socrates; what you call repetition was the especial merit of the speech; for he omitted no topic of which the subject rightly allowed, and I do not think that any one could have spoken better or more exhaustively."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There I cannot go along with you. Ancient sages, men and women, who have spoken and written of these things, would rise up in judgment against me, if out of complaisance I assented to you."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Who are they, and where did you hear anything better than this?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am sure that I must have heard; but at this moment I do not remember from whom; perhaps from Sappho the fair, or Anacreon the wise; or, possibly, from a prose writer. Why do I say so? Why, because I perceive that my bosom is full, and that I could make another speech as good as that of Lysias, and different. Now I am certain that this is not an invention of my own, who am well aware that I know nothing, and therefore I can only infer that I have been filled through the ears, like a pitcher, from the waters of another, though I have actually forgotten in my stupidity who was my informant."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"That is grand:--but never mind where you heard the discourse or from whom; let that be a mystery not to be divulged even at my earnest desire. Only, as you say, promise to make another and better oration, equal in length and entirely new, on the same subject; and I, like the nine Archons, will promise to set up a golden image at Delphi, not only of myself, but of you, and as large as life."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You are a dear golden ass if you suppose me to mean that Lysias has altogether missed the mark, and that I can make a speech from which all his arguments are to be excluded. The worst of authors will say something which is to the point. Who, for example, could speak on this thesis of yours without praising the discretion of the non-lover and blaming the indiscretion of the lover? These are the commonplaces of the subject which must come in (for what else is there to be said?) and must be allowed and excused; the only merit is in the arrangement of them, for there can be none in the invention; but when you leave the commonplaces, then there may be some originality."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I admit that there is reason in what you say, and I too will be reasonable, and will allow you to start with the premiss that the lover is more disordered in his wits than the non-lover; if in what remains you make a longer and better speech than Lysias, and use other arguments, then I say again, that a statue you shall have of beaten gold, and take your place by the colossal offerings of the Cypselids at Olympia."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"How profoundly in earnest is the lover, because to tease him I lay a finger upon his love! And so, Phaedrus, you really imagine that I am going to improve upon the ingenuity of Lysias?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"There I have you as you had me, and you must just speak 'as you best can.' Do not let us exchange 'tu quoque' as in a farce, or compel me to say to you as you said to me, 'I know Socrates as well as I know myself, and he was wanting to speak, but he gave himself airs.' Rather I would have you consider that from this place we stir not until you have unbosomed yourself of the speech; for here are we all alone, and I am stronger, remember, and younger than you:--Wherefore perpend, and do not compel me to use violence."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But, my sweet Phaedrus, how ridiculous it would be of me to compete with Lysias in an extempore speech! He is a master in his art and I am an untaught man."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"You see how matters stand; and therefore let there be no more pretences; for, indeed, I know the word that is irresistible."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then don't say it."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes, but I will; and my word shall be an oath. 'I say, or rather swear'--but what god will be witness of my oath?--'By this plane-tree I swear, that unless you repeat the discourse here in the face of this very plane-tree, I will never tell you another; never let you have word of another!'"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Villain! I am conquered; the poor lover of discourse has no more to say."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Then why are you still at your tricks?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am not going to play tricks now that you have taken the oath, for I cannot allow myself to be starved."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Proceed."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall I tell you what I will do?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will veil my face and gallop through the discourse as fast as I can, for if I see you I shall feel ashamed and not know what to say."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Only go on and you may do anything else which you please."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Come, O ye Muses, melodious, as ye are called, whether you have received this name from the character of your strains, or because the Melians are a musical race, help, O help me in the tale which my good friend here desires me to rehearse, in order that his friend whom he always deemed wise may seem to him to be wiser than ever. Once upon a time there was a fair boy, or, more properly speaking, a youth; he was very fair and had a great many lovers; and there was one special cunning one, who had persuaded the youth that he did not love him, but he really loved him all the same; and one day when he was paying his addresses to him, he used this very argument--that he ought to accept the non-lover rather than the lover; his words were as follows:-- 'All good counsel begins in the same way; a man should know what he is advising about, or his counsel will all come to nought. But people imagine that they know about the nature of things, when they don't know about them, and, not having come to an understanding at first because they think that they know, they end, as might be expected, in contradicting one another and themselves. Now you and I must not be guilty of this fundamental error which we condemn in others; but as our question is whether the lover or non-lover is to be preferred, let us first of all agree in defining the nature and power of love, and then, keeping our eyes upon the definition and to this appealing, let us further enquire whether love brings advantage or disadvantage. 'Every one sees that love is a desire, and we know also that non-lovers desire the beautiful and good. Now in what way is the lover to be distinguished from the non-lover? Let us note that in every one of us there are two guiding and ruling principles which lead us whither they will; one is the natural desire of pleasure, the other is an acquired opinion which aspires after the best; and these two are sometimes in harmony and then again at war, and sometimes the one, sometimes the other conquers. When opinion by the help of reason leads us to the best, the conquering principle is called temperance; but when desire, which is devoid of reason, rules in us and drags us to pleasure, that power of misrule is called excess. Now excess has many names, and many members, and many forms, and any of these forms when very marked gives a name, neither honourable nor creditable, to the bearer of the name. The desire of eating, for example, which gets the better of the higher reason and the other desires, is called gluttony, and he who is possessed by it is called a glutton; the tyrannical desire of drink, which inclines the possessor of the desire to drink, has a name which is only too obvious, and there can be as little doubt by what name any other appetite of the same family would be called;--it will be the name of that which happens to be dominant. And now I think that you will perceive the drift of my discourse; but as every spoken word is in a manner plainer than the unspoken, I had better say further that the irrational desire which overcomes the tendency of opinion towards right, and is led away to the enjoyment of beauty, and especially of personal beauty, by the desires which are her own kindred--that supreme desire, I say, which by leading conquers and by the force of passion is reinforced, from this very force, receiving a name, is called love (erromenos eros).' And now, dear Phaedrus, I shall pause for an instant to ask whether you do not think me, as I appear to myself, inspired?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, you seem to have a very unusual flow of words."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Listen to me, then, in silence; for surely the place is holy; so that you must not wonder, if, as I proceed, I appear to be in a divine fury, for already I am getting into dithyrambics."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Nothing can be truer."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The responsibility rests with you. But hear what follows, and perhaps the fit may be averted; all is in their hands above. I will go on talking to my youth. Listen:-- Thus, my friend, we have declared and defined the nature of the subject. Keeping the definition in view, let us now enquire what advantage or disadvantage is likely to ensue from the lover or the non-lover to him who accepts their advances. He who is the victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure will of course desire to make his beloved as agreeable to himself as possible. Now to him who has a mind diseased anything is agreeable which is not opposed to him, but that which is equal or superior is hateful to him, and therefore the lover will not brook any superiority or equality on the part of his beloved; he is always employed in reducing him to inferiority. And the ignorant is the inferior of the wise, the coward of the brave, the slow of speech of the speaker, the dull of the clever. These, and not these only, are the mental defects of the beloved;--defects which, when implanted by nature, are necessarily a delight to the lover, and when not implanted, he must contrive to implant them in him, if he would not be deprived of his fleeting joy. And therefore he cannot help being jealous, and will debar his beloved from the advantages of society which would make a man of him, and especially from that society which would have given him wisdom, and thereby he cannot fail to do him great harm. That is to say, in his excessive fear lest he should come to be despised in his eyes he will be compelled to banish from him divine philosophy; and there is no greater injury which he can inflict upon him than this. He will contrive that his beloved shall be wholly ignorant, and in everything shall look to him; he is to be the delight of the lover's heart, and a curse to himself. Verily, a lover is a profitable guardian and associate for him in all that relates to his mind. Let us next see how his master, whose law of life is pleasure and not good, will keep and train the body of his servant. Will he not choose a beloved who is delicate rather than sturdy and strong? One brought up in shady bowers and not in the bright sun, a stranger to manly exercises and the sweat of toil, accustomed only to a soft and luxurious diet, instead of the hues of health having the colours of paint and ornament, and the rest of a piece?--such a life as any one can imagine and which I need not detail at length. But I may sum up all that I have to say in a word, and pass on. Such a person in war, or in any of the great crises of life, will be the anxiety of his friends and also of his lover, and certainly not the terror of his enemies; which nobody can deny. And now let us tell what advantage or disadvantage the beloved will receive from the guardianship and society of his lover in the matter of his property; this is the next point to be considered. The lover will be the first to see what, indeed, will be sufficiently evident to all men, that he desires above all things to deprive his beloved of his dearest and best and holiest possessions, father, mother, kindred, friends, of all whom he thinks may be hinderers or reprovers of their most sweet converse; he will even cast a jealous eye upon his gold and silver or other property, because these make him a less easy prey, and when caught less manageable; hence he is of necessity displeased at his possession of them and rejoices at their loss; and he would like him to be wifeless, childless, homeless, as well; and the longer the better, for the longer he is all this, the longer he will enjoy him. There are some sort of animals, such as flatterers, who are dangerous and mischievous enough, and yet nature has mingled a temporary pleasure and grace in their composition. You may say that a courtesan is hurtful, and disapprove of such creatures and their practices, and yet for the time they are very pleasant. But the lover is not only hurtful to his love; he is also an extremely disagreeable companion. The old proverb says that 'birds of a feather flock together'; I suppose that equality of years inclines them to the same pleasures, and similarity begets friendship; yet you may have more than enough even of this; and verily constraint is always said to be grievous. Now the lover is not only unlike his beloved, but he forces himself upon him. For he is old and his love is young, and neither day nor night will he leave him if he can help; necessity and the sting of desire drive him on, and allure him with the pleasure which he receives from seeing, hearing, touching, perceiving him in every way. And therefore he is delighted to fasten upon him and to minister to him. But what pleasure or consolation can the beloved be receiving all this time? Must he not feel the extremity of disgust when he looks at an old shrivelled face and the remainder to match, which even in a description is disagreeable, and quite detestable when he is forced into daily contact with his lover; moreover he is jealously watched and guarded against everything and everybody, and has to hear misplaced and exaggerated praises of himself, and censures equally inappropriate, which are intolerable when the man is sober, and, besides being intolerable, are published all over the world in all their indelicacy and wearisomeness when he is drunk. And not only while his love continues is he mischievous and unpleasant, but when his love ceases he becomes a perfidious enemy of him on whom he showered his oaths and prayers and promises, and yet could hardly prevail upon him to tolerate the tedium of his company even from motives of interest. The hour of payment arrives, and now he is the servant of another master; instead of love and infatuation, wisdom and temperance are his bosom's lords; but the beloved has not discovered the change which has taken place in him, when he asks for a return and recalls to his recollection former sayings and doings; he believes himself to be speaking to the same person, and the other, not having the courage to confess the truth, and not knowing how to fulfil the oaths and promises which he made when under the dominion of folly, and having now grown wise and temperate, does not want to do as he did or to be as he was before. And so he runs away and is constrained to be a defaulter; the oyster-shell (In allusion to a game in which two parties fled or pursued according as an oyster-shell which was thrown into the air fell with the dark or light side uppermost.) has fallen with the other side uppermost--he changes pursuit into flight, while the other is compelled to follow him with passion and imprecation, not knowing that he ought never from the first to have accepted a demented lover instead of a sensible non-lover; and that in making such a choice he was giving himself up to a faithless, morose, envious, disagreeable being, hurtful to his estate, hurtful to his bodily health, and still more hurtful to the cultivation of his mind, than which there neither is nor ever will be anything more honoured in the eyes both of gods and men. Consider this, fair youth, and know that in the friendship of the lover there is no real kindness; he has an appetite and wants to feed upon you: 'As wolves love lambs so lovers love their loves.' But I told you so, I am speaking in verse, and therefore I had better make an end; enough."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I thought that you were only half-way and were going to make a similar speech about all the advantages of accepting the non-lover. Why do you not proceed?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Does not your simplicity observe that I have got out of dithyrambics into heroics, when only uttering a censure on the lover? And if I am to add the praises of the non-lover what will become of me? Do you not perceive that I am already overtaken by the Nymphs to whom you have mischievously exposed me? And therefore I will only add that the non-lover has all the advantages in which the lover is accused of being deficient. And now I will say no more; there has been enough of both of them. Leaving the tale to its fate, I will cross the river and make the best of my way home, lest a worse thing be inflicted upon me by you."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Not yet, Socrates; not until the heat of the day has passed; do you not see that the hour is almost noon? there is the midday sun standing still, as people say, in the meridian. Let us rather stay and talk over what has been said, and then return in the cool."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Your love of discourse, Phaedrus, is superhuman, simply marvellous, and I do not believe that there is any one of your contemporaries who has either made or in one way or another has compelled others to make an equal number of speeches. I would except Simmias the Theban, but all the rest are far behind you. And now I do verily believe that you have been the cause of another."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"That is good news. But what do you mean?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean to say that as I was about to cross the stream the usual sign was given to me,--that sign which always forbids, but never bids, me to do anything which I am going to do; and I thought that I heard a voice saying in my ear that I had been guilty of impiety, and that I must not go away until I had made an atonement. Now I am a diviner, though not a very good one, but I have enough religion for my own use, as you might say of a bad writer--his writing is good enough for him; and I am beginning to see that I was in error. O my friend, how prophetic is the human soul! At the time I had a sort of misgiving, and, like Ibycus, 'I was troubled; I feared that I might be buying honour from men at the price of sinning against the gods.' Now I recognize my error."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What error?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That was a dreadful speech which you brought with you, and you made me utter one as bad."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"It was foolish, I say,--to a certain extent, impious; can anything be more dreadful?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Nothing, if the speech was really such as you describe."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, and is not Eros the son of Aphrodite, and a god?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"So men say."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But that was not acknowledged by Lysias in his speech, nor by you in that other speech which you by a charm drew from my lips. For if love be, as he surely is, a divinity, he cannot be evil. Yet this was the error of both the speeches. There was also a simplicity about them which was refreshing; having no truth or honesty in them, nevertheless they pretended to be something, hoping to succeed in deceiving the manikins of earth and gain celebrity among them. Wherefore I must have a purgation. And I bethink me of an ancient purgation of mythological error which was devised, not by Homer, for he never had the wit to discover why he was blind, but by Stesichorus, who was a philosopher and knew the reason why; and therefore, when he lost his eyes, for that was the penalty which was inflicted upon him for reviling the lovely Helen, he at once purged himself. And the purgation was a recantation, which began thus,-- 'False is that word of mine--the truth is that thou didst not embark in ships, nor ever go to the walls of Troy;' and when he had completed his poem, which is called 'the recantation,' immediately his sight returned to him. Now I will be wiser than either Stesichorus or Homer, in that I am going to make my recantation for reviling love before I suffer; and this I will attempt, not as before, veiled and ashamed, but with forehead bold and bare."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Nothing could be more agreeable to me than to hear you say so."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Only think, my good Phaedrus, what an utter want of delicacy was shown in the two discourses; I mean, in my own and in that which you recited out of the book. Would not any one who was himself of a noble and gentle nature, and who loved or ever had loved a nature like his own, when we tell of the petty causes of lovers' jealousies, and of their exceeding animosities, and of the injuries which they do to their beloved, have imagined that our ideas of love were taken from some haunt of sailors to which good manners were unknown--he would certainly never have admitted the justice of our censure?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I dare say not, Socrates."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Therefore, because I blush at the thought of this person, and also because I am afraid of Love himself, I desire to wash the brine out of my ears with water from the spring; and I would counsel Lysias not to delay, but to write another discourse, which shall prove that 'ceteris paribus' the lover ought to be accepted rather than the non-lover."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Be assured that he shall. You shall speak the praises of the lover, and Lysias shall be compelled by me to write another discourse on the same theme."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You will be true to your nature in that, and therefore I believe you."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Speak, and fear not."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But where is the fair youth whom I was addressing before, and who ought to listen now; lest, if he hear me not, he should accept a non-lover before he knows what he is doing?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"He is close at hand, and always at your service."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Know then, fair youth, that the former discourse was the word of Phaedrus, the son of Vain Man, who dwells in the city of Myrrhina (Myrrhinusius). And this which I am about to utter is the recantation of Stesichorus the son of Godly Man (Euphemus), who comes from the town of Desire (Himera), and is to the following effect: 'I told a lie when I said' that the beloved ought to accept the non-lover when he might have the lover, because the one is sane, and the other mad. It might be so if madness were simply an evil; but there is also a madness which is a divine gift, and the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men. For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have conferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, but when in their senses few or none. And I might also tell you how the Sibyl and other inspired persons have given to many an one many an intimation of the future which has saved them from falling. But it would be tedious to speak of what every one knows. There will be more reason in appealing to the ancient inventors of names (compare Cratylus), who would never have connected prophecy (mantike) which foretells the future and is the noblest of arts, with madness (manike), or called them both by the same name, if they had deemed madness to be a disgrace or dishonour;--they must have thought that there was an inspired madness which was a noble thing; for the two words, mantike and manike, are really the same, and the letter tau is only a modern and tasteless insertion. And this is confirmed by the name which was given by them to the rational investigation of futurity, whether made by the help of birds or of other signs--this, for as much as it is an art which supplies from the reasoning faculty mind (nous) and information (istoria) to human thought (oiesis) they originally termed oionoistike, but the word has been lately altered and made sonorous by the modern introduction of the letter Omega (oionoistike and oionistike), and in proportion as prophecy (mantike) is more perfect and august than augury, both in name and fact, in the same proportion, as the ancients testify, is madness superior to a sane mind (sophrosune) for the one is only of human, but the other of divine origin. Again, where plagues and mightiest woes have bred in certain families, owing to some ancient blood-guiltiness, there madness has entered with holy prayers and rites, and by inspired utterances found a way of deliverance for those who are in need; and he who has part in this gift, and is truly possessed and duly out of his mind, is by the use of purifications and mysteries made whole and exempt from evil, future as well as present, and has a release from the calamity which was afflicting him. The third kind is the madness of those who are possessed by the Muses; which taking hold of a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers; with these adorning the myriad actions of ancient heroes for the instruction of posterity. But he who, having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man disappears and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman. I might tell of many other noble deeds which have sprung from inspired madness. And therefore, let no one frighten or flutter us by saying that the temperate friend is to be chosen rather than the inspired, but let him further show that love is not sent by the gods for any good to lover or beloved; if he can do so we will allow him to carry off the palm. And we, on our part, will prove in answer to him that the madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings, and the proof shall be one which the wise will receive, and the witling disbelieve. But first of all, let us view the affections and actions of the soul divine and human, and try to ascertain the truth about them. The beginning of our proof is as follows:-- (Translated by Cic. Tus. Quaest.) The soul through all her being is immortal, for that which is ever in motion is immortal; but that which moves another and is moved by another, in ceasing to move ceases also to live. Only the self-moving, never leaving self, never ceases to move, and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves besides. Now, the beginning is unbegotten, for that which is begotten has a beginning; but the beginning is begotten of nothing, for if it were begotten of something, then the begotten would not come from a beginning. But if unbegotten, it must also be indestructible; for if beginning were destroyed, there could be no beginning out of anything, nor anything out of a beginning; and all things must have a beginning. And therefore the self-moving is the beginning of motion; and this can neither be destroyed nor begotten, else the whole heavens and all creation would collapse and stand still, and never again have motion or birth. But if the self-moving is proved to be immortal, he who affirms that self-motion is the very idea and essence of the soul will not be put to confusion. For the body which is moved from without is soulless; but that which is moved from within has a soul, for such is the nature of the soul. But if this be true, must not the soul be the self-moving, and therefore of necessity unbegotten and immortal? Enough of the soul's immortality. Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite--a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him. I will endeavour to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immortal creature. The soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing--when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and orders the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground--there, finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which appears to be self-moved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of soul and body is called a living and mortal creature. For immortal no such union can be reasonably believed to be; although fancy, not having seen nor surely known the nature of God, may imagine an immortal creature having both a body and also a soul which are united throughout all time. Let that, however, be as God wills, and be spoken of acceptably to him. And now let us ask the reason why the soul loses her wings! The wing is the corporeal element which is most akin to the divine, and which by nature tends to soar aloft and carry that which gravitates downwards into the upper region, which is the habitation of the gods. The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace; but when fed upon evil and foulness and the opposite of good, wastes and falls away. Zeus, the mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way in heaven, ordering all and taking care of all; and there follows him the array of gods and demi-gods, marshalled in eleven bands; Hestia alone abides at home in the house of heaven; of the rest they who are reckoned among the princely twelve march in their appointed order. They see many blessed sights in the inner heaven, and there are many ways to and fro, along which the blessed gods are passing, every one doing his own work; he may follow who will and can, for jealousy has no place in the celestial choir. But when they go to banquet and festival, then they move up the steep to the top of the vault of heaven. The chariots of the gods in even poise, obeying the rein, glide rapidly; but the others labour, for the vicious steed goes heavily, weighing down the charioteer to the earth when his steed has not been thoroughly trained:--and this is the hour of agony and extremest conflict for the soul. For the immortals, when they are at the end of their course, go forth and stand upon the outside of heaven, and the revolution of the spheres carries them round, and they behold the things beyond. But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily? It is such as I will describe; for I must dare to speak the truth, when truth is my theme. There abides the very being with which true knowledge is concerned; the colourless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul. The divine intelligence, being nurtured upon mind and pure knowledge, and the intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving the food proper to it, rejoices at beholding reality, and once more gazing upon truth, is replenished and made glad, until the revolution of the worlds brings her round again to the same place. In the revolution she beholds justice, and temperance, and knowledge absolute, not in the form of generation or of relation, which men call existence, but knowledge absolute in existence absolute; and beholding the other true existences in like manner, and feasting upon them, she passes down into the interior of the heavens and returns home; and there the charioteer putting up his horses at the stall, gives them ambrosia to eat and nectar to drink. Such is the life of the gods; but of other souls, that which follows God best and is likest to him lifts the head of the charioteer into the outer world, and is carried round in the revolution, troubled indeed by the steeds, and with difficulty beholding true being; while another only rises and falls, and sees, and again fails to see by reason of the unruliness of the steeds. The rest of the souls are also longing after the upper world and they all follow, but not being strong enough they are carried round below the surface, plunging, treading on one another, each striving to be first; and there is confusion and perspiration and the extremity of effort; and many of them are lamed or have their wings broken through the ill-driving of the charioteers; and all of them after a fruitless toil, not having attained to the mysteries of true being, go away, and feed upon opinion. The reason why the souls exhibit this exceeding eagerness to behold the plain of truth is that pasturage is found there, which is suited to the highest part of the soul; and the wing on which the soul soars is nourished with this. And there is a law of Destiny, that the soul which attains any vision of truth in company with a god is preserved from harm until the next period, and if attaining always is always unharmed. But when she is unable to follow, and fails to behold the truth, and through some ill-hap sinks beneath the double load of forgetfulness and vice, and her wings fall from her and she drops to the ground, then the law ordains that this soul shall at her first birth pass, not into any other animal, but only into man; and the soul which has seen most of truth shall come to the birth as a philosopher, or artist, or some musical and loving nature; that which has seen truth in the second degree shall be some righteous king or warrior chief; the soul which is of the third class shall be a politician, or economist, or trader; the fourth shall be a lover of gymnastic toils, or a physician; the fifth shall lead the life of a prophet or hierophant; to the sixth the character of poet or some other imitative artist will be assigned; to the seventh the life of an artisan or husbandman; to the eighth that of a sophist or demagogue; to the ninth that of a tyrant--all these are states of probation, in which he who does righteously improves, and he who does unrighteously, deteriorates his lot. Ten thousand years must elapse before the soul of each one can return to the place from whence she came, for she cannot grow her wings in less; only the soul of a philosopher, guileless and true, or the soul of a lover, who is not devoid of philosophy, may acquire wings in the third of the recurring periods of a thousand years; he is distinguished from the ordinary good man who gains wings in three thousand years:--and they who choose this life three times in succession have wings given them, and go away at the end of three thousand years. But the others (The philosopher alone is not subject to judgment (krisis), for he has never lost the vision of truth.) receive judgment when they have completed their first life, and after the judgment they go, some of them to the houses of correction which are under the earth, and are punished; others to some place in heaven whither they are lightly borne by justice, and there they live in a manner worthy of the life which they led here when in the form of men. And at the end of the first thousand years the good souls and also the evil souls both come to draw lots and choose their second life, and they may take any which they please. The soul of a man may pass into the life of a beast, or from the beast return again into the man. But the soul which has never seen the truth will not pass into the human form. For a man must have intelligence of universals, and be able to proceed from the many particulars of sense to one conception of reason;--this is the recollection of those things which our soul once saw while following God--when regardless of that which we now call being she raised her head up towards the true being. And therefore the mind of the philosopher alone has wings; and this is just, for he is always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which He is what He is. And he who employs aright these memories is ever being initiated into perfect mysteries and alone becomes truly perfect. But, as he forgets earthly interests and is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him mad, and rebuke him; they do not see that he is inspired. Thus far I have been speaking of the fourth and last kind of madness, which is imputed to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, is transported with the recollection of the true beauty; he would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad. And I have shown this of all inspirations to be the noblest and highest and the offspring of the highest to him who has or shares in it, and that he who loves the beautiful is called a lover because he partakes of it. For, as has been already said, every soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate in their earthly lot, and, having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through some corrupting influence, they may have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few only retain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, when they behold here any image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they are ignorant of what this rapture means, because they do not clearly perceive. For there is no light of justice or temperance or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls in the earthly copies of them: they are seen through a glass dimly; and there are few who, going to the images, behold in them the realities, and these only with difficulty. There was a time when with the rest of the happy band they saw beauty shining in brightness,--we philosophers following in the train of Zeus, others in company with other gods; and then we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery which may be truly called most blessed, celebrated by us in our state of innocence, before we had any experience of evils to come, when we were admitted to the sight of apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy, which we beheld shining in pure light, pure ourselves and not yet enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, like an oyster in his shell. Let me linger over the memory of scenes which have passed away. But of beauty, I repeat again that we saw her there shining in company with the celestial forms; and coming to earth we find her here too, shining in clearness through the clearest aperture of sense. For sight is the most piercing of our bodily senses; though not by that is wisdom seen; her loveliness would have been transporting if there had been a visible image of her, and the other ideas, if they had visible counterparts, would be equally lovely. But this is the privilege of beauty, that being the loveliest she is also the most palpable to sight. Now he who is not newly initiated or who has become corrupted, does not easily rise out of this world to the sight of true beauty in the other; he looks only at her earthly namesake, and instead of being awed at the sight of her, he is given over to pleasure, and like a brutish beast he rushes on to enjoy and beget; he consorts with wantonness, and is not afraid or ashamed of pursuing pleasure in violation of nature. But he whose initiation is recent, and who has been the spectator of many glories in the other world, is amazed when he sees any one having a godlike face or form, which is the expression of divine beauty; and at first a shudder runs through him, and again the old awe steals over him; then looking upon the face of his beloved as of a god he reverences him, and if he were not afraid of being thought a downright madman, he would sacrifice to his beloved as to the image of a god; then while he gazes on him there is a sort of reaction, and the shudder passes into an unusual heat and perspiration; for, as he receives the effluence of beauty through the eyes, the wing moistens and he warms. And as he warms, the parts out of which the wing grew, and which had been hitherto closed and rigid, and had prevented the wing from shooting forth, are melted, and as nourishment streams upon him, the lower end of the wing begins to swell and grow from the root upwards; and the growth extends under the whole soul--for once the whole was winged. During this process the whole soul is all in a state of ebullition and effervescence,--which may be compared to the irritation and uneasiness in the gums at the time of cutting teeth,--bubbles up, and has a feeling of uneasiness and tickling; but when in like manner the soul is beginning to grow wings, the beauty of the beloved meets her eye and she receives the sensible warm motion of particles which flow towards her, therefore called emotion (imeros), and is refreshed and warmed by them, and then she ceases from her pain with joy. But when she is parted from her beloved and her moisture fails, then the orifices of the passage out of which the wing shoots dry up and close, and intercept the germ of the wing; which, being shut up with the emotion, throbbing as with the pulsations of an artery, pricks the aperture which is nearest, until at length the entire soul is pierced and maddened and pained, and at the recollection of beauty is again delighted. And from both of them together the soul is oppressed at the strangeness of her condition, and is in a great strait and excitement, and in her madness can neither sleep by night nor abide in her place by day. And wherever she thinks that she will behold the beautiful one, thither in her desire she runs. And when she has seen him, and bathed herself in the waters of beauty, her constraint is loosened, and she is refreshed, and has no more pangs and pains; and this is the sweetest of all pleasures at the time, and is the reason why the soul of the lover will never forsake his beautiful one, whom he esteems above all; he has forgotten mother and brethren and companions, and he thinks nothing of the neglect and loss of his property; the rules and proprieties of life, on which he formerly prided himself, he now despises, and is ready to sleep like a servant, wherever he is allowed, as near as he can to his desired one, who is the object of his worship, and the physician who can alone assuage the greatness of his pain. And this state, my dear imaginary youth to whom I am talking, is by men called love, and among the gods has a name at which you, in your simplicity, may be inclined to mock; there are two lines in the apocryphal writings of Homer in which the name occurs. One of them is rather outrageous, and not altogether metrical. They are as follows: 'Mortals call him fluttering love, But the immortals call him winged one, Because the growing of wings (Or, reading pterothoiton, 'the movement of wings.') is a necessity to him.' You may believe this, but not unless you like. At any rate the loves of lovers and their causes are such as I have described. Now the lover who is taken to be the attendant of Zeus is better able to bear the winged god, and can endure a heavier burden; but the attendants and companions of Ares, when under the influence of love, if they fancy that they have been at all wronged, are ready to kill and put an end to themselves and their beloved. And he who follows in the train of any other god, while he is unspoiled and the impression lasts, honours and imitates him, as far as he is able; and after the manner of his God he behaves in his intercourse with his beloved and with the rest of the world during the first period of his earthly existence. Every one chooses his love from the ranks of beauty according to his character, and this he makes his god, and fashions and adorns as a sort of image which he is to fall down and worship. The followers of Zeus desire that their beloved should have a soul like him; and therefore they seek out some one of a philosophical and imperial nature, and when they have found him and loved him, they do all they can to confirm such a nature in him, and if they have no experience of such a disposition hitherto, they learn of any one who can teach them, and themselves follow in the same way. And they have the less difficulty in finding the nature of their own god in themselves, because they have been compelled to gaze intensely on him; their recollection clings to him, and they become possessed of him, and receive from him their character and disposition, so far as man can participate in God. The qualities of their god they attribute to the beloved, wherefore they love him all the more, and if, like the Bacchic Nymphs, they draw inspiration from Zeus, they pour out their own fountain upon him, wanting to make him as like as possible to their own god. But those who are the followers of Here seek a royal love, and when they have found him they do just the same with him; and in like manner the followers of Apollo, and of every other god walking in the ways of their god, seek a love who is to be made like him whom they serve, and when they have found him, they themselves imitate their god, and persuade their love to do the same, and educate him into the manner and nature of the god as far as they each can; for no feelings of envy or jealousy are entertained by them towards their beloved, but they do their utmost to create in him the greatest likeness of themselves and of the god whom they honour. Thus fair and blissful to the beloved is the desire of the inspired lover, and the initiation of which I speak into the mysteries of true love, if he be captured by the lover and their purpose is effected. Now the beloved is taken captive in the following manner:-- As I said at the beginning of this tale, I divided each soul into three--two horses and a charioteer; and one of the horses was good and the other bad: the division may remain, but I have not yet explained in what the goodness or badness of either consists, and to that I will now proceed. The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark colour, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion (Or with grey and blood-shot eyes.); the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur. Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, and is full of the prickings and ticklings of desire, the obedient steed, then as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other, heedless of the pricks and of the blows of the whip, plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and the charioteer, whom he forces to approach the beloved and to remember the joys of love. They at first indignantly oppose him and will not be urged on to do terrible and unlawful deeds; but at last, when he persists in plaguing them, they yield and agree to do as he bids them. And now they are at the spot and behold the flashing beauty of the beloved; which when the charioteer sees, his memory is carried to the true beauty, whom he beholds in company with Modesty like an image placed upon a holy pedestal. He sees her, but he is afraid and falls backwards in adoration, and by his fall is compelled to pull back the reins with such violence as to bring both the steeds on their haunches, the one willing and unresisting, the unruly one very unwilling; and when they have gone back a little, the one is overcome with shame and wonder, and his whole soul is bathed in perspiration; the other, when the pain is over which the bridle and the fall had given him, having with difficulty taken breath, is full of wrath and reproaches, which he heaps upon the charioteer and his fellow-steed, for want of courage and manhood, declaring that they have been false to their agreement and guilty of desertion. Again they refuse, and again he urges them on, and will scarce yield to their prayer that he would wait until another time. When the appointed hour comes, they make as if they had forgotten, and he reminds them, fighting and neighing and dragging them on, until at length he on the same thoughts intent, forces them to draw near again. And when they are near he stoops his head and puts up his tail, and takes the bit in his teeth and pulls shamelessly. Then the charioteer is worse off than ever; he falls back like a racer at the barrier, and with a still more violent wrench drags the bit out of the teeth of the wild steed and covers his abusive tongue and jaws with blood, and forces his legs and haunches to the ground and punishes him sorely. And when this has happened several times and the villain has ceased from his wanton way, he is tamed and humbled, and follows the will of the charioteer, and when he sees the beautiful one he is ready to die of fear. And from that time forward the soul of the lover follows the beloved in modesty and holy fear. And so the beloved who, like a god, has received every true and loyal service from his lover, not in pretence but in reality, being also himself of a nature friendly to his admirer, if in former days he has blushed to own his passion and turned away his lover, because his youthful companions or others slanderously told him that he would be disgraced, now as years advance, at the appointed age and time, is led to receive him into communion. For fate which has ordained that there shall be no friendship among the evil has also ordained that there shall ever be friendship among the good. And the beloved when he has received him into communion and intimacy, is quite amazed at the good-will of the lover; he recognises that the inspired friend is worth all other friends or kinsmen; they have nothing of friendship in them worthy to be compared with his. And when this feeling continues and he is nearer to him and embraces him, in gymnastic exercises and at other times of meeting, then the fountain of that stream, which Zeus when he was in love with Ganymede named Desire, overflows upon the lover, and some enters into his soul, and some when he is filled flows out again; and as a breeze or an echo rebounds from the smooth rocks and returns whence it came, so does the stream of beauty, passing through the eyes which are the windows of the soul, come back to the beautiful one; there arriving and quickening the passages of the wings, watering them and inclining them to grow, and filling the soul of the beloved also with love. And thus he loves, but he knows not what; he does not understand and cannot explain his own state; he appears to have caught the infection of blindness from another; the lover is his mirror in whom he is beholding himself, but he is not aware of this. When he is with the lover, both cease from their pain, but when he is away then he longs as he is longed for, and has love's image, love for love (Anteros) lodging in his breast, which he calls and believes to be not love but friendship only, and his desire is as the desire of the other, but weaker; he wants to see him, touch him, kiss him, embrace him, and probably not long afterwards his desire is accomplished. When they meet, the wanton steed of the lover has a word to say to the charioteer; he would like to have a little pleasure in return for many pains, but the wanton steed of the beloved says not a word, for he is bursting with passion which he understands not;--he throws his arms round the lover and embraces him as his dearest friend; and, when they are side by side, he is not in a state in which he can refuse the lover anything, if he ask him; although his fellow-steed and the charioteer oppose him with the arguments of shame and reason. After this their happiness depends upon their self-control; if the better elements of the mind which lead to order and philosophy prevail, then they pass their life here in happiness and harmony--masters of themselves and orderly--enslaving the vicious and emancipating the virtuous elements of the soul; and when the end comes, they are light and winged for flight, having conquered in one of the three heavenly or truly Olympian victories; nor can human discipline or divine inspiration confer any greater blessing on man than this. If, on the other hand, they leave philosophy and lead the lower life of ambition, then probably, after wine or in some other careless hour, the two wanton animals take the two souls when off their guard and bring them together, and they accomplish that desire of their hearts which to the many is bliss; and this having once enjoyed they continue to enjoy, yet rarely because they have not the approval of the whole soul. They too are dear, but not so dear to one another as the others, either at the time of their love or afterwards. They consider that they have given and taken from each other the most sacred pledges, and they may not break them and fall into enmity. At last they pass out of the body, unwinged, but eager to soar, and thus obtain no mean reward of love and madness. For those who have once begun the heavenward pilgrimage may not go down again to darkness and the journey beneath the earth, but they live in light always; happy companions in their pilgrimage, and when the time comes at which they receive their wings they have the same plumage because of their love. Thus great are the heavenly blessings which the friendship of a lover will confer upon you, my youth. Whereas the attachment of the non-lover, which is alloyed with a worldly prudence and has worldly and niggardly ways of doling out benefits, will breed in your soul those vulgar qualities which the populace applaud, will send you bowling round the earth during a period of nine thousand years, and leave you a fool in the world below. And thus, dear Eros, I have made and paid my recantation, as well and as fairly as I could; more especially in the matter of the poetical figures which I was compelled to use, because Phaedrus would have them. And now forgive the past and accept the present, and be gracious and merciful to me, and do not in thine anger deprive me of sight, or take from me the art of love which thou hast given me, but grant that I may be yet more esteemed in the eyes of the fair. And if Phaedrus or I myself said anything rude in our first speeches, blame Lysias, who is the father of the brat, and let us have no more of his progeny; bid him study philosophy, like his brother Polemarchus; and then his lover Phaedrus will no longer halt between two opinions, but will dedicate himself wholly to love and to philosophical discourses."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I join in the prayer, Socrates, and say with you, if this be for my good, may your words come to pass. But why did you make your second oration so much finer than the first? I wonder why. And I begin to be afraid that I shall lose conceit of Lysias, and that he will appear tame in comparison, even if he be willing to put another as fine and as long as yours into the field, which I doubt. For quite lately one of your politicians was abusing him on this very account; and called him a 'speech writer' again and again. So that a feeling of pride may probably induce him to give up writing speeches."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What a very amusing notion! But I think, my young man, that you are much mistaken in your friend if you imagine that he is frightened at a little noise; and, possibly, you think that his assailant was in earnest?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I thought, Socrates, that he was. And you are aware that the greatest and most influential statesmen are ashamed of writing speeches and leaving them in a written form, lest they should be called Sophists by posterity."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You seem to be unconscious, Phaedrus, that the 'sweet elbow' (A proverb, like 'the grapes are sour,' applied to pleasures which cannot be had, meaning sweet things which, like the elbow, are out of the reach of the mouth. The promised pleasure turns out to be a long and tedious affair.) of the proverb is really the long arm of the Nile. And you appear to be equally unaware of the fact that this sweet elbow of theirs is also a long arm. For there is nothing of which our great politicians are so fond as of writing speeches and bequeathing them to posterity. And they add their admirers' names at the top of the writing, out of gratitude to them."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean? I do not understand."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, do you not know that when a politician writes, he begins with the names of his approvers?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, he begins in this manner: 'Be it enacted by the senate, the people, or both, on the motion of a certain person,' who is our author; and so putting on a serious face, he proceeds to display his own wisdom to his admirers in what is often a long and tedious composition. Now what is that sort of thing but a regular piece of authorship?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if the law is finally approved, then the author leaves the theatre in high delight; but if the law is rejected and he is done out of his speech-making, and not thought good enough to write, then he and his party are in mourning."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"So far are they from despising, or rather so highly do they value the practice of writing."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"No doubt."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when the king or orator has the power, as Lycurgus or Solon or Darius had, of attaining an immortality or authorship in a state, is he not thought by posterity, when they see his compositions, and does he not think himself, while he is yet alive, to be a god?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then do you think that any one of this class, however ill-disposed, would reproach Lysias with being an author?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Not upon your view; for according to you he would be casting a slur upon his own favourite pursuit."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The disgrace begins when a man writes not well, but badly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Clearly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what is well and what is badly--need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Need we? For what should a man live if not for the pleasures of discourse? Surely not for the sake of bodily pleasures, which almost always have previous pain as a condition of them, and therefore are rightly called slavish."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is time enough. And I believe that the grasshoppers chirruping after their manner in the heat of the sun over our heads are talking to one another and looking down at us. What would they say if they saw that we, like the many, are not conversing, but slumbering at mid-day, lulled by their voices, too indolent to think? Would they not have a right to laugh at us? They might imagine that we were slaves, who, coming to rest at a place of resort of theirs, like sheep lie asleep at noon around the well. But if they see us discoursing, and like Odysseus sailing past them, deaf to their siren voices, they may perhaps, out of respect, give us of the gifts which they receive from the gods that they may impart them to men."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What gifts do you mean? I never heard of any."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"A lover of music like yourself ought surely to have heard the story of the grasshoppers, who are said to have been human beings in an age before the Muses. And when the Muses came and song appeared they were ravished with delight; and singing always, never thought of eating and drinking, until at last in their forgetfulness they died. And now they live again in the grasshoppers; and this is the return which the Muses make to them--they neither hunger, nor thirst, but from the hour of their birth are always singing, and never eating or drinking; and when they die they go and inform the Muses in heaven who honours them on earth. They win the love of Terpsichore for the dancers by their report of them; of Erato for the lovers, and of the other Muses for those who do them honour, according to the several ways of honouring them;--of Calliope the eldest Muse and of Urania who is next to her, for the philosophers, of whose music the grasshoppers make report to them; for these are the Muses who are chiefly concerned with heaven and thought, divine as well as human, and they have the sweetest utterance. For many reasons, then, we ought always to talk and not to sleep at mid-day."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Let us talk."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall we discuss the rules of writing and speech as we were proposing?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Very good."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In good speaking should not the mind of the speaker know the truth of the matter about which he is going to speak?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"And yet, Socrates, I have heard that he who would be an orator has nothing to do with true justice, but only with that which is likely to be approved by the many who sit in judgment; nor with the truly good or honourable, but only with opinion about them, and that from opinion comes persuasion, and not from the truth."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The words of the wise are not to be set aside; for there is probably something in them; and therefore the meaning of this saying is not hastily to be dismissed."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us put the matter thus:--Suppose that I persuaded you to buy a horse and go to the wars. Neither of us knew what a horse was like, but I knew that you believed a horse to be of tame animals the one which has the longest ears."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"That would be ridiculous."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There is something more ridiculous coming:--Suppose, further, that in sober earnest I, having persuaded you of this, went and composed a speech in honour of an ass, whom I entitled a horse beginning: 'A noble animal and a most useful possession, especially in war, and you may get on his back and fight, and he will carry baggage or anything.'"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"How ridiculous!"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Ridiculous! Yes; but is not even a ridiculous friend better than a cunning enemy?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when the orator instead of putting an ass in the place of a horse, puts good for evil, being himself as ignorant of their true nature as the city on which he imposes is ignorant; and having studied the notions of the multitude, falsely persuades them not about 'the shadow of an ass,' which he confounds with a horse, but about good which he confounds with evil,--what will be the harvest which rhetoric will be likely to gather after the sowing of that seed?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"The reverse of good."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But perhaps rhetoric has been getting too roughly handled by us, and she might answer: What amazing nonsense you are talking! As if I forced any man to learn to speak in ignorance of the truth! Whatever my advice may be worth, I should have told him to arrive at the truth first, and then come to me. At the same time I boldly assert that mere knowledge of the truth will not give you the art of persuasion."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"There is reason in the lady's defence of herself."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Quite true; if only the other arguments which remain to be brought up bear her witness that she is an art at all. But I seem to hear them arraying themselves on the opposite side, declaring that she speaks falsely, and that rhetoric is a mere routine and trick, not an art. Lo! a Spartan appears, and says that there never is nor ever will be a real art of speaking which is divorced from the truth."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"And what are these arguments, Socrates? Bring them out that we may examine them."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Come out, fair children, and convince Phaedrus, who is the father of similar beauties, that he will never be able to speak about anything as he ought to speak unless he have a knowledge of philosophy. And let Phaedrus answer you."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Put the question."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is not rhetoric, taken generally, a universal art of enchanting the mind by arguments; which is practised not only in courts and public assemblies, but in private houses also, having to do with all matters, great as well as small, good and bad alike, and is in all equally right, and equally to be esteemed--that is what you have heard?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Nay, not exactly that; I should say rather that I have heard the art confined to speaking and writing in lawsuits, and to speaking in public assemblies--not extended farther."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I suppose that you have only heard of the rhetoric of Nestor and Odysseus, which they composed in their leisure hours when at Troy, and never of the rhetoric of Palamedes?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"No more than of Nestor and Odysseus, unless Gorgias is your Nestor, and Thrasymachus or Theodorus your Odysseus."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Perhaps that is my meaning. But let us leave them. And do you tell me, instead, what are plaintiff and defendant doing in a law court--are they not contending?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Exactly so."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"About the just and unjust--that is the matter in dispute?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And a professor of the art will make the same thing appear to the same persons to be at one time just, at another time, if he is so inclined, to be unjust?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when he speaks in the assembly, he will make the same things seem good to the city at one time, and at another time the reverse of good?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Have we not heard of the Eleatic Palamedes (Zeno), who has an art of speaking by which he makes the same things appear to his hearers like and unlike, one and many, at rest and in motion?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The art of disputation, then, is not confined to the courts and the assembly, but is one and the same in every use of language; this is the art, if there be such an art, which is able to find a likeness of everything to which a likeness can be found, and draws into the light of day the likenesses and disguises which are used by others?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"How do you mean?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let me put the matter thus: When will there be more chance of deception--when the difference is large or small?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"When the difference is small."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you will be less likely to be discovered in passing by degrees into the other extreme than when you go all at once?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Of course."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He, then, who would deceive others, and not be deceived, must exactly know the real likenesses and differences of things?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"He must."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if he is ignorant of the true nature of any subject, how can he detect the greater or less degree of likeness in other things to that of which by the hypothesis he is ignorant?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"He cannot."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when men are deceived and their notions are at variance with realities, it is clear that the error slips in through resemblances?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that is the way."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he who would be a master of the art must understand the real nature of everything; or he will never know either how to make the gradual departure from truth into the opposite of truth which is effected by the help of resemblances, or how to avoid it?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"He will not."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He then, who being ignorant of the truth aims at appearances, will only attain an art of rhetoric which is ridiculous and is not an art at all?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"That may be expected."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Shall I propose that we look for examples of art and want of art, according to our notion of them, in the speech of Lysias which you have in your hand, and in my own speech?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Nothing could be better; and indeed I think that our previous argument has been too abstract and wanting in illustrations."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes; and the two speeches happen to afford a very good example of the way in which the speaker who knows the truth may, without any serious purpose, steal away the hearts of his hearers. This piece of good-fortune I attribute to the local deities; and, perhaps, the prophets of the Muses who are singing over our heads may have imparted their inspiration to me. For I do not imagine that I have any rhetorical art of my own."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Granted; if you will only please to get on."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Suppose that you read me the first words of Lysias' speech."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"'You know how matters stand with me, and how, as I conceive, they might be arranged for our common interest; and I maintain that I ought not to fail in my suit, because I am not your lover. For lovers repent--'"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Enough:--Now, shall I point out the rhetorical error of those words?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Every one is aware that about some things we are agreed, whereas about other things we differ."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I think that I understand you; but will you explain yourself?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"When any one speaks of iron and silver, is not the same thing present in the minds of all?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But when any one speaks of justice and goodness we part company and are at odds with one another and with ourselves?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Precisely."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then in some things we agree, but not in others?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"That is true."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"In which are we more likely to be deceived, and in which has rhetoric the greater power?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Clearly, in the uncertain class."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then the rhetorician ought to make a regular division, and acquire a distinct notion of both classes, as well of that in which the many err, as of that in which they do not err?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"He who made such a distinction would have an excellent principle."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes; and in the next place he must have a keen eye for the observation of particulars in speaking, and not make a mistake about the class to which they are to be referred."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now to which class does love belong--to the debatable or to the undisputed class?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"To the debatable, clearly; for if not, do you think that love would have allowed you to say as you did, that he is an evil both to the lover and the beloved, and also the greatest possible good?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Capital. But will you tell me whether I defined love at the beginning of my speech? for, having been in an ecstasy, I cannot well remember."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed; that you did, and no mistake."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then I perceive that the Nymphs of Achelous and Pan the son of Hermes, who inspired me, were far better rhetoricians than Lysias the son of Cephalus. Alas! how inferior to them he is! But perhaps I am mistaken; and Lysias at the commencement of his lover's speech did insist on our supposing love to be something or other which he fancied him to be, and according to this model he fashioned and framed the remainder of his discourse. Suppose we read his beginning over again:"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"If you please; but you will not find what you want."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Read, that I may have his exact words."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"'You know how matters stand with me, and how, as I conceive, they might be arranged for our common interest; and I maintain I ought not to fail in my suit because I am not your lover, for lovers repent of the kindnesses which they have shown, when their love is over.'"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Here he appears to have done just the reverse of what he ought; for he has begun at the end, and is swimming on his back through the flood to the place of starting. His address to the fair youth begins where the lover would have ended. Am I not right, sweet Phaedrus?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes, indeed, Socrates; he does begin at the end."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then as to the other topics--are they not thrown down anyhow? Is there any principle in them? Why should the next topic follow next in order, or any other topic? I cannot help fancying in my ignorance that he wrote off boldly just what came into his head, but I dare say that you would recognize a rhetorical necessity in the succession of the several parts of the composition?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"You have too good an opinion of me if you think that I have any such insight into his principles of composition."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"At any rate, you will allow that every discourse ought to be a living creature, having a body of its own and a head and feet; there should be a middle, beginning, and end, adapted to one another and to the whole?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Can this be said of the discourse of Lysias? See whether you can find any more connexion in his words than in the epitaph which is said by some to have been inscribed on the grave of Midas the Phrygian."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What is there remarkable in the epitaph?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"It is as follows:-- 'I am a maiden of bronze and lie on the tomb of Midas; So long as water flows and tall trees grow, So long here on this spot by his sad tomb abiding, I shall declare to passers-by that Midas sleeps below.' Now in this rhyme whether a line comes first or comes last, as you will perceive, makes no difference."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"You are making fun of that oration of ours."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Well, I will say no more about your friend's speech lest I should give offence to you; although I think that it might furnish many other examples of what a man ought rather to avoid. But I will proceed to the other speech, which, as I think, is also suggestive to students of rhetoric."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"In what way?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The two speeches, as you may remember, were unlike; the one argued that the lover and the other that the non-lover ought to be accepted."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"And right manfully."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"You should rather say 'madly;' and madness was the argument of them, for, as I said, 'love is a madness.'"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And of madness there were two kinds; one produced by human infirmity, the other was a divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The divine madness was subdivided into four kinds, prophetic, initiatory, poetic, erotic, having four gods presiding over them; the first was the inspiration of Apollo, the second that of Dionysus, the third that of the Muses, the fourth that of Aphrodite and Eros. In the description of the last kind of madness, which was also said to be the best, we spoke of the affection of love in a figure, into which we introduced a tolerably credible and possibly true though partly erring myth, which was also a hymn in honour of Love, who is your lord and also mine, Phaedrus, and the guardian of fair children, and to him we sung the hymn in measured and solemn strain."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I know that I had great pleasure in listening to you."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us take this instance and note how the transition was made from blame to praise."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What do you mean?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean to say that the composition was mostly playful. Yet in these chance fancies of the hour were involved two principles of which we should be too glad to have a clearer description if art could give us one."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What are they?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"First, the comprehension of scattered particulars in one idea; as in our definition of love, which whether true or false certainly gave clearness and consistency to the discourse, the speaker should define his several notions and so make his meaning clear."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What is the other principle, Socrates?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The second principle is that of division into species according to the natural formation, where the joint is, not breaking any part as a bad carver might. Just as our two discourses, alike assumed, first of all, a single form of unreason; and then, as the body which from being one becomes double and may be divided into a left side and right side, each having parts right and left of the same name--after this manner the speaker proceeded to divide the parts of the left side and did not desist until he found in them an evil or left-handed love which he justly reviled; and the other discourse leading us to the madness which lay on the right side, found another love, also having the same name, but divine, which the speaker held up before us and applauded and affirmed to be the author of the greatest benefits."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Most true."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I am myself a great lover of these processes of division and generalization; they help me to speak and to think. And if I find any man who is able to see 'a One and Many' in nature, him I follow, and 'walk in his footsteps as if he were a god.' And those who have this art, I have hitherto been in the habit of calling dialecticians; but God knows whether the name is right or not. And I should like to know what name you would give to your or to Lysias' disciples, and whether this may not be that famous art of rhetoric which Thrasymachus and others teach and practise? Skilful speakers they are, and impart their skill to any who is willing to make kings of them and to bring gifts to them."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes, they are royal men; but their art is not the same with the art of those whom you call, and rightly, in my opinion, dialecticians:--Still we are in the dark about rhetoric."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"What do you mean? The remains of it, if there be anything remaining which can be brought under rules of art, must be a fine thing; and, at any rate, is not to be despised by you and me. But how much is left?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"There is a great deal surely to be found in books of rhetoric?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes; thank you for reminding me:--There is the exordium, showing how the speech should begin, if I remember rightly; that is what you mean--the niceties of the art?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then follows the statement of facts, and upon that witnesses; thirdly, proofs; fourthly, probabilities are to come; the great Byzantian word-maker also speaks, if I am not mistaken, of confirmation and further confirmation."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"You mean the excellent Theodorus."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes; and he tells how refutation or further refutation is to be managed, whether in accusation or defence. I ought also to mention the illustrious Parian, Evenus, who first invented insinuations and indirect praises; and also indirect censures, which according to some he put into verse to help the memory. But shall I 'to dumb forgetfulness consign' Tisias and Gorgias, who are not ignorant that probability is superior to truth, and who by force of argument make the little appear great and the great little, disguise the new in old fashions and the old in new fashions, and have discovered forms for everything, either short or going on to infinity. I remember Prodicus laughing when I told him of this; he said that he had himself discovered the true rule of art, which was to be neither long nor short, but of a convenient length."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Well done, Prodicus!"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then there is Hippias the Elean stranger, who probably agrees with him."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And there is also Polus, who has treasuries of diplasiology, and gnomology, and eikonology, and who teaches in them the names of which Licymnius made him a present; they were to give a polish."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Had not Protagoras something of the same sort?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, rules of correct diction and many other fine precepts; for the 'sorrows of a poor old man,' or any other pathetic case, no one is better than the Chalcedonian giant; he can put a whole company of people into a passion and out of one again by his mighty magic, and is first-rate at inventing or disposing of any sort of calumny on any grounds or none. All of them agree in asserting that a speech should end in a recapitulation, though they do not all agree to use the same word."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"You mean that there should be a summing up of the arguments in order to remind the hearers of them."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I have now said all that I have to say of the art of rhetoric: have you anything to add?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Not much; nothing very important."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Leave the unimportant and let us bring the really important question into the light of day, which is: What power has this art of rhetoric, and when?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"A very great power in public meetings."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"It has. But I should like to know whether you have the same feeling as I have about the rhetoricians? To me there seem to be a great many holes in their web."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Give an example."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I will. Suppose a person to come to your friend Eryximachus, or to his father Acumenus, and to say to him: 'I know how to apply drugs which shall have either a heating or a cooling effect, and I can give a vomit and also a purge, and all that sort of thing; and knowing all this, as I do, I claim to be a physician and to make physicians by imparting this knowledge to others,'--what do you suppose that they would say?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"They would be sure to ask him whether he knew 'to whom' he would give his medicines, and 'when,' and 'how much.'"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And suppose that he were to reply: 'No; I know nothing of all that; I expect the patient who consults me to be able to do these things for himself'?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"They would say in reply that he is a madman or a pedant who fancies that he is a physician because he has read something in a book, or has stumbled on a prescription or two, although he has no real understanding of the art of medicine."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And suppose a person were to come to Sophocles or Euripides and say that he knows how to make a very long speech about a small matter, and a short speech about a great matter, and also a sorrowful speech, or a terrible, or threatening speech, or any other kind of speech, and in teaching this fancies that he is teaching the art of tragedy--?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"They too would surely laugh at him if he fancies that tragedy is anything but the arranging of these elements in a manner which will be suitable to one another and to the whole."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But I do not suppose that they would be rude or abusive to him: Would they not treat him as a musician a man who thinks that he is a harmonist because he knows how to pitch the highest and lowest note; happening to meet such an one he would not say to him savagely, 'Fool, you are mad!' But like a musician, in a gentle and harmonious tone of voice, he would answer: 'My good friend, he who would be a harmonist must certainly know this, and yet he may understand nothing of harmony if he has not got beyond your stage of knowledge, for you only know the preliminaries of harmony and not harmony itself.'"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And will not Sophocles say to the display of the would-be tragedian, that this is not tragedy but the preliminaries of tragedy? and will not Acumenus say the same of medicine to the would-be physician?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Quite true."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And if Adrastus the mellifluous or Pericles heard of these wonderful arts, brachylogies and eikonologies and all the hard names which we have been endeavouring to draw into the light of day, what would they say? Instead of losing temper and applying uncomplimentary epithets, as you and I have been doing, to the authors of such an imaginary art, their superior wisdom would rather censure us, as well as them. 'Have a little patience, Phaedrus and Socrates, they would say; you should not be in such a passion with those who from some want of dialectical skill are unable to define the nature of rhetoric, and consequently suppose that they have found the art in the preliminary conditions of it, and when these have been taught by them to others, fancy that the whole art of rhetoric has been taught by them; but as to using the several instruments of the art effectively, or making the composition a whole,--an application of it such as this is they regard as an easy thing which their disciples may make for themselves.'"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I quite admit, Socrates, that the art of rhetoric which these men teach and of which they write is such as you describe--there I agree with you. But I still want to know where and how the true art of rhetoric and persuasion is to be acquired."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The perfection which is required of the finished orator is, or rather must be, like the perfection of anything else; partly given by nature, but may also be assisted by art. If you have the natural power and add to it knowledge and practice, you will be a distinguished speaker; if you fall short in either of these, you will be to that extent defective. But the art, as far as there is an art, of rhetoric does not lie in the direction of Lysias or Thrasymachus."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"In what direction then?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I conceive Pericles to have been the most accomplished of rhetoricians."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What of that?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"All the great arts require discussion and high speculation about the truths of nature; hence come loftiness of thought and completeness of execution. And this, as I conceive, was the quality which, in addition to his natural gifts, Pericles acquired from his intercourse with Anaxagoras whom he happened to know. He was thus imbued with the higher philosophy, and attained the knowledge of Mind and the negative of Mind, which were favourite themes of Anaxagoras, and applied what suited his purpose to the art of speaking."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Explain."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Rhetoric is like medicine."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"How so?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Why, because medicine has to define the nature of the body and rhetoric of the soul--if we would proceed, not empirically but scientifically, in the one case to impart health and strength by giving medicine and food, in the other to implant the conviction or virtue which you desire, by the right application of words and training."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"There, Socrates, I suspect that you are right."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you think that you can know the nature of the soul intelligently without knowing the nature of the whole?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Hippocrates the Asclepiad says that the nature even of the body can only be understood as a whole. (Compare Charmides.)"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, friend, and he was right:--still, we ought not to be content with the name of Hippocrates, but to examine and see whether his argument agrees with his conception of nature."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I agree."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then consider what truth as well as Hippocrates says about this or about any other nature. Ought we not to consider first whether that which we wish to learn and to teach is a simple or multiform thing, and if simple, then to enquire what power it has of acting or being acted upon in relation to other things, and if multiform, then to number the forms; and see first in the case of one of them, and then in the case of all of them, what is that power of acting or being acted upon which makes each and all of them to be what they are?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"You may very likely be right, Socrates."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"The method which proceeds without analysis is like the groping of a blind man. Yet, surely, he who is an artist ought not to admit of a comparison with the blind, or deaf. The rhetorician, who teaches his pupil to speak scientifically, will particularly set forth the nature of that being to which he addresses his speeches; and this, I conceive, to be the soul."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"His whole effort is directed to the soul; for in that he seeks to produce conviction."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then clearly, Thrasymachus or any one else who teaches rhetoric in earnest will give an exact description of the nature of the soul; which will enable us to see whether she be single and same, or, like the body, multiform. That is what we should call showing the nature of the soul."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He will explain, secondly, the mode in which she acts or is acted upon."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Thirdly, having classified men and speeches, and their kinds and affections, and adapted them to one another, he will tell the reasons of his arrangement, and show why one soul is persuaded by a particular form of argument, and another not."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"You have hit upon a very good way."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, that is the true and only way in which any subject can be set forth or treated by rules of art, whether in speaking or writing. But the writers of the present day, at whose feet you have sat, craftily conceal the nature of the soul which they know quite well. Nor, until they adopt our method of reading and writing, can we admit that they write by rules of art?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What is our method?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I cannot give you the exact details; but I should like to tell you generally, as far as is in my power, how a man ought to proceed according to rules of art."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Let me hear."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Oratory is the art of enchanting the soul, and therefore he who would be an orator has to learn the differences of human souls--they are so many and of such a nature, and from them come the differences between man and man. Having proceeded thus far in his analysis, he will next divide speeches into their different classes:--'Such and such persons,' he will say, are affected by this or that kind of speech in this or that way,' and he will tell you why. The pupil must have a good theoretical notion of them first, and then he must have experience of them in actual life, and be able to follow them with all his senses about him, or he will never get beyond the precepts of his masters. But when he understands what persons are persuaded by what arguments, and sees the person about whom he was speaking in the abstract actually before him, and knows that it is he, and can say to himself, 'This is the man or this is the character who ought to have a certain argument applied to him in order to convince him of a certain opinion;'--he who knows all this, and knows also when he should speak and when he should refrain, and when he should use pithy sayings, pathetic appeals, sensational effects, and all the other modes of speech which he has learned;--when, I say, he knows the times and seasons of all these things, then, and not till then, he is a perfect master of his art; but if he fail in any of these points, whether in speaking or teaching or writing them, and yet declares that he speaks by rules of art, he who says 'I don't believe you' has the better of him. Well, the teacher will say, is this, Phaedrus and Socrates, your account of the so-called art of rhetoric, or am I to look for another?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"He must take this, Socrates, for there is no possibility of another, and yet the creation of such an art is not easy."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very true; and therefore let us consider this matter in every light, and see whether we cannot find a shorter and easier road; there is no use in taking a long rough roundabout way if there be a shorter and easier one. And I wish that you would try and remember whether you have heard from Lysias or any one else anything which might be of service to us."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"If trying would avail, then I might; but at the moment I can think of nothing."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Suppose I tell you something which somebody who knows told me."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"May not 'the wolf,' as the proverb says, 'claim a hearing'?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Do you say what can be said for him."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He will argue that there is no use in putting a solemn face on these matters, or in going round and round, until you arrive at first principles; for, as I said at first, when the question is of justice and good, or is a question in which men are concerned who are just and good, either by nature or habit, he who would be a skilful rhetorician has no need of truth--for that in courts of law men literally care nothing about truth, but only about conviction: and this is based on probability, to which he who would be a skilful orator should therefore give his whole attention. And they say also that there are cases in which the actual facts, if they are improbable, ought to be withheld, and only the probabilities should be told either in accusation or defence, and that always in speaking, the orator should keep probability in view, and say good-bye to the truth. And the observance of this principle throughout a speech furnishes the whole art."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"That is what the professors of rhetoric do actually say, Socrates. I have not forgotten that we have quite briefly touched upon this matter already; with them the point is all-important."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I dare say that you are familiar with Tisias. Does he not define probability to be that which the many think?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Certainly, he does."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I believe that he has a clever and ingenious case of this sort:--He supposes a feeble and valiant man to have assaulted a strong and cowardly one, and to have robbed him of his coat or of something or other; he is brought into court, and then Tisias says that both parties should tell lies: the coward should say that he was assaulted by more men than one; the other should prove that they were alone, and should argue thus: 'How could a weak man like me have assaulted a strong man like him?' The complainant will not like to confess his own cowardice, and will therefore invent some other lie which his adversary will thus gain an opportunity of refuting. And there are other devices of the same kind which have a place in the system. Am I not right, Phaedrus?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Bless me, what a wonderfully mysterious art is this which Tisias or some other gentleman, in whatever name or country he rejoices, has discovered. Shall we say a word to him or not?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What shall we say to him?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us tell him that, before he appeared, you and I were saying that the probability of which he speaks was engendered in the minds of the many by the likeness of the truth, and we had just been affirming that he who knew the truth would always know best how to discover the resemblances of the truth. If he has anything else to say about the art of speaking we should like to hear him; but if not, we are satisfied with our own view, that unless a man estimates the various characters of his hearers and is able to divide all things into classes and to comprehend them under single ideas, he will never be a skilful rhetorician even within the limits of human power. And this skill he will not attain without a great deal of trouble, which a good man ought to undergo, not for the sake of speaking and acting before men, but in order that he may be able to say what is acceptable to God and always to act acceptably to Him as far as in him lies; for there is a saying of wiser men than ourselves, that a man of sense should not try to please his fellow-servants (at least this should not be his first object) but his good and noble masters; and therefore if the way is long and circuitous, marvel not at this, for, where the end is great, there we may take the longer road, but not for lesser ends such as yours. Truly, the argument may say, Tisias, that if you do not mind going so far, rhetoric has a fair beginning here."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I think, Socrates, that this is admirable, if only practicable."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But even to fail in an honourable object is honourable."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Enough appears to have been said by us of a true and false art of speaking."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But there is something yet to be said of propriety and impropriety of writing."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you know how you can speak or act about rhetoric in a manner which will be acceptable to God?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"No, indeed. Do you?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know; although if we had found the truth ourselves, do you think that we should care much about the opinions of men?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Your question needs no answer; but I wish that you would tell me what you say that you have heard."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any other country."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"There was a tradition in the temple of Dodona that oaks first gave prophetic utterances. The men of old, unlike in their simplicity to young philosophy, deemed that if they heard the truth even from 'oak or rock,' it was enough for them; whereas you seem to consider not whether a thing is or is not true, but who the speaker is and from what country the tale comes."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I acknowledge the justice of your rebuke; and I think that the Theban is right in his view about letters."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the oracles of Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"That is most true."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"That again is most true."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Is there not another kind of word or speech far better than this, and having far greater power--a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Whom do you mean, and what is his origin?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Yes, of course that is what I mean. And now may I be allowed to ask you a question: Would a husbandman, who is a man of sense, take the seeds, which he values and which he wishes to bear fruit, and in sober seriousness plant them during the heat of summer, in some garden of Adonis, that he may rejoice when he sees them in eight days appearing in beauty? at least he would do so, if at all, only for the sake of amusement and pastime. But when he is in earnest he sows in fitting soil, and practises husbandry, and is satisfied if in eight months the seeds which he has sown arrive at perfection?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates, that will be his way when he is in earnest; he will do the other, as you say, only in play."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And can we suppose that he who knows the just and good and honourable has less understanding, than the husbandman, about his own seeds?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Certainly not."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then he will not seriously incline to 'write' his thoughts 'in water' with pen and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"No, that is not likely."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"No, that is not likely--in the garden of letters he will sow and plant, but only for the sake of recreation and amusement; he will write them down as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age, by himself, or by any other old man who is treading the same path. He will rejoice in beholding their tender growth; and while others are refreshing their souls with banqueting and the like, this will be the pastime in which his days are spent."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"A pastime, Socrates, as noble as the other is ignoble, the pastime of a man who can be amused by serious talk, and can discourse merrily about justice and the like."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"True, Phaedrus. But nobler far is the serious pursuit of the dialectician, who, finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants therein words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them a seed which others brought up in different soils render immortal, making the possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Far nobler, certainly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now, Phaedrus, having agreed upon the premises we may decide about the conclusion."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"About what conclusion?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"About Lysias, whom we censured, and his art of writing, and his discourses, and the rhetorical skill or want of skill which was shown in them--these are the questions which we sought to determine, and they brought us to this point. And I think that we are now pretty well informed about the nature of art and its opposite."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes, I think with you; but I wish that you would repeat what was said."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Until a man knows the truth of the several particulars of which he is writing or speaking, and is able to define them as they are, and having defined them again to divide them until they can be no longer divided, and until in like manner he is able to discern the nature of the soul, and discover the different modes of discourse which are adapted to different natures, and to arrange and dispose them in such a way that the simple form of speech may be addressed to the simpler nature, and the complex and composite to the more complex nature--until he has accomplished all this, he will be unable to handle arguments according to rules of art, as far as their nature allows them to be subjected to art, either for the purpose of teaching or persuading;--such is the view which is implied in the whole preceding argument."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Yes, that was our view, certainly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Secondly, as to the censure which was passed on the speaking or writing of discourses, and how they might be rightly or wrongly censured--did not our previous argument show--?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Show what?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"That whether Lysias or any other writer that ever was or will be, whether private man or statesman, proposes laws and so becomes the author of a political treatise, fancying that there is any great certainty and clearness in his performance, the fact of his so writing is only a disgrace to him, whatever men may say. For not to know the nature of justice and injustice, and good and evil, and not to be able to distinguish the dream from the reality, cannot in truth be otherwise than disgraceful to him, even though he have the applause of the whole world."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"But he who thinks that in the written word there is necessarily much which is not serious, and that neither poetry nor prose, spoken or written, is of any great value, if, like the compositions of the rhapsodes, they are only recited in order to be believed, and not with any view to criticism or instruction; and who thinks that even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know, and that only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility taught and communicated orally for the sake of instruction and graven in the soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and perfection and seriousness, and that such principles are a man's own and his legitimate offspring;--being, in the first place, the word which he finds in his own bosom; secondly, the brethren and descendants and relations of his idea which have been duly implanted by him in the souls of others;--and who cares for them and no others--this is the right sort of man; and you and I, Phaedrus, would pray that we may become like him."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"That is most assuredly my desire and prayer."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And now the play is played out; and of rhetoric enough. Go and tell Lysias that to the fountain and school of the Nymphs we went down, and were bidden by them to convey a message to him and to other composers of speeches--to Homer and other writers of poems, whether set to music or not; and to Solon and others who have composed writings in the form of political discourses which they would term laws--to all of them we are to say that if their compositions are based on knowledge of the truth, and they can defend or prove them, when they are put to the test, by spoken arguments, which leave their writings poor in comparison of them, then they are to be called, not only poets, orators, legislators, but are worthy of a higher name, befitting the serious pursuit of their life."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What name would you assign to them?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Wise, I may not call them; for that is a great name which belongs to God alone,--lovers of wisdom or philosophers is their modest and befitting title."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Very suitable."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And he who cannot rise above his own compilations and compositions, which he has been long patching and piecing, adding some and taking away some, may be justly called poet or speech-maker or law-maker."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Now go and tell this to your companion."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"But there is also a friend of yours who ought not to be forgotten."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Who is he?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Isocrates the fair:--What message will you send to him, and how shall we describe him?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Isocrates is still young, Phaedrus; but I am willing to hazard a prophecy concerning him."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"What would you prophesy?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I think that he has a genius which soars above the orations of Lysias, and that his character is cast in a finer mould. My impression of him is that he will marvellously improve as he grows older, and that all former rhetoricians will be as children in comparison of him. And I believe that he will not be satisfied with rhetoric, but that there is in him a divine inspiration which will lead him to things higher still. For he has an element of philosophy in his nature. This is the message of the gods dwelling in this place, and which I will myself deliver to Isocrates, who is my delight; and do you give the other to Lysias, who is yours."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"I will; and now as the heat is abated let us depart."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Should we not offer up a prayer first of all to the local deities?"}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"By all means."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry.--Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"PHAEDRUS","Dialogue":"Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common."}
{"Book":"phaedrus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Let us go. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PHAEDRUS *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg\u2122 electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG\u2122 concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away\u2014you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"HERMOCRATES","Dialogue":"\u2018We will do our best, and have been already preparing; for on our way home, Critias told us of an ancient tradition, which I wish, Critias, that you would repeat to Socrates.\u2019 \u2018I will, if Timaeus approves.\u2019 \u2018I approve.\u2019 Listen then, Socrates, to a tale of Solon\u2019s, who, being the friend of Dropidas my great-grandfather, told it to my grandfather Critias, and he told me. The narrative related to ancient famous actions of the Athenian people, and to one especially, which I will rehearse in honour of you and of the goddess. Critias when he told this tale of the olden time, was ninety years old, I being not more than ten. The occasion of the rehearsal was the day of the Apaturia called the Registration of Youth, at which our parents gave prizes for recitation. Some poems of Solon were recited by the boys. They had not at that time gone out of fashion, and the recital of them led some one to say, perhaps in compliment to Critias, that Solon was not only the wisest of men but also the best of poets. The old man brightened up at hearing this, and said: Had Solon only had the leisure which was required to complete the famous legend which he brought with him from Egypt he would have been as distinguished as Homer and Hesiod. \u2018And what was the subject of the poem?\u2019 said the person who made the remark. The subject was a very noble one; he described the most famous action in which the Athenian people were ever engaged. But the memory of their exploits has passed away owing to the lapse of time and the extinction of the actors. \u2018Tell us,\u2019 said the other, \u2018the whole story, and where Solon heard the story.\u2019 He replied\u2014There is at the head of the Egyptian Delta, where the river Nile divides, a city and district called Sais; the city was the birthplace of King Amasis, and is under the protection of the goddess Neith or Athene. The citizens have a friendly feeling towards the Athenians, believing themselves to be related to them. Hither came Solon, and was received with honour; and here he first learnt, by conversing with the Egyptian priests, how ignorant he and his countrymen were of antiquity. Perceiving this, and with the view of eliciting information from them, he told them the tales of Phoroneus and Niobe, and also of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and he endeavoured to count the generations which had since passed. Thereupon an aged priest said to him: \u2018O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever young, and there is no old man who is a Hellene.\u2019 \u2018What do you mean?\u2019 he asked. \u2018In mind,\u2019 replied the priest, \u2018I mean to say that you are children; there is no opinion or tradition of knowledge among you which is white with age; and I will tell you why. Like the rest of mankind you have suffered from convulsions of nature, which are chiefly brought about by the two great agencies of fire and water. The former is symbolized in the Hellenic tale of young Phaethon who drove his father\u2019s horses the wrong way, and having burnt up the earth was himself burnt up by a thunderbolt. For there occurs at long intervals a derangement of the heavenly bodies, and then the earth is destroyed by fire. At such times, and when fire is the agent, those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore are safer than those who dwell upon high and dry places, who in their turn are safer when the danger is from water. Now the Nile is our saviour from fire, and as there is little rain in Egypt, we are not harmed by water; whereas in other countries, when a deluge comes, the inhabitants are swept by the rivers into the sea. The memorials which your own and other nations have once had of the famous actions of mankind perish in the waters at certain periods; and the rude survivors in the mountains begin again, knowing nothing of the world before the flood. But in Egypt the traditions of our own and other lands are by us registered for ever in our temples. The genealogies which you have recited to us out of your own annals, Solon, are a mere children\u2019s story. For in the first place, you remember one deluge only, and there were many of them, and you know nothing of that fairest and noblest race of which you are a seed or remnant. The memory of them was lost, because there was no written voice among you. For in the times before the great flood Athens was the greatest and best of cities and did the noblest deeds and had the best constitution of any under the face of heaven.\u2019 Solon marvelled, and desired to be informed of the particulars. \u2018You are welcome to hear them,\u2019 said the priest, \u2018both for your own sake and for that of the city, and above all for the sake of the goddess who is the common foundress of both our cities. Nine thousand years have elapsed since she founded yours, and eight thousand since she founded ours, as our annals record. Many laws exist among us which are the counterpart of yours as they were in the olden time. I will briefly describe them to you, and you shall read the account of them at your leisure in the sacred registers. In the first place, there was a caste of priests among the ancient Athenians, and another of artisans; also castes of shepherds, hunters, and husbandmen, and lastly of warriors, who, like the warriors of Egypt, were separated from the rest, and carried shields and spears, a custom which the goddess first taught you, and then the Asiatics, and we among Asiatics first received from her. Observe again, what care the law took in the pursuit of wisdom, searching out the deep things of the world, and applying them to the use of man. The spot of earth which the goddess chose had the best of climates, and produced the wisest men; in no other was she herself, the philosopher and warrior goddess, so likely to have votaries. And there you dwelt as became the children of the gods, excelling all men in virtue, and many famous actions are recorded of you. The most famous of them all was the overthrow of the island of Atlantis. This great island lay over against the Pillars of Heracles, in extent greater than Libya and Asia put together, and was the passage to other islands and to a great ocean of which the Mediterranean sea was only the harbour; and within the Pillars the empire of Atlantis reached in Europe to Tyrrhenia and in Libya to Egypt. This mighty power was arrayed against Egypt and Hellas and all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean. Then your city did bravely, and won renown over the whole earth. For at the peril of her own existence, and when the other Hellenes had deserted her, she repelled the invader, and of her own accord gave liberty to all the nations within the Pillars. A little while afterwards there were great earthquakes and floods, and your warrior race all sank into the earth; and the great island of Atlantis also disappeared in the sea. This is the explanation of the shallows which are found in that part of the Atlantic ocean.\u2019 Such was the tale, Socrates, which Critias heard from Solon; and I noticed when listening to you yesterday, how close the resemblance was between your city and citizens and the ancient Athenian State. But I would not speak at the time, because I wanted to refresh my memory. I had heard the old man when I was a child, and though I could not remember the whole of our yesterday\u2019s discourse, I was able to recall every word of this, which is branded into my mind; and I am prepared, Socrates, to rehearse to you the entire narrative. The imaginary State which you were describing may be identified with the reality of Solon, and our antediluvian ancestors may be your citizens. \u2018That is excellent, Critias, and very appropriate to a Panathenaic festival; the truth of the story is a great advantage.\u2019 Then now let me explain to you the order of our entertainment; first, Timaeus, who is a natural philosopher, will speak of the origin of the world, going down to the creation of man, and then I shall receive the men whom he has created, and some of whom will have been educated by you, and introduce them to you as the lost Athenian citizens of whom the Egyptian record spoke. As the law of Solon prescribes, we will bring them into court and acknowledge their claims to citizenship. \u2018I see,\u2019 replied Socrates, \u2018that I shall be well entertained; and do you, Timaeus, offer up a prayer and begin.\u2019"}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"All men who have any right feeling, at the beginning of any enterprise, call upon the Gods; and he who is about to speak of the origin of the universe has a special need of their aid. May my words be acceptable to them, and may I speak in the manner which will be most intelligible to you and will best express my own meaning! First, I must distinguish between that which always is and never becomes and which is apprehended by reason and reflection, and that which always becomes and never is and is conceived by opinion with the help of sense. All that becomes and is created is the work of a cause, and that is fair which the artificer makes after an eternal pattern, but whatever is fashioned after a created pattern is not fair. Is the world created or uncreated?\u2014that is the first question. Created, I reply, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore sensible; and if sensible, then created; and if created, made by a cause, and the cause is the ineffable father of all things, who had before him an eternal archetype. For to imagine that the archetype was created would be blasphemy, seeing that the world is the noblest of creations, and God is the best of causes. And the world being thus created according to the eternal pattern is the copy of something; and we may assume that words are akin to the matter of which they speak. What is spoken of the unchanging or intelligible must be certain and true; but what is spoken of the created image can only be probable; being is to becoming what truth is to belief. And amid the variety of opinions which have arisen about God and the nature of the world we must be content to take probability for our rule, considering that I, who am the speaker, and you, who are the judges, are only men; to probability we may attain but no further."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Excellent, Timaeus, I like your manner of approaching the subject\u2014proceed."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"Why did the Creator make the world?...He was good, and therefore not jealous, and being free from jealousy he desired that all things should be like himself. Wherefore he set in order the visible world, which he found in disorder. Now he who is the best could only create the fairest; and reflecting that of visible things the intelligent is superior to the unintelligent, he put intelligence in soul and soul in body, and framed the universe to be the best and fairest work in the order of nature, and the world became a living soul through the providence of God. In the likeness of what animal was the world made?\u2014that is the third question...The form of the perfect animal was a whole, and contained all intelligible beings, and the visible animal, made after the pattern of this, included all visible creatures. Are there many worlds or one only?\u2014that is the fourth question...One only. For if in the original there had been more than one they would have been the parts of a third, which would have been the true pattern of the world; and therefore there is, and will ever be, but one created world. Now that which is created is of necessity corporeal and visible and tangible,\u2014visible and therefore made of fire,\u2014tangible and therefore solid and made of earth. But two terms must be united by a third, which is a mean between them; and had the earth been a surface only, one mean would have sufficed, but two means are required to unite solid bodies. And as the world was composed of solids, between the elements of fire and earth God placed two other elements of air and water, and arranged them in a continuous proportion\u2014 fire:air::air:water, and air:water::water:earth, and so put together a visible and palpable heaven, having harmony and friendship in the union of the four elements; and being at unity with itself it was indissoluble except by the hand of the framer. Each of the elements was taken into the universe whole and entire; for he considered that the animal should be perfect and one, leaving no remnants out of which another animal could be created, and should also be free from old age and disease, which are produced by the action of external forces. And as he was to contain all things, he was made in the all-containing form of a sphere, round as from a lathe and every way equidistant from the centre, as was natural and suitable to him. He was finished and smooth, having neither eyes nor ears, for there was nothing without him which he could see or hear; and he had no need to carry food to his mouth, nor was there air for him to breathe; and he did not require hands, for there was nothing of which he could take hold, nor feet, with which to walk. All that he did was done rationally in and by himself, and he moved in a circle turning within himself, which is the most intellectual of motions; but the other six motions were wanting to him; wherefore the universe had no feet or legs. And so the thought of God made a God in the image of a perfect body, having intercourse with himself and needing no other, but in every part harmonious and self-contained and truly blessed. The soul was first made by him\u2014the elder to rule the younger; not in the order in which our wayward fancy has led us to describe them, but the soul first and afterwards the body. God took of the unchangeable and indivisible and also of the divisible and corporeal, and out of the two he made a third nature, essence, which was in a mean between them, and partook of the same and the other, the intractable nature of the other being compressed into the same. Having made a compound of all the three, he proceeded to divide the entire mass into portions related to one another in the ratios of 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27, and proceeded to fill up the double and triple intervals thus\u2014 - over 1, 4\/3, 3\/2, - over 2, 8\/3, 3, - over 4, 16\/3, 6,  - over 8: - over 1, 3\/2, 2,   - over 3, 9\/2, 6, - over 9, 27\/2, 18, - over 27; in which double series of numbers are two kinds of means; the one exceeds and is exceeded by equal parts of the extremes, e.g. 1, 4\/3, 2; the other kind of mean is one which is equidistant from the extremes\u20142, 4, 6. In this manner there were formed intervals of thirds, 3:2, of fourths, 4:3, and of ninths, 9:8. And next he filled up the intervals of a fourth with ninths, leaving a remnant which is in the ratio of 256:243. The entire compound was divided by him lengthways into two parts, which he united at the centre like the letter X, and bent into an inner and outer circle or sphere, cutting one another again at a point over against the point at which they cross. The outer circle or sphere was named the sphere of the same\u2014the inner, the sphere of the other or diverse; and the one revolved horizontally to the right, the other diagonally to the left. To the sphere of the same which was undivided he gave dominion, but the sphere of the other or diverse was distributed into seven unequal orbits, having intervals in ratios of twos and threes, three of either sort, and he bade the orbits move in opposite directions to one another\u2014three of them, the Sun, Mercury, Venus, with equal swiftness, and the remaining four\u2014the Moon, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, with unequal swiftness to the three and to one another, but all in due proportion. When the Creator had made the soul he made the body within her; and the soul interfused everywhere from the centre to the circumference of heaven, herself turning in herself, began a divine life of rational and everlasting motion. The body of heaven is visible, but the soul is invisible, and partakes of reason and harmony, and is the best of creations, being the work of the best. And being composed of the same, the other, and the essence, these three, and also divided and bound in harmonical proportion, and revolving within herself\u2014the soul when touching anything which has essence, whether divided or undivided, is stirred to utter the sameness or diversity of that and some other thing, and to tell how and when and where individuals are affected or related, whether in the world of change or of essence. When reason is in the neighbourhood of sense, and the circle of the other or diverse is moving truly, then arise true opinions and beliefs; when reason is in the sphere of thought, and the circle of the same runs smoothly, then intelligence is perfected. When the Father who begat the world saw the image which he had made of the Eternal Gods moving and living, he rejoiced; and in his joy resolved, since the archetype was eternal, to make the creature eternal as far as this was possible. Wherefore he made an image of eternity which is time, having an uniform motion according to number, parted into months and days and years, and also having greater divisions of past, present, and future. These all apply to becoming in time, and have no meaning in relation to the eternal nature, which ever is and never was or will be; for the unchangeable is never older or younger, and when we say that he \u2018was\u2019 or \u2018will be,\u2019 we are mistaken, for these words are applicable only to becoming, and not to true being; and equally wrong are we in saying that what has become IS become and that what becomes IS becoming, and that the non-existent IS non-existent...These are the forms of time which imitate eternity and move in a circle measured by number. Thus was time made in the image of the eternal nature; and it was created together with the heavens, in order that if they were dissolved, it might perish with them. And God made the sun and moon and five other wanderers, as they are called, seven in all, and to each of them he gave a body moving in an orbit, being one of the seven orbits into which the circle of the other was divided. He put the moon in the orbit which was nearest to the earth, the sun in that next, the morning star and Mercury in the orbits which move opposite to the sun but with equal swiftness\u2014this being the reason why they overtake and are overtaken by one another. All these bodies became living creatures, and learnt their appointed tasks, and began to move, the nearer more swiftly, the remoter more slowly, according to the diagonal movement of the other. And since this was controlled by the movement of the same, the seven planets in their courses appeared to describe spirals; and that appeared fastest which was slowest, and that which overtook others appeared to be overtaken by them. And God lighted a fire in the second orbit from the earth which is called the sun, to give light over the whole heaven, and to teach intelligent beings that knowledge of number which is derived from the revolution of the same. Thus arose day and night, which are the periods of the most intelligent nature; a month is created by the revolution of the moon, a year by that of the sun. Other periods of wonderful length and complexity are not observed by men in general; there is moreover a cycle or perfect year at the completion of which they all meet and coincide...To this end the stars came into being, that the created heaven might imitate the eternal nature. Thus far the universal animal was made in the divine image, but the other animals were not as yet included in him. And God created them according to the patterns or species of them which existed in the divine original. There are four of them: one of gods, another of birds, a third of fishes, and a fourth of animals. The gods were made in the form of a circle, which is the most perfect figure and the figure of the universe. They were created chiefly of fire, that they might be bright, and were made to know and follow the best, and to be scattered over the heavens, of which they were to be the glory. Two kinds of motion were assigned to them\u2014first, the revolution in the same and around the same, in peaceful unchanging thought of the same; and to this was added a forward motion which was under the control of the same. Thus then the fixed stars were created, being divine and eternal animals, revolving on the same spot, and the wandering stars, in their courses, were created in the manner already described. The earth, which is our nurse, clinging around the pole extended through the universe, he made to be the guardian and artificer of night and day, first and eldest of gods that are in the interior of heaven. Vain would be the labour of telling all the figures of them, moving as in dance, and their juxta-positions and approximations, and when and where and behind what other stars they appear to disappear\u2014to tell of all this without looking at a plan of them would be labour in vain. The knowledge of the other gods is beyond us, and we can only accept the traditions of the ancients, who were the children of the gods, as they said; for surely they must have known their own ancestors. Although they give no proof, we must believe them as is customary. They tell us that Oceanus and Tethys were the children of Earth and Heaven; that Phoreys, Cronos, and Rhea came in the next generation, and were followed by Zeus and Here, whose brothers and children are known to everybody. When all of them, both those who show themselves in the sky, and those who retire from view, had come into being, the Creator addressed them thus:\u2014\u2018Gods, sons of gods, my works, if I will, are indissoluble. That which is bound may be dissolved, but only an evil being would dissolve that which is harmonious and happy. And although you are not immortal you shall not die, for I will hold you together. Hear me, then:\u2014Three tribes of mortal beings have still to be created, but if created by me they would be like gods. Do ye therefore make them; I will implant in them the seed of immortality, and you shall weave together the mortal and immortal, and provide food for them, and receive them again in death.\u2019 Thus he spake, and poured the remains of the elements into the cup in which he had mingled the soul of the universe. They were no longer pure as before, but diluted; and the mixture he distributed into souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each to a star\u2014then having mounted them, as in a chariot, he showed them the nature of the universe, and told them of their future birth and human lot. They were to be sown in the planets, and out of them was to come forth the most religious of animals, which would hereafter be called man. The souls were to be implanted in bodies, which were in a perpetual flux, whence, he said, would arise, first, sensation; secondly, love, which is a mixture of pleasure and pain; thirdly, fear and anger, and the opposite affections: and if they conquered these, they would live righteously, but if they were conquered by them, unrighteously. He who lived well would return to his native star, and would there have a blessed existence; but, if he lived ill, he would pass into the nature of a woman, and if he did not then alter his evil ways, into the likeness of some animal, until the reason which was in him reasserted her sway over the elements of fire, air, earth, water, which had engrossed her, and he regained his first and better nature. Having given this law to his creatures, that he might be guiltless of their future evil, he sowed them, some in the earth, some in the moon, and some in the other planets; and he ordered the younger gods to frame human bodies for them and to make the necessary additions to them, and to avert from them all but self-inflicted evil. Having given these commands, the Creator remained in his own nature. And his children, receiving from him the immortal principle, borrowed from the world portions of earth, air, fire, water, hereafter to be returned, which they fastened together, not with the adamantine bonds which bound themselves, but by little invisible pegs, making each separate body out of all the elements, subject to influx and efflux, and containing the courses of the soul. These swelling and surging as in a river moved irregularly and irrationally in all the six possible ways, forwards, backwards, right, left, up and down. But violent as were the internal and alimentary fluids, the tide became still more violent when the body came into contact with flaming fire, or the solid earth, or gliding waters, or the stormy wind; the motions produced by these impulses pass through the body to the soul and have the name of sensations. Uniting with the ever-flowing current, they shake the courses of the soul, stopping the revolution of the same and twisting in all sorts of ways the nature of the other, and the harmonical ratios of twos and threes and the mean terms which connect them, until the circles are bent and disordered and their motion becomes irregular. You may imagine a position of the body in which the head is resting upon the ground, and the legs are in the air, and the top is bottom and the left right. And something similar happens when the disordered motions of the soul come into contact with any external thing; they say the same or the other in a manner which is the very opposite of the truth, and they are false and foolish, and have no guiding principle in them. And when external impressions enter in, they are really conquered, though they seem to conquer. By reason of these affections the soul is at first without intelligence, but as time goes on the stream of nutriment abates, and the courses of the soul regain their proper motion, and apprehend the same and the other rightly, and become rational. The soul of him who has education is whole and perfect and escapes the worst disease, but, if a man\u2019s education be neglected, he walks lamely through life and returns good for nothing to the world below. This, however, is an after-stage\u2014at present, we are only concerned with the creation of the body and soul. The two divine courses were encased by the gods in a sphere which is called the head, and is the god and lord of us. And to this they gave the body to be a vehicle, and the members to be instruments, having the power of flexion and extension. Such was the origin of legs and arms. In the next place, the gods gave a forward motion to the human body, because the front part of man was the more honourable and had authority. And they put in a face in which they inserted organs to minister in all things to the providence of the soul. They first contrived the eyes, into which they conveyed a light akin to the light of day, making it flow through the pupils. When the light of the eye is surrounded by the light of day, then like falls upon like, and they unite and form one body which conveys to the soul the motions of visible objects. But when the visual ray goes forth into the darkness, then unlike falls upon unlike\u2014the eye no longer sees, and we go to sleep. The fire or light, when kept in by the eyelids, equalizes the inward motions, and there is rest accompanied by few dreams; only when the greater motions remain they engender in us corresponding visions of the night. And now we shall be able to understand the nature of reflections in mirrors. The fires from within and from without meet about the smooth and bright surface of the mirror; and because they meet in a manner contrary to the usual mode, the right and left sides of the object are transposed. In a concave mirror the top and bottom are inverted, but this is no transposition. These are the second causes which God used as his ministers in fashioning the world. They are thought by many to be the prime causes, but they are not so; for they are destitute of mind and reason, and the lover of mind will not allow that there are any prime causes other than the rational and invisible ones\u2014these he investigates first, and afterwards the causes of things which are moved by others, and which work by chance and without order. Of the second or concurrent causes of sight I have already spoken, and I will now speak of the higher purpose of God in giving us eyes. Sight is the source of the greatest benefits to us; for if our eyes had never seen the sun, stars, and heavens, the words which we have spoken would not have been uttered. The sight of them and their revolutions has given us the knowledge of number and time, the power of enquiry, and philosophy, which is the great blessing of human life; not to speak of the lesser benefits which even the vulgar can appreciate. God gave us the faculty of sight that we might behold the order of the heavens and create a corresponding order in our own erring minds. To the like end the gifts of speech and hearing were bestowed upon us; not for the sake of irrational pleasure, but in order that we might harmonize the courses of the soul by sympathy with the harmony of sound, and cure ourselves of our irregular and graceless ways. Thus far we have spoken of the works of mind; and there are other works done from necessity, which we must now place beside them; for the creation is made up of both, mind persuading necessity as far as possible to work out good. Before the heavens there existed fire, air, water, earth, which we suppose men to know, though no one has explained their nature, and we erroneously maintain them to be the letters or elements of the whole, although they cannot reasonably be compared even to syllables or first compounds. I am not now speaking of the first principles of things, because I cannot discover them by our present mode of enquiry. But as I observed the rule of probability at first, I will begin anew, seeking by the grace of God to observe it still. In our former discussion I distinguished two kinds of being\u2014the unchanging or invisible, and the visible or changing. But now a third kind is required, which I shall call the receptacle or nurse of generation. There is a difficulty in arriving at an exact notion of this third kind, because the four elements themselves are of inexact natures and easily pass into one another, and are too transient to be detained by any one name; wherefore we are compelled to speak of water or fire, not as substances, but as qualities. They may be compared to images made of gold, which are continually assuming new forms. Somebody asks what they are; if you do not know, the safest answer is to reply that they are gold. In like manner there is a universal nature out of which all things are made, and which is like none of them; but they enter into and pass out of her, and are made after patterns of the true in a wonderful and inexplicable manner. The containing principle may be likened to a mother, the source or spring to a father, the intermediate nature to a child; and we may also remark that the matter which receives every variety of form must be formless, like the inodorous liquids which are prepared to receive scents, or the smooth and soft materials on which figures are impressed. In the same way space or matter is neither earth nor fire nor air nor water, but an invisible and formless being which receives all things, and in an incomprehensible manner partakes of the intelligible. But we may say, speaking generally, that fire is that part of this nature which is inflamed, water that which is moistened, and the like. Let me ask a question in which a great principle is involved: Is there an essence of fire and the other elements, or are there only fires visible to sense? I answer in a word: If mind is one thing and true opinion another, then there are self-existent essences; but if mind is the same with opinion, then the visible and corporeal is most real. But they are not the same, and they have a different origin and nature. The one comes to us by instruction, the other by persuasion, the one is rational, the other is irrational; the one is movable by persuasion, the other immovable; the one is possessed by every man, the other by the gods and by very few men. And we must acknowledge that as there are two kinds of knowledge, so there are two kinds of being corresponding to them; the one uncreated, indestructible, immovable, which is seen by intelligence only; the other created, which is always becoming in place and vanishing out of place, and is apprehended by opinion and sense. There is also a third nature\u2014that of space, which is indestructible, and is perceived by a kind of spurious reason without the help of sense. This is presented to us in a dreamy manner, and yet is said to be necessary, for we say that all things must be somewhere in space. For they are the images of other things and must therefore have a separate existence and exist in something (i.e. in space). But true reason assures us that while two things (i.e. the idea and the image) are different they cannot inhere in one another, so as to be one and two at the same time. To sum up: Being and generation and space, these three, existed before the heavens, and the nurse or vessel of generation, moistened by water and inflamed by fire, and taking the forms of air and earth, assumed various shapes. By the motion of the vessel, the elements were divided, and like grain winnowed by fans, the close and heavy particles settled in one place, the light and airy ones in another. At first they were without reason and measure, and had only certain faint traces of themselves, until God fashioned them by figure and number. In this, as in every other part of creation, I suppose God to have made things, as far as was possible, fair and good, out of things not fair and good. And now I will explain to you the generation of the world by a method with which your scientific training will have made you familiar. Fire, air, earth, and water are bodies and therefore solids, and solids are contained in planes, and plane rectilinear figures are made up of triangles. Of triangles there are two kinds; one having the opposite sides equal (isosceles), the other with unequal sides (scalene). These we may fairly assume to be the original elements of fire and the other bodies; what principles are prior to these God only knows, and he of men whom God loves. Next, we must determine what are the four most beautiful figures which are unlike one another and yet sometimes capable of resolution into one another...Of the two kinds of triangles the equal-sided has but one form, the unequal-sided has an infinite variety of forms; and there is none more beautiful than that which forms the half of an equilateral triangle. Let us then choose two triangles; one, the isosceles, the other, that form of scalene which has the square of the longer side three times as great as the square of the lesser side; and affirm that, out of these, fire and the other elements have been constructed. I was wrong in imagining that all the four elements could be generated into and out of one another. For as they are formed, three of them from the triangle which has the sides unequal, the fourth from the triangle which has equal sides, three can be resolved into one another, but the fourth cannot be resolved into them nor they into it. So much for their passage into one another: I must now speak of their construction. From the triangle of which the hypotenuse is twice the lesser side the three first regular solids are formed\u2014first, the equilateral pyramid or tetrahedron; secondly, the octahedron; thirdly, the icosahedron; and from the isosceles triangle is formed the cube. And there is a fifth figure (which is made out of twelve pentagons), the dodecahedron\u2014this God used as a model for the twelvefold division of the Zodiac. Let us now assign the geometrical forms to their respective elements. The cube is the most stable of them because resting on a quadrangular plane surface, and composed of isosceles triangles. To the earth then, which is the most stable of bodies and the most easily modelled of them, may be assigned the form of a cube; and the remaining forms to the other elements,\u2014to fire the pyramid, to air the octahedron, and to water the icosahedron,\u2014according to their degrees of lightness or heaviness or power, or want of power, of penetration. The single particles of any of the elements are not seen by reason of their smallness; they only become visible when collected. The ratios of their motions, numbers, and other properties, are ordered by the God, who harmonized them as far as necessity permitted. The probable conclusion is as follows:\u2014Earth, when dissolved by the more penetrating element of fire, whether acting immediately or through the medium of air or water, is decomposed but not transformed. Water, when divided by fire or air, becomes one part fire, and two parts air. A volume of air divided becomes two of fire. On the other hand, when condensed, two volumes of fire make a volume of air; and two and a half parts of air condense into one of water. Any element which is fastened upon by fire is cut by the sharpness of the triangles, until at length, coalescing with the fire, it is at rest; for similars are not affected by similars. When two kinds of bodies quarrel with one another, then the tendency to decomposition continues until the smaller either escapes to its kindred element or becomes one with its conqueror. And this tendency in bodies to condense or escape is a source of motion...Where there is motion there must be a mover, and where there is a mover there must be something to move. These cannot exist in what is uniform, and therefore motion is due to want of uniformity. But then why, when things are divided after their kinds, do they not cease from motion? The answer is, that the circular motion of all things compresses them, and as \u2018nature abhors a vacuum,\u2019 the finer and more subtle particles of the lighter elements, such as fire and air, are thrust into the interstices of the larger, each of them penetrating according to their rarity, and thus all the elements are on their way up and down everywhere and always into their own places. Hence there is a principle of inequality, and therefore of motion, in all time. In the next place, we may observe that there are different kinds of fire\u2014(1) flame, (2) light that burns not, (3) the red heat of the embers of fire. And there are varieties of air, as for example, the pure aether, the opaque mist, and other nameless forms. Water, again, is of two kinds, liquid and fusile. The liquid is composed of small and unequal particles, the fusile of large and uniform particles and is more solid, but nevertheless melts at the approach of fire, and then spreads upon the earth. When the substance cools, the fire passes into the air, which is displaced, and forces together and condenses the liquid mass. This process is called cooling and congealment. Of the fusile kinds the fairest and heaviest is gold; this is hardened by filtration through rock, and is of a bright yellow colour. A shoot of gold which is darker and denser than the rest is called adamant. Another kind is called copper, which is harder and yet lighter because the interstices are larger than in gold. There is mingled with it a fine and small portion of earth which comes out in the form of rust. These are a few of the conjectures which philosophy forms, when, leaving the eternal nature, she turns for innocent recreation to consider the truths of generation. Water which is mingled with fire is called liquid because it rolls upon the earth, and soft because its bases give way. This becomes more equable when separated from fire and air, and then congeals into hail or ice, or the looser forms of hoar frost or snow. There are other waters which are called juices and are distilled through plants. Of these we may mention, first, wine, which warms the soul as well as the body; secondly, oily substances, as for example, oil or pitch; thirdly, honey, which relaxes the contracted parts of the mouth and so produces sweetness; fourthly, vegetable acid, which is frothy and has a burning quality and dissolves the flesh. Of the kinds of earth, that which is filtered through water passes into stone; the water is broken up by the earth and escapes in the form of air\u2014this in turn presses upon the mass of earth, and the earth, compressed into an indissoluble union with the remaining water, becomes rock. Rock, when it is made up of equal particles, is fair and transparent, but the reverse when of unequal. Earth is converted into pottery when the watery part is suddenly drawn away; or if moisture remains, the earth, when fused by fire, becomes, on cooling, a stone of a black colour. When the earth is finer and of a briny nature then two half-solid bodies are formed by separating the water,\u2014soda and salt. The strong compounds of earth and water are not soluble by water, but only by fire. Earth itself, when not consolidated, is dissolved by water; when consolidated, by fire only. The cohesion of water, when strong, is dissolved by fire only; when weak, either by air or fire, the former entering the interstices, the latter penetrating even the triangles. Air when strongly condensed is indissoluble by any power which does not reach the triangles, and even when not strongly condensed is only resolved by fire. Compounds of earth and water are unaffected by water while the water occupies the interstices in them, but begin to liquefy when fire enters into the interstices of the water. They are of two kinds, some of them, like glass, having more earth, others, like wax, having more water in them. Having considered objects of sense, we now pass on to sensation. But we cannot explain sensation without explaining the nature of flesh and of the mortal soul; and as we cannot treat of both together, in order that we may proceed at once to the sensations we must assume the existence of body and soul. What makes fire burn? The fineness of the sides, the sharpness of the angles, the smallness of the particles, the quickness of the motion. Moreover, the pyramid, which is the figure of fire, is more cutting than any other. The feeling of cold is produced by the larger particles of moisture outside the body trying to eject the smaller ones in the body which they compress. The struggle which arises between elements thus unnaturally brought together causes shivering. That is hard to which the flesh yields, and soft which yields to the flesh, and these two terms are also relative to one another. The yielding matter is that which has the slenderest base, whereas that which has a rectangular base is compact and repellent. Light and heavy are wrongly explained with reference to a lower and higher in place. For in the universe, which is a sphere, there is no opposition of above or below, and that which is to us above would be below to a man standing at the antipodes. The greater or less difficulty in detaching any element from its like is the real cause of heaviness or of lightness. If you draw the earth into the dissimilar air, the particles of earth cling to their native element, and you more easily detach a small portion than a large. There would be the same difficulty in moving any of the upper elements towards the lower. The smooth and the rough are severally produced by the union of evenness with compactness, and of hardness with inequality. Pleasure and pain are the most important of the affections common to the whole body. According to our general doctrine of sensation, parts of the body which are easily moved readily transmit the motion to the mind; but parts which are not easily moved have no effect upon the patient. The bones and hair are of the latter kind, sight and hearing of the former. Ordinary affections are neither pleasant nor painful. The impressions of sight afford an example of these, and are neither violent nor sudden. But sudden replenishments of the body cause pleasure, and sudden disturbances, as for example cuttings and burnings, have the opposite effect. >From sensations common to the whole body, we proceed to those of particular parts. The affections of the tongue appear to be caused by contraction and dilation, but they have more of roughness or smoothness than is found in other affections. Earthy particles, entering into the small veins of the tongue which reach to the heart, when they melt into and dry up the little veins are astringent if they are rough; or if not so rough, they are only harsh, and if excessively abstergent, like potash and soda, bitter. Purgatives of a weaker sort are called salt and, having no bitterness, are rather agreeable. Inflammatory bodies, which by their lightness are carried up into the head, cutting all that comes in their way, are termed pungent. But when these are refined by putrefaction, and enter the narrow veins of the tongue, and meet there particles of earth and air, two kinds of globules are formed\u2014one of earthy and impure liquid, which boils and ferments, the other of pure and transparent water, which are called bubbles; of all these affections the cause is termed acid. When, on the other hand, the composition of the deliquescent particles is congenial to the tongue, and disposes the parts according to their nature, this remedial power in them is called sweet. Smells are not divided into kinds; all of them are transitional, and arise out of the decomposition of one element into another, for the simple air or water is without smell. They are vapours or mists, thinner than water and thicker than air: and hence in drawing in the breath, when there is an obstruction, the air passes, but there is no smell. They have no names, but are distinguished as pleasant and unpleasant, and their influence extends over the whole region from the head to the navel. Hearing is the effect of a stroke which is transmitted through the ears by means of the air, brain, and blood to the soul, beginning at the head and extending to the liver. The sound which moves swiftly is acute; that which moves slowly is grave; that which is uniform is smooth, and the opposite is harsh. Loudness depends on the quantity of the sound. Of the harmony of sounds I will hereafter speak. Colours are flames which emanate from all bodies, having particles corresponding to the sense of sight. Some of the particles are less and some larger, and some are equal to the parts of the sight. The equal particles appear transparent; the larger contract, and the lesser dilate the sight. White is produced by the dilation, black by the contraction, of the particles of sight. There is also a swifter motion of another sort of fire which forces a way through the passages of the eyes, and elicits from them a union of fire and water which we call tears. The inner fire flashes forth, and the outer finds a way in and is extinguished in the moisture, and all sorts of colours are generated by the mixture. This affection is termed by us dazzling, and the object which produces it is called bright. There is yet another sort of fire which mingles with the moisture of the eye without flashing, and produces a colour like blood\u2014to this we give the name of red. A bright element mingling with red and white produces a colour which we call auburn. The law of proportion, however, according to which compound colours are formed, cannot be determined scientifically or even probably. Red, when mingled with black and white, gives a purple hue, which becomes umber when the colours are burnt and there is a larger admixture of black. Flame-colour is a mixture of auburn and dun; dun of white and black; yellow of white and auburn. White and bright meeting, and falling upon a full black, become dark blue; dark blue mingling with white becomes a light blue; the union of flame-colour and black makes leek-green. There is no difficulty in seeing how other colours are probably composed. But he who should attempt to test the truth of this by experiment, would forget the difference of the human and divine nature. God only is able to compound and resolve substances; such experiments are impossible to man. These are the elements of necessity which the Creator received in the world of generation when he made the all-sufficient and perfect creature, using the secondary causes as his ministers, but himself fashioning the good in all things. For there are two sorts of causes, the one divine, the other necessary; and we should seek to discover the divine above all, and, for their sake, the necessary, because without them the higher cannot be attained by us. Having now before us the causes out of which the rest of our discourse is to be framed, let us go back to the point at which we began, and add a fair ending to our tale. As I said at first, all things were originally a chaos in which there was no order or proportion. The elements of this chaos were arranged by the Creator, and out of them he made the world. Of the divine he himself was the author, but he committed to his offspring the creation of the mortal. From him they received the immortal soul, but themselves made the body to be its vehicle, and constructed within another soul which was mortal, and subject to terrible affections\u2014pleasure, the inciter of evil; pain, which deters from good; rashness and fear, foolish counsellors; anger hard to be appeased; hope easily led astray. These they mingled with irrational sense and all-daring love according to necessary laws and so framed man. And, fearing to pollute the divine element, they gave the mortal soul a separate habitation in the breast, parted off from the head by a narrow isthmus. And as in a house the women\u2019s apartments are divided from the men\u2019s, the cavity of the thorax was divided into two parts, a higher and a lower. The higher of the two, which is the seat of courage and anger, lies nearer to the head, between the midriff and the neck, and assists reason in restraining the desires. The heart is the house of guard in which all the veins meet, and through them reason sends her commands to the extremity of her kingdom. When the passions are in revolt, or danger approaches from without, then the heart beats and swells; and the creating powers, knowing this, implanted in the body the soft and bloodless substance of the lung, having a porous and springy nature like a sponge, and being kept cool by drink and air which enters through the trachea. The part of the soul which desires meat and drink was placed between the midriff and navel, where they made a sort of manger; and here they bound it down, like a wild animal, away from the council-chamber, and leaving the better principle undisturbed to advise quietly for the good of the whole. For the Creator knew that the belly would not listen to reason, and was under the power of idols and fancies. Wherefore he framed the liver to connect with the lower nature, contriving that it should be compact, and bright, and sweet, and also bitter and smooth, in order that the power of thought which originates in the mind might there be reflected, terrifying the belly with the elements of bitterness and gall, and a suffusion of bilious colours when the liver is contracted, and causing pain and misery by twisting out of its place the lobe and closing up the vessels and gates. And the converse happens when some gentle inspiration coming from intelligence mirrors the opposite fancies, giving rest and sweetness and freedom, and at night, moderation and peace accompanied with prophetic insight, when reason and sense are asleep. For the authors of our being, in obedience to their Father\u2019s will and in order to make men as good as they could, gave to the liver the power of divination, which is never active when men are awake or in health; but when they are under the influence of some disorder or enthusiasm then they receive intimations, which have to be interpreted by others who are called prophets, but should rather be called interpreters of prophecy; after death these intimations become unintelligible. The spleen which is situated in the neighbourhood, on the left side, keeps the liver bright and clean, as a napkin does a mirror, and the evacuations of the liver are received into it; and being a hollow tissue it is for a time swollen with these impurities, but when the body is purged it returns to its natural size. The truth concerning the soul can only be established by the word of God. Still, we may venture to assert what is probable both concerning soul and body. The creative powers were aware of our tendency to excess. And so when they made the belly to be a receptacle for food, in order that men might not perish by insatiable gluttony, they formed the convolutions of the intestines, in this way retarding the passage of food through the body, lest mankind should be absorbed in eating and drinking, and the whole race become impervious to divine philosophy. The creation of bones and flesh was on this wise. The foundation of these is the marrow which binds together body and soul, and the marrow is made out of such of the primary triangles as are adapted by their perfection to produce all the four elements. These God took and mingled them in due proportion, making as many kinds of marrow as there were hereafter to be kinds of souls. The receptacle of the divine soul he made round, and called that portion of the marrow brain, intending that the vessel containing this substance should be the head. The remaining part he divided into long and round figures, and to these as to anchors, fastening the mortal soul, he proceeded to make the rest of the body, first forming for both parts a covering of bone. The bone was formed by sifting pure smooth earth and wetting it with marrow. It was then thrust alternately into fire and water, and thus rendered insoluble by either. Of bone he made a globe which he placed around the brain, leaving a narrow opening, and around the marrow of the neck and spine he formed the vertebrae, like hinges, which extended from the head through the whole of the trunk. And as the bone was brittle and liable to mortify and destroy the marrow by too great rigidity and susceptibility to heat and cold, he contrived sinews and flesh\u2014the first to give flexibility, the second to guard against heat and cold, and to be a protection against falls, containing a warm moisture, which in summer exudes and cools the body, and in winter is a defence against cold. Having this in view, the Creator mingled earth with fire and water and mixed with them a ferment of acid and salt, so as to form pulpy flesh. But the sinews he made of a mixture of bone and unfermented flesh, giving them a mean nature between the two, and a yellow colour. Hence they were more glutinous than flesh, but softer than bone. The bones which have most of the living soul within them he covered with the thinnest film of flesh, those which have least of it, he lodged deeper. At the joints he diminished the flesh in order not to impede the flexure of the limbs, and also to avoid clogging the perceptions of the mind. About the thighs and arms, which have no sense because there is little soul in the marrow, and about the inner bones, he laid the flesh thicker. For where the flesh is thicker there is less feeling, except in certain parts which the Creator has made solely of flesh, as for example, the tongue. Had the combination of solid bone and thick flesh been consistent with acute perceptions, the Creator would have given man a sinewy and fleshy head, and then he would have lived twice as long. But our creators were of opinion that a shorter life which was better was preferable to a longer which was worse, and therefore they covered the head with thin bone, and placed the sinews at the extremity of the head round the neck, and fastened the jawbones to them below the face. And they framed the mouth, having teeth and tongue and lips, with a view to the necessary and the good; for food is a necessity, and the river of speech is the best of rivers. Still, the head could not be left a bare globe of bone on account of the extremes of heat and cold, nor be allowed to become dull and senseless by an overgrowth of flesh. Wherefore it was covered by a peel or skin which met and grew by the help of the cerebral humour. The diversity of the sutures was caused by the struggle of the food against the courses of the soul. The skin of the head was pierced by fire, and out of the punctures came forth a moisture, part liquid, and part of a skinny nature, which was hardened by the pressure of the external cold and became hair. And God gave hair to the head of man to be a light covering, so that it might not interfere with his perceptions. Nails were formed by combining sinew, skin, and bone, and were made by the creators with a view to the future when, as they knew, women and other animals who would require them would be framed out of man. The gods also mingled natures akin to that of man with other forms and perceptions. Thus trees and plants were created, which were originally wild and have been adapted by cultivation to our use. They partake of that third kind of life which is seated between the midriff and the navel, and is altogether passive and incapable of reflection. When the creators had furnished all these natures for our sustenance, they cut channels through our bodies as in a garden, watering them with a perennial stream. Two were cut down the back, along the back bone, where the skin and flesh meet, one on the right and the other on the left, having the marrow of generation between them. In the next place, they divided the veins about the head and interlaced them with each other in order that they might form an additional link between the head and the body, and that the sensations from both sides might be diffused throughout the body. In the third place, they contrived the passage of liquids, which may be explained in this way:\u2014Finer bodies retain coarser, but not the coarser the finer, and the belly is capable of retaining food, but not fire and air. God therefore formed a network of fire and air to irrigate the veins, having within it two lesser nets, and stretched cords reaching from both the lesser nets to the extremity of the outer net. The inner parts of the net were made by him of fire, the lesser nets and their cavities of air. The two latter he made to pass into the mouth; the one ascending by the air-pipes from the lungs, the other by the side of the air-pipes from the belly. The entrance to the first he divided into two parts, both of which he made to meet at the channels of the nose, that when the mouth was closed the passage connected with it might still be fed with air. The cavity of the network he spread around the hollows of the body, making the entire receptacle to flow into and out of the lesser nets and the lesser nets into and out of it, while the outer net found a way into and out of the pores of the body, and the internal heat followed the air to and fro. These, as we affirm, are the phenomena of respiration. And all this process takes place in order that the body may be watered and cooled and nourished, and the meat and drink digested and liquefied and carried into the veins. The causes of respiration have now to be considered. The exhalation of the breath through the mouth and nostrils displaces the external air, and at the same time leaves a vacuum into which through the pores the air which is displaced enters. Also the vacuum which is made when the air is exhaled through the pores is filled up by the inhalation of breath through the mouth and nostrils. The explanation of this double phenomenon is as follows:\u2014Elements move towards their natural places. Now as every animal has within him a fountain of fire, the air which is inhaled through the mouth and nostrils, on coming into contact with this, is heated; and when heated, in accordance with the law of attraction, it escapes by the way it entered toward the place of fire. On leaving the body it is cooled and drives round the air which it displaces through the pores into the empty lungs. This again is in turn heated by the internal fire and escapes, as it entered, through the pores. The phenomena of medical cupping-glasses, of swallowing, and of the hurling of bodies, are to be explained on a similar principle; as also sounds, which are sometimes discordant on account of the inequality of them, and again harmonious by reason of equality. The slower sounds reaching the swifter, when they begin to pause, by degrees assimilate with them: whence arises a pleasure which even the unwise feel, and which to the wise becomes a higher sense of delight, being an imitation of divine harmony in mortal motions. Streams flow, lightnings play, amber and the magnet attract, not by reason of attraction, but because \u2018nature abhors a vacuum,\u2019 and because things, when compounded or dissolved, move different ways, each to its own place. I will now return to the phenomena of respiration. The fire, entering the belly, minces the food, and as it escapes, fills the veins by drawing after it the divided portions, and thus the streams of nutriment are diffused through the body. The fruits or herbs which are our daily sustenance take all sorts of colours when intermixed, but the colour of red or fire predominates, and hence the liquid which we call blood is red, being the nurturing principle of the body, whence all parts are watered and empty places filled. The process of repletion and depletion is produced by the attraction of like to like, after the manner of the universal motion. The external elements by their attraction are always diminishing the substance of the body: the particles of blood, too, formed out of the newly digested food, are attracted towards kindred elements within the body and so fill up the void. When more is taken away than flows in, then we decay; and when less, we grow and increase. The young of every animal has the triangles new and closely locked together, and yet the entire frame is soft and delicate, being newly made of marrow and nurtured on milk. These triangles are sharper than those which enter the body from without in the shape of food, and therefore they cut them up. But as life advances, the triangles wear out and are no longer able to assimilate food; and at length, when the bonds which unite the triangles of the marrow become undone, they in turn unloose the bonds of the soul; and if the release be according to nature, she then flies away with joy. For the death which is natural is pleasant, but that which is caused by violence is painful. Every one may understand the origin of diseases. They may be occasioned by the disarrangement or disproportion of the elements out of which the body is framed. This is the origin of many of them, but the worst of all owe their severity to the following causes: There is a natural order in the human frame according to which the flesh and sinews are made of blood, the sinews out of the fibres, and the flesh out of the congealed substance which is formed by separation from the fibres. The glutinous matter which comes away from the sinews and the flesh, not only binds the flesh to the bones, but nourishes the bones and waters the marrow. When these processes take place in regular order the body is in health. But when the flesh wastes and returns into the veins there is discoloured blood as well as air in the veins, having acid and salt qualities, from which is generated every sort of phlegm and bile. All things go the wrong way and cease to give nourishment to the body, no longer preserving their natural courses, but at war with themselves and destructive to the constitution of the body. The oldest part of the flesh which is hard to decompose blackens from long burning, and from being corroded grows bitter, and as the bitter element refines away, becomes acid. When tinged with blood the bitter substance has a red colour, and this when mixed with black takes the hue of grass; or again, the bitter substance has an auburn colour, when new flesh is decomposed by the internal flame. To all which phenomena some physician or philosopher who was able to see the one in many has given the name of bile. The various kinds of bile have names answering to their colours. Lymph or serum is of two kinds: first, the whey of blood, which is gentle; secondly, the secretion of dark and bitter bile, which, when mingled under the influence of heat with salt, is malignant and is called acid phlegm. There is also white phlegm, formed by the decomposition of young and tender flesh, and covered with little bubbles, separately invisible, but becoming visible when collected. The water of tears and perspiration and similar substances is also the watery part of fresh phlegm. All these humours become sources of disease when the blood is replenished in irregular ways and not by food or drink. The danger, however, is not so great when the foundation remains, for then there is a possibility of recovery. But when the substance which unites the flesh and bones is diseased, and is no longer renewed from the muscles and sinews, and instead of being oily and smooth and glutinous becomes rough and salt and dry, then the fleshy parts fall away and leave the sinews bare and full of brine, and the flesh gets back again into the circulation of the blood, and makes the previously mentioned disorders still greater. There are other and worse diseases which are prior to these; as when the bone through the density of the flesh does not receive sufficient air, and becomes stagnant and gangrened, and crumbling away passes into the food, and the food into the flesh, and the flesh returns again into the blood. Worst of all and most fatal is the disease of the marrow, by which the whole course of the body is reversed. There is a third class of diseases which are produced, some by wind and some by phlegm and some by bile. When the lung, which is the steward of the air, is obstructed, by rheums, and in one part no air, and in another too much, enters in, then the parts which are unrefreshed by air corrode, and other parts are distorted by the excess of air; and in this manner painful diseases are produced. The most painful are caused by wind generated within the body, which gets about the great sinews of the shoulders\u2014these are termed tetanus. The cure of them is difficult, and in most cases they are relieved only by fever. White phlegm, which is dangerous if kept in, by reason of the air bubbles, is not equally dangerous if able to escape through the pores, although it variegates the body, generating diverse kinds of leprosies. If, when mingled with black bile, it disturbs the courses of the head in sleep, there is not so much danger; but if it assails those who are awake, then the attack is far more dangerous, and is called epilepsy or the sacred disease. Acid and salt phlegm is the source of catarrh. Inflammations originate in bile, which is sometimes relieved by boils and swellings, but when detained, and above all when mingled with pure blood, generates many inflammatory disorders, disturbing the position of the fibres which are scattered about in the blood in order to maintain the balance of rare and dense which is necessary to its regular circulation. If the bile, which is only stale blood, or liquefied flesh, comes in little by little, it is congealed by the fibres and produces internal cold and shuddering. But when it enters with more of a flood it overcomes the fibres by its heat and reaches the spinal marrow, and burning up the cables of the soul sets her free from the body. When on the other hand the body, though wasted, still holds out, then the bile is expelled, like an exile from a factious state, causing associating diarrhoeas and dysenteries and similar disorders. The body which is diseased from the effects of fire is in a continual fever; when air is the agent, the fever is quotidian; when water, the fever intermits a day; when earth, which is the most sluggish element, the fever intermits three days and is with difficulty shaken off. Of mental disorders there are two sorts, one madness, the other ignorance, and they may be justly attributed to disease. Excessive pleasures or pains are among the greatest diseases, and deprive men of their senses. When the seed about the spinal marrow is too abundant, the body has too great pleasures and pains; and during a great part of his life he who is the subject of them is more or less mad. He is often thought bad, but this is a mistake; for the truth is that the intemperance of lust is due to the fluidity of the marrow produced by the loose consistency of the bones. And this is true of vice in general, which is commonly regarded as disgraceful, whereas it is really involuntary and arises from a bad habit of the body and evil education. In like manner the soul is often made vicious by the influence of bodily pain; the briny phlegm and other bitter and bilious humours wander over the body and find no exit, but are compressed within, and mingle their own vapours with the motions of the soul, and are carried to the three places of the soul, creating infinite varieties of trouble and melancholy, of rashness and cowardice, of forgetfulness and stupidity. When men are in this evil plight of body, and evil forms of government and evil discourses are superadded, and there is no education to save them, they are corrupted through two causes; but of neither of them are they really the authors. For the planters are to blame rather than the plants, the educators and not the educated. Still, we should endeavour to attain virtue and avoid vice; but this is part of another subject. Enough of disease\u2014I have now to speak of the means by which the mind and body are to be preserved, a higher theme than the other. The good is the beautiful, and the beautiful is the symmetrical, and there is no greater or fairer symmetry than that of body and soul, as the contrary is the greatest of deformities. A leg or an arm too long or too short is at once ugly and unserviceable, and the same is true if body and soul are disproportionate. For a strong and impassioned soul may \u2018fret the pigmy body to decay,\u2019 and so produce convulsions and other evils. The violence of controversy, or the earnestness of enquiry, will often generate inflammations and rheums which are not understood, or assigned to their true cause by the professors of medicine. And in like manner the body may be too much for the soul, darkening the reason, and quickening the animal desires. The only security is to preserve the balance of the two, and to this end the mathematician or philosopher must practise gymnastics, and the gymnast must cultivate music. The parts of the body too must be treated in the same way\u2014they should receive their appropriate exercise. For the body is set in motion when it is heated and cooled by the elements which enter in, or is dried up and moistened by external things; and, if given up to these processes when at rest, it is liable to destruction. But the natural motion, as in the world, so also in the human frame, produces harmony and divides hostile powers. The best exercise is the spontaneous motion of the body, as in gymnastics, because most akin to the motion of mind; not so good is the motion of which the source is in another, as in sailing or riding; least good when the body is at rest and the motion is in parts only, which is a species of motion imparted by physic. This should only be resorted to by men of sense in extreme cases; lesser diseases are not to be irritated by medicine. For every disease is akin to the living being and has an appointed term, just as life has, which depends on the form of the triangles, and cannot be protracted when they are worn out. And he who, instead of accepting his destiny, endeavours to prolong his life by medicine, is likely to multiply and magnify his diseases. Regimen and not medicine is the true cure, when a man has time at his disposal. Enough of the nature of man and of the body, and of training and education. The subject is a great one and cannot be adequately treated as an appendage to another. To sum up all in a word: there are three kinds of soul located within us, and any one of them, if remaining inactive, becomes very weak; if exercised, very strong. Wherefore we should duly train and exercise all three kinds. The divine soul God lodged in the head, to raise us, like plants which are not of earthly origin, to our kindred; for the head is nearest to heaven. He who is intent upon the gratification of his desires and cherishes the mortal soul, has all his ideas mortal, and is himself mortal in the truest sense. But he who seeks after knowledge and exercises the divine part of himself in godly and immortal thoughts, attains to truth and immortality, as far as is possible to man, and also to happiness, while he is training up within him the divine principle and indwelling power of order. There is only one way in which one person can benefit another; and that is by assigning to him his proper nurture and motion. To the motions of the soul answer the motions of the universe, and by the study of these the individual is restored to his original nature. Thus we have finished the discussion of the universe, which, according to our original intention, has now been brought down to the creation of man. Completeness seems to require that something should be briefly said about other animals: first of women, who are probably degenerate and cowardly men. And when they degenerated, the gods implanted in men the desire of union with them, creating in man one animate substance and in woman another in the following manner:\u2014The outlet for liquids they connected with the living principle of the spinal marrow, which the man has the desire to emit into the fruitful womb of the woman; this is like a fertile field in which the seed is quickened and matured, and at last brought to light. When this desire is unsatisfied the man is over-mastered by the power of the generative organs, and the woman is subjected to disorders from the obstruction of the passages of the breath, until the two meet and pluck the fruit of the tree. The race of birds was created out of innocent, light-minded men, who thought to pursue the study of the heavens by sight; these were transformed into birds, and grew feathers instead of hair. The race of wild animals were men who had no philosophy, and never looked up to heaven or used the courses of the head, but followed only the influences of passion. Naturally they turned to their kindred earth, and put their forelegs to the ground, and their heads were crushed into strange oblong forms. Some of them have four feet, and some of them more than four,\u2014the latter, who are the more senseless, drawing closer to their native element; the most senseless of all have no limbs and trail their whole body on the ground. The fourth kind are the inhabitants of the waters; these are made out of the most senseless and ignorant and impure of men, whom God placed in the uttermost parts of the world in return for their utter ignorance, and caused them to respire water instead of the pure element of air. Such are the laws by which animals pass into one another. And so the world received animals, mortal and immortal, and was fulfilled with them, and became a visible God, comprehending the visible, made in the image of the Intellectual, being the one perfect only-begotten heaven. Section 2. Nature in the aspect which she presented to a Greek philosopher of the fourth century before Christ is not easily reproduced to modern eyes. The associations of mythology and poetry have to be added, and the unconscious influence of science has to be subtracted, before we can behold the heavens or the earth as they appeared to the Greek. The philosopher himself was a child and also a man\u2014a child in the range of his attainments, but also a great intelligence having an insight into nature, and often anticipations of the truth. He was full of original thoughts, and yet liable to be imposed upon by the most obvious fallacies. He occasionally confused numbers with ideas, and atoms with numbers; his a priori notions were out of all proportion to his experience. He was ready to explain the phenomena of the heavens by the most trivial analogies of earth. The experiments which nature worked for him he sometimes accepted, but he never tried experiments for himself which would either prove or disprove his theories. His knowledge was unequal; while in some branches, such as medicine and astronomy, he had made considerable proficiency, there were others, such as chemistry, electricity, mechanics, of which the very names were unknown to him. He was the natural enemy of mythology, and yet mythological ideas still retained their hold over him. He was endeavouring to form a conception of principles, but these principles or ideas were regarded by him as real powers or entities, to which the world had been subjected. He was always tending to argue from what was near to what was remote, from what was known to what was unknown, from man to the universe, and back again from the universe to man. While he was arranging the world, he was arranging the forms of thought in his own mind; and the light from within and the light from without often crossed and helped to confuse one another. He might be compared to a builder engaged in some great design, who could only dig with his hands because he was unprovided with common tools; or to some poet or musician, like Tynnichus (Ion), obliged to accommodate his lyric raptures to the limits of the tetrachord or of the flute. The Hesiodic and Orphic cosmogonies were a phase of thought intermediate between mythology and philosophy and had a great influence on the beginnings of knowledge. There was nothing behind them; they were to physical science what the poems of Homer were to early Greek history. They made men think of the world as a whole; they carried the mind back into the infinity of past time; they suggested the first observation of the effects of fire and water on the earth\u2019s surface. To the ancient physics they stood much in the same relation which geology does to modern science. But the Greek was not, like the enquirer of the last generation, confined to a period of six thousand years; he was able to speculate freely on the effects of infinite ages in the production of physical phenomena. He could imagine cities which had existed time out of mind (States.; Laws), laws or forms of art and music which had lasted, \u2018not in word only, but in very truth, for ten thousand years\u2019 (Laws); he was aware that natural phenomena like the Delta of the Nile might have slowly accumulated in long periods of time (Hdt.). But he seems to have supposed that the course of events was recurring rather than progressive. To this he was probably led by the fixedness of Egyptian customs and the general observation that there were other civilisations in the world more ancient than that of Hellas. The ancient philosophers found in mythology many ideas which, if not originally derived from nature, were easily transferred to her\u2014such, for example, as love or hate, corresponding to attraction or repulsion; or the conception of necessity allied both to the regularity and irregularity of nature; or of chance, the nameless or unknown cause; or of justice, symbolizing the law of compensation; are of the Fates and Furies, typifying the fixed order or the extraordinary convulsions of nature. Their own interpretations of Homer and the poets were supposed by them to be the original meaning. Musing in themselves on the phenomena of nature, they were relieved at being able to utter the thoughts of their hearts in figures of speech which to them were not figures, and were already consecrated by tradition. Hesiod and the Orphic poets moved in a region of half-personification in which the meaning or principle appeared through the person. In their vaster conceptions of Chaos, Erebus, Aether, Night, and the like, the first rude attempts at generalization are dimly seen. The Gods themselves, especially the greater Gods, such as Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Athene, are universals as well as individuals. They were gradually becoming lost in a common conception of mind or God. They continued to exist for the purposes of ritual or of art; but from the sixth century onwards or even earlier there arose and gained strength in the minds of men the notion of \u2018one God, greatest among Gods and men, who was all sight, all hearing, all knowing\u2019 (Xenophanes). Under the influence of such ideas, perhaps also deriving from the traditions of their own or of other nations scraps of medicine and astronomy, men came to the observation of nature. The Greek philosopher looked at the blue circle of the heavens and it flashed upon him that all things were one; the tumult of sense abated, and the mind found repose in the thought which former generations had been striving to realize. The first expression of this was some element, rarefied by degrees into a pure abstraction, and purged from any tincture of sense. Soon an inner world of ideas began to be unfolded, more absorbing, more overpowering, more abiding than the brightest of visible objects, which to the eye of the philosopher looking inward, seemed to pale before them, retaining only a faint and precarious existence. At the same time, the minds of men parted into the two great divisions of those who saw only a principle of motion, and of those who saw only a principle of rest, in nature and in themselves; there were born Heracliteans or Eleatics, as there have been in later ages born Aristotelians or Platonists. Like some philosophers in modern times, who are accused of making a theory first and finding their facts afterwards, the advocates of either opinion never thought of applying either to themselves or to their adversaries the criterion of fact. They were mastered by their ideas and not masters of them. Like the Heraclitean fanatics whom Plato has ridiculed in the Theaetetus, they were incapable of giving a reason of the faith that was in them, and had all the animosities of a religious sect. Yet, doubtless, there was some first impression derived from external nature, which, as in mythology, so also in philosophy, worked upon the minds of the first thinkers. Though incapable of induction or generalization in the modern sense, they caught an inspiration from the external world. The most general facts or appearances of nature, the circle of the universe, the nutritive power of water, the air which is the breath of life, the destructive force of fire, the seeming regularity of the greater part of nature and the irregularity of a remnant, the recurrence of day and night and of the seasons, the solid earth and the impalpable aether, were always present to them. The great source of error and also the beginning of truth to them was reasoning from analogy; they could see resemblances, but not differences; and they were incapable of distinguishing illustration from argument. Analogy in modern times only points the way, and is immediately verified by experiment. The dreams and visions, which pass through the philosopher\u2019s mind, of resemblances between different classes of substances, or between the animal and vegetable world, are put into the refiner\u2019s fire, and the dross and other elements which adhere to them are purged away. But the contemporary of Plato and Socrates was incapable of resisting the power of any analogy which occurred to him, and was drawn into any consequences which seemed to follow. He had no methods of difference or of concomitant variations, by the use of which he could distinguish the accidental from the essential. He could not isolate phenomena, and he was helpless against the influence of any word which had an equivocal or double sense. Yet without this crude use of analogy the ancient physical philosopher would have stood still; he could not have made even \u2018one guess among many\u2019 without comparison. The course of natural phenomena would have passed unheeded before his eyes, like fair sights or musical sounds before the eyes and ears of an animal. Even the fetichism of the savage is the beginning of reasoning; the assumption of the most fanciful of causes indicates a higher mental state than the absence of all enquiry about them. The tendency to argue from the higher to the lower, from man to the world, has led to many errors, but has also had an elevating influence on philosophy. The conception of the world as a whole, a person, an animal, has been the source of hasty generalizations; yet this general grasp of nature led also to a spirit of comprehensiveness in early philosophy, which has not increased, but rather diminished, as the fields of knowledge have become more divided. The modern physicist confines himself to one or perhaps two branches of science. But he comparatively seldom rises above his own department, and often falls under the narrowing influence which any single branch, when pursued to the exclusion of every other, has over the mind. Language, two, exercised a spell over the beginnings of physical philosophy, leading to error and sometimes to truth; for many thoughts were suggested by the double meanings of words (Greek), and the accidental distinctions of words sometimes led the ancient philosopher to make corresponding differences in things (Greek). \u2018If they are the same, why have they different names; or if they are different, why have they the same name?\u2019\u2014is an argument not easily answered in the infancy of knowledge. The modern philosopher has always been taught the lesson which he still imperfectly learns, that he must disengage himself from the influence of words. Nor are there wanting in Plato, who was himself too often the victim of them, impressive admonitions that we should regard not words but things (States.). But upon the whole, the ancients, though not entirely dominated by them, were much more subject to the influence of words than the moderns. They had no clear divisions of colours or substances; even the four elements were undefined; the fields of knowledge were not parted off. They were bringing order out of disorder, having a small grain of experience mingled in a confused heap of a priori notions. And yet, probably, their first impressions, the illusions and mirages of their fancy, created a greater intellectual activity and made a nearer approach to the truth than any patient investigation of isolated facts, for which the time had not yet come, could have accomplished. There was one more illusion to which the ancient philosophers were subject, and against which Plato in his later dialogues seems to be struggling\u2014the tendency to mere abstractions; not perceiving that pure abstraction is only negation, they thought that the greater the abstraction the greater the truth. Behind any pair of ideas a new idea which comprehended them\u2014the (Greek), as it was technically termed\u2014began at once to appear. Two are truer than three, one than two. The words \u2018being,\u2019 or \u2018unity,\u2019 or essence,\u2019 or \u2018good,\u2019 became sacred to them. They did not see that they had a word only, and in one sense the most unmeaning of words. They did not understand that the content of notions is in inverse proportion to their universality\u2014the element which is the most widely diffused is also the thinnest; or, in the language of the common logic, the greater the extension the less the comprehension. But this vacant idea of a whole without parts, of a subject without predicates, a rest without motion, has been also the most fruitful of all ideas. It is the beginning of a priori thought, and indeed of thinking at all. Men were led to conceive it, not by a love of hasty generalization, but by a divine instinct, a dialectical enthusiasm, in which the human faculties seemed to yearn for enlargement. We know that \u2018being\u2019 is only the verb of existence, the copula, the most general symbol of relation, the first and most meagre of abstractions; but to some of the ancient philosophers this little word appeared to attain divine proportions, and to comprehend all truth. Being or essence, and similar words, represented to them a supreme or divine being, in which they thought that they found the containing and continuing principle of the universe. In a few years the human mind was peopled with abstractions; a new world was called into existence to give law and order to the old. But between them there was still a gulf, and no one could pass from the one to the other. Number and figure were the greatest instruments of thought which were possessed by the Greek philosopher; having the same power over the mind which was exerted by abstract ideas, they were also capable of practical application. Many curious and, to the early thinker, mysterious properties of them came to light when they were compared with one another. They admitted of infinite multiplication and construction; in Pythagorean triangles or in proportions of 1:2:4:8 and 1:3:9:27, or compounds of them, the laws of the world seemed to be more than half revealed. They were also capable of infinite subdivision\u2014a wonder and also a puzzle to the ancient thinker (Rep.). They were not, like being or essence, mere vacant abstractions, but admitted of progress and growth, while at the same time they confirmed a higher sentiment of the mind, that there was order in the universe. And so there began to be a real sympathy between the world within and the world without. The numbers and figures which were present to the mind\u2019s eye became visible to the eye of sense; the truth of nature was mathematics; the other properties of objects seemed to reappear only in the light of number. Law and morality also found a natural expression in number and figure. Instruments of such power and elasticity could not fail to be \u2018a most gracious assistance\u2019 to the first efforts of human intelligence. There was another reason why numbers had so great an influence over the minds of early thinkers\u2014they were verified by experience. Every use of them, even the most trivial, assured men of their truth; they were everywhere to be found, in the least things and the greatest alike. One, two, three, counted on the fingers was a \u2018trivial matter (Rep.), a little instrument out of which to create a world; but from these and by the help of these all our knowledge of nature has been developed. They were the measure of all things, and seemed to give law to all things; nature was rescued from chaos and confusion by their power; the notes of music, the motions of the stars, the forms of atoms, the evolution and recurrence of days, months, years, the military divisions of an army, the civil divisions of a state, seemed to afford a \u2018present witness\u2019 of them\u2014what would have become of man or of the world if deprived of number (Rep.)? The mystery of number and the mystery of music were akin. There was a music of rhythm and of harmonious motion everywhere; and to the real connexion which existed between music and number, a fanciful or imaginary relation was superadded. There was a music of the spheres as well as of the notes of the lyre. If in all things seen there was number and figure, why should they not also pervade the unseen world, with which by their wonderful and unchangeable nature they seemed to hold communion? Two other points strike us in the use which the ancient philosophers made of numbers. First, they applied to external nature the relations of them which they found in their own minds; and where nature seemed to be at variance with number, as for example in the case of fractions, they protested against her (Rep.; Arist. Metaph.). Having long meditated on the properties of 1:2:4:8, or 1:3:9:27, or of 3, 4, 5, they discovered in them many curious correspondences and were disposed to find in them the secret of the universe. Secondly, they applied number and figure equally to those parts of physics, such as astronomy or mechanics, in which the modern philosopher expects to find them, and to those in which he would never think of looking for them, such as physiology and psychology. For the sciences were not yet divided, and there was nothing really irrational in arguing that the same laws which regulated the heavenly bodies were partially applied to the erring limbs or brain of man. Astrology was the form which the lively fancy of ancient thinkers almost necessarily gave to astronomy. The observation that the lower principle, e.g. mechanics, is always seen in the higher, e.g. in the phenomena of life, further tended to perplex them. Plato\u2019s doctrine of the same and the other ruling the courses of the heavens and of the human body is not a mere vagary, but is a natural result of the state of knowledge and thought at which he had arrived. When in modern times we contemplate the heavens, a certain amount of scientific truth imperceptibly blends, even with the cursory glance of an unscientific person. He knows that the earth is revolving round the sun, and not the sun around the earth. He does not imagine the earth to be the centre of the universe, and he has some conception of chemistry and the cognate sciences. A very different aspect of nature would have been present to the mind of the early Greek philosopher. He would have beheld the earth a surface only, not mirrored, however faintly, in the glass of science, but indissolubly connected with some theory of one, two, or more elements. He would have seen the world pervaded by number and figure, animated by a principle of motion, immanent in a principle of rest. He would have tried to construct the universe on a quantitative principle, seeming to find in endless combinations of geometrical figures or in the infinite variety of their sizes a sufficient account of the multiplicity of phenomena. To these a priori speculations he would add a rude conception of matter and his own immediate experience of health and disease. His cosmos would necessarily be imperfect and unequal, being the first attempt to impress form and order on the primaeval chaos of human knowledge. He would see all things as in a dream. The ancient physical philosophers have been charged by Dr. Whewell and others with wasting their fine intelligences in wrong methods of enquiry; and their progress in moral and political philosophy has been sometimes contrasted with their supposed failure in physical investigations. \u2018They had plenty of ideas,\u2019 says Dr. Whewell, \u2018and plenty of facts; but their ideas did not accurately represent the facts with which they were acquainted.\u2019 This is a very crude and misleading way of describing ancient science. It is the mistake of an uneducated person\u2014uneducated, that is, in the higher sense of the word\u2014who imagines every one else to be like himself and explains every other age by his own. No doubt the ancients often fell into strange and fanciful errors: the time had not yet arrived for the slower and surer path of the modern inductive philosophy. But it remains to be shown that they could have done more in their age and country; or that the contributions which they made to the sciences with which they were acquainted are not as great upon the whole as those made by their successors. There is no single step in astronomy as great as that of the nameless Pythagorean who first conceived the world to be a body moving round the sun in space: there is no truer or more comprehensive principle than the application of mathematics alike to the heavenly bodies, and to the particles of matter. The ancients had not the instruments which would have enabled them to correct or verify their anticipations, and their opportunities of observation were limited. Plato probably did more for physical science by asserting the supremacy of mathematics than Aristotle or his disciples by their collections of facts. When the thinkers of modern times, following Bacon, undervalue or disparage the speculations of ancient philosophers, they seem wholly to forget the conditions of the world and of the human mind, under which they carried on their investigations. When we accuse them of being under the influence of words, do we suppose that we are altogether free from this illusion? When we remark that Greek physics soon became stationary or extinct, may we not observe also that there have been and may be again periods in the history of modern philosophy which have been barren and unproductive? We might as well maintain that Greek art was not real or great, because it had nihil simile aut secundum, as say that Greek physics were a failure because they admire no subsequent progress. The charge of premature generalization which is often urged against ancient philosophers is really an anachronism. For they can hardly be said to have generalized at all. They may be said more truly to have cleared up and defined by the help of experience ideas which they already possessed. The beginnings of thought about nature must always have this character. A true method is the result of many ages of experiment and observation, and is ever going on and enlarging with the progress of science and knowledge. At first men personify nature, then they form impressions of nature, at last they conceive \u2018measure\u2019 or laws of nature. They pass out of mythology into philosophy. Early science is not a process of discovery in the modern sense; but rather a process of correcting by observation, and to a certain extent only, the first impressions of nature, which mankind, when they began to think, had received from poetry or language or unintelligent sense. Of all scientific truths the greatest and simplest is the uniformity of nature; this was expressed by the ancients in many ways, as fate, or necessity, or measure, or limit. Unexpected events, of which the cause was unknown to them, they attributed to chance (Thucyd.). But their conception of nature was never that of law interrupted by exceptions,\u2014a somewhat unfortunate metaphysical invention of modern times, which is at variance with facts and has failed to satisfy the requirements of thought. Section 3. Plato\u2019s account of the soul is partly mythical or figurative, and partly literal. Not that either he or we can draw a line between them, or say, \u2018This is poetry, this is philosophy\u2019; for the transition from the one to the other is imperceptible. Neither must we expect to find in him absolute consistency. He is apt to pass from one level or stage of thought to another without always making it apparent that he is changing his ground. In such passages we have to interpret his meaning by the general spirit of his writings. To reconcile his inconsistencies would be contrary to the first principles of criticism and fatal to any true understanding of him. There is a further difficulty in explaining this part of the Timaeus\u2014the natural order of thought is inverted. We begin with the most abstract, and proceed from the abstract to the concrete. We are searching into things which are upon the utmost limit of human intelligence, and then of a sudden we fall rather heavily to the earth. There are no intermediate steps which lead from one to the other. But the abstract is a vacant form to us until brought into relation with man and nature. God and the world are mere names, like the Being of the Eleatics, unless some human qualities are added on to them. Yet the negation has a kind of unknown meaning to us. The priority of God and of the world, which he is imagined to have created, to all other existences, gives a solemn awe to them. And as in other systems of theology and philosophy, that of which we know least has the greatest interest to us. There is no use in attempting to define or explain the first God in the Platonic system, who has sometimes been thought to answer to God the Father; or the world, in whom the Fathers of the Church seemed to recognize \u2018the firstborn of every creature.\u2019 Nor need we discuss at length how far Plato agrees in the later Jewish idea of creation, according to which God made the world out of nothing. For his original conception of matter as something which has no qualities is really a negation. Moreover in the Hebrew Scriptures the creation of the world is described, even more explicitly than in the Timaeus, not as a single act, but as a work or process which occupied six days. There is a chaos in both, and it would be untrue to say that the Greek, any more than the Hebrew, had any definite belief in the eternal existence of matter. The beginning of things vanished into the distance. The real creation began, not with matter, but with ideas. According to Plato in the Timaeus, God took of the same and the other, of the divided and undivided, of the finite and infinite, and made essence, and out of the three combined created the soul of the world. To the soul he added a body formed out of the four elements. The general meaning of these words is that God imparted determinations of thought, or, as we might say, gave law and variety to the material universe. The elements are moving in a disorderly manner before the work of creation begins; and there is an eternal pattern of the world, which, like the \u2018idea of good,\u2019 is not the Creator himself, but not separable from him. The pattern too, though eternal, is a creation, a world of thought prior to the world of sense, which may be compared to the wisdom of God in the book of Ecclesiasticus, or to the \u2018God in the form of a globe\u2019 of the old Eleatic philosophers. The visible, which already exists, is fashioned in the likeness of this eternal pattern. On the other hand, there is no truth of which Plato is more firmly convinced than of the priority of the soul to the body, both in the universe and in man. So inconsistent are the forms in which he describes the works which no tongue can utter\u2014his language, as he himself says, partaking of his own uncertainty about the things of which he is speaking. We may remark in passing, that the Platonic compared with the Jewish description of the process of creation has less of freedom or spontaneity. The Creator in Plato is still subject to a remnant of necessity which he cannot wholly overcome. When his work is accomplished he remains in his own nature. Plato is more sensible than the Hebrew prophet of the existence of evil, which he seeks to put as far as possible out of the way of God. And he can only suppose this to be accomplished by God retiring into himself and committing the lesser works of creation to inferior powers. (Compare, however, Laws for another solution of the difficulty.) Nor can we attach any intelligible meaning to his words when he speaks of the visible being in the image of the invisible. For how can that which is divided be like that which is undivided? Or that which is changing be the copy of that which is unchanging? All the old difficulties about the ideas come back upon us in an altered form. We can imagine two worlds, one of which is the mere double of the other, or one of which is an imperfect copy of the other, or one of which is the vanishing ideal of the other; but we cannot imagine an intellectual world which has no qualities\u2014\u2018a thing in itself\u2019\u2014a point which has no parts or magnitude, which is nowhere, and nothing. This cannot be the archetype according to which God made the world, and is in reality, whether in Plato or in Kant, a mere negative residuum of human thought. There is another aspect of the same difficulty which appears to have no satisfactory solution. In what relation does the archetype stand to the Creator himself? For the idea or pattern of the world is not the thought of God, but a separate, self-existent nature, of which creation is the copy. We can only reply, (1) that to the mind of Plato subject and object were not yet distinguished; (2) that he supposes the process of creation to take place in accordance with his own theory of ideas; and as we cannot give a consistent account of the one, neither can we of the other. He means (3) to say that the creation of the world is not a material process of working with legs and arms, but ideal and intellectual; according to his own fine expression, \u2018the thought of God made the God that was to be.\u2019 He means (4) to draw an absolute distinction between the invisible or unchangeable which is or is the place of mind or being, and the world of sense or becoming which is visible and changing. He means (5) that the idea of the world is prior to the world, just as the other ideas are prior to sensible objects; and like them may be regarded as eternal and self-existent, and also, like the IDEA of good, may be viewed apart from the divine mind. There are several other questions which we might ask and which can receive no answer, or at least only an answer of the same kind as the preceding. How can matter be conceived to exist without form? Or, how can the essences or forms of things be distinguished from the eternal ideas, or essence itself from the soul? Or, how could there have been motion in the chaos when as yet time was not? Or, how did chaos come into existence, if not by the will of the Creator? Or, how could there have been a time when the world was not, if time was not? Or, how could the Creator have taken portions of an indivisible same? Or, how could space or anything else have been eternal when time is only created? Or, how could the surfaces of geometrical figures have formed solids? We must reply again that we cannot follow Plato in all his inconsistencies, but that the gaps of thought are probably more apparent to us than to him. He would, perhaps, have said that \u2018the first things are known only to God and to him of men whom God loves.\u2019 How often have the gaps in Theology been concealed from the eye of faith! And we may say that only by an effort of metaphysical imagination can we hope to understand Plato from his own point of view; we must not ask for consistency. Everywhere we find traces of the Platonic theory of knowledge expressed in an objective form, which by us has to be translated into the subjective, before we can attach any meaning to it. And this theory is exhibited in so many different points of view, that we cannot with any certainty interpret one dialogue by another; e.g. the Timaeus by the Parmenides or Phaedrus or Philebus. The soul of the world may also be conceived as the personification of the numbers and figures in which the heavenly bodies move. Imagine these as in a Pythagorean dream, stripped of qualitative difference and reduced to mathematical abstractions. They too conform to the principle of the same, and may be compared with the modern conception of laws of nature. They are in space, but not in time, and they are the makers of time. They are represented as constantly thinking of the same; for thought in the view of Plato is equivalent to truth or law, and need not imply a human consciousness, a conception which is familiar enough to us, but has no place, hardly even a name, in ancient Greek philosophy. To this principle of the same is opposed the principle of the other\u2014the principle of irregularity and disorder, of necessity and chance, which is only partially impressed by mathematical laws and figures. (We may observe by the way, that the principle of the other, which is the principle of plurality and variation in the Timaeus, has nothing in common with the \u2018other\u2019 of the Sophist, which is the principle of determination.) The element of the same dominates to a certain extent over the other\u2014the fixed stars keep the \u2018wanderers\u2019 of the inner circle in their courses, and a similar principle of fixedness or order appears to regulate the bodily constitution of man. But there still remains a rebellious seed of evil derived from the original chaos, which is the source of disorder in the world, and of vice and disease in man. But what did Plato mean by essence, (Greek), which is the intermediate nature compounded of the Same and the Other, and out of which, together with these two, the soul of the world is created? It is difficult to explain a process of thought so strange and unaccustomed to us, in which modern distinctions run into one another and are lost sight of. First, let us consider once more the meaning of the Same and the Other. The Same is the unchanging and indivisible, the heaven of the fixed stars, partaking of the divine nature, which, having law in itself, gives law to all besides and is the element of order and permanence in man and on the earth. It is the rational principle, mind regarded as a work, as creation\u2014not as the creator. The old tradition of Parmenides and of the Eleatic Being, the foundation of so much in the philosophy of Greece and of the world, was lingering in Plato\u2019s mind. The Other is the variable or changing element, the residuum of disorder or chaos, which cannot be reduced to order, nor altogether banished, the source of evil, seen in the errors of man and also in the wanderings of the planets, a necessity which protrudes through nature. Of this too there was a shadow in the Eleatic philosophy in the realm of opinion, which, like a mist, seemed to darken the purity of truth in itself.\u2014So far the words of Plato may perhaps find an intelligible meaning. But when he goes on to speak of the Essence which is compounded out of both, the track becomes fainter and we can only follow him with hesitating steps. But still we find a trace reappearing of the teaching of Anaxagoras: \u2018All was confusion, and then mind came and arranged things.\u2019 We have already remarked that Plato was not acquainted with the modern distinction of subject and object, and therefore he sometimes confuses mind and the things of mind\u2014(Greek) and (Greek). By (Greek) he clearly means some conception of the intelligible and the intelligent; it belongs to the class of (Greek). Matter, being, the Same, the eternal,\u2014for any of these terms, being almost vacant of meaning, is equally suitable to express indefinite existence,\u2014are compared or united with the Other or Diverse, and out of the union or comparison is elicited the idea of intelligence, the \u2018One in many,\u2019 brighter than any Promethean fire (Phil.), which co-existing with them and so forming a new existence, is or becomes the intelligible world...So we may perhaps venture to paraphrase or interpret or put into other words the parable in which Plato has wrapped up his conception of the creation of the world. The explanation may help to fill up with figures of speech the void of knowledge. The entire compound was divided by the Creator in certain proportions and reunited; it was then cut into two strips, which were bent into an inner circle and an outer, both moving with an uniform motion around a centre, the outer circle containing the fixed, the inner the wandering stars. The soul of the world was diffused everywhere from the centre to the circumference. To this God gave a body, consisting at first of fire and earth, and afterwards receiving an addition of air and water; because solid bodies, like the world, are always connected by two middle terms and not by one. The world was made in the form of a globe, and all the material elements were exhausted in the work of creation. The proportions in which the soul of the world as well as the human soul is divided answer to a series of numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27, composed of the two Pythagorean progressions 1, 2, 4, 8 and 1, 3, 9, 27, of which the number 1 represents a point, 2 and 3 lines, 4 and 8, 9 and 27 the squares and cubes respectively of 2 and 3. This series, of which the intervals are afterwards filled up, probably represents (1) the diatonic scale according to the Pythagoreans and Plato; (2) the order and distances of the heavenly bodies; and (3) may possibly contain an allusion to the music of the spheres, which is referred to in the myth at the end of the Republic. The meaning of the words that \u2018solid bodies are always connected by two middle terms\u2019 or mean proportionals has been much disputed. The most received explanation is that of Martin, who supposes that Plato is only speaking of surfaces and solids compounded of prime numbers (i.e. of numbers not made up of two factors, or, in other words, only measurable by unity). The square of any such number represents a surface, the cube a solid. The squares of any two such numbers (e.g. 2 squared, 3 squared = 4, 9), have always a single mean proportional (e.g. 4 and 9 have the single mean 6), whereas the cubes of primes (e.g. 3 cubed and 5 cubed) have always two mean proportionals (e.g. 27:45:75:125). But to this explanation of Martin\u2019s it may be objected, (1) that Plato nowhere says that his proportion is to be limited to prime numbers; (2) that the limitation of surfaces to squares is also not to be found in his words; nor (3) is there any evidence to show that the distinction of prime from other numbers was known to him. What Plato chiefly intends to express is that a solid requires a stronger bond than a surface; and that the double bond which is given by two means is stronger than the single bond given by one. Having reflected on the singular numerical phenomena of the existence of one mean proportional between two square numbers are rather perhaps only between the two lowest squares; and of two mean proportionals between two cubes, perhaps again confining his attention to the two lowest cubes, he finds in the latter symbol an expression of the relation of the elements, as in the former an image of the combination of two surfaces. Between fire and earth, the two extremes, he remarks that there are introduced, not one, but two elements, air and water, which are compared to the two mean proportionals between two cube numbers. The vagueness of his language does not allow us to determine whether anything more than this was intended by him. Leaving the further explanation of details, which the reader will find discussed at length in Boeckh and Martin, we may now return to the main argument: Why did God make the world? Like man, he must have a purpose; and his purpose is the diffusion of that goodness or good which he himself is. The term \u2018goodness\u2019 is not to be understood in this passage as meaning benevolence or love, in the Christian sense of the term, but rather law, order, harmony, like the idea of good in the Republic. The ancient mythologers, and even the Hebrew prophets, had spoken of the jealousy of God; and the Greek had imagined that there was a Nemesis always attending the prosperity of mortals. But Plato delights to think of God as the author of order in his works, who, like a father, lives over again in his children, and can never have too much of good or friendship among his creatures. Only, as there is a certain remnant of evil inherent in matter which he cannot get rid of, he detaches himself from them and leaves them to themselves, that he may be guiltless of their faults and sufferings. Between the ideal and the sensible Plato interposes the two natures of time and space. Time is conceived by him to be only the shadow or image of eternity which ever is and never has been or will be, but is described in a figure only as past or future. This is one of the great thoughts of early philosophy, which are still as difficult to our minds as they were to the early thinkers; or perhaps more difficult, because we more distinctly see the consequences which are involved in such an hypothesis. All the objections which may be urged against Kant\u2019s doctrine of the ideality of space and time at once press upon us. If time is unreal, then all which is contained in time is unreal\u2014the succession of human thoughts as well as the flux of sensations; there is no connecting link between (Greek) and (Greek). Yet, on the other hand, we are conscious that knowledge is independent of time, that truth is not a thing of yesterday or tomorrow, but an \u2018eternal now.\u2019 To the \u2018spectator of all time and all existence\u2019 the universe remains at rest. The truths of geometry and arithmetic in all their combinations are always the same. The generations of men, like the leaves of the forest, come and go, but the mathematical laws by which the world is governed remain, and seem as if they could never change. The ever-present image of space is transferred to time\u2014succession is conceived as extension. (We remark that Plato does away with the above and below in space, as he has done away with the absolute existence of past and future.) The course of time, unless regularly marked by divisions of number, partakes of the indefiniteness of the Heraclitean flux. By such reflections we may conceive the Greek to have attained the metaphysical conception of eternity, which to the Hebrew was gained by meditation on the Divine Being. No one saw that this objective was really a subjective, and involved the subjectivity of all knowledge. \u2018Non in tempore sed cum tempore finxit Deus mundum,\u2019 says St. Augustine, repeating a thought derived from the Timaeus, but apparently unconscious of the results to which his doctrine would have led. The contradictions involved in the conception of time or motion, like the infinitesimal in space, were a source of perplexity to the mind of the Greek, who was driven to find a point of view above or beyond them. They had sprung up in the decline of the Eleatic philosophy and were very familiar to Plato, as we gather from the Parmenides. The consciousness of them had led the great Eleatic philosopher to describe the nature of God or Being under negatives. He sings of \u2018Being unbegotten and imperishable, unmoved and never-ending, which never was nor will be, but always is, one and continuous, which cannot spring from any other; for it cannot be said or imagined not to be.\u2019 The idea of eternity was for a great part a negation. There are regions of speculation in which the negative is hardly separable from the positive, and even seems to pass into it. Not only Buddhism, but Greek as well as Christian philosophy, show that it is quite possible that the human mind should retain an enthusiasm for mere negations. In different ages and countries there have been forms of light in which nothing could be discerned and which have nevertheless exercised a life-giving and illumining power. For the higher intelligence of man seems to require, not only something above sense, but above knowledge, which can only be described as Mind or Being or Truth or God or the unchangeable and eternal element, in the expression of which all predicates fail and fall short. Eternity or the eternal is not merely the unlimited in time but the truest of all Being, the most real of all realities, the most certain of all knowledge, which we nevertheless only see through a glass darkly. The passionate earnestness of Parmenides contrasts with the vacuity of the thought which he is revolving in his mind. Space is said by Plato to be the \u2018containing vessel or nurse of generation.\u2019 Reflecting on the simplest kinds of external objects, which to the ancients were the four elements, he was led to a more general notion of a substance, more or less like themselves, out of which they were fashioned. He would not have them too precisely distinguished. Thus seems to have arisen the first dim perception of (Greek) or matter, which has played so great a part in the metaphysical philosophy of Aristotle and his followers. But besides the material out of which the elements are made, there is also a space in which they are contained. There arises thus a second nature which the senses are incapable of discerning and which can hardly be referred to the intelligible class. For it is and it is not, it is nowhere when filled, it is nothing when empty. Hence it is said to be discerned by a kind of spurious or analogous reason, partaking so feebly of existence as to be hardly perceivable, yet always reappearing as the containing mother or nurse of all things. It had not that sort of consistency to Plato which has been given to it in modern times by geometry and metaphysics. Neither of the Greek words by which it is described are so purely abstract as the English word \u2018space\u2019 or the Latin \u2018spatium.\u2019 Neither Plato nor any other Greek would have spoken of (Greek) or (Greek) in the same manner as we speak of \u2018time\u2019 and \u2018space.\u2019 Yet space is also of a very permanent or even eternal nature; and Plato seems more willing to admit of the unreality of time than of the unreality of space; because, as he says, all things must necessarily exist in space. We, on the other hand, are disposed to fancy that even if space were annihilated time might still survive. He admits indeed that our knowledge of space is of a dreamy kind, and is given by a spurious reason without the help of sense. (Compare the hypotheses and images of Rep.) It is true that it does not attain to the clearness of ideas. But like them it seems to remain, even if all the objects contained in it are supposed to have vanished away. Hence it was natural for Plato to conceive of it as eternal. We must remember further that in his attempt to realize either space or matter the two abstract ideas of weight and extension, which are familiar to us, had never passed before his mind. Thus far God, working according to an eternal pattern, out of his goodness has created the same, the other, and the essence (compare the three principles of the Philebus\u2014the finite, the infinite, and the union of the two), and out of them has formed the outer circle of the fixed stars and the inner circle of the planets, divided according to certain musical intervals; he has also created time, the moving image of eternity, and space, existing by a sort of necessity and hardly distinguishable from matter. The matter out of which the world is formed is not absolutely void, but retains in the chaos certain germs or traces of the elements. These Plato, like Empedocles, supposed to be four in number\u2014fire, air, earth, and water. They were at first mixed together; but already in the chaos, before God fashioned them by form and number, the greater masses of the elements had an appointed place. Into the confusion (Greek) which preceded Plato does not attempt further to penetrate. They are called elements, but they are so far from being elements (Greek) or letters in the higher sense that they are not even syllables or first compounds. The real elements are two triangles, the rectangular isosceles which has but one form, and the most beautiful of the many forms of scalene, which is half of an equilateral triangle. By the combination of these triangles which exist in an infinite variety of sizes, the surfaces of the four elements are constructed. That there were only five regular solids was already known to the ancients, and out of the surfaces which he has formed Plato proceeds to generate the four first of the five. He perhaps forgets that he is only putting together surfaces and has not provided for their transformation into solids. The first solid is a regular pyramid, of which the base and sides are formed by four equilateral or twenty-four scalene triangles. Each of the four solid angles in this figure is a little larger than the largest of obtuse angles. The second solid is composed of the same triangles, which unite as eight equilateral triangles, and make one solid angle out of four plane angles\u2014six of these angles form a regular octahedron. The third solid is a regular icosahedron, having twenty triangular equilateral bases, and therefore 120 rectangular scalene triangles. The fourth regular solid, or cube, is formed by the combination of four isosceles triangles into one square and of six squares into a cube. The fifth regular solid, or dodecahedron, cannot be formed by a combination of either of these triangles, but each of its faces may be regarded as composed of thirty triangles of another kind. Probably Plato notices this as the only remaining regular polyhedron, which from its approximation to a globe, and possibly because, as Plutarch remarks, it is composed of 12 x 30 = 360 scalene triangles (Platon. Quaest.), representing thus the signs and degrees of the Zodiac, as well as the months and days of the year, God may be said to have \u2018used in the delineation of the universe.\u2019 According to Plato earth was composed of cubes, fire of regular pyramids, air of regular octahedrons, water of regular icosahedrons. The stability of the last three increases with the number of their sides. The elements are supposed to pass into one another, but we must remember that these transformations are not the transformations of real solids, but of imaginary geometrical figures; in other words, we are composing and decomposing the faces of substances and not the substances themselves\u2014it is a house of cards which we are pulling to pieces and putting together again (compare however Laws). Yet perhaps Plato may regard these sides or faces as only the forms which are impressed on pre-existent matter. It is remarkable that he should speak of each of these solids as a possible world in itself, though upon the whole he inclines to the opinion that they form one world and not five. To suppose that there is an infinite number of worlds, as Democritus (Hippolyt. Ref. Haer. I.) had said, would be, as he satirically observes, \u2018the characteristic of a very indefinite and ignorant mind.\u2019 The twenty triangular faces of an icosahedron form the faces or sides of two regular octahedrons and of a regular pyramid (20 = 8 x 2 + 4); and therefore, according to Plato, a particle of water when decomposed is supposed to give two particles of air and one of fire. So because an octahedron gives the sides of two pyramids (8 = 4 x 2), a particle of air is resolved into two particles of fire. The transformation is effected by the superior power or number of the conquering elements. The manner of the change is (1) a separation of portions of the elements from the masses in which they are collected; (2) a resolution of them into their original triangles; and (3) a reunion of them in new forms. Plato himself proposes the question, Why does motion continue at all when the elements are settled in their places? He answers that although the force of attraction is continually drawing similar elements to the same spot, still the revolution of the universe exercises a condensing power, and thrusts them again out of their natural places. Thus want of uniformity, the condition of motion, is produced. In all such disturbances of matter there is an alternative for the weaker element: it may escape to its kindred, or take the form of the stronger\u2014becoming denser, if it be denser, or rarer if rarer. This is true of fire, air, and water, which, being composed of similar triangles, are interchangeable; earth, however, which has triangles peculiar to itself, is capable of dissolution, but not of change. Of the interchangeable elements, fire, the rarest, can only become a denser, and water, the densest, only a rarer: but air may become a denser or a rarer. No single particle of the elements is visible, but only the aggregates of them are seen. The subordinate species depend, not upon differences of form in the original triangles, but upon differences of size. The obvious physical phenomena from which Plato has gathered his views of the relations of the elements seem to be the effect of fire upon air, water, and earth, and the effect of water upon earth. The particles are supposed by him to be in a perpetual process of circulation caused by inequality. This process of circulation does not admit of a vacuum, as he tells us in his strange account of respiration. Of the phenomena of light and heavy he speaks afterwards, when treating of sensation, but they may be more conveniently considered by us in this place. They are not, he says, to be explained by \u2018above\u2019 and \u2018below,\u2019 which in the universal globe have no existence, but by the attraction of similars towards the great masses of similar substances; fire to fire, air to air, water to water, earth to earth. Plato\u2019s doctrine of attraction implies not only (1) the attraction of similar elements to one another, but also (2) of smaller bodies to larger ones. Had he confined himself to the latter he would have arrived, though, perhaps, without any further result or any sense of the greatness of the discovery, at the modern doctrine of gravitation. He does not observe that water has an equal tendency towards both water and earth. So easily did the most obvious facts which were inconsistent with his theories escape him. The general physical doctrines of the Timaeus may be summed up as follows: (1) Plato supposes the greater masses of the elements to have been already settled in their places at the creation: (2) they are four in number, and are formed of rectangular triangles variously combined into regular solid figures: (3) three of them, fire, air, and water, admit of transformation into one another; the fourth, earth, cannot be similarly transformed: (4) different sizes of the same triangles form the lesser species of each element: (5) there is an attraction of like to like\u2014smaller masses of the same kind being drawn towards greater: (6) there is no void, but the particles of matter are ever pushing one another round and round (Greek). Like the atomists, Plato attributes the differences between the elements to differences in geometrical figures. But he does not explain the process by which surfaces become solids; and he characteristically ridicules Democritus for not seeing that the worlds are finite and not infinite. Section 4. The astronomy of Plato is based on the two principles of the same and the other, which God combined in the creation of the world. The soul, which is compounded of the same, the other, and the essence, is diffused from the centre to the circumference of the heavens. We speak of a soul of the universe; but more truly regarded, the universe of the Timaeus is a soul, governed by mind, and holding in solution a residuum of matter or evil, which the author of the world is unable to expel, and of which Plato cannot tell us the origin. The creation, in Plato\u2019s sense, is really the creation of order; and the first step in giving order is the division of the heavens into an inner and outer circle of the other and the same, of the divisible and the indivisible, answering to the two spheres, of the planets and of the world beyond them, all together moving around the earth, which is their centre. To us there is a difficulty in apprehending how that which is at rest can also be in motion, or that which is indivisible exist in space. But the whole description is so ideal and imaginative, that we can hardly venture to attribute to many of Plato\u2019s words in the Timaeus any more meaning than to his mythical account of the heavens in the Republic and in the Phaedrus. (Compare his denial of the \u2018blasphemous opinion\u2019 that there are planets or wandering stars; all alike move in circles\u2014Laws.) The stars are the habitations of the souls of men, from which they come and to which they return. In attributing to the fixed stars only the most perfect motion\u2014that which is on the same spot or circulating around the same\u2014he might perhaps have said that to \u2018the spectator of all time and all existence,\u2019 to borrow once more his own grand expression, or viewed, in the language of Spinoza, \u2018sub specie aeternitatis,\u2019 they were still at rest, but appeared to move in order to teach men the periods of time. Although absolutely in motion, they are relatively at rest; or we may conceive of them as resting, while the space in which they are contained, or the whole anima mundi, revolves. The universe revolves around a centre once in twenty-four hours, but the orbits of the fixed stars take a different direction from those of the planets. The outer and the inner sphere cross one another and meet again at a point opposite to that of their first contact; the first moving in a circle from left to right along the side of a parallelogram which is supposed to be inscribed in it, the second also moving in a circle along the diagonal of the same parallelogram from right to left; or, in other words, the first describing the path of the equator, the second, the path of the ecliptic. The motion of the second is controlled by the first, and hence the oblique line in which the planets are supposed to move becomes a spiral. The motion of the same is said to be undivided, whereas the inner motion is split into seven unequal orbits\u2014the intervals between them being in the ratio of two and three, three of either:\u2014the Sun, moving in the opposite direction to Mercury and Venus, but with equal swiftness; the remaining four, Moon, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, with unequal swiftness to the former three and to one another. Thus arises the following progression:\u2014Moon 1, Sun 2, Venus 3, Mercury 4, Mars 8, Jupiter 9, Saturn 27. This series of numbers is the compound of the two Pythagorean ratios, having the same intervals, though not in the same order, as the mixture which was originally divided in forming the soul of the world. Plato was struck by the phenomenon of Mercury, Venus, and the Sun appearing to overtake and be overtaken by one another. The true reason of this, namely, that they lie within the circle of the earth\u2019s orbit, was unknown to him, and the reason which he gives\u2014that the two former move in an opposite direction to the latter\u2014is far from explaining the appearance of them in the heavens. All the planets, including the sun, are carried round in the daily motion of the circle of the fixed stars, and they have a second or oblique motion which gives the explanation of the different lengths of the sun\u2019s course in different parts of the earth. The fixed stars have also two movements\u2014a forward movement in their orbit which is common to the whole circle; and a movement on the same spot around an axis, which Plato calls the movement of thought about the same. In this latter respect they are more perfect than the wandering stars, as Plato himself terms them in the Timaeus, although in the Laws he condemns the appellation as blasphemous. The revolution of the world around earth, which is accomplished in a single day and night, is described as being the most perfect or intelligent. Yet Plato also speaks of an \u2018annus magnus\u2019 or cyclical year, in which periods wonderful for their complexity are found to coincide in a perfect number, i.e. a number which equals the sum of its factors, as 6 = 1 + 2 + 3. This, although not literally contradictory, is in spirit irreconcilable with the perfect revolution of twenty-four hours. The same remark may be applied to the complexity of the appearances and occultations of the stars, which, if the outer heaven is supposed to be moving around the centre once in twenty-four hours, must be confined to the effects produced by the seven planets. Plato seems to confuse the actual observation of the heavens with his desire to find in them mathematical perfection. The same spirit is carried yet further by him in the passage already quoted from the Laws, in which he affirms their wanderings to be an appearance only, which a little knowledge of mathematics would enable men to correct. We have now to consider the much discussed question of the rotation or immobility of the earth. Plato\u2019s doctrine on this subject is contained in the following words:\u2014\u2018The earth, which is our nurse, compacted (OR revolving) around the pole which is extended through the universe, he made to be the guardian and artificer of night and day, first and eldest of gods that are in the interior of heaven\u2019. There is an unfortunate doubt in this passage (1) about the meaning of the word (Greek), which is translated either \u2018compacted\u2019 or \u2018revolving,\u2019 and is equally capable of both explanations. A doubt (2) may also be raised as to whether the words \u2018artificer of day and night\u2019 are consistent with the mere passive causation of them, produced by the immobility of the earth in the midst of the circling universe. We must admit, further, (3) that Aristotle attributed to Plato the doctrine of the rotation of the earth on its axis. On the other hand it has been urged that if the earth goes round with the outer heaven and sun in twenty-four hours, there is no way of accounting for the alternation of day and night; since the equal motion of the earth and sun would have the effect of absolute immobility. To which it may be replied that Plato never says that the earth goes round with the outer heaven and sun; although the whole question depends on the relation of earth and sun, their movements are nowhere precisely described. But if we suppose, with Mr. Grote, that the diurnal rotation of the earth on its axis and the revolution of the sun and outer heaven precisely coincide, it would be difficult to imagine that Plato was unaware of the consequence. For though he was ignorant of many things which are familiar to us, and often confused in his ideas where we have become clear, we have no right to attribute to him a childish want of reasoning about very simple facts, or an inability to understand the necessary and obvious deductions from geometrical figures or movements. Of the causes of day and night the pre-Socratic philosophers, and especially the Pythagoreans, gave various accounts, and therefore the question can hardly be imagined to have escaped him. On the other hand it may be urged that the further step, however simple and obvious, is just what Plato often seems to be ignorant of, and that as there is no limit to his insight, there is also no limit to the blindness which sometimes obscures his intelligence (compare the construction of solids out of surfaces in his account of the creation of the world, or the attraction of similars to similars). Further, Mr. Grote supposes, not that (Greek) means \u2018revolving,\u2019 or that this is the sense in which Aristotle understood the word, but that the rotation of the earth is necessarily implied in its adherence to the cosmical axis. But (a) if, as Mr Grote assumes, Plato did not see that the rotation of the earth on its axis and of the sun and outer heavens around the earth in equal times was inconsistent with the alternation of day and night, neither need we suppose that he would have seen the immobility of the earth to be inconsistent with the rotation of the axis. And (b) what proof is there that the axis of the world revolves at all? (c) The comparison of the two passages quoted by Mr Grote (see his pamphlet on \u2018The Rotation of the Earth\u2019) from Aristotle De Coelo, Book II (Greek) clearly shows, although this is a matter of minor importance, that Aristotle, as Proclus and Simplicius supposed, understood (Greek) in the Timaeus to mean \u2018revolving.\u2019 For the second passage, in which motion on an axis is expressly mentioned, refers to the first, but this would be unmeaning unless (Greek) in the first passage meant rotation on an axis. (4) The immobility of the earth is more in accordance with Plato\u2019s other writings than the opposite hypothesis. For in the Phaedo the earth is described as the centre of the world, and is not said to be in motion. In the Republic the pilgrims appear to be looking out from the earth upon the motions of the heavenly bodies; in the Phaedrus, Hestia, who remains immovable in the house of Zeus while the other gods go in procession, is called the first and eldest of the gods, and is probably the symbol of the earth. The silence of Plato in these and in some other passages (Laws) in which he might be expected to speak of the rotation of the earth, is more favourable to the doctrine of its immobility than to the opposite. If he had meant to say that the earth revolves on its axis, he would have said so in distinct words, and have explained the relation of its movements to those of the other heavenly bodies. (5) The meaning of the words \u2018artificer of day and night\u2019 is literally true according to Plato\u2019s view. For the alternation of day and night is not produced by the motion of the heavens alone, or by the immobility of the earth alone, but by both together; and that which has the inherent force or energy to remain at rest when all other bodies are moving, may be truly said to act, equally with them. (6) We should not lay too much stress on Aristotle or the writer De Caelo having adopted the other interpretation of the words, although Alexander of Aphrodisias thinks that he could not have been ignorant either of the doctrine of Plato or of the sense which he intended to give to the word (Greek). For the citations of Plato in Aristotle are frequently misinterpreted by him; and he seems hardly ever to have had in his mind the connection in which they occur. In this instance the allusion is very slight, and there is no reason to suppose that the diurnal revolution of the heavens was present to his mind. Hence we need not attribute to him the error from which we are defending Plato. After weighing one against the other all these complicated probabilities, the final conclusion at which we arrive is that there is nearly as much to be said on the one side of the question as on the other, and that we are not perfectly certain, whether, as Bockh and the majority of commentators, ancient as well as modern, are inclined to believe, Plato thought that the earth was at rest in the centre of the universe, or, as Aristotle and Mr. Grote suppose, that it revolved on its axis. Whether we assume the earth to be stationary in the centre of the universe, or to revolve with the heavens, no explanation is given of the variation in the length of days and nights at different times of the year. The relations of the earth and heavens are so indistinct in the Timaeus and so figurative in the Phaedo, Phaedrus and Republic, that we must give up the hope of ascertaining how they were imagined by Plato, if he had any fixed or scientific conception of them at all. Section 5. The soul of the world is framed on the analogy of the soul of man, and many traces of anthropomorphism blend with Plato\u2019s highest flights of idealism. The heavenly bodies are endowed with thought; the principles of the same and other exist in the universe as well as in the human mind. The soul of man is made out of the remains of the elements which had been used in creating the soul of the world; these remains, however, are diluted to the third degree; by this Plato expresses the measure of the difference between the soul human and divine. The human soul, like the cosmical, is framed before the body, as the mind is before the soul of either\u2014this is the order of the divine work\u2014and the finer parts of the body, which are more akin to the soul, such as the spinal marrow, are prior to the bones and flesh. The brain, the containing vessel of the divine part of the soul, is (nearly) in the form of a globe, which is the image of the gods, who are the stars, and of the universe. There is, however, an inconsistency in Plato\u2019s manner of conceiving the soul of man; he cannot get rid of the element of necessity which is allowed to enter. He does not, like Kant, attempt to vindicate for men a freedom out of space and time; but he acknowledges him to be subject to the influence of external causes, and leaves hardly any place for freedom of the will. The lusts of men are caused by their bodily constitution, though they may be increased by bad education and bad laws, which implies that they may be decreased by good education and good laws. He appears to have an inkling of the truth that to the higher nature of man evil is involuntary. This is mixed up with the view which, while apparently agreeing with it, is in reality the opposite of it, that vice is due to physical causes. In the Timaeus, as well as in the Laws, he also regards vices and crimes as simply involuntary; they are diseases analogous to the diseases of the body, and arising out of the same causes. If we draw together the opposite poles of Plato\u2019s system, we find that, like Spinoza, he combines idealism with fatalism. The soul of man is divided by him into three parts, answering roughly to the charioteer and steeds of the Phaedrus, and to the (Greek) of the Republic and Nicomachean Ethics. First, there is the immortal nature of which the brain is the seat, and which is akin to the soul of the universe. This alone thinks and knows and is the ruler of the whole. Secondly, there is the higher mortal soul which, though liable to perturbations of her own, takes the side of reason against the lower appetites. The seat of this is the heart, in which courage, anger, and all the nobler affections are supposed to reside. There the veins all meet; it is their centre or house of guard whence they carry the orders of the thinking being to the extremities of his kingdom. There is also a third or appetitive soul, which receives the commands of the immortal part, not immediately but mediately, through the liver, which reflects on its surface the admonitions and threats of the reason. The liver is imagined by Plato to be a smooth and bright substance, having a store of sweetness and also of bitterness, which reason freely uses in the execution of her mandates. In this region, as ancient superstition told, were to be found intimations of the future. But Plato is careful to observe that although such knowledge is given to the inferior parts of man, it requires to be interpreted by the superior. Reason, and not enthusiasm, is the true guide of man; he is only inspired when he is demented by some distemper or possession. The ancient saying, that \u2018only a man in his senses can judge of his own actions,\u2019 is approved by modern philosophy too. The same irony which appears in Plato\u2019s remark, that \u2018the men of old time must surely have known the gods who were their ancestors, and we should believe them as custom requires,\u2019 is also manifest in his account of divination. The appetitive soul is seated in the belly, and there imprisoned like a wild beast, far away from the council chamber, as Plato graphically calls the head, in order that the animal passions may not interfere with the deliberations of reason. Though the soul is said by him to be prior to the body, yet we cannot help seeing that it is constructed on the model of the body\u2014the threefold division into the rational, passionate, and appetitive corresponding to the head, heart and belly. The human soul differs from the soul of the world in this respect, that it is enveloped and finds its expression in matter, whereas the soul of the world is not only enveloped or diffused in matter, but is the element in which matter moves. The breath of man is within him, but the air or aether of heaven is the element which surrounds him and all things. Pleasure and pain are attributed in the Timaeus to the suddenness of our sensations\u2014the first being a sudden restoration, the second a sudden violation, of nature (Phileb.). The sensations become conscious to us when they are exceptional. Sight is not attended either by pleasure or pain, but hunger and the appeasing of hunger are pleasant and painful because they are extraordinary. Section 6. I shall not attempt to connect the physiological speculations of Plato either with ancient or modern medicine. What light I can throw upon them will be derived from the comparison of them with his general system. There is no principle so apparent in the physics of the Timaeus, or in ancient physics generally, as that of continuity. The world is conceived of as a whole, and the elements are formed into and out of one another; the varieties of substances and processes are hardly known or noticed. And in a similar manner the human body is conceived of as a whole, and the different substances of which, to a superficial observer, it appears to be composed\u2014the blood, flesh, sinews\u2014like the elements out of which they are formed, are supposed to pass into one another in regular order, while the infinite complexity of the human frame remains unobserved. And diseases arise from the opposite process\u2014when the natural proportions of the four elements are disturbed, and the secondary substances which are formed out of them, namely, blood, flesh, sinews, are generated in an inverse order. Plato found heat and air within the human frame, and the blood circulating in every part. He assumes in language almost unintelligible to us that a network of fire and air envelopes the greater part of the body. This outer net contains two lesser nets, one corresponding to the stomach, the other to the lungs; and the entrance to the latter is forked or divided into two passages which lead to the nostrils and to the mouth. In the process of respiration the external net is said to find a way in and out of the pores of the skin: while the interior of it and the lesser nets move alternately into each other. The whole description is figurative, as Plato himself implies when he speaks of a \u2018fountain of fire which we compare to the network of a creel.\u2019 He really means by this what we should describe as a state of heat or temperature in the interior of the body. The \u2018fountain of fire\u2019 or heat is also in a figure the circulation of the blood. The passage is partly imagination, partly fact. He has a singular theory of respiration for which he accounts solely by the movement of the air in and out of the body; he does not attribute any part of the process to the action of the body itself. The air has a double ingress and a double exit, through the mouth or nostrils, and through the skin. When exhaled through the mouth or nostrils, it leaves a vacuum which is filled up by other air finding a way in through the pores, this air being thrust out of its place by the exhalation from the mouth and nostrils. There is also a corresponding process of inhalation through the mouth or nostrils, and of exhalation through the pores. The inhalation through the pores appears to take place nearly at the same time as the exhalation through the mouth; and conversely. The internal fire is in either case the propelling cause outwards\u2014the inhaled air, when heated by it, having a natural tendency to move out of the body to the place of fire; while the impossibility of a vacuum is the propelling cause inwards. Thus we see that this singular theory is dependent on two principles largely employed by Plato in explaining the operations of nature, the impossibility of a vacuum and the attraction of like to like. To these there has to be added a third principle, which is the condition of the action of the other two,\u2014the interpenetration of particles in proportion to their density or rarity. It is this which enables fire and air to permeate the flesh. Plato\u2019s account of digestion and the circulation of the blood is closely connected with his theory of respiration. Digestion is supposed to be effected by the action of the internal fire, which in the process of respiration moves into the stomach and minces the food. As the fire returns to its place, it takes with it the minced food or blood; and in this way the veins are replenished. Plato does not enquire how the blood is separated from the faeces. Of the anatomy and functions of the body he knew very little,\u2014e.g. of the uses of the nerves in conveying motion and sensation, which he supposed to be communicated by the bones and veins; he was also ignorant of the distinction between veins and arteries;\u2014the latter term he applies to the vessels which conduct air from the mouth to the lungs;\u2014he supposes the lung to be hollow and bloodless; the spinal marrow he conceives to be the seed of generation; he confuses the parts of the body with the states of the body\u2014the network of fire and air is spoken of as a bodily organ; he has absolutely no idea of the phenomena of respiration, which he attributes to a law of equalization in nature, the air which is breathed out displacing other air which finds a way in; he is wholly unacquainted with the process of digestion. Except the general divisions into the spleen, the liver, the belly, and the lungs, and the obvious distinctions of flesh, bones, and the limbs of the body, we find nothing that reminds us of anatomical facts. But we find much which is derived from his theory of the universe, and transferred to man, as there is much also in his theory of the universe which is suggested by man. The microcosm of the human body is the lesser image of the macrocosm. The courses of the same and the other affect both; they are made of the same elements and therefore in the same proportions. Both are intelligent natures endued with the power of self-motion, and the same equipoise is maintained in both. The animal is a sort of \u2018world\u2019 to the particles of the blood which circulate in it. All the four elements entered into the original composition of the human frame; the bone was formed out of smooth earth; liquids of various kinds pass to and fro; the network of fire and air irrigates the veins. Infancy and childhood is the chaos or first turbid flux of sense prior to the establishment of order; the intervals of time which may be observed in some intermittent fevers correspond to the density of the elements. The spinal marrow, including the brain, is formed out of the finest sorts of triangles, and is the connecting link between body and mind. Health is only to be preserved by imitating the motions of the world in space, which is the mother and nurse of generation. The work of digestion is carried on by the superior sharpness of the triangles forming the substances of the human body to those which are introduced into it in the shape of food. The freshest and acutest forms of triangles are those that are found in children, but they become more obtuse with advancing years; and when they finally wear out and fall to pieces, old age and death supervene. As in the Republic, Plato is still the enemy of the purgative treatment of physicians, which, except in extreme cases, no man of sense will ever adopt. For, as he adds, with an insight into the truth, \u2018every disease is akin to the nature of the living being and is only irritated by stimulants.\u2019 He is of opinion that nature should be left to herself, and is inclined to think that physicians are in vain (Laws\u2014where he says that warm baths would be more beneficial to the limbs of the aged rustic than the prescriptions of a not over-wise doctor). If he seems to be extreme in his condemnation of medicine and to rely too much on diet and exercise, he might appeal to nearly all the best physicians of our own age in support of his opinions, who often speak to their patients of the worthlessness of drugs. For we ourselves are sceptical about medicine, and very unwilling to submit to the purgative treatment of physicians. May we not claim for Plato an anticipation of modern ideas as about some questions of astronomy and physics, so also about medicine? As in the Charmides he tells us that the body cannot be cured without the soul, so in the Timaeus he strongly asserts the sympathy of soul and body; any defect of either is the occasion of the greatest discord and disproportion in the other. Here too may be a presentiment that in the medicine of the future the interdependence of mind and body will be more fully recognized, and that the influence of the one over the other may be exerted in a manner which is not now thought possible. Section 7. In Plato\u2019s explanation of sensation we are struck by the fact that he has not the same distinct conception of organs of sense which is familiar to ourselves. The senses are not instruments, but rather passages, through which external objects strike upon the mind. The eye is the aperture through which the stream of vision passes, the ear is the aperture through which the vibrations of sound pass. But that the complex structure of the eye or the ear is in any sense the cause of sight and hearing he seems hardly to be aware. The process of sight is the most complicated (Rep.), and consists of three elements\u2014the light which is supposed to reside within the eye, the light of the sun, and the light emitted from external objects. When the light of the eye meets the light of the sun, and both together meet the light issuing from an external object, this is the simple act of sight. When the particles of light which proceed from the object are exactly equal to the particles of the visual ray which meet them from within, then the body is transparent. If they are larger and contract the visual ray, a black colour is produced; if they are smaller and dilate it, a white. Other phenomena are produced by the variety and motion of light. A sudden flash of fire at once elicits light and moisture from the eye, and causes a bright colour. A more subdued light, on mingling with the moisture of the eye, produces a red colour. Out of these elements all other colours are derived. All of them are combinations of bright and red with white and black. Plato himself tells us that he does not know in what proportions they combine, and he is of opinion that such knowledge is granted to the gods only. To have seen the affinity of them to each other and their connection with light, is not a bad basis for a theory of colours. We must remember that they were not distinctly defined to his, as they are to our eyes; he saw them, not as they are divided in the prism, or artificially manufactured for the painter\u2019s use, but as they exist in nature, blended and confused with one another. We can hardly agree with him when he tells us that smells do not admit of kinds. He seems to think that no definite qualities can attach to bodies which are in a state of transition or evaporation; he also makes the subtle observation that smells must be denser than air, though thinner than water, because when there is an obstruction to the breathing, air can penetrate, but not smell. The affections peculiar to the tongue are of various kinds, and, like many other affections, are caused by contraction and dilation. Some of them are produced by rough, others by abstergent, others by inflammatory substances,\u2014these act upon the testing instruments of the tongue, and produce a more or less disagreeable sensation, while other particles congenial to the tongue soften and harmonize them. The instruments of taste reach from the tongue to the heart. Plato has a lively sense of the manner in which sensation and motion are communicated from one part of the body to the other, though he confuses the affections with the organs. Hearing is a blow which passes through the ear and ends in the region of the liver, being transmitted by means of the air, the brain, and the blood to the soul. The swifter sound is acute, the sound which moves slowly is grave. A great body of sound is loud, the opposite is low. Discord is produced by the swifter and slower motions of two sounds, and is converted into harmony when the swifter motions begin to pause and are overtaken by the slower. The general phenomena of sensation are partly internal, but the more violent are caused by conflict with external objects. Proceeding by a method of superficial observation, Plato remarks that the more sensitive parts of the human frame are those which are least covered by flesh, as is the case with the head and the elbows. Man, if his head had been covered with a thicker pulp of flesh, might have been a longer-lived animal than he is, but could not have had as quick perceptions. On the other hand, the tongue is one of the most sensitive of organs; but then this is made, not to be a covering to the bones which contain the marrow or source of life, but with an express purpose, and in a separate mass. Section 8. We have now to consider how far in any of these speculations Plato approximated to the discoveries of modern science. The modern physical philosopher is apt to dwell exclusively on the absurdities of ancient ideas about science, on the haphazard fancies and a priori assumptions of ancient teachers, on their confusion of facts and ideas, on their inconsistency and blindness to the most obvious phenomena. He measures them not by what preceded them, but by what has followed them. He does not consider that ancient physical philosophy was not a free enquiry, but a growth, in which the mind was passive rather than active, and was incapable of resisting the impressions which flowed in upon it. He hardly allows to the notions of the ancients the merit of being the stepping-stones by which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge. He never reflects, how great a thing it was to have formed a conception, however imperfect, either of the human frame as a whole, or of the world as a whole. According to the view taken in these volumes the errors of ancient physicists were not separable from the intellectual conditions under which they lived. Their genius was their own; and they were not the rash and hasty generalizers which, since the days of Bacon, we have been apt to suppose them. The thoughts of men widened to receive experience; at first they seemed to know all things as in a dream: after a while they look at them closely and hold them in their hands. They begin to arrange them in classes and to connect causes with effects. General notions are necessary to the apprehension of particular facts, the metaphysical to the physical. Before men can observe the world, they must be able to conceive it. To do justice to the subject, we should consider the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole; we should remember, (1) that the nebular theory was the received belief of several of the early physicists; (2) that the development of animals out of fishes who came to land, and of man out of the animals, was held by Anaximander in the sixth century before Christ (Plut. Symp. Quaest; Plac. Phil.); (3) that even by Philolaus and the early Pythagoreans, the earth was held to be a body like the other stars revolving in space around the sun or a central fire; (4) that the beginnings of chemistry are discernible in the \u2018similar particles\u2019 of Anaxagoras. Also they knew or thought (5) that there was a sex in plants as well as in animals; (6) they were aware that musical notes depended on the relative length or tension of the strings from which they were emitted, and were measured by ratios of number; (7) that mathematical laws pervaded the world; and even qualitative differences were supposed to have their origin in number and figure; (8) the annihilation of matter was denied by several of them, and the seeming disappearance of it held to be a transformation only. For, although one of these discoveries might have been supposed to be a happy guess, taken together they seem to imply a great advance and almost maturity of natural knowledge. We should also remember, when we attribute to the ancients hasty generalizations and delusions of language, that physical philosophy and metaphysical too have been guilty of similar fallacies in quite recent times. We by no means distinguish clearly between mind and body, between ideas and facts. Have not many discussions arisen about the Atomic theory in which a point has been confused with a material atom? Have not the natures of things been explained by imaginary entities, such as life or phlogiston, which exist in the mind only? Has not disease been regarded, like sin, sometimes as a negative and necessary, sometimes as a positive or malignant principle? The \u2018idols\u2019 of Bacon are nearly as common now as ever; they are inherent in the human mind, and when they have the most complete dominion over us, we are least able to perceive them. We recognize them in the ancients, but we fail to see them in ourselves. Such reflections, although this is not the place in which to dwell upon them at length, lead us to take a favourable view of the speculations of the Timaeus. We should consider not how much Plato actually knew, but how far he has contributed to the general ideas of physics, or supplied the notions which, whether true or false, have stimulated the minds of later generations in the path of discovery. Some of them may seem old-fashioned, but may nevertheless have had a great influence in promoting system and assisting enquiry, while in others we hear the latest word of physical or metaphysical philosophy. There is also an intermediate class, in which Plato falls short of the truths of modern science, though he is not wholly unacquainted with them. (1) To the first class belongs the teleological theory of creation. Whether all things in the world can be explained as the result of natural laws, or whether we must not admit of tendencies and marks of design also, has been a question much disputed of late years. Even if all phenomena are the result of natural forces, we must admit that there are many things in heaven and earth which are as well expressed under the image of mind or design as under any other. At any rate, the language of Plato has been the language of natural theology down to our own time, nor can any description of the world wholly dispense with it. The notion of first and second or co-operative causes, which originally appears in the Timaeus, has likewise survived to our own day, and has been a great peace-maker between theology and science. Plato also approaches very near to our doctrine of the primary and secondary qualities of matter. (2) Another popular notion which is found in the Timaeus, is the feebleness of the human intellect\u2014\u2018God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability.\u2019 We speak in almost the same words of human intelligence, but not in the same manner of the uncertainty of our knowledge of nature. The reason is that the latter is assured to us by experiment, and is not contrasted with the certainty of ideal or mathematical knowledge. But the ancient philosopher never experimented: in the Timaeus Plato seems to have thought that there would be impiety in making the attempt; he, for example, who tried experiments in colours would \u2018forget the difference of the human and divine natures.\u2019 Their indefiniteness is probably the reason why he singles them out, as especially incapable of being tested by experiment. (Compare the saying of Anaxagoras\u2014Sext. Pyrrh.\u2014that since snow is made of water and water is black, snow ought to be black.) The greatest \u2018divination\u2019 of the ancients was the supremacy which they assigned to mathematics in all the realms of nature; for in all of them there is a foundation of mechanics. Even physiology partakes of figure and number; and Plato is not wrong in attributing them to the human frame, but in the omission to observe how little could be explained by them. Thus we may remark in passing that the most fanciful of ancient philosophies is also the most nearly verified in fact. The fortunate guess that the world is a sum of numbers and figures has been the most fruitful of anticipations. The \u2018diatonic\u2019 scale of the Pythagoreans and Plato suggested to Kepler that the secret of the distances of the planets from one another was to be found in mathematical proportions. The doctrine that the heavenly bodies all move in a circle is known by us to be erroneous; but without such an error how could the human mind have comprehended the heavens? Astronomy, even in modern times, has made far greater progress by the high a priori road than could have been attained by any other. Yet, strictly speaking\u2014and the remark applies to ancient physics generally\u2014this high a priori road was based upon a posteriori grounds. For there were no facts of which the ancients were so well assured by experience as facts of number. Having observed that they held good in a few instances, they applied them everywhere; and in the complexity, of which they were capable, found the explanation of the equally complex phenomena of the universe. They seemed to see them in the least things as well as in the greatest; in atoms, as well as in suns and stars; in the human body as well as in external nature. And now a favourite speculation of modern chemistry is the explanation of qualitative difference by quantitative, which is at present verified to a certain extent and may hereafter be of far more universal application. What is this but the atoms of Democritus and the triangles of Plato? The ancients should not be wholly deprived of the credit of their guesses because they were unable to prove them. May they not have had, like the animals, an instinct of something more than they knew? Besides general notions we seem to find in the Timaeus some more precise approximations to the discoveries of modern physical science. First, the doctrine of equipoise. Plato affirms, almost in so many words, that nature abhors a vacuum. Whenever a particle is displaced, the rest push and thrust one another until equality is restored. We must remember that these ideas were not derived from any definite experiment, but were the original reflections of man, fresh from the first observation of nature. The latest word of modern philosophy is continuity and development, but to Plato this is the beginning and foundation of science; there is nothing that he is so strongly persuaded of as that the world is one, and that all the various existences which are contained in it are only the transformations of the same soul of the world acting on the same matter. He would have readily admitted that out of the protoplasm all things were formed by the gradual process of creation; but he would have insisted that mind and intelligence\u2014not meaning by this, however, a conscious mind or person\u2014were prior to them, and could alone have created them. Into the workings of this eternal mind or intelligence he does not enter further; nor would there have been any use in attempting to investigate the things which no eye has seen nor any human language can express. Lastly, there remain two points in which he seems to touch great discoveries of modern times\u2014the law of gravitation, and the circulation of the blood. (1) The law of gravitation, according to Plato, is a law, not only of the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, but of similar bodies to similar, having a magnetic power as well as a principle of gravitation. He observed that earth, water, and air had settled down to their places, and he imagined fire or the exterior aether to have a place beyond air. When air seemed to go upwards and fire to pierce through air\u2014when water and earth fell downward, they were seeking their native elements. He did not remark that his own explanation did not suit all phenomena; and the simpler explanation, which assigns to bodies degrees of heaviness and lightness proportioned to the mass and distance of the bodies which attract them, never occurred to him. Yet the affinities of similar substances have some effect upon the composition of the world, and of this Plato may be thought to have had an anticipation. He may be described as confusing the attraction of gravitation with the attraction of cohesion. The influence of such affinities and the chemical action of one body upon another in long periods of time have become a recognized principle of geology. (2) Plato is perfectly aware\u2014and he could hardly be ignorant\u2014that blood is a fluid in constant motion. He also knew that blood is partly a solid substance consisting of several elements, which, as he might have observed in the use of \u2018cupping-glasses\u2019, decompose and die, when no longer in motion. But the specific discovery that the blood flows out on one side of the heart through the arteries and returns through the veins on the other, which is commonly called the circulation of the blood, was absolutely unknown to him. A further study of the Timaeus suggests some after-thoughts which may be conveniently brought together in this place. The topics which I propose briefly to reconsider are (a) the relation of the Timaeus to the other dialogues of Plato and to the previous philosophy; (b) the nature of God and of creation (c) the morality of the Timaeus:\u2014 (a) The Timaeus is more imaginative and less scientific than any other of the Platonic dialogues. It is conjectural astronomy, conjectural natural philosophy, conjectural medicine. The writer himself is constantly repeating that he is speaking what is probable only. The dialogue is put into the mouth of Timaeus, a Pythagorean philosopher, and therefore here, as in the Parmenides, we are in doubt how far Plato is expressing his own sentiments. Hence the connexion with the other dialogues is comparatively slight. We may fill up the lacunae of the Timaeus by the help of the Republic or Phaedrus: we may identify the same and other with the (Greek) of the Philebus. We may find in the Laws or in the Statesman parallels with the account of creation and of the first origin of man. It would be possible to frame a scheme in which all these various elements might have a place. But such a mode of proceeding would be unsatisfactory, because we have no reason to suppose that Plato intended his scattered thoughts to be collected in a system. There is a common spirit in his writings, and there are certain general principles, such as the opposition of the sensible and intellectual, and the priority of mind, which run through all of them; but he has no definite forms of words in which he consistently expresses himself. While the determinations of human thought are in process of creation he is necessarily tentative and uncertain. And there is least of definiteness, whenever either in describing the beginning or the end of the world, he has recourse to myths. These are not the fixed modes in which spiritual truths are revealed to him, but the efforts of imagination, by which at different times and in various manners he seeks to embody his conceptions. The clouds of mythology are still resting upon him, and he has not yet pierced \u2018to the heaven of the fixed stars\u2019 which is beyond them. It is safer then to admit the inconsistencies of the Timaeus, or to endeavour to fill up what is wanting from our own imagination, inspired by a study of the dialogue, than to refer to other Platonic writings,\u2014and still less should we refer to the successors of Plato,\u2014for the elucidation of it. More light is thrown upon the Timaeus by a comparison of the previous philosophies. For the physical science of the ancients was traditional, descending through many generations of Ionian and Pythagorean philosophers. Plato does not look out upon the heavens and describe what he sees in them, but he builds upon the foundations of others, adding something out of the \u2018depths of his own self-consciousness.\u2019 Socrates had already spoken of God the creator, who made all things for the best. While he ridiculed the superficial explanations of phenomena which were current in his age, he recognised the marks both of benevolence and of design in the frame of man and in the world. The apparatus of winds and waters is contemptuously rejected by him in the Phaedo, but he thinks that there is a power greater than that of any Atlas in the \u2018Best\u2019 (Phaedo; Arist. Met.). Plato, following his master, affirms this principle of the best, but he acknowledges that the best is limited by the conditions of matter. In the generation before Socrates, Anaxagoras had brought together \u2018Chaos\u2019 and \u2018Mind\u2019; and these are connected by Plato in the Timaeus, but in accordance with his own mode of thinking he has interposed between them the idea or pattern according to which mind worked. The circular impulse (Greek) of the one philosopher answers to the circular movement (Greek) of the other. But unlike Anaxagoras, Plato made the sun and stars living beings and not masses of earth or metal. The Pythagoreans again had framed a world out of numbers, which they constructed into figures. Plato adopted their speculations and improved upon them by a more exact knowledge of geometry. The Atomists too made the world, if not out of geometrical figures, at least out of different forms of atoms, and these atoms resembled the triangles of Plato in being too small to be visible. But though the physiology of the Timaeus is partly borrowed from them, they are either ignored by Plato or referred to with a secret contempt and dislike. He looks with more favour on the Pythagoreans, whose intervals of number applied to the distances of the planets reappear in the Timaeus. It is probable that among the Pythagoreans living in the fourth century B.C., there were already some who, like Plato, made the earth their centre. Whether he obtained his circles of the Same and Other from any previous thinker is uncertain. The four elements are taken from Empedocles; the interstices of the Timaeus may also be compared with his (Greek). The passage of one element into another is common to Heracleitus and several of the Ionian philosophers. So much of a syncretist is Plato, though not after the manner of the Neoplatonists. For the elements which he borrows from others are fused and transformed by his own genius. On the other hand we find fewer traces in Plato of early Ionic or Eleatic speculation. He does not imagine the world of sense to be made up of opposites or to be in a perpetual flux, but to vary within certain limits which are controlled by what he calls the principle of the same. Unlike the Eleatics, who relegated the world to the sphere of not-being, he admits creation to have an existence which is real and even eternal, although dependent on the will of the creator. Instead of maintaining the doctrine that the void has a necessary place in the existence of the world, he rather affirms the modern thesis that nature abhors a vacuum, as in the Sophist he also denies the reality of not-being (Aristot. Metaph.). But though in these respects he differs from them, he is deeply penetrated by the spirit of their philosophy; he differs from them with reluctance, and gladly recognizes the \u2018generous depth\u2019 of Parmenides (Theaet.). There is a similarity between the Timaeus and the fragments of Philolaus, which by some has been thought to be so great as to create a suspicion that they are derived from it. Philolaus is known to us from the Phaedo of Plato as a Pythagorean philosopher residing at Thebes in the latter half of the fifth century B.C., after the dispersion of the original Pythagorean society. He was the teacher of Simmias and Cebes, who became disciples of Socrates. We have hardly any other information about him. The story that Plato had purchased three books of his writings from a relation is not worth repeating; it is only a fanciful way in which an ancient biographer dresses up the fact that there was supposed to be a resemblance between the two writers. Similar gossiping stories are told about the sources of the Republic and the Phaedo. That there really existed in antiquity a work passing under the name of Philolaus there can be no doubt. Fragments of this work are preserved to us, chiefly in Stobaeus, a few in Boethius and other writers. They remind us of the Timaeus, as well as of the Phaedrus and Philebus. When the writer says (Stob. Eclog.) that all things are either finite (definite) or infinite (indefinite), or a union of the two, and that this antithesis and synthesis pervades all art and nature, we are reminded of the Philebus. When he calls the centre of the world (Greek), we have a parallel to the Phaedrus. His distinction between the world of order, to which the sun and moon and the stars belong, and the world of disorder, which lies in the region between the moon and the earth, approximates to Plato\u2019s sphere of the Same and of the Other. Like Plato (Tim.), he denied the above and below in space, and said that all things were the same in relation to a centre. He speaks also of the world as one and indestructible: \u2018for neither from within nor from without does it admit of destruction\u2019 (Tim). He mentions ten heavenly bodies, including the sun and moon, the earth and the counter-earth (Greek), and in the midst of them all he places the central fire, around which they are moving\u2014this is hidden from the earth by the counter-earth. Of neither is there any trace in Plato, who makes the earth the centre of his system. Philolaus magnifies the virtues of particular numbers, especially of the number 10 (Stob. Eclog.), and descants upon odd and even numbers, after the manner of the later Pythagoreans. It is worthy of remark that these mystical fancies are nowhere to be found in the writings of Plato, although the importance of number as a form and also an instrument of thought is ever present to his mind. Both Philolaus and Plato agree in making the world move in certain numerical ratios according to a musical scale: though Bockh is of opinion that the two scales, of Philolaus and of the Timaeus, do not correspond...We appear not to be sufficiently acquainted with the early Pythagoreans to know how far the statements contained in these fragments corresponded with their doctrines; and we therefore cannot pronounce, either in favour of the genuineness of the fragments, with Bockh and Zeller, or, with Valentine Rose and Schaarschmidt, against them. But it is clear that they throw but little light upon the Timaeus, and that their resemblance to it has been exaggerated. That there is a degree of confusion and indistinctness in Plato\u2019s account both of man and of the universe has been already acknowledged. We cannot tell (nor could Plato himself have told) where the figure or myth ends and the philosophical truth begins; we cannot explain (nor could Plato himself have explained to us) the relation of the ideas to appearance, of which one is the copy of the other, and yet of all things in the world they are the most opposed and unlike. This opposition is presented to us in many forms, as the antithesis of the one and many, of the finite and infinite, of the intelligible and sensible, of the unchangeable and the changing, of the indivisible and the divisible, of the fixed stars and the planets, of the creative mind and the primeval chaos. These pairs of opposites are so many aspects of the great opposition between ideas and phenomena\u2014they easily pass into one another; and sometimes the two members of the relation differ in kind, sometimes only in degree. As in Aristotle\u2019s matter and form the connexion between them is really inseparable; for if we attempt to separate them they become devoid of content and therefore indistinguishable; there is no difference between the idea of which nothing can be predicated, and the chaos or matter which has no perceptible qualities\u2014between Being in the abstract and Nothing. Yet we are frequently told that the one class of them is the reality and the other appearance; and one is often spoken of as the double or reflection of the other. For Plato never clearly saw that both elements had an equal place in mind and in nature; and hence, especially when we argue from isolated passages in his writings, or attempt to draw what appear to us to be the natural inferences from them, we are full of perplexity. There is a similar confusion about necessity and free-will, and about the state of the soul after death. Also he sometimes supposes that God is immanent in the world, sometimes that he is transcendent. And having no distinction of objective and subjective, he passes imperceptibly from one to the other; from intelligence to soul, from eternity to time. These contradictions may be softened or concealed by a judicious use of language, but they cannot be wholly got rid of. That an age of intellectual transition must also be one of inconsistency; that the creative is opposed to the critical or defining habit of mind or time, has been often repeated by us. But, as Plato would say, \u2018there is no harm in repeating twice or thrice\u2019 (Laws) what is important for the understanding of a great author. It has not, however, been observed, that the confusion partly arises out of the elements of opposing philosophies which are preserved in him. He holds these in solution, he brings them into relation with one another, but he does not perfectly harmonize them. They are part of his own mind, and he is incapable of placing himself outside of them and criticizing them. They grow as he grows; they are a kind of composition with which his own philosophy is overlaid. In early life he fancies that he has mastered them: but he is also mastered by them; and in language (Sophist) which may be compared with the hesitating tone of the Timaeus, he confesses in his later years that they are full of obscurity to him. He attributes new meanings to the words of Parmenides and Heracleitus; but at times the old Eleatic philosophy appears to go beyond him; then the world of phenomena disappears, but the doctrine of ideas is also reduced to nothingness. All of them are nearer to one another than they themselves supposed, and nearer to him than he supposed. All of them are antagonistic to sense and have an affinity to number and measure and a presentiment of ideas. Even in Plato they still retain their contentious or controversial character, which was developed by the growth of dialectic. He is never able to reconcile the first causes of the pre-Socratic philosophers with the final causes of Socrates himself. There is no intelligible account of the relation of numbers to the universal ideas, or of universals to the idea of good. He found them all three, in the Pythagorean philosophy and in the teaching of Socrates and of the Megarians respectively; and, because they all furnished modes of explaining and arranging phenomena, he is unwilling to give up any of them, though he is unable to unite them in a consistent whole. Lastly, Plato, though an idealist philosopher, is Greek and not Oriental in spirit and feeling. He is no mystic or ascetic; he is not seeking in vain to get rid of matter or to find absorption in the divine nature, or in the Soul of the universe. And therefore we are not surprised to find that his philosophy in the Timaeus returns at last to a worship of the heavens, and that to him, as to other Greeks, nature, though containing a remnant of evil, is still glorious and divine. He takes away or drops the veil of mythology, and presents her to us in what appears to him to be the form-fairer and truer far\u2014of mathematical figures. It is this element in the Timaeus, no less than its affinity to certain Pythagorean speculations, which gives it a character not wholly in accordance with the other dialogues of Plato. (b) The Timaeus contains an assertion perhaps more distinct than is found in any of the other dialogues (Rep.; Laws) of the goodness of God. \u2018He was good himself, and he fashioned the good everywhere.\u2019 He was not \u2018a jealous God,\u2019 and therefore he desired that all other things should be equally good. He is the IDEA of good who has now become a person, and speaks and is spoken of as God. Yet his personality seems to appear only in the act of creation. In so far as he works with his eye fixed upon an eternal pattern he is like the human artificer in the Republic. Here the theory of Platonic ideas intrudes upon us. God, like man, is supposed to have an ideal of which Plato is unable to tell us the origin. He may be said, in the language of modern philosophy, to resolve the divine mind into subject and object. The first work of creation is perfected, the second begins under the direction of inferior ministers. The supreme God is withdrawn from the world and returns to his own accustomed nature (Tim.). As in the Statesman, he retires to his place of view. So early did the Epicurean doctrine take possession of the Greek mind, and so natural is it to the heart of man, when he has once passed out of the stage of mythology into that of rational religion. For he sees the marks of design in the world; but he no longer sees or fancies that he sees God walking in the garden or haunting stream or mountain. He feels also that he must put God as far as possible out of the way of evil, and therefore he banishes him from an evil world. Plato is sensible of the difficulty; and he often shows that he is desirous of justifying the ways of God to man. Yet on the other hand, in the Tenth Book of the Laws he passes a censure on those who say that the Gods have no care of human things. The creation of the world is the impression of order on a previously existing chaos. The formula of Anaxagoras\u2014\u2018all things were in chaos or confusion, and then mind came and disposed them\u2019\u2014is a summary of the first part of the Timaeus. It is true that of a chaos without differences no idea could be formed. All was not mixed but one; and therefore it was not difficult for the later Platonists to draw inferences by which they were enabled to reconcile the narrative of the Timaeus with the Mosaic account of the creation. Neither when we speak of mind or intelligence, do we seem to get much further in our conception than circular motion, which was deemed to be the most perfect. Plato, like Anaxagoras, while commencing his theory of the universe with ideas of mind and of the best, is compelled in the execution of his design to condescend to the crudest physics. (c) The morality of the Timaeus is singular, and it is difficult to adjust the balance between the two elements of it. The difficulty which Plato feels, is that which all of us feel, and which is increased in our own day by the progress of physical science, how the responsibility of man is to be reconciled with his dependence on natural causes. And sometimes, like other men, he is more impressed by one aspect of human life, sometimes by the other. In the Republic he represents man as freely choosing his own lot in a state prior to birth\u2014a conception which, if taken literally, would still leave him subject to the dominion of necessity in his after life; in the Statesman he supposes the human race to be preserved in the world only by a divine interposition; while in the Timaeus the supreme God commissions the inferior deities to avert from him all but self-inflicted evils\u2014words which imply that all the evils of men are really self-inflicted. And here, like Plato (the insertion of a note in the text of an ancient writer is a literary curiosity worthy of remark), we may take occasion to correct an error. For we too hastily said that Plato in the Timaeus regarded all \u2018vices and crimes as involuntary.\u2019 But the fact is that he is inconsistent with himself; in one and the same passage vice is attributed to the relaxation of the bodily frame, and yet we are exhorted to avoid it and pursue virtue. It is also admitted that good and evil conduct are to be attributed respectively to good and evil laws and institutions. These cannot be given by individuals to themselves; and therefore human actions, in so far as they are dependent upon them, are regarded by Plato as involuntary rather than voluntary. Like other writers on this subject, he is unable to escape from some degree of self-contradiction. He had learned from Socrates that vice is ignorance, and suddenly the doctrine seems to him to be confirmed by observing how much of the good and bad in human character depends on the bodily constitution. So in modern times the speculative doctrine of necessity has often been supported by physical facts. The Timaeus also contains an anticipation of the stoical life according to nature. Man contemplating the heavens is to regulate his erring life according to them. He is to partake of the repose of nature and of the order of nature, to bring the variable principle in himself into harmony with the principle of the same. The ethics of the Timaeus may be summed up in the single idea of \u2018law.\u2019 To feel habitually that he is part of the order of the universe, is one of the highest ethical motives of which man is capable. Something like this is what Plato means when he speaks of the soul \u2018moving about the same in unchanging thought of the same.\u2019 He does not explain how man is acted upon by the lesser influences of custom or of opinion; or how the commands of the soul watching in the citadel are conveyed to the bodily organs. But this perhaps, to use once more expressions of his own, \u2018is part of another subject\u2019 or \u2018may be more suitably discussed on some other occasion.\u2019 There is no difficulty, by the help of Aristotle and later writers, in criticizing the Timaeus of Plato, in pointing out the inconsistencies of the work, in dwelling on the ignorance of anatomy displayed by the author, in showing the fancifulness or unmeaningness of some of his reasons. But the Timaeus still remains the greatest effort of the human mind to conceive the world as a whole which the genius of antiquity has bequeathed to us. One more aspect of the Timaeus remains to be considered\u2014the mythological or geographical. Is it not a wonderful thing that a few pages of one of Plato\u2019s dialogues have grown into a great legend, not confined to Greece only, but spreading far and wide over the nations of Europe and reaching even to Egypt and Asia? Like the tale of Troy, or the legend of the Ten Tribes (Ewald, Hist. of Isr.), which perhaps originated in a few verses of II Esdras, it has become famous, because it has coincided with a great historical fact. Like the romance of King Arthur, which has had so great a charm, it has found a way over the seas from one country and language to another. It inspired the navigators of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; it foreshadowed the discovery of America. It realized the fiction so natural to the human mind, because it answered the enquiry about the origin of the arts, that there had somewhere existed an ancient primitive civilization. It might find a place wherever men chose to look for it; in North, South, East, or West; in the Islands of the Blest; before the entrance of the Straits of Gibraltar, in Sweden or in Palestine. It mattered little whether the description in Plato agreed with the locality assigned to it or not. It was a legend so adapted to the human mind that it made a habitation for itself in any country. It was an island in the clouds, which might be seen anywhere by the eye of faith. It was a subject especially congenial to the ponderous industry of certain French and Swedish writers, who delighted in heaping up learning of all sorts but were incapable of using it. M. Martin has written a valuable dissertation on the opinions entertained respecting the Island of Atlantis in ancient and modern times. It is a curious chapter in the history of the human mind. The tale of Atlantis is the fabric of a vision, but it has never ceased to interest mankind. It was variously regarded by the ancients themselves. The stronger heads among them, like Strabo and Longinus, were as little disposed to believe in the truth of it as the modern reader in Gulliver or Robinson Crusoe. On the other hand there is no kind or degree of absurdity or fancy in which the more foolish writers, both of antiquity and of modern times, have not indulged respecting it. The Neo-Platonists, loyal to their master, like some commentators on the Christian Scriptures, sought to give an allegorical meaning to what they also believed to be an historical fact. It was as if some one in our own day were to convert the poems of Homer into an allegory of the Christian religion, at the same time maintaining them to be an exact and veritable history. In the Middle Ages the legend seems to have been half-forgotten until revived by the discovery of America. It helped to form the Utopia of Sir Thomas More and the New Atlantis of Bacon, although probably neither of those great men were at all imposed upon by the fiction. It was most prolific in the seventeenth or in the early part of the eighteenth century, when the human mind, seeking for Utopias or inventing them, was glad to escape out of the dulness of the present into the romance of the past or some ideal of the future. The later forms of such narratives contained features taken from the Edda, as well as from the Old and New Testament; also from the tales of missionaries and the experiences of travellers and of colonists. The various opinions respecting the Island of Atlantis have no interest for us except in so far as they illustrate the extravagances of which men are capable. But this is a real interest and a serious lesson, if we remember that now as formerly the human mind is liable to be imposed upon by the illusions of the past, which are ever assuming some new form. When we have shaken off the rubbish of ages, there remain one or two questions of which the investigation has a permanent value:\u2014 1. Did Plato derive the legend of Atlantis from an Egyptian source? It may be replied that there is no such legend in any writer previous to Plato; neither in Homer, nor in Pindar, nor in Herodotus is there any mention of an Island of Atlantis, nor any reference to it in Aristotle, nor any citation of an earlier writer by a later one in which it is to be found. Nor have any traces been discovered hitherto in Egyptian monuments of a connexion between Greece and Egypt older than the eighth or ninth century B.C. It is true that Proclus, writing in the fifth century after Christ, tells us of stones and columns in Egypt on which the history of the Island of Atlantis was engraved. The statement may be false\u2014there are similar tales about columns set up \u2018by the Canaanites whom Joshua drove out\u2019 (Procop.); but even if true, it would only show that the legend, 800 years after the time of Plato, had been transferred to Egypt, and inscribed, not, like other forgeries, in books, but on stone. Probably in the Alexandrian age, when Egypt had ceased to have a history and began to appropriate the legends of other nations, many such monuments were to be found of events which had become famous in that or other countries. The oldest witness to the story is said to be Crantor, a Stoic philosopher who lived a generation later than Plato, and therefore may have borrowed it from him. The statement is found in Proclus; but we require better assurance than Proclus can give us before we accept this or any other statement which he makes. Secondly, passing from the external to the internal evidence, we may remark that the story is far more likely to have been invented by Plato than to have been brought by Solon from Egypt. That is another part of his legend which Plato also seeks to impose upon us. The verisimilitude which he has given to the tale is a further reason for suspecting it; for he could easily \u2018invent Egyptian or any other tales\u2019 (Phaedrus). Are not the words, \u2018The truth of the story is a great advantage,\u2019 if we read between the lines, an indication of the fiction? It is only a legend that Solon went to Egypt, and if he did he could not have conversed with Egyptian priests or have read records in their temples. The truth is that the introduction is a mosaic work of small touches which, partly by their minuteness, and also by their seeming probability, win the confidence of the reader. Who would desire better evidence than that of Critias, who had heard the narrative in youth when the memory is strongest at the age of ten from his grandfather Critias, an old man of ninety, who in turn had heard it from Solon himself? Is not the famous expression\u2014\u2018You Hellenes are ever children and there is no knowledge among you hoary with age,\u2019 really a compliment to the Athenians who are described in these words as \u2018ever young\u2019? And is the thought expressed in them to be attributed to the learning of the Egyptian priest, and not rather to the genius of Plato? Or when the Egyptian says\u2014\u2018Hereafter at our leisure we will take up the written documents and examine in detail the exact truth about these things\u2019\u2014what is this but a literary trick by which Plato sets off his narrative? Could any war between Athens and the Island of Atlantis have really coincided with the struggle between the Greeks and Persians, as is sufficiently hinted though not expressly stated in the narrative of Plato? And whence came the tradition to Egypt? or in what does the story consist except in the war between the two rival powers and the submersion of both of them? And how was the tale transferred to the poem of Solon? \u2018It is not improbable,\u2019 says Mr. Grote, \u2018that Solon did leave an unfinished Egyptian poem\u2019 (Plato). But are probabilities for which there is not a tittle of evidence, and which are without any parallel, to be deemed worthy of attention by the critic? How came the poem of Solon to disappear in antiquity? or why did Plato, if the whole narrative was known to him, break off almost at the beginning of it? While therefore admiring the diligence and erudition of M. Martin, we cannot for a moment suppose that the tale was told to Solon by an Egyptian priest, nor can we believe that Solon wrote a poem upon the theme which was thus suggested to him\u2014a poem which disappeared in antiquity; or that the Island of Atlantis or the antediluvian Athens ever had any existence except in the imagination of Plato. Martin is of opinion that Plato would have been terrified if he could have foreseen the endless fancies to which his Island of Atlantis has given occasion. Rather he would have been infinitely amused if he could have known that his gift of invention would have deceived M. Martin himself into the belief that the tradition was brought from Egypt by Solon and made the subject of a poem by him. M. Martin may also be gently censured for citing without sufficient discrimination ancient authors having very different degrees of authority and value. 2. It is an interesting and not unimportant question which is touched upon by Martin, whether the Atlantis of Plato in any degree held out a guiding light to the early navigators. He is inclined to think that there is no real connexion between them. But surely the discovery of the New World was preceded by a prophetic anticipation of it, which, like the hope of a Messiah, was entering into the hearts of men? And this hope was nursed by ancient tradition, which had found expression from time to time in the celebrated lines of Seneca and in many other places. This tradition was sustained by the great authority of Plato, and therefore the legend of the Island of Atlantis, though not closely connected with the voyages of the early navigators, may be truly said to have contributed indirectly to the great discovery. The Timaeus of Plato, like the Protagoras and several portions of the Phaedrus and Republic, was translated by Cicero into Latin. About a fourth, comprehending with lacunae the first portion of the dialogue, is preserved in several MSS. These generally agree, and therefore may be supposed to be derived from a single original. The version is very faithful, and is a remarkable monument of Cicero\u2019s skill in managing the difficult and intractable Greek. In his treatise De Natura Deorum, he also refers to the Timaeus, which, speaking in the person of Velleius the Epicurean, he severely criticises. The commentary of Proclus on the Timaeus is a wonderful monument of the silliness and prolixity of the Alexandrian Age. It extends to about thirty pages of the book, and is thirty times the length of the original. It is surprising that this voluminous work should have found a translator (Thomas Taylor, a kindred spirit, who was himself a Neo-Platonist, after the fashion, not of the fifth or sixteenth, but of the nineteenth century A.D.). The commentary is of little or no value, either in a philosophical or philological point of view. The writer is unable to explain particular passages in any precise manner, and he is equally incapable of grasping the whole. He does not take words in their simple meaning or sentences in their natural connexion. He is thinking, not of the context in Plato, but of the contemporary Pythagorean philosophers and their wordy strife. He finds nothing in the text which he does not bring to it. He is full of Porphyry, Iamblichus and Plotinus, of misapplied logic, of misunderstood grammar, and of the Orphic theology. Although such a work can contribute little or nothing to the understanding of Plato, it throws an interesting light on the Alexandrian times; it realizes how a philosophy made up of words only may create a deep and widespread enthusiasm, how the forms of logic and rhetoric may usurp the place of reason and truth, how all philosophies grow faded and discoloured, and are patched and made up again like worn-out garments, and retain only a second-hand existence. He who would study this degeneracy of philosophy and of the Greek mind in the original cannot do better than devote a few of his days and nights to the commentary of Proclus on the Timaeus. A very different account must be given of the short work entitled \u2018Timaeus Locrus,\u2019 which is a brief but clear analysis of the Timaeus of Plato, omitting the introduction or dialogue and making a few small additions. It does not allude to the original from which it is taken; it is quite free from mysticism and Neo-Platonism. In length it does not exceed a fifth part of the Timaeus. It is written in the Doric dialect, and contains several words which do not occur in classical Greek. No other indication of its date, except this uncertain one of language, appears in it. In several places the writer has simplified the language of Plato, in a few others he has embellished and exaggerated it. He generally preserves the thought of the original, but does not copy the words. On the whole this little tract faithfully reflects the meaning and spirit of the Timaeus. From the garden of the Timaeus, as from the other dialogues of Plato, we may still gather a few flowers and present them at parting to the reader. There is nothing in Plato grander and simpler than the conversation between Solon and the Egyptian priest, in which the youthfulness of Hellas is contrasted with the antiquity of Egypt. Here are to be found the famous words, \u2018O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever young, and there is not an old man among you\u2019\u2014which may be compared to the lively saying of Hegel, that \u2018Greek history began with the youth Achilles and left off with the youth Alexander.\u2019 The numerous arts of verisimilitude by which Plato insinuates into the mind of the reader the truth of his narrative have been already referred to. Here occur a sentence or two not wanting in Platonic irony (Greek\u2014a word to the wise). \u2018To know or tell the origin of the other divinities is beyond us, and we must accept the traditions of the men of old time who affirm themselves to be the offspring of the Gods\u2014that is what they say\u2014and they must surely have known their own ancestors. How can we doubt the word of the children of the Gods? Although they give no probable or certain proofs, still, as they declare that they are speaking of what took place in their own family, we must conform to custom and believe them.\u2019 \u2018Our creators well knew that women and other animals would some day be framed out of men, and they further knew that many animals would require the use of nails for many purposes; wherefore they fashioned in men at their first creation the rudiments of nails.\u2019 Or once more, let us reflect on two serious passages in which the order of the world is supposed to find a place in the human soul and to infuse harmony into it. \u2018The soul, when touching anything that has essence, whether dispersed in parts or undivided, is stirred through all her powers to declare the sameness or difference of that thing and some other; and to what individuals are related, and by what affected, and in what way and how and when, both in the world of generation and in the world of immutable being. And when reason, which works with equal truth, whether she be in the circle of the diverse or of the same,\u2014in voiceless silence holding her onward course in the sphere of the self-moved,\u2014when reason, I say, is hovering around the sensible world, and when the circle of the diverse also moving truly imparts the intimations of sense to the whole soul, then arise opinions and beliefs sure and certain. But when reason is concerned with the rational, and the circle of the same moving smoothly declares it, then intelligence and knowledge are necessarily perfected;\u2019 where, proceeding in a similar path of contemplation, he supposes the inward and the outer world mutually to imply each other. \u2018God invented and gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed; and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries.\u2019 Or let us weigh carefully some other profound thoughts, such as the following. \u2018He who neglects education walks lame to the end of his life, and returns imperfect and good for nothing to the world below.\u2019 \u2018The father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible.\u2019 \u2018Let me tell you then why the Creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable.\u2019 This is the leading thought in the Timaeus, just as the IDEA of Good is the leading thought of the Republic, the one expression describing the personal, the other the impersonal Good or God, differing in form rather than in substance, and both equally implying to the mind of Plato a divine reality. The slight touch, perhaps ironical, contained in the words, \u2018as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men,\u2019 is very characteristic of Plato. TIMAEUS. PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Critias, Timaeus, Hermocrates."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"One, two, three; but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth of those who were yesterday my guests and are to be my entertainers to-day?"}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"He has been taken ill, Socrates; for he would not willingly have been absent from this gathering."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then, if he is not coming, you and the two others must supply his place."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"Certainly, and we will do all that we can; having been handsomely entertained by you yesterday, those of us who remain should be only too glad to return your hospitality."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Do you remember what were the points of which I required you to speak?"}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"We remember some of them, and you will be here to remind us of anything which we have forgotten: or rather, if we are not troubling you, will you briefly recapitulate the whole, and then the particulars will be more firmly fixed in our memories?"}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"To be sure I will: the chief theme of my yesterday\u2019s discourse was the State\u2014how constituted and of what citizens composed it would seem likely to be most perfect."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"Yes, Socrates; and what you said of it was very much to our mind."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Did we not begin by separating the husbandmen and the artisans from the class of defenders of the State?"}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"Yes."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And when we had given to each one that single employment and particular art which was suited to his nature, we spoke of those who were intended to be our warriors, and said that they were to be guardians of the city against attacks from within as well as from without, and to have no other employment; they were to be merciful in judging their subjects, of whom they were by nature friends, but fierce to their enemies, when they came across them in battle."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"Exactly."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"We said, if I am not mistaken, that the guardians should be gifted with a temperament in a high degree both passionate and philosophical; and that then they would be as they ought to be, gentle to their friends and fierce with their enemies."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"Certainly."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what did we say of their education? Were they not to be trained in gymnastic, and music, and all other sorts of knowledge which were proper for them?"}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"Very true."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And being thus trained they were not to consider gold or silver or anything else to be their own private property; they were to be like hired troops, receiving pay for keeping guard from those who were protected by them\u2014the pay was to be no more than would suffice for men of simple life; and they were to spend in common, and to live together in the continual practice of virtue, which was to be their sole pursuit."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"That was also said."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Neither did we forget the women; of whom we declared, that their natures should be assimilated and brought into harmony with those of the men, and that common pursuits should be assigned to them both in time of war and in their ordinary life."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"That, again, was as you say."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what about the procreation of children? Or rather was not the proposal too singular to be forgotten? for all wives and children were to be in common, to the intent that no one should ever know his own child, but they were to imagine that they were all one family; those who were within a suitable limit of age were to be brothers and sisters, those who were of an elder generation parents and grandparents, and those of a younger, children and grandchildren."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"Yes, and the proposal is easy to remember, as you say."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And do you also remember how, with a view of securing as far as we could the best breed, we said that the chief magistrates, male and female, should contrive secretly, by the use of certain lots, so to arrange the nuptial meeting, that the bad of either sex and the good of either sex might pair with their like; and there was to be no quarrelling on this account, for they would imagine that the union was a mere accident, and was to be attributed to the lot?"}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"I remember."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And you remember how we said that the children of the good parents were to be educated, and the children of the bad secretly dispersed among the inferior citizens; and while they were all growing up the rulers were to be on the look-out, and to bring up from below in their turn those who were worthy, and those among themselves who were unworthy were to take the places of those who came up?"}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"True."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Then have I now given you all the heads of our yesterday\u2019s discussion? Or is there anything more, my dear Timaeus, which has been omitted?"}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"Nothing, Socrates; it was just as you have said."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I should like, before proceeding further, to tell you how I feel about the State which we have described. I might compare myself to a person who, on beholding beautiful animals either created by the painter\u2019s art, or, better still, alive but at rest, is seized with a desire of seeing them in motion or engaged in some struggle or conflict to which their forms appear suited; this is my feeling about the State which we have been describing. There are conflicts which all cities undergo, and I should like to hear some one tell of our own city carrying on a struggle against her neighbours, and how she went out to war in a becoming manner, and when at war showed by the greatness of her actions and the magnanimity of her words in dealing with other cities a result worthy of her training and education. Now I, Critias and Hermocrates, am conscious that I myself should never be able to celebrate the city and her citizens in a befitting manner, and I am not surprised at my own incapacity; to me the wonder is rather that the poets present as well as past are no better\u2014not that I mean to depreciate them; but every one can see that they are a tribe of imitators, and will imitate best and most easily the life in which they have been brought up; while that which is beyond the range of a man\u2019s education he finds hard to carry out in action, and still harder adequately to represent in language. I am aware that the Sophists have plenty of brave words and fair conceits, but I am afraid that being only wanderers from one city to another, and having never had habitations of their own, they may fail in their conception of philosophers and statesmen, and may not know what they do and say in time of war, when they are fighting or holding parley with their enemies. And thus people of your class are the only ones remaining who are fitted by nature and education to take part at once both in politics and philosophy. Here is Timaeus, of Locris in Italy, a city which has admirable laws, and who is himself in wealth and rank the equal of any of his fellow-citizens; he has held the most important and honourable offices in his own state, and, as I believe, has scaled the heights of all philosophy; and here is Critias, whom every Athenian knows to be no novice in the matters of which we are speaking; and as to Hermocrates, I am assured by many witnesses that his genius and education qualify him to take part in any speculation of the kind. And therefore yesterday when I saw that you wanted me to describe the formation of the State, I readily assented, being very well aware, that, if you only would, none were better qualified to carry the discussion further, and that when you had engaged our city in a suitable war, you of all men living could best exhibit her playing a fitting part. When I had completed my task, I in return imposed this other task upon you. You conferred together and agreed to entertain me to-day, as I had entertained you, with a feast of discourse. Here am I in festive array, and no man can be more ready for the promised banquet."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"HERMOCRATES","Dialogue":"And we too, Socrates, as Timaeus says, will not be wanting in enthusiasm; and there is no excuse for not complying with your request. As soon as we arrived yesterday at the guest-chamber of Critias, with whom we are staying, or rather on our way thither, we talked the matter over, and he told us an ancient tradition, which I wish, Critias, that you would repeat to Socrates, so that he may help us to judge whether it will satisfy his requirements or not."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"CRITIAS","Dialogue":"I will, if Timaeus, who is our other partner, approves."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"I quite approve."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"CRITIAS","Dialogue":"Then listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange, is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of the seven sages. He was a relative and a dear friend of my great-grandfather, Dropides, as he himself says in many passages of his poems; and he told the story to Critias, my grandfather, who remembered and repeated it to us. There were of old, he said, great and marvellous actions of the Athenian city, which have passed into oblivion through lapse of time and the destruction of mankind, and one in particular, greater than all the rest. This we will now rehearse. It will be a fitting monument of our gratitude to you, and a hymn of praise true and worthy of the goddess, on this her day of festival."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Very good. And what is this ancient famous action of the Athenians, which Critias declared, on the authority of Solon, to be not a mere legend, but an actual fact?"}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"CRITIAS","Dialogue":"I will tell an old-world story which I heard from an aged man; for Critias, at the time of telling it, was, as he said, nearly ninety years of age, and I was about ten. Now the day was that day of the Apaturia which is called the Registration of Youth, at which, according to custom, our parents gave prizes for recitations, and the poems of several poets were recited by us boys, and many of us sang the poems of Solon, which at that time had not gone out of fashion. One of our tribe, either because he thought so or to please Critias, said that in his judgment Solon was not only the wisest of men, but also the noblest of poets. The old man, as I very well remember, brightened up at hearing this and said, smiling: Yes, Amynander, if Solon had only, like other poets, made poetry the business of his life, and had completed the tale which he brought with him from Egypt, and had not been compelled, by reason of the factions and troubles which he found stirring in his own country when he came home, to attend to other matters, in my opinion he would have been as famous as Homer or Hesiod, or any poet. And what was the tale about, Critias? said Amynander. About the greatest action which the Athenians ever did, and which ought to have been the most famous, but, through the lapse of time and the destruction of the actors, it has not come down to us. Tell us, said the other, the whole story, and how and from whom Solon heard this veritable tradition. He replied:\u2014In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais, and the great city of the district is also called Sais, and is the city from which King Amasis came. The citizens have a deity for their foundress; she is called in the Egyptian tongue Neith, and is asserted by them to be the same whom the Hellenes call Athene; they are great lovers of the Athenians, and say that they are in some way related to them. To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour; he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On one occasion, wishing to draw them on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world\u2014about Phoroneus, who is called \u2018the first man,\u2019 and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the events of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father\u2019s chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us. When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land, neither then nor at any other time, does the water come down from above on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below; for which reason the traditions preserved here are the most ancient. The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer sun does not prevent, mankind exist, sometimes in greater, sometimes in lesser numbers. And whatever happened either in your country or in ours, or in any other region of which we are informed\u2014if there were any actions noble or great or in any other way remarkable, they have all been written down by us of old, and are preserved in our temples. Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. As for those genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of children. In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; in the next place, you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived, and that you and your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them which survived. And this was unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written word. For there was a time, Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the city which now is Athens was first in war and in every way the best governed of all cities, is said to have performed the noblest deeds and to have had the fairest constitution of any of which tradition tells, under the face of heaven. Solon marvelled at his words, and earnestly requested the priests to inform him exactly and in order about these former citizens. You are welcome to hear about them, Solon, said the priest, both for your own sake and for that of your city, and above all, for the sake of the goddess who is the common patron and parent and educator of both our cities. She founded your city a thousand years before ours (Observe that Plato gives the same date (9000 years ago) for the foundation of Athens and for the repulse of the invasion from Atlantis (Crit.).), receiving from the Earth and Hephaestus the seed of your race, and afterwards she founded ours, of which the constitution is recorded in our sacred registers to be 8000 years old. As touching your citizens of 9000 years ago, I will briefly inform you of their laws and of their most famous action; the exact particulars of the whole we will hereafter go through at our leisure in the sacred registers themselves. If you compare these very laws with ours you will find that many of ours are the counterpart of yours as they were in the olden time. In the first place, there is the caste of priests, which is separated from all the others; next, there are the artificers, who ply their several crafts by themselves and do not intermix; and also there is the class of shepherds and of hunters, as well as that of husbandmen; and you will observe, too, that the warriors in Egypt are distinct from all the other classes, and are commanded by the law to devote themselves solely to military pursuits; moreover, the weapons which they carry are shields and spears, a style of equipment which the goddess taught of Asiatics first to us, as in your part of the world first to you. Then as to wisdom, do you observe how our law from the very first made a study of the whole order of things, extending even to prophecy and medicine which gives health, out of these divine elements deriving what was needful for human life, and adding every sort of knowledge which was akin to them. All this order and arrangement the goddess first imparted to you when establishing your city; and she chose the spot of earth in which you were born, because she saw that the happy temperament of the seasons in that land would produce the wisest of men. Wherefore the goddess, who was a lover both of war and of wisdom, selected and first of all settled that spot which was the most likely to produce men likest herself. And there you dwelt, having such laws as these and still better ones, and excelled all mankind in all virtue, as became the children and disciples of the gods. Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island. I have told you briefly, Socrates, what the aged Critias heard from Solon and related to us. And when you were speaking yesterday about your city and citizens, the tale which I have just been repeating to you came into my mind, and I remarked with astonishment how, by some mysterious coincidence, you agreed in almost every particular with the narrative of Solon; but I did not like to speak at the moment. For a long time had elapsed, and I had forgotten too much; I thought that I must first of all run over the narrative in my own mind, and then I would speak. And so I readily assented to your request yesterday, considering that in all such cases the chief difficulty is to find a tale suitable to our purpose, and that with such a tale we should be fairly well provided. And therefore, as Hermocrates has told you, on my way home yesterday I at once communicated the tale to my companions as I remembered it; and after I left them, during the night by thinking I recovered nearly the whole of it. Truly, as is often said, the lessons of our childhood make a wonderful impression on our memories; for I am not sure that I could remember all the discourse of yesterday, but I should be much surprised if I forgot any of these things which I have heard very long ago. I listened at the time with childlike interest to the old man\u2019s narrative; he was very ready to teach me, and I asked him again and again to repeat his words, so that like an indelible picture they were branded into my mind. As soon as the day broke, I rehearsed them as he spoke them to my companions, that they, as well as myself, might have something to say. And now, Socrates, to make an end of my preface, I am ready to tell you the whole tale. I will give you not only the general heads, but the particulars, as they were told to me. The city and citizens, which you yesterday described to us in fiction, we will now transfer to the world of reality. It shall be the ancient city of Athens, and we will suppose that the citizens whom you imagined, were our veritable ancestors, of whom the priest spoke; they will perfectly harmonize, and there will be no inconsistency in saying that the citizens of your republic are these ancient Athenians. Let us divide the subject among us, and all endeavour according to our ability gracefully to execute the task which you have imposed upon us. Consider then, Socrates, if this narrative is suited to the purpose, or whether we should seek for some other instead."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"And what other, Critias, can we find that will be better than this, which is natural and suitable to the festival of the goddess, and has the very great advantage of being a fact and not a fiction? How or where shall we find another if we abandon this? We cannot, and therefore you must tell the tale, and good luck to you; and I in return for my yesterday\u2019s discourse will now rest and be a listener."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"CRITIAS","Dialogue":"Let me proceed to explain to you, Socrates, the order in which we have arranged our entertainment. Our intention is, that Timaeus, who is the most of an astronomer amongst us, and has made the nature of the universe his special study, should speak first, beginning with the generation of the world and going down to the creation of man; next, I am to receive the men whom he has created, and of whom some will have profited by the excellent education which you have given them; and then, in accordance with the tale of Solon, and equally with his law, we will bring them into court and make them citizens, as if they were those very Athenians whom the sacred Egyptian record has recovered from oblivion, and thenceforward we will speak of them as Athenians and fellow-citizens."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"I see that I shall receive in my turn a perfect and splendid feast of reason. And now, Timaeus, you, I suppose, should speak next, after duly calling upon the Gods."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"All men, Socrates, who have any degree of right feeling, at the beginning of every enterprise, whether small or great, always call upon God. And we, too, who are going to discourse of the nature of the universe, how created or how existing without creation, if we be not altogether out of our wits, must invoke the aid of Gods and Goddesses and pray that our words may be acceptable to them and consistent with themselves. Let this, then, be our invocation of the Gods, to which I add an exhortation of myself to speak in such manner as will be most intelligible to you, and will most accord with my own intent. First then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask, What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created. The work of the creator, whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be made fair and perfect; but when he looks to the created only, and uses a created pattern, it is not fair or perfect. Was the heaven then or the world, whether called by this or by any other more appropriate name\u2014assuming the name, I am asking a question which has to be asked at the beginning of an enquiry about anything\u2014was the world, I say, always in existence and without beginning? or created, and had it a beginning? Created, I reply, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore sensible; and all sensible things are apprehended by opinion and sense and are in a process of creation and created. Now that which is created must, as we affirm, of necessity be created by a cause. But the father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible. And there is still a question to be asked about him: Which of the patterns had the artificer in view when he made the world\u2014the pattern of the unchangeable, or of that which is created? If the world be indeed fair and the artificer good, it is manifest that he must have looked to that which is eternal; but if what cannot be said without blasphemy is true, then to the created pattern. Every one will see that he must have looked to the eternal; for the world is the fairest of creations and he is the best of causes. And having been created in this way, the world has been framed in the likeness of that which is apprehended by reason and mind and is unchangeable, and must therefore of necessity, if this is admitted, be a copy of something. Now it is all-important that the beginning of everything should be according to nature. And in speaking of the copy and the original we may assume that words are akin to the matter which they describe; when they relate to the lasting and permanent and intelligible, they ought to be lasting and unalterable, and, as far as their nature allows, irrefutable and immovable\u2014nothing less. But when they express only the copy or likeness and not the eternal things themselves, they need only be likely and analogous to the real words. As being is to becoming, so is truth to belief. If then, Socrates, amid the many opinions about the gods and the generation of the universe, we are not able to give notions which are altogether and in every respect exact and consistent with one another, do not be surprised. Enough, if we adduce probabilities as likely as any others; for we must remember that I who am the speaker, and you who are the judges, are only mortal men, and we ought to accept the tale which is probable and enquire no further."}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"SOCRATES","Dialogue":"Excellent, Timaeus; and we will do precisely as you bid us. The prelude is charming, and is already accepted by us\u2014may we beg of you to proceed to the strain?"}
{"Book":"timaeus","Speaker":"TIMAEUS","Dialogue":"Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable. Wherefore also finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order, considering that this was in every way better than the other. Now the deeds of the best could never be or have been other than the fairest; and the creator, reflecting on the things which are by nature visible, found that no unintelligent creature taken as a whole was fairer than the intelligent taken as a whole; and that intelligence could not be present in anything which was devoid of soul. For which reason, when he was framing the universe, he put intelligence in soul, and soul in body, that he might be the creator of a work which was by nature fairest and best. Wherefore, using the language of probability, we may say that the world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God. This being supposed, let us proceed to the next stage: In the likeness of what animal did the Creator make the world? It would be an unworthy thing to liken it to any nature which exists as a part only; for nothing can be beautiful which is like any imperfect thing; but let us suppose the world to be the very image of that whole of which all other animals both individually and in their tribes are portions. For the original of the universe contains in itself all intelligible beings, just as this world comprehends us and all other visible creatures. For the Deity, intending to make this world like the fairest and most perfect of intelligible beings, framed one visible animal comprehending within itself all other animals of a kindred nature. Are we right in saying that there is one world, or that they are many and infinite? There must be one only, if the created copy is to accord with the original. For that which includes all other intelligible creatures cannot have a second or companion; in that case there would be need of another living being which would include both, and of which they would be parts, and the likeness would be more truly said to resemble not them, but that other which included them. In order then that the world might be solitary, like the perfect animal, the creator made not two worlds or an infinite number of them; but there is and ever will be one only-begotten and created heaven. Now that which is created is of necessity corporeal, and also visible and tangible. And nothing is visible where there is no fire, or tangible which has no solidity, and nothing is solid without earth. Wherefore also God in the beginning of creation made the body of the universe to consist of fire and earth. But two things cannot be rightly put together without a third; there must be some bond of union between them. And the fairest bond is that which makes the most complete fusion of itself and the things which it combines; and proportion is best adapted to effect such a union. For whenever in any three numbers, whether cube or square, there is a mean, which is to the last term what the first term is to it; and again, when the mean is to the first term as the last term is to the mean\u2014then the mean becoming first and last, and the first and last both becoming means, they will all of them of necessity come to be the same, and having become the same with one another will be all one. If the universal frame had been created a surface only and having no depth, a single mean would have sufficed to bind together itself and the other terms; but now, as the world must be solid, and solid bodies are always compacted not by one mean but by two, God placed water and air in the mean between fire and earth, and made them to have the same proportion so far as was possible (as fire is to air so is air to water, and as air is to water so is water to earth); and thus he bound and put together a visible and tangible heaven. And for these reasons, and out of such elements which are in number four, the body of the world was created, and it was harmonized by proportion, and therefore has the spirit of friendship; and having been reconciled to itself, it was indissoluble by the hand of any other than the framer. Now the creation took up the whole of each of the four elements; for the Creator compounded the world out of all the fire and all the water and all the air and all the earth, leaving no part of any of them nor any power of them outside. His intention was, in the first place, that the animal should be as far as possible a perfect whole and of perfect parts: secondly, that it should be one, leaving no remnants out of which another such world might be created: and also that it should be free from old age and unaffected by disease. Considering that if heat and cold and other powerful forces which unite bodies surround and attack them from without when they are unprepared, they decompose them, and by bringing diseases and old age upon them, make them waste away\u2014for this cause and on these grounds he made the world one whole, having every part entire, and being therefore perfect and not liable to old age and disease. And he gave to the world the figure which was suitable and also natural. Now to the animal which was to comprehend all animals, that figure was suitable which comprehends within itself all other figures. Wherefore he made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the centre, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures; for he considered that the like is infinitely fairer than the unlike. This he finished off, making the surface smooth all round for many reasons; in the first place, because the living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement suited to his spherical form was assigned to him, being of all the seven that which is most appropriate to mind and intelligence; and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. All the other six motions were taken away from him, and he was made not to partake of their deviations. And as this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created without legs and without feet. Such was the whole plan of the eternal God about the god that was to be, to whom for this reason he gave a body, smooth and even, having a surface in every direction equidistant from the centre, a body entire and perfect, and formed out of perfect bodies. And in the centre he put the soul, which he diffused throughout the body, making it also to be the exterior environment of it; and he made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of its excellence able to converse with itself, and needing no other friendship or acquaintance. Having these purposes in view he created the world a blessed god. Now God did not make the soul after the body, although we are speaking of them in this order; for having brought them together he would never have allowed that the elder should be ruled by the younger; but this is a random manner of speaking which we have, because somehow we ourselves too are very much under the dominion of chance. Whereas he made the soul in origin and excellence prior to and older than the body, to be the ruler and mistress, of whom the body was to be the subject. And he made her out of the following elements and on this wise: Out of the indivisible and unchangeable, and also out of that which is divisible and has to do with material bodies, he compounded a third and intermediate kind of essence, partaking of the nature of the same and of the other, and this compound he placed accordingly in a mean between the indivisible, and the divisible and material. He took the three elements of the same, the other, and the essence, and mingled them into one form, compressing by force the reluctant and unsociable nature of the other into the same. When he had mingled them with the essence and out of three made one, he again divided this whole into as many portions as was fitting, each portion being a compound of the same, the other, and the essence. And he proceeded to divide after this manner:\u2014First of all, he took away one part of the whole (1), and then he separated a second part which was double the first (2), and then he took away a third part which was half as much again as the second and three times as much as the first (3), and then he took a fourth part which was twice as much as the second (4), and a fifth part which was three times the third (9), and a sixth part which was eight times the first (8), and a seventh part which was twenty-seven times the first (27). After this he filled up the double intervals (i.e. between 1, 2, 4, 8) and the triple (i.e. between 1, 3, 9, 27) cutting off yet other portions from the mixture and placing them in the intervals, so that in each interval there were two kinds of means, the one exceeding and exceeded by equal parts of its extremes (as for example 1, 4\/3, 2, in which the mean 4\/3 is one-third of 1 more than 1, and one-third of 2 less than 2), the other being that kind of mean which exceeds and is exceeded by an equal number (e.g. - over 1, 4\/3, 3\/2, - over 2, 8\/3, 3, - over 4, 16\/3, 6,  - over 8: and - over 1, 3\/2, 2,   - over 3, 9\/2, 6, - over 9, 27\/2, 18, - over 27. Where there were intervals of 3\/2 and of 4\/3 and of 9\/8, made by the connecting terms in the former intervals, he filled up all the intervals of 4\/3 with the interval of 9\/8, leaving a fraction over; and the interval which this fraction expressed was in the ratio of 256 to 243 (e.g. 243:256::81\/64:4\/3::243\/128:2::81\/32:8\/3::243\/64:4::81\/16:16\/3::242\/32:8. And thus the whole mixture out of which he cut these portions was all exhausted by him. This entire compound he divided lengthways into two parts, which he joined to one another at the centre like the letter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and each other at the point opposite to their original meeting-point; and, comprehending them in a uniform revolution upon the same axis, he made the one the outer and the other the inner circle. Now the motion of the outer circle he called the motion of the same, and the motion of the inner circle the motion of the other or diverse. The motion of the same he carried round by the side (i.e. of the rectangular figure supposed to be inscribed in the circle of the Same) to the right, and the motion of the diverse diagonally (i.e. across the rectangular figure from corner to corner) to the left. And he gave dominion to the motion of the same and like, for that he left single and undivided; but the inner motion he divided in six places and made seven unequal circles having their intervals in ratios of two and three, three of each, and bade the orbits proceed in a direction opposite to one another; and three (Sun, Mercury, Venus) he made to move with equal swiftness, and the remaining four (Moon, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter) to move with unequal swiftness to the three and to one another, but in due proportion. Now when the Creator had framed the soul according to his will, he formed within her the corporeal universe, and brought the two together, and united them centre to centre. The soul, interfused everywhere from the centre to the circumference of heaven, of which also she is the external envelopment, herself turning in herself, began a divine beginning of never-ceasing and rational life enduring throughout all time. The body of heaven is visible, but the soul is invisible, and partakes of reason and harmony, and being made by the best of intellectual and everlasting natures, is the best of things created. And because she is composed of the same and of the other and of the essence, these three, and is divided and united in due proportion, and in her revolutions returns upon herself, the soul, when touching anything which has essence, whether dispersed in parts or undivided, is stirred through all her powers, to declare the sameness or difference of that thing and some other; and to what individuals are related, and by what affected, and in what way and how and when, both in the world of generation and in the world of immutable being. And when reason, which works with equal truth, whether she be in the circle of the diverse or of the same\u2014in voiceless silence holding her onward course in the sphere of the self-moved\u2014when reason, I say, is hovering around the sensible world and when the circle of the diverse also moving truly imparts the intimations of sense to the whole soul, then arise opinions and beliefs sure and certain. But when reason is concerned with the rational, and the circle of the same moving smoothly declares it, then intelligence and knowledge are necessarily perfected. And if any one affirms that in which these two are found to be other than the soul, he will say the very opposite of the truth. When the father and creator saw the creature which he had made moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more like the original; and as this was eternal, he sought to make the universe eternal, so far as might be. Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its fulness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call time. For there were no days and nights and months and years before the heaven was created, but when he constructed the heaven he created them also. They are all parts of time, and the past and future are created species of time, which we unconsciously but wrongly transfer to the eternal essence; for we say that he \u2018was,\u2019 he \u2018is,\u2019 he \u2018will be,\u2019 but the truth is that \u2018is\u2019 alone is properly attributed to him, and that \u2018was\u2019 and \u2018will be\u2019 are only to be spoken of becoming in time, for they are motions, but that which is immovably the same cannot become older or younger by time, nor ever did or has become, or hereafter will be, older or younger, nor is subject at all to any of those states which affect moving and sensible things and of which generation is the cause. These are the forms of time, which imitates eternity and revolves according to a law of number. Moreover, when we say that what has become IS become and what becomes IS becoming, and that what will become IS about to become and that the non-existent IS non-existent\u2014all these are inaccurate modes of expression (compare Parmen.). But perhaps this whole subject will be more suitably discussed on some other occasion. Time, then, and the heaven came into being at the same instant in order that, having been created together, if ever there was to be a dissolution of them, they might be dissolved together. It was framed after the pattern of the eternal nature, that it might resemble this as far as was possible; for the pattern exists from eternity, and the created heaven has been, and is, and will be, in all time. Such was the mind and thought of God in the creation of time. The sun and moon and five other stars, which are called the planets, were created by him in order to distinguish and preserve the numbers of time; and when he had made their several bodies, he placed them in the orbits in which the circle of the other was revolving,\u2014in seven orbits seven stars. First, there was the moon in the orbit nearest the earth, and next the sun, in the second orbit above the earth; then came the morning star and the star sacred to Hermes, moving in orbits which have an equal swiftness with the sun, but in an opposite direction; and this is the reason why the sun and Hermes and Lucifer overtake and are overtaken by each other. To enumerate the places which he assigned to the other stars, and to give all the reasons why he assigned them, although a secondary matter, would give more trouble than the primary. These things at some future time, when we are at leisure, may have the consideration which they deserve, but not at present. Now, when all the stars which were necessary to the creation of time had attained a motion suitable to them, and had become living creatures having bodies fastened by vital chains, and learnt their appointed task, moving in the motion of the diverse, which is diagonal, and passes through and is governed by the motion of the same, they revolved, some in a larger and some in a lesser orbit\u2014those which had the lesser orbit revolving faster, and those which had the larger more slowly. Now by reason of the motion of the same, those which revolved fastest appeared to be overtaken by those which moved slower although they really overtook them; for the motion of the same made them all turn in a spiral, and, because some went one way and some another, that which receded most slowly from the sphere of the same, which was the swiftest, appeared to follow it most nearly. That there might be some visible measure of their relative swiftness and slowness as they proceeded in their eight courses, God lighted a fire, which we now call the sun, in the second from the earth of these orbits, that it might give light to the whole of heaven, and that the animals, as many as nature intended, might participate in number, learning arithmetic from the revolution of the same and the like. Thus then, and for this reason the night and the day were created, being the period of the one most intelligent revolution. And the month is accomplished when the moon has completed her orbit and overtaken the sun, and the year when the sun has completed his own orbit. Mankind, with hardly an exception, have not remarked the periods of the other stars, and they have no name for them, and do not measure them against one another by the help of number, and hence they can scarcely be said to know that their wanderings, being infinite in number and admirable for their variety, make up time. And yet there is no difficulty in seeing that the perfect number of time fulfils the perfect year when all the eight revolutions, having their relative degrees of swiftness, are accomplished together and attain their completion at the same time, measured by the rotation of the same and equally moving. After this manner, and for these reasons, came into being such of the stars as in their heavenly progress received reversals of motion, to the end that the created heaven might imitate the eternal nature, and be as like as possible to the perfect and intelligible animal. Thus far and until the birth of time the created universe was made in the likeness of the original, but inasmuch as all animals were not yet comprehended therein, it was still unlike. What remained, the creator then proceeded to fashion after the nature of the pattern. Now as in the ideal animal the mind perceives ideas or species of a certain nature and number, he thought that this created animal ought to have species of a like nature and number. There are four such; one of them is the heavenly race of the gods; another, the race of birds whose way is in the air; the third, the watery species; and the fourth, the pedestrian and land creatures. Of the heavenly and divine, he created the greater part out of fire, that they might be the brightest of all things and fairest to behold, and he fashioned them after the likeness of the universe in the figure of a circle, and made them follow the intelligent motion of the supreme, distributing them over the whole circumference of heaven, which was to be a true cosmos or glorious world spangled with them all over. And he gave to each of them two movements: the first, a movement on the same spot after the same manner, whereby they ever continue to think consistently the same thoughts about the same things; the second, a forward movement, in which they are controlled by the revolution of the same and the like; but by the other five motions they were unaffected, in order that each of them might attain the highest perfection. And for this reason the fixed stars were created, to be divine and eternal animals, ever-abiding and revolving after the same manner and on the same spot; and the other stars which reverse their motion and are subject to deviations of this kind, were created in the manner already described. The earth, which is our nurse, clinging (or \u2018circling\u2019) around the pole which is extended through the universe, he framed to be the guardian and artificer of night and day, first and eldest of gods that are in the interior of heaven. Vain would be the attempt to tell all the figures of them circling as in dance, and their juxtapositions, and the return of them in their revolutions upon themselves, and their approximations, and to say which of these deities in their conjunctions meet, and which of them are in opposition, and in what order they get behind and before one another, and when they are severally eclipsed to our sight and again reappear, sending terrors and intimations of the future to those who cannot calculate their movements\u2014to attempt to tell of all this without a visible representation of the heavenly system would be labour in vain. Enough on this head; and now let what we have said about the nature of the created and visible gods have an end. To know or tell the origin of the other divinities is beyond us, and we must accept the traditions of the men of old time who affirm themselves to be the offspring of the gods\u2014that is what they say\u2014and they must surely have known their own ancestors. How can we doubt the word of the children of the gods? Although they give no probable or certain proofs, still, as they declare that they are speaking of what took place in their own family, we must conform to custom and believe them. In this manner, then, according to them, the genealogy of these gods is to be received and set forth. Oceanus and Tethys were the children of Earth and Heaven, and from these sprang Phorcys and Cronos and Rhea, and all that generation; and from Cronos and Rhea sprang Zeus and Here, and all those who are said to be their brethren, and others who were the children of these. Now, when all of them, both those who visibly appear in their revolutions as well as those other gods who are of a more retiring nature, had come into being, the creator of the universe addressed them in these words: \u2018Gods, children of gods, who are my works, and of whom I am the artificer and father, my creations are indissoluble, if so I will. All that is bound may be undone, but only an evil being would wish to undo that which is harmonious and happy. Wherefore, since ye are but creatures, ye are not altogether immortal and indissoluble, but ye shall certainly not be dissolved, nor be liable to the fate of death, having in my will a greater and mightier bond than those with which ye were bound at the time of your birth. And now listen to my instructions:\u2014Three tribes of mortal beings remain to be created\u2014without them the universe will be incomplete, for it will not contain every kind of animal which it ought to contain, if it is to be perfect. On the other hand, if they were created by me and received life at my hands, they would be on an equality with the gods. In order then that they may be mortal, and that this universe may be truly universal, do ye, according to your natures, betake yourselves to the formation of animals, imitating the power which was shown by me in creating you. The part of them worthy of the name immortal, which is called divine and is the guiding principle of those who are willing to follow justice and you\u2014of that divine part I will myself sow the seed, and having made a beginning, I will hand the work over to you. And do ye then interweave the mortal with the immortal, and make and beget living creatures, and give them food, and make them to grow, and receive them again in death.\u2019 Thus he spake, and once more into the cup in which he had previously mingled the soul of the universe he poured the remains of the elements, and mingled them in much the same manner; they were not, however, pure as before, but diluted to the second and third degree. And having made it he divided the whole mixture into souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each soul to a star; and having there placed them as in a chariot, he showed them the nature of the universe, and declared to them the laws of destiny, according to which their first birth would be one and the same for all,\u2014no one should suffer a disadvantage at his hands; they were to be sown in the instruments of time severally adapted to them, and to come forth the most religious of animals; and as human nature was of two kinds, the superior race would hereafter be called man. Now, when they should be implanted in bodies by necessity, and be always gaining or losing some part of their bodily substance, then in the first place it would be necessary that they should all have in them one and the same faculty of sensation, arising out of irresistible impressions; in the second place, they must have love, in which pleasure and pain mingle; also fear and anger, and the feelings which are akin or opposite to them; if they conquered these they would live righteously, and if they were conquered by them, unrighteously. He who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence. But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired, and would not cease from his toils and transformations until he followed the revolution of the same and the like within him, and overcame by the help of reason the turbulent and irrational mob of later accretions, made up of fire and air and water and earth, and returned to the form of his first and better state. Having given all these laws to his creatures, that he might be guiltless of future evil in any of them, the creator sowed some of them in the earth, and some in the moon, and some in the other instruments of time; and when he had sown them he committed to the younger gods the fashioning of their mortal bodies, and desired them to furnish what was still lacking to the human soul, and having made all the suitable additions, to rule over them, and to pilot the mortal animal in the best and wisest manner which they could, and avert from him all but self-inflicted evils. When the creator had made all these ordinances he remained in his own accustomed nature, and his children heard and were obedient to their father\u2019s word, and receiving from him the immortal principle of a mortal creature, in imitation of their own creator they borrowed portions of fire, and earth, and water, and air from the world, which were hereafter to be restored\u2014these they took and welded them together, not with the indissoluble chains by which they were themselves bound, but with little pegs too small to be visible, making up out of all the four elements each separate body, and fastening the courses of the immortal soul in a body which was in a state of perpetual influx and efflux. Now these courses, detained as in a vast river, neither overcame nor were overcome; but were hurrying and hurried to and fro, so that the whole animal was moved and progressed, irregularly however and irrationally and anyhow, in all the six directions of motion, wandering backwards and forwards, and right and left, and up and down, and in all the six directions. For great as was the advancing and retiring flood which provided nourishment, the affections produced by external contact caused still greater tumult\u2014when the body of any one met and came into collision with some external fire, or with the solid earth or the gliding waters, or was caught in the tempest borne on the air, and the motions produced by any of these impulses were carried through the body to the soul. All such motions have consequently received the general name of \u2018sensations,\u2019 which they still retain. And they did in fact at that time create a very great and mighty movement; uniting with the ever-flowing stream in stirring up and violently shaking the courses of the soul, they completely stopped the revolution of the same by their opposing current, and hindered it from predominating and advancing; and they so disturbed the nature of the other or diverse, that the three double intervals (i.e. between 1, 2, 4, 8), and the three triple intervals (i.e. between 1, 3, 9, 27), together with the mean terms and connecting links which are expressed by the ratios of 3:2, and 4:3, and of 9:8\u2014these, although they cannot be wholly undone except by him who united them, were twisted by them in all sorts of ways, and the circles were broken and disordered in every possible manner, so that when they moved they were tumbling to pieces, and moved irrationally, at one time in a reverse direction, and then again obliquely, and then upside down, as you might imagine a person who is upside down and has his head leaning upon the ground and his feet up against something in the air; and when he is in such a position, both he and the spectator fancy that the right of either is his left, and the left right. If, when powerfully experiencing these and similar effects, the revolutions of the soul come in contact with some external thing, either of the class of the same or of the other, they speak of the same or of the other in a manner the very opposite of the truth; and they become false and foolish, and there is no course or revolution in them which has a guiding or directing power; and if again any sensations enter in violently from without and drag after them the whole vessel of the soul, then the courses of the soul, though they seem to conquer, are really conquered. And by reason of all these affections, the soul, when encased in a mortal body, now, as in the beginning, is at first without intelligence; but when the flood of growth and nutriment abates, and the courses of the soul, calming down, go their own way and become steadier as time goes on, then the several circles return to their natural form, and their revolutions are corrected, and they call the same and the other by their right names, and make the possessor of them to become a rational being. And if these combine in him with any true nurture or education, he attains the fulness and health of the perfect man, and escapes the worst disease of all; but if he neglects education he walks lame to the end of his life, and returns imperfect and good for nothing to the world below. This, however, is a later stage; at present we must treat more exactly the subject before us, which involves a preliminary enquiry into the generation of the body and its members, and as to how the soul was created\u2014for what reason and by what providence of the gods; and holding fast to probability, we must pursue our way. First, then, the gods, imitating the spherical shape of the universe, enclosed the two divine courses in a spherical body, that, namely, which we now term the head, being the most divine part of us and the lord of all that is in us: to this the gods, when they put together the body, gave all the other members to be servants, considering that it partook of every sort of motion. In order then that it might not tumble about among the high and deep places of the earth, but might be able to get over the one and out of the other, they provided the body to be its vehicle and means of locomotion; which consequently had length and was furnished with four limbs extended and flexible; these God contrived to be instruments of locomotion with which it might take hold and find support, and so be able to pass through all places, carrying on high the dwelling-place of the most sacred and divine part of us. Such was the origin of legs and hands, which for this reason were attached to every man; and the gods, deeming the front part of man to be more honourable and more fit to command than the hinder part, made us to move mostly in a forward direction. Wherefore man must needs have his front part unlike and distinguished from the rest of his body. And so in the vessel of the head, they first of all put a face in which they inserted organs to minister in all things to the providence of the soul, and they appointed this part, which has authority, to be by nature the part which is in front. And of the organs they first contrived the eyes to give light, and the principle according to which they were inserted was as follows: So much of fire as would not burn, but gave a gentle light, they formed into a substance akin to the light of every-day life; and the pure fire which is within us and related thereto they made to flow through the eyes in a stream smooth and dense, compressing the whole eye, and especially the centre part, so that it kept out everything of a coarser nature, and allowed to pass only this pure element. When the light of day surrounds the stream of vision, then like falls upon like, and they coalesce, and one body is formed by natural affinity in the line of vision, wherever the light that falls from within meets with an external object. And the whole stream of vision, being similarly affected in virtue of similarity, diffuses the motions of what it touches or what touches it over the whole body, until they reach the soul, causing that perception which we call sight. But when night comes on and the external and kindred fire departs, then the stream of vision is cut off; for going forth to an unlike element it is changed and extinguished, being no longer of one nature with the surrounding atmosphere which is now deprived of fire: and so the eye no longer sees, and we feel disposed to sleep. For when the eyelids, which the gods invented for the preservation of sight, are closed, they keep in the internal fire; and the power of the fire diffuses and equalizes the inward motions; when they are equalized, there is rest, and when the rest is profound, sleep comes over us scarce disturbed by dreams; but where the greater motions still remain, of whatever nature and in whatever locality, they engender corresponding visions in dreams, which are remembered by us when we are awake and in the external world. And now there is no longer any difficulty in understanding the creation of images in mirrors and all smooth and bright surfaces. For from the communion of the internal and external fires, and again from the union of them and their numerous transformations when they meet in the mirror, all these appearances of necessity arise, when the fire from the face coalesces with the fire from the eye on the bright and smooth surface. And right appears left and left right, because the visual rays come into contact with the rays emitted by the object in a manner contrary to the usual mode of meeting; but the right appears right, and the left left, when the position of one of the two concurring lights is reversed; and this happens when the mirror is concave and its smooth surface repels the right stream of vision to the left side, and the left to the right (He is speaking of two kinds of mirrors, first the plane, secondly the concave; and the latter is supposed to be placed, first horizontally, and then vertically.). Or if the mirror be turned vertically, then the concavity makes the countenance appear to be all upside down, and the lower rays are driven upwards and the upper downwards. All these are to be reckoned among the second and co-operative causes which God, carrying into execution the idea of the best as far as possible, uses as his ministers. They are thought by most men not to be the second, but the prime causes of all things, because they freeze and heat, and contract and dilate, and the like. But they are not so, for they are incapable of reason or intellect; the only being which can properly have mind is the invisible soul, whereas fire and water, and earth and air, are all of them visible bodies. The lover of intellect and knowledge ought to explore causes of intelligent nature first of all, and, secondly, of those things which, being moved by others, are compelled to move others. And this is what we too must do. Both kinds of causes should be acknowledged by us, but a distinction should be made between those which are endowed with mind and are the workers of things fair and good, and those which are deprived of intelligence and always produce chance effects without order or design. Of the second or co-operative causes of sight, which help to give to the eyes the power which they now possess, enough has been said. I will therefore now proceed to speak of the higher use and purpose for which God has given them to us. The sight in my opinion is the source of the greatest benefit to us, for had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolutions of the years, have created number, and have given us a conception of time, and the power of enquiring about the nature of the universe; and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man. This is the greatest boon of sight: and of the lesser benefits why should I speak? even the ordinary man if he were deprived of them would bewail his loss, but in vain. Thus much let me say however: God invented and gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed; and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries. The same may be affirmed of speech and hearing: they have been given by the gods to the same end and for a like reason. For this is the principal end of speech, whereto it most contributes. Moreover, so much of music as is adapted to the sound of the voice and to the sense of hearing is granted to us for the sake of harmony; and harmony, which has motions akin to the revolutions of our souls, is not regarded by the intelligent votary of the Muses as given by them with a view to irrational pleasure, which is deemed to be the purpose of it in our day, but as meant to correct any discord which may have arisen in the courses of the soul, and to be our ally in bringing her into harmony and agreement with herself; and rhythm too was given by them for the same reason, on account of the irregular and graceless ways which prevail among mankind generally, and to help us against them. Thus far in what we have been saying, with small exception, the works of intelligence have been set forth; and now we must place by the side of them in our discourse the things which come into being through necessity\u2014for the creation is mixed, being made up of necessity and mind. Mind, the ruling power, persuaded necessity to bring the greater part of created things to perfection, and thus and after this manner in the beginning, when the influence of reason got the better of necessity, the universe was created. But if a person will truly tell of the way in which the work was accomplished, he must include the other influence of the variable cause as well. Wherefore, we must return again and find another suitable beginning, as about the former matters, so also about these. To which end we must consider the nature of fire, and water, and air, and earth, such as they were prior to the creation of the heaven, and what was happening to them in this previous state; for no one has as yet explained the manner of their generation, but we speak of fire and the rest of them, whatever they mean, as though men knew their natures, and we maintain them to be the first principles and letters or elements of the whole, when they cannot reasonably be compared by a man of any sense even to syllables or first compounds. And let me say thus much: I will not now speak of the first principle or principles of all things, or by whatever name they are to be called, for this reason\u2014because it is difficult to set forth my opinion according to the method of discussion which we are at present employing. Do not imagine, any more than I can bring myself to imagine, that I should be right in undertaking so great and difficult a task. Remembering what I said at first about probability, I will do my best to give as probable an explanation as any other\u2014or rather, more probable; and I will first go back to the beginning and try to speak of each thing and of all. Once more, then, at the commencement of my discourse, I call upon God, and beg him to be our saviour out of a strange and unwonted enquiry, and to bring us to the haven of probability. So now let us begin again. This new beginning of our discussion of the universe requires a fuller division than the former; for then we made two classes, now a third must be revealed. The two sufficed for the former discussion: one, which we assumed, was a pattern intelligible and always the same; and the second was only the imitation of the pattern, generated and visible. There is also a third kind which we did not distinguish at the time, conceiving that the two would be enough. But now the argument seems to require that we should set forth in words another kind, which is difficult of explanation and dimly seen. What nature are we to attribute to this new kind of being? We reply, that it is the receptacle, and in a manner the nurse, of all generation. I have spoken the truth; but I must express myself in clearer language, and this will be an arduous task for many reasons, and in particular because I must first raise questions concerning fire and the other elements, and determine what each of them is; for to say, with any probability or certitude, which of them should be called water rather than fire, and which should be called any of them rather than all or some one of them, is a difficult matter. How, then, shall we settle this point, and what questions about the elements may be fairly raised? In the first place, we see that what we just now called water, by condensation, I suppose, becomes stone and earth; and this same element, when melted and dispersed, passes into vapour and air. Air, again, when inflamed, becomes fire; and again fire, when condensed and extinguished, passes once more into the form of air; and once more, air, when collected and condensed, produces cloud and mist; and from these, when still more compressed, comes flowing water, and from water comes earth and stones once more; and thus generation appears to be transmitted from one to the other in a circle. Thus, then, as the several elements never present themselves in the same form, how can any one have the assurance to assert positively that any of them, whatever it may be, is one thing rather than another? No one can. But much the safest plan is to speak of them as follows:\u2014Anything which we see to be continually changing, as, for example, fire, we must not call \u2018this\u2019 or \u2018that,\u2019 but rather say that it is \u2018of such a nature\u2019; nor let us speak of water as \u2018this\u2019; but always as \u2018such\u2019; nor must we imply that there is any stability in any of those things which we indicate by the use of the words \u2018this\u2019 and \u2018that,\u2019 supposing ourselves to signify something thereby; for they are too volatile to be detained in any such expressions as \u2018this,\u2019 or \u2018that,\u2019 or \u2018relative to this,\u2019 or any other mode of speaking which represents them as permanent. We ought not to apply \u2018this\u2019 to any of them, but rather the word \u2018such\u2019; which expresses the similar principle circulating in each and all of them; for example, that should be called \u2018fire\u2019 which is of such a nature always, and so of everything that has generation. That in which the elements severally grow up, and appear, and decay, is alone to be called by the name \u2018this\u2019 or \u2018that\u2019; but that which is of a certain nature, hot or white, or anything which admits of opposite qualities, and all things that are compounded of them, ought not to be so denominated. Let me make another attempt to explain my meaning more clearly. Suppose a person to make all kinds of figures of gold and to be always transmuting one form into all the rest;\u2014somebody points to one of them and asks what it is. By far the safest and truest answer is, That is gold; and not to call the triangle or any other figures which are formed in the gold \u2018these,\u2019 as though they had existence, since they are in process of change while he is making the assertion; but if the questioner be willing to take the safe and indefinite expression, \u2018such,\u2019 we should be satisfied. And the same argument applies to the universal nature which receives all bodies\u2014that must be always called the same; for, while receiving all things, she never departs at all from her own nature, and never in any way, or at any time, assumes a form like that of any of the things which enter into her; she is the natural recipient of all impressions, and is stirred and informed by them, and appears different from time to time by reason of them. But the forms which enter into and go out of her are the likenesses of real existences modelled after their patterns in a wonderful and inexplicable manner, which we will hereafter investigate. For the present we have only to conceive of three natures: first, that which is in process of generation; secondly, that in which the generation takes place; and thirdly, that of which the thing generated is a resemblance. And we may liken the receiving principle to a mother, and the source or spring to a father, and the intermediate nature to a child; and may remark further, that if the model is to take every variety of form, then the matter in which the model is fashioned will not be duly prepared, unless it is formless, and free from the impress of any of those shapes which it is hereafter to receive from without. For if the matter were like any of the supervening forms, then whenever any opposite or entirely different nature was stamped upon its surface, it would take the impression badly, because it would intrude its own shape. Wherefore, that which is to receive all forms should have no form; as in making perfumes they first contrive that the liquid substance which is to receive the scent shall be as inodorous as possible; or as those who wish to impress figures on soft substances do not allow any previous impression to remain, but begin by making the surface as even and smooth as possible. In the same way that which is to receive perpetually and through its whole extent the resemblances of all eternal beings ought to be devoid of any particular form. Wherefore, the mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any way sensible things, is not to be termed earth, or air, or fire, or water, or any of their compounds or any of the elements from which these are derived, but is an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible. In saying this we shall not be far wrong; as far, however, as we can attain to a knowledge of her from the previous considerations, we may truly say that fire is that part of her nature which from time to time is inflamed, and water that which is moistened, and that the mother substance becomes earth and air, in so far as she receives the impressions of them. Let us consider this question more precisely. Is there any self-existent fire? and do all those things which we call self-existent exist? or are only those things which we see, or in some way perceive through the bodily organs, truly existent, and nothing whatever besides them? And is all that which we call an intelligible essence nothing at all, and only a name? Here is a question which we must not leave unexamined or undetermined, nor must we affirm too confidently that there can be no decision; neither must we interpolate in our present long discourse a digression equally long, but if it is possible to set forth a great principle in a few words, that is just what we want. Thus I state my view:\u2014If mind and true opinion are two distinct classes, then I say that there certainly are these self-existent ideas unperceived by sense, and apprehended only by the mind; if, however, as some say, true opinion differs in no respect from mind, then everything that we perceive through the body is to be regarded as most real and certain. But we must affirm them to be distinct, for they have a distinct origin and are of a different nature; the one is implanted in us by instruction, the other by persuasion; the one is always accompanied by true reason, the other is without reason; the one cannot be overcome by persuasion, but the other can: and lastly, every man may be said to share in true opinion, but mind is the attribute of the gods and of very few men. Wherefore also we must acknowledge that there is one kind of being which is always the same, uncreated and indestructible, never receiving anything into itself from without, nor itself going out to any other, but invisible and imperceptible by any sense, and of which the contemplation is granted to intelligence only. And there is another nature of the same name with it, and like to it, perceived by sense, created, always in motion, becoming in place and again vanishing out of place, which is apprehended by opinion and sense. And there is a third nature, which is space, and is eternal, and admits not of destruction and provides a home for all created things, and is apprehended without the help of sense, by a kind of spurious reason, and is hardly real; which we beholding as in a dream, say of all existence that it must of necessity be in some place and occupy a space, but that what is neither in heaven nor in earth has no existence. Of these and other things of the same kind, relating to the true and waking reality of nature, we have only this dreamlike sense, and we are unable to cast off sleep and determine the truth about them. For an image, since the reality, after which it is modelled, does not belong to it, and it exists ever as the fleeting shadow of some other, must be inferred to be in another (i.e. in space), grasping existence in some way or other, or it could not be at all. But true and exact reason, vindicating the nature of true being, maintains that while two things (i.e. the image and space) are different they cannot exist one of them in the other and so be one and also two at the same time. Thus have I concisely given the result of my thoughts; and my verdict is that being and space and generation, these three, existed in their three ways before the heaven; and that the nurse of generation, moistened by water and inflamed by fire, and receiving the forms of earth and air, and experiencing all the affections which accompany these, presented a strange variety of appearances; and being full of powers which were neither similar nor equally balanced, was never in any part in a state of equipoise, but swaying unevenly hither and thither, was shaken by them, and by its motion again shook them; and the elements when moved were separated and carried continually, some one way, some another; as, when grain is shaken and winnowed by fans and other instruments used in the threshing of corn, the close and heavy particles are borne away and settle in one direction, and the loose and light particles in another. In this manner, the four kinds or elements were then shaken by the receiving vessel, which, moving like a winnowing machine, scattered far away from one another the elements most unlike, and forced the most similar elements into close contact. Wherefore also the various elements had different places before they were arranged so as to form the universe. At first, they were all without reason and measure. But when the world began to get into order, fire and water and earth and air had only certain faint traces of themselves, and were altogether such as everything might be expected to be in the absence of God; this, I say, was their nature at that time, and God fashioned them by form and number. Let it be consistently maintained by us in all that we say that God made them as far as possible the fairest and best, out of things which were not fair and good. And now I will endeavour to show you the disposition and generation of them by an unaccustomed argument, which I am compelled to use; but I believe that you will be able to follow me, for your education has made you familiar with the methods of science. In the first place, then, as is evident to all, fire and earth and water and air are bodies. And every sort of body possesses solidity, and every solid must necessarily be contained in planes; and every plane rectilinear figure is composed of triangles; and all triangles are originally of two kinds, both of which are made up of one right and two acute angles; one of them has at either end of the base the half of a divided right angle, having equal sides, while in the other the right angle is divided into unequal parts, having unequal sides. These, then, proceeding by a combination of probability with demonstration, we assume to be the original elements of fire and the other bodies; but the principles which are prior to these God only knows, and he of men who is the friend of God. And next we have to determine what are the four most beautiful bodies which are unlike one another, and of which some are capable of resolution into one another; for having discovered thus much, we shall know the true origin of earth and fire and of the proportionate and intermediate elements. And then we shall not be willing to allow that there are any distinct kinds of visible bodies fairer than these. Wherefore we must endeavour to construct the four forms of bodies which excel in beauty, and then we shall be able to say that we have sufficiently apprehended their nature. Now of the two triangles, the isosceles has one form only; the scalene or unequal-sided has an infinite number. Of the infinite forms we must select the most beautiful, if we are to proceed in due order, and any one who can point out a more beautiful form than ours for the construction of these bodies, shall carry off the palm, not as an enemy, but as a friend. Now, the one which we maintain to be the most beautiful of all the many triangles (and we need not speak of the others) is that of which the double forms a third triangle which is equilateral; the reason of this would be long to tell; he who disproves what we are saying, and shows that we are mistaken, may claim a friendly victory. Then let us choose two triangles, out of which fire and the other elements have been constructed, one isosceles, the other having the square of the longer side equal to three times the square of the lesser side. Now is the time to explain what was before obscurely said: there was an error in imagining that all the four elements might be generated by and into one another; this, I say, was an erroneous supposition, for there are generated from the triangles which we have selected four kinds\u2014three from the one which has the sides unequal; the fourth alone is framed out of the isosceles triangle. Hence they cannot all be resolved into one another, a great number of small bodies being combined into a few large ones, or the converse. But three of them can be thus resolved and compounded, for they all spring from one, and when the greater bodies are broken up, many small bodies will spring up out of them and take their own proper figures; or, again, when many small bodies are dissolved into their triangles, if they become one, they will form one large mass of another kind. So much for their passage into one another. I have now to speak of their several kinds, and show out of what combinations of numbers each of them was formed. The first will be the simplest and smallest construction, and its element is that triangle which has its hypotenuse twice the lesser side. When two such triangles are joined at the diagonal, and this is repeated three times, and the triangles rest their diagonals and shorter sides on the same point as a centre, a single equilateral triangle is formed out of six triangles; and four equilateral triangles, if put together, make out of every three plane angles one solid angle, being that which is nearest to the most obtuse of plane angles; and out of the combination of these four angles arises the first solid form which distributes into equal and similar parts the whole circle in which it is inscribed. The second species of solid is formed out of the same triangles, which unite as eight equilateral triangles and form one solid angle out of four plane angles, and out of six such angles the second body is completed. And the third body is made up of 120 triangular elements, forming twelve solid angles, each of them included in five plane equilateral triangles, having altogether twenty bases, each of which is an equilateral triangle. The one element (that is, the triangle which has its hypotenuse twice the lesser side) having generated these figures, generated no more; but the isosceles triangle produced the fourth elementary figure, which is compounded of four such triangles, joining their right angles in a centre, and forming one equilateral quadrangle. Six of these united form eight solid angles, each of which is made by the combination of three plane right angles; the figure of the body thus composed is a cube, having six plane quadrangular equilateral bases. There was yet a fifth combination which God used in the delineation of the universe. Now, he who, duly reflecting on all this, enquires whether the worlds are to be regarded as indefinite or definite in number, will be of opinion that the notion of their indefiniteness is characteristic of a sadly indefinite and ignorant mind. He, however, who raises the question whether they are to be truly regarded as one or five, takes up a more reasonable position. Arguing from probabilities, I am of opinion that they are one; another, regarding the question from another point of view, will be of another mind. But, leaving this enquiry, let us proceed to distribute the elementary forms, which have now been created in idea, among the four elements. To earth, then, let us assign the cubical form; for earth is the most immoveable of the four and the most plastic of all bodies, and that which has the most stable bases must of necessity be of such a nature. Now, of the triangles which we assumed at first, that which has two equal sides is by nature more firmly based than that which has unequal sides; and of the compound figures which are formed out of either, the plane equilateral quadrangle has necessarily a more stable basis than the equilateral triangle, both in the whole and in the parts. Wherefore, in assigning this figure to earth, we adhere to probability; and to water we assign that one of the remaining forms which is the least moveable; and the most moveable of them to fire; and to air that which is intermediate. Also we assign the smallest body to fire, and the greatest to water, and the intermediate in size to air; and, again, the acutest body to fire, and the next in acuteness to air, and the third to water. Of all these elements, that which has the fewest bases must necessarily be the most moveable, for it must be the acutest and most penetrating in every way, and also the lightest as being composed of the smallest number of similar particles: and the second body has similar properties in a second degree, and the third body in the third degree. Let it be agreed, then, both according to strict reason and according to probability, that the pyramid is the solid which is the original element and seed of fire; and let us assign the element which was next in the order of generation to air, and the third to water. We must imagine all these to be so small that no single particle of any of the four kinds is seen by us on account of their smallness: but when many of them are collected together their aggregates are seen. And the ratios of their numbers, motions, and other properties, everywhere God, as far as necessity allowed or gave consent, has exactly perfected, and harmonized in due proportion. From all that we have just been saying about the elements or kinds, the most probable conclusion is as follows:\u2014earth, when meeting with fire and dissolved by its sharpness, whether the dissolution take place in the fire itself or perhaps in some mass of air or water, is borne hither and thither, until its parts, meeting together and mutually harmonising, again become earth; for they can never take any other form. But water, when divided by fire or by air, on re-forming, may become one part fire and two parts air; and a single volume of air divided becomes two of fire. Again, when a small body of fire is contained in a larger body of air or water or earth, and both are moving, and the fire struggling is overcome and broken up, then two volumes of fire form one volume of air; and when air is overcome and cut up into small pieces, two and a half parts of air are condensed into one part of water. Let us consider the matter in another way. When one of the other elements is fastened upon by fire, and is cut by the sharpness of its angles and sides, it coalesces with the fire, and then ceases to be cut by them any longer. For no element which is one and the same with itself can be changed by or change another of the same kind and in the same state. But so long as in the process of transition the weaker is fighting against the stronger, the dissolution continues. Again, when a few small particles, enclosed in many larger ones, are in process of decomposition and extinction, they only cease from their tendency to extinction when they consent to pass into the conquering nature, and fire becomes air and air water. But if bodies of another kind go and attack them (i.e. the small particles), the latter continue to be dissolved until, being completely forced back and dispersed, they make their escape to their own kindred, or else, being overcome and assimilated to the conquering power, they remain where they are and dwell with their victors, and from being many become one. And owing to these affections, all things are changing their place, for by the motion of the receiving vessel the bulk of each class is distributed into its proper place; but those things which become unlike themselves and like other things, are hurried by the shaking into the place of the things to which they grow like. Now all unmixed and primary bodies are produced by such causes as these. As to the subordinate species which are included in the greater kinds, they are to be attributed to the varieties in the structure of the two original triangles. For either structure did not originally produce the triangle of one size only, but some larger and some smaller, and there are as many sizes as there are species of the four elements. Hence when they are mingled with themselves and with one another there is an endless variety of them, which those who would arrive at the probable truth of nature ought duly to consider. Unless a person comes to an understanding about the nature and conditions of rest and motion, he will meet with many difficulties in the discussion which follows. Something has been said of this matter already, and something more remains to be said, which is, that motion never exists in what is uniform. For to conceive that anything can be moved without a mover is hard or indeed impossible, and equally impossible to conceive that there can be a mover unless there be something which can be moved\u2014motion cannot exist where either of these are wanting, and for these to be uniform is impossible; wherefore we must assign rest to uniformity and motion to the want of uniformity. Now inequality is the cause of the nature which is wanting in uniformity; and of this we have already described the origin. But there still remains the further point\u2014why things when divided after their kinds do not cease to pass through one another and to change their place\u2014which we will now proceed to explain. In the revolution of the universe are comprehended all the four elements, and this being circular and having a tendency to come together, compresses everything and will not allow any place to be left void. Wherefore, also, fire above all things penetrates everywhere, and air next, as being next in rarity of the elements; and the two other elements in like manner penetrate according to their degrees of rarity. For those things which are composed of the largest particles have the largest void left in their compositions, and those which are composed of the smallest particles have the least. And the contraction caused by the compression thrusts the smaller particles into the interstices of the larger. And thus, when the small parts are placed side by side with the larger, and the lesser divide the greater and the greater unite the lesser, all the elements are borne up and down and hither and thither towards their own places; for the change in the size of each changes its position in space. And these causes generate an inequality which is always maintained, and is continually creating a perpetual motion of the elements in all time. In the next place we have to consider that there are divers kinds of fire. There are, for example, first, flame; and secondly, those emanations of flame which do not burn but only give light to the eyes; thirdly, the remains of fire, which are seen in red-hot embers after the flame has been extinguished. There are similar differences in the air; of which the brightest part is called the aether, and the most turbid sort mist and darkness; and there are various other nameless kinds which arise from the inequality of the triangles. Water, again, admits in the first place of a division into two kinds; the one liquid and the other fusile. The liquid kind is composed of the small and unequal particles of water; and moves itself and is moved by other bodies owing to the want of uniformity and the shape of its particles; whereas the fusile kind, being formed of large and uniform particles, is more stable than the other, and is heavy and compact by reason of its uniformity. But when fire gets in and dissolves the particles and destroys the uniformity, it has greater mobility, and becoming fluid is thrust forth by the neighbouring air and spreads upon the earth; and this dissolution of the solid masses is called melting, and their spreading out upon the earth flowing. Again, when the fire goes out of the fusile substance, it does not pass into a vacuum, but into the neighbouring air; and the air which is displaced forces together the liquid and still moveable mass into the place which was occupied by the fire, and unites it with itself. Thus compressed the mass resumes its equability, and is again at unity with itself, because the fire which was the author of the inequality has retreated; and this departure of the fire is called cooling, and the coming together which follows upon it is termed congealment. Of all the kinds termed fusile, that which is the densest and is formed out of the finest and most uniform parts is that most precious possession called gold, which is hardened by filtration through rock; this is unique in kind, and has both a glittering and a yellow colour. A shoot of gold, which is so dense as to be very hard, and takes a black colour, is termed adamant. There is also another kind which has parts nearly like gold, and of which there are several species; it is denser than gold, and it contains a small and fine portion of earth, and is therefore harder, yet also lighter because of the great interstices which it has within itself; and this substance, which is one of the bright and denser kinds of water, when solidified is called copper. There is an alloy of earth mingled with it, which, when the two parts grow old and are disunited, shows itself separately and is called rust. The remaining phenomena of the same kind there will be no difficulty in reasoning out by the method of probabilities. A man may sometimes set aside meditations about eternal things, and for recreation turn to consider the truths of generation which are probable only; he will thus gain a pleasure not to be repented of, and secure for himself while he lives a wise and moderate pastime. Let us grant ourselves this indulgence, and go through the probabilities relating to the same subjects which follow next in order. Water which is mingled with fire, so much as is fine and liquid (being so called by reason of its motion and the way in which it rolls along the ground), and soft, because its bases give way and are less stable than those of earth, when separated from fire and air and isolated, becomes more uniform, and by their retirement is compressed into itself; and if the condensation be very great, the water above the earth becomes hail, but on the earth, ice; and that which is congealed in a less degree and is only half solid, when above the earth is called snow, and when upon the earth, and condensed from dew, hoar-frost. Then, again, there are the numerous kinds of water which have been mingled with one another, and are distilled through plants which grow in the earth; and this whole class is called by the name of juices or saps. The unequal admixture of these fluids creates a variety of species; most of them are nameless, but four which are of a fiery nature are clearly distinguished and have names. First, there is wine, which warms the soul as well as the body: secondly, there is the oily nature, which is smooth and divides the visual ray, and for this reason is bright and shining and of a glistening appearance, including pitch, the juice of the castor berry, oil itself, and other things of a like kind: thirdly, there is the class of substances which expand the contracted parts of the mouth, until they return to their natural state, and by reason of this property create sweetness;\u2014these are included under the general name of honey: and, lastly, there is a frothy nature, which differs from all juices, having a burning quality which dissolves the flesh; it is called opos (a vegetable acid). As to the kinds of earth, that which is filtered through water passes into stone in the following manner:\u2014The water which mixes with the earth and is broken up in the process changes into air, and taking this form mounts into its own place. But as there is no surrounding vacuum it thrusts away the neighbouring air, and this being rendered heavy, and, when it is displaced, having been poured around the mass of earth, forcibly compresses it and drives it into the vacant space whence the new air had come up; and the earth when compressed by the air into an indissoluble union with water becomes rock. The fairer sort is that which is made up of equal and similar parts and is transparent; that which has the opposite qualities is inferior. But when all the watery part is suddenly drawn out by fire, a more brittle substance is formed, to which we give the name of pottery. Sometimes also moisture may remain, and the earth which has been fused by fire becomes, when cool, a certain stone of a black colour. A like separation of the water which had been copiously mingled with them may occur in two substances composed of finer particles of earth and of a briny nature; out of either of them a half-solid-body is then formed, soluble in water\u2014the one, soda, which is used for purging away oil and earth, the other, salt, which harmonizes so well in combinations pleasing to the palate, and is, as the law testifies, a substance dear to the gods. The compounds of earth and water are not soluble by water, but by fire only, and for this reason:\u2014Neither fire nor air melt masses of earth; for their particles, being smaller than the interstices in its structure, have plenty of room to move without forcing their way, and so they leave the earth unmelted and undissolved; but particles of water, which are larger, force a passage, and dissolve and melt the earth. Wherefore earth when not consolidated by force is dissolved by water only; when consolidated, by nothing but fire; for this is the only body which can find an entrance. The cohesion of water again, when very strong, is dissolved by fire only\u2014when weaker, then either by air or fire\u2014the former entering the interstices, and the latter penetrating even the triangles. But nothing can dissolve air, when strongly condensed, which does not reach the elements or triangles; or if not strongly condensed, then only fire can dissolve it. As to bodies composed of earth and water, while the water occupies the vacant interstices of the earth in them which are compressed by force, the particles of water which approach them from without, finding no entrance, flow around the entire mass and leave it undissolved; but the particles of fire, entering into the interstices of the water, do to the water what water does to earth and fire to air (The text seems to be corrupt.), and are the sole causes of the compound body of earth and water liquefying and becoming fluid. Now these bodies are of two kinds; some of them, such as glass and the fusible sort of stones, have less water than they have earth; on the other hand, substances of the nature of wax and incense have more of water entering into their composition. I have thus shown the various classes of bodies as they are diversified by their forms and combinations and changes into one another, and now I must endeavour to set forth their affections and the causes of them. In the first place, the bodies which I have been describing are necessarily objects of sense. But we have not yet considered the origin of flesh, or what belongs to flesh, or of that part of the soul which is mortal. And these things cannot be adequately explained without also explaining the affections which are concerned with sensation, nor the latter without the former: and yet to explain them together is hardly possible; for which reason we must assume first one or the other and afterwards examine the nature of our hypothesis. In order, then, that the affections may follow regularly after the elements, let us presuppose the existence of body and soul. First, let us enquire what we mean by saying that fire is hot; and about this we may reason from the dividing or cutting power which it exercises on our bodies. We all of us feel that fire is sharp; and we may further consider the fineness of the sides, and the sharpness of the angles, and the smallness of the particles, and the swiftness of the motion\u2014all this makes the action of fire violent and sharp, so that it cuts whatever it meets. And we must not forget that the original figure of fire (i.e. the pyramid), more than any other form, has a dividing power which cuts our bodies into small pieces (Kepmatizei), and thus naturally produces that affection which we call heat; and hence the origin of the name (thepmos, Kepma). Now, the opposite of this is sufficiently manifest; nevertheless we will not fail to describe it. For the larger particles of moisture which surround the body, entering in and driving out the lesser, but not being able to take their places, compress the moist principle in us; and this from being unequal and disturbed, is forced by them into a state of rest, which is due to equability and compression. But things which are contracted contrary to nature are by nature at war, and force themselves apart; and to this war and convulsion the name of shivering and trembling is given; and the whole affection and the cause of the affection are both termed cold. That is called hard to which our flesh yields, and soft which yields to our flesh; and things are also termed hard and soft relatively to one another. That which yields has a small base; but that which rests on quadrangular bases is firmly posed and belongs to the class which offers the greatest resistance; so too does that which is the most compact and therefore most repellent. The nature of the light and the heavy will be best understood when examined in connexion with our notions of above and below; for it is quite a mistake to suppose that the universe is parted into two regions, separate from and opposite to each other, the one a lower to which all things tend which have any bulk, and an upper to which things only ascend against their will. For as the universe is in the form of a sphere, all the extremities, being equidistant from the centre, are equally extremities, and the centre, which is equidistant from them, is equally to be regarded as the opposite of them all. Such being the nature of the world, when a person says that any of these points is above or below, may he not be justly charged with using an improper expression? For the centre of the world cannot be rightly called either above or below, but is the centre and nothing else; and the circumference is not the centre, and has in no one part of itself a different relation to the centre from what it has in any of the opposite parts. Indeed, when it is in every direction similar, how can one rightly give to it names which imply opposition? For if there were any solid body in equipoise at the centre of the universe, there would be nothing to draw it to this extreme rather than to that, for they are all perfectly similar; and if a person were to go round the world in a circle, he would often, when standing at the antipodes of his former position, speak of the same point as above and below; for, as I was saying just now, to speak of the whole which is in the form of a globe as having one part above and another below is not like a sensible man. The reason why these names are used, and the circumstances under which they are ordinarily applied by us to the division of the heavens, may be elucidated by the following supposition:\u2014if a person were to stand in that part of the universe which is the appointed place of fire, and where there is the great mass of fire to which fiery bodies gather\u2014if, I say, he were to ascend thither, and, having the power to do this, were to abstract particles of fire and put them in scales and weigh them, and then, raising the balance, were to draw the fire by force towards the uncongenial element of the air, it would be very evident that he could compel the smaller mass more readily than the larger; for when two things are simultaneously raised by one and the same power, the smaller body must necessarily yield to the superior power with less reluctance than the larger; and the larger body is called heavy and said to tend downwards, and the smaller body is called light and said to tend upwards. And we may detect ourselves who are upon the earth doing precisely the same thing. For we often separate earthy natures, and sometimes earth itself, and draw them into the uncongenial element of air by force and contrary to nature, both clinging to their kindred elements. But that which is smaller yields to the impulse given by us towards the dissimilar element more easily than the larger; and so we call the former light, and the place towards which it is impelled we call above, and the contrary state and place we call heavy and below respectively. Now the relations of these must necessarily vary, because the principal masses of the different elements hold opposite positions; for that which is light, heavy, below or above in one place will be found to be and become contrary and transverse and every way diverse in relation to that which is light, heavy, below or above in an opposite place. And about all of them this has to be considered:\u2014that the tendency of each towards its kindred element makes the body which is moved heavy, and the place towards which the motion tends below, but things which have an opposite tendency we call by an opposite name. Such are the causes which we assign to these phenomena. As to the smooth and the rough, any one who sees them can explain the reason of them to another. For roughness is hardness mingled with irregularity, and smoothness is produced by the joint effect of uniformity and density. The most important of the affections which concern the whole body remains to be considered\u2014that is, the cause of pleasure and pain in the perceptions of which I have been speaking, and in all other things which are perceived by sense through the parts of the body, and have both pains and pleasures attendant on them. Let us imagine the causes of every affection, whether of sense or not, to be of the following nature, remembering that we have already distinguished between the nature which is easy and which is hard to move; for this is the direction in which we must hunt the prey which we mean to take. A body which is of a nature to be easily moved, on receiving an impression however slight, spreads abroad the motion in a circle, the parts communicating with each other, until at last, reaching the principle of mind, they announce the quality of the agent. But a body of the opposite kind, being immobile, and not extending to the surrounding region, merely receives the impression, and does not stir any of the neighbouring parts; and since the parts do not distribute the original impression to other parts, it has no effect of motion on the whole animal, and therefore produces no effect on the patient. This is true of the bones and hair and other more earthy parts of the human body; whereas what was said above relates mainly to sight and hearing, because they have in them the greatest amount of fire and air. Now we must conceive of pleasure and pain in this way. An impression produced in us contrary to nature and violent, if sudden, is painful; and, again, the sudden return to nature is pleasant; but a gentle and gradual return is imperceptible and vice versa. On the other hand the impression of sense which is most easily produced is most readily felt, but is not accompanied by pleasure or pain; such, for example, are the affections of the sight, which, as we said above, is a body naturally uniting with our body in the day-time; for cuttings and burnings and other affections which happen to the sight do not give pain, nor is there pleasure when the sight returns to its natural state; but the sensations are clearest and strongest according to the manner in which the eye is affected by the object, and itself strikes and touches it; there is no violence either in the contraction or dilation of the eye. But bodies formed of larger particles yield to the agent only with a struggle; and then they impart their motions to the whole and cause pleasure and pain\u2014pain when alienated from their natural conditions, and pleasure when restored to them. Things which experience gradual withdrawings and emptyings of their nature, and great and sudden replenishments, fail to perceive the emptying, but are sensible of the replenishment; and so they occasion no pain, but the greatest pleasure, to the mortal part of the soul, as is manifest in the case of perfumes. But things which are changed all of a sudden, and only gradually and with difficulty return to their own nature, have effects in every way opposite to the former, as is evident in the case of burnings and cuttings of the body. Thus have we discussed the general affections of the whole body, and the names of the agents which produce them. And now I will endeavour to speak of the affections of particular parts, and the causes and agents of them, as far as I am able. In the first place let us set forth what was omitted when we were speaking of juices, concerning the affections peculiar to the tongue. These too, like most of the other affections, appear to be caused by certain contractions and dilations, but they have besides more of roughness and smoothness than is found in other affections; for whenever earthy particles enter into the small veins which are the testing instruments of the tongue, reaching to the heart, and fall upon the moist, delicate portions of flesh\u2014when, as they are dissolved, they contract and dry up the little veins, they are astringent if they are rougher, but if not so rough, then only harsh. Those of them which are of an abstergent nature, and purge the whole surface of the tongue, if they do it in excess, and so encroach as to consume some part of the flesh itself, like potash and soda, are all termed bitter. But the particles which are deficient in the alkaline quality, and which cleanse only moderately, are called salt, and having no bitterness or roughness, are regarded as rather agreeable than otherwise. Bodies which share in and are made smooth by the heat of the mouth, and which are inflamed, and again in turn inflame that which heats them, and which are so light that they are carried upwards to the sensations of the head, and cut all that comes in their way, by reason of these qualities in them, are all termed pungent. But when these same particles, refined by putrefaction, enter into the narrow veins, and are duly proportioned to the particles of earth and air which are there, they set them whirling about one another, and while they are in a whirl cause them to dash against and enter into one another, and so form hollows surrounding the particles that enter\u2014which watery vessels of air (for a film of moisture, sometimes earthy, sometimes pure, is spread around the air) are hollow spheres of water; and those of them which are pure, are transparent, and are called bubbles, while those composed of the earthy liquid, which is in a state of general agitation and effervescence, are said to boil or ferment\u2014of all these affections the cause is termed acid. And there is the opposite affection arising from an opposite cause, when the mass of entering particles, immersed in the moisture of the mouth, is congenial to the tongue, and smooths and oils over the roughness, and relaxes the parts which are unnaturally contracted, and contracts the parts which are relaxed, and disposes them all according to their nature;\u2014that sort of remedy of violent affections is pleasant and agreeable to every man, and has the name sweet. But enough of this. The faculty of smell does not admit of differences of kind; for all smells are of a half-formed nature, and no element is so proportioned as to have any smell. The veins about the nose are too narrow to admit earth and water, and too wide to detain fire and air; and for this reason no one ever perceives the smell of any of them; but smells always proceed from bodies that are damp, or putrefying, or liquefying, or evaporating, and are perceptible only in the intermediate state, when water is changing into air and air into water; and all of them are either vapour or mist. That which is passing out of air into water is mist, and that which is passing from water into air is vapour; and hence all smells are thinner than water and thicker than air. The proof of this is, that when there is any obstruction to the respiration, and a man draws in his breath by force, then no smell filters through, but the air without the smell alone penetrates. Wherefore the varieties of smell have no name, and they have not many, or definite and simple kinds; but they are distinguished only as painful and pleasant, the one sort irritating and disturbing the whole cavity which is situated between the head and the navel, the other having a soothing influence, and restoring this same region to an agreeable and natural condition. In considering the third kind of sense, hearing, we must speak of the causes in which it originates. We may in general assume sound to be a blow which passes through the ears, and is transmitted by means of the air, the brain, and the blood, to the soul, and that hearing is the vibration of this blow, which begins in the head and ends in the region of the liver. The sound which moves swiftly is acute, and the sound which moves slowly is grave, and that which is regular is equable and smooth, and the reverse is harsh. A great body of sound is loud, and a small body of sound the reverse. Respecting the harmonies of sound I must hereafter speak. There is a fourth class of sensible things, having many intricate varieties, which must now be distinguished. They are called by the general name of colours, and are a flame which emanates from every sort of body, and has particles corresponding to the sense of sight. I have spoken already, in what has preceded, of the causes which generate sight, and in this place it will be natural and suitable to give a rational theory of colours. Of the particles coming from other bodies which fall upon the sight, some are smaller and some are larger, and some are equal to the parts of the sight itself. Those which are equal are imperceptible, and we call them transparent. The larger produce contraction, the smaller dilation, in the sight, exercising a power akin to that of hot and cold bodies on the flesh, or of astringent bodies on the tongue, or of those heating bodies which we termed pungent. White and black are similar effects of contraction and dilation in another sphere, and for this reason have a different appearance. Wherefore, we ought to term white that which dilates the visual ray, and the opposite of this is black. There is also a swifter motion of a different sort of fire which strikes and dilates the ray of sight until it reaches the eyes, forcing a way through their passages and melting them, and eliciting from them a union of fire and water which we call tears, being itself an opposite fire which comes to them from an opposite direction\u2014the inner fire flashes forth like lightning, and the outer finds a way in and is extinguished in the moisture, and all sorts of colours are generated by the mixture. This affection is termed dazzling, and the object which produces it is called bright and flashing. There is another sort of fire which is intermediate, and which reaches and mingles with the moisture of the eye without flashing; and in this, the fire mingling with the ray of the moisture, produces a colour like blood, to which we give the name of red. A bright hue mingled with red and white gives the colour called auburn (Greek). The law of proportion, however, according to which the several colours are formed, even if a man knew he would be foolish in telling, for he could not give any necessary reason, nor indeed any tolerable or probable explanation of them. Again, red, when mingled with black and white, becomes purple, but it becomes umber (Greek) when the colours are burnt as well as mingled and the black is more thoroughly mixed with them. Flame-colour (Greek) is produced by a union of auburn and dun (Greek), and dun by an admixture of black and white; pale yellow (Greek), by an admixture of white and auburn. White and bright meeting, and falling upon a full black, become dark blue (Greek), and when dark blue mingles with white, a light blue (Greek) colour is formed, as flame-colour with black makes leek green (Greek). There will be no difficulty in seeing how and by what mixtures the colours derived from these are made according to the rules of probability. He, however, who should attempt to verify all this by experiment, would forget the difference of the human and divine nature. For God only has the knowledge and also the power which are able to combine many things into one and again resolve the one into many. But no man either is or ever will be able to accomplish either the one or the other operation. These are the elements, thus of necessity then subsisting, which the creator of the fairest and best of created things associated with himself, when he made the self-sufficing and most perfect God, using the necessary causes as his ministers in the accomplishment of his work, but himself contriving the good in all his creations. Wherefore we may distinguish two sorts of causes, the one divine and the other necessary, and may seek for the divine in all things, as far as our nature admits, with a view to the blessed life; but the necessary kind only for the sake of the divine, considering that without them and when isolated from them, these higher things for which we look cannot be apprehended or received or in any way shared by us. Seeing, then, that we have now prepared for our use the various classes of causes which are the material out of which the remainder of our discourse must be woven, just as wood is the material of the carpenter, let us revert in a few words to the point at which we began, and then endeavour to add on a suitable ending to the beginning of our tale. As I said at first, when all things were in disorder God created in each thing in relation to itself, and in all things in relation to each other, all the measures and harmonies which they could possibly receive. For in those days nothing had any proportion except by accident; nor did any of the things which now have names deserve to be named at all\u2014as, for example, fire, water, and the rest of the elements. All these the creator first set in order, and out of them he constructed the universe, which was a single animal comprehending in itself all other animals, mortal and immortal. Now of the divine, he himself was the creator, but the creation of the mortal he committed to his offspring. And they, imitating him, received from him the immortal principle of the soul; and around this they proceeded to fashion a mortal body, and made it to be the vehicle of the soul, and constructed within the body a soul of another nature which was mortal, subject to terrible and irresistible affections,\u2014first of all, pleasure, the greatest incitement to evil; then, pain, which deters from good; also rashness and fear, two foolish counsellors, anger hard to be appeased, and hope easily led astray;\u2014these they mingled with irrational sense and with all-daring love according to necessary laws, and so framed man. Wherefore, fearing to pollute the divine any more than was absolutely unavoidable, they gave to the mortal nature a separate habitation in another part of the body, placing the neck between them to be the isthmus and boundary, which they constructed between the head and breast, to keep them apart. And in the breast, and in what is termed the thorax, they encased the mortal soul; and as the one part of this was superior and the other inferior they divided the cavity of the thorax into two parts, as the women\u2019s and men\u2019s apartments are divided in houses, and placed the midriff to be a wall of partition between them. That part of the inferior soul which is endowed with courage and passion and loves contention they settled nearer the head, midway between the midriff and the neck, in order that it might be under the rule of reason and might join with it in controlling and restraining the desires when they are no longer willing of their own accord to obey the word of command issuing from the citadel. The heart, the knot of the veins and the fountain of the blood which races through all the limbs, was set in the place of guard, that when the might of passion was roused by reason making proclamation of any wrong assailing them from without or being perpetrated by the desires within, quickly the whole power of feeling in the body, perceiving these commands and threats, might obey and follow through every turn and alley, and thus allow the principle of the best to have the command in all of them. But the gods, foreknowing that the palpitation of the heart in the expectation of danger and the swelling and excitement of passion was caused by fire, formed and implanted as a supporter to the heart the lung, which was, in the first place, soft and bloodless, and also had within hollows like the pores of a sponge, in order that by receiving the breath and the drink, it might give coolness and the power of respiration and alleviate the heat. Wherefore they cut the air-channels leading to the lung, and placed the lung about the heart as a soft spring, that, when passion was rife within, the heart, beating against a yielding body, might be cooled and suffer less, and might thus become more ready to join with passion in the service of reason. The part of the soul which desires meats and drinks and the other things of which it has need by reason of the bodily nature, they placed between the midriff and the boundary of the navel, contriving in all this region a sort of manger for the food of the body; and there they bound it down like a wild animal which was chained up with man, and must be nourished if man was to exist. They appointed this lower creation his place here in order that he might be always feeding at the manger, and have his dwelling as far as might be from the council-chamber, making as little noise and disturbance as possible, and permitting the best part to advise quietly for the good of the whole. And knowing that this lower principle in man would not comprehend reason, and even if attaining to some degree of perception would never naturally care for rational notions, but that it would be led away by phantoms and visions night and day,\u2014to be a remedy for this, God combined with it the liver, and placed it in the house of the lower nature, contriving that it should be solid and smooth, and bright and sweet, and should also have a bitter quality, in order that the power of thought, which proceeds from the mind, might be reflected as in a mirror which receives likenesses of objects and gives back images of them to the sight; and so might strike terror into the desires, when, making use of the bitter part of the liver, to which it is akin, it comes threatening and invading, and diffusing this bitter element swiftly through the whole liver produces colours like bile, and contracting every part makes it wrinkled and rough; and twisting out of its right place and contorting the lobe and closing and shutting up the vessels and gates, causes pain and loathing. And the converse happens when some gentle inspiration of the understanding pictures images of an opposite character, and allays the bile and bitterness by refusing to stir or touch the nature opposed to itself, but by making use of the natural sweetness of the liver, corrects all things and makes them to be right and smooth and free, and renders the portion of the soul which resides about the liver happy and joyful, enabling it to pass the night in peace, and to practise divination in sleep, inasmuch as it has no share in mind and reason. For the authors of our being, remembering the command of their father when he bade them create the human race as good as they could, that they might correct our inferior parts and make them to attain a measure of truth, placed in the liver the seat of divination. And herein is a proof that God has given the art of divination not to the wisdom, but to the foolishness of man. No man, when in his wits, attains prophetic truth and inspiration; but when he receives the inspired word, either his intelligence is enthralled in sleep, or he is demented by some distemper or possession. And he who would understand what he remembers to have been said, whether in a dream or when he was awake, by the prophetic and inspired nature, or would determine by reason the meaning of the apparitions which he has seen, and what indications they afford to this man or that, of past, present or future good and evil, must first recover his wits. But, while he continues demented, he cannot judge of the visions which he sees or the words which he utters; the ancient saying is very true, that \u2018only a man who has his wits can act or judge about himself and his own affairs.\u2019 And for this reason it is customary to appoint interpreters to be judges of the true inspiration. Some persons call them prophets; they are quite unaware that they are only the expositors of dark sayings and visions, and are not to be called prophets at all, but only interpreters of prophecy. Such is the nature of the liver, which is placed as we have described in order that it may give prophetic intimations. During the life of each individual these intimations are plainer, but after his death the liver becomes blind, and delivers oracles too obscure to be intelligible. The neighbouring organ (the spleen) is situated on the left-hand side, and is constructed with a view of keeping the liver bright and pure,\u2014like a napkin, always ready prepared and at hand to clean the mirror. And hence, when any impurities arise in the region of the liver by reason of disorders of the body, the loose nature of the spleen, which is composed of a hollow and bloodless tissue, receives them all and clears them away, and when filled with the unclean matter, swells and festers, but, again, when the body is purged, settles down into the same place as before, and is humbled. Concerning the soul, as to which part is mortal and which divine, and how and why they are separated, and where located, if God acknowledges that we have spoken the truth, then, and then only, can we be confident; still, we may venture to assert that what has been said by us is probable, and will be rendered more probable by investigation. Let us assume thus much. The creation of the rest of the body follows next in order, and this we may investigate in a similar manner. And it appears to be very meet that the body should be framed on the following principles:\u2014 The authors of our race were aware that we should be intemperate in eating and drinking, and take a good deal more than was necessary or proper, by reason of gluttony. In order then that disease might not quickly destroy us, and lest our mortal race should perish without fulfilling its end\u2014intending to provide against this, the gods made what is called the lower belly, to be a receptacle for the superfluous meat and drink, and formed the convolution of the bowels, so that the food might be prevented from passing quickly through and compelling the body to require more food, thus producing insatiable gluttony, and making the whole race an enemy to philosophy and music, and rebellious against the divinest element within us. The bones and flesh, and other similar parts of us, were made as follows. The first principle of all of them was the generation of the marrow. For the bonds of life which unite the soul with the body are made fast there, and they are the root and foundation of the human race. The marrow itself is created out of other materials: God took such of the primary triangles as were straight and smooth, and were adapted by their perfection to produce fire and water, and air and earth\u2014these, I say, he separated from their kinds, and mingling them in due proportions with one another, made the marrow out of them to be a universal seed of the whole race of mankind; and in this seed he then planted and enclosed the souls, and in the original distribution gave to the marrow as many and various forms as the different kinds of souls were hereafter to receive. That which, like a field, was to receive the divine seed, he made round every way, and called that portion of the marrow, brain, intending that, when an animal was perfected, the vessel containing this substance should be the head; but that which was intended to contain the remaining and mortal part of the soul he distributed into figures at once round and elongated, and he called them all by the name \u2018marrow\u2019; and to these, as to anchors, fastening the bonds of the whole soul, he proceeded to fashion around them the entire framework of our body, constructing for the marrow, first of all a complete covering of bone. Bone was composed by him in the following manner. Having sifted pure and smooth earth he kneaded it and wetted it with marrow, and after that he put it into fire and then into water, and once more into fire and again into water\u2014in this way by frequent transfers from one to the other he made it insoluble by either. Out of this he fashioned, as in a lathe, a globe made of bone, which he placed around the brain, and in this he left a narrow opening; and around the marrow of the neck and back he formed vertebrae which he placed under one another like pivots, beginning at the head and extending through the whole of the trunk. Thus wishing to preserve the entire seed, he enclosed it in a stone-like casing, inserting joints, and using in the formation of them the power of the other or diverse as an intermediate nature, that they might have motion and flexure. Then again, considering that the bone would be too brittle and inflexible, and when heated and again cooled would soon mortify and destroy the seed within\u2014having this in view, he contrived the sinews and the flesh, that so binding all the members together by the sinews, which admitted of being stretched and relaxed about the vertebrae, he might thus make the body capable of flexion and extension, while the flesh would serve as a protection against the summer heat and against the winter cold, and also against falls, softly and easily yielding to external bodies, like articles made of felt; and containing in itself a warm moisture which in summer exudes and makes the surface damp, would impart a natural coolness to the whole body; and again in winter by the help of this internal warmth would form a very tolerable defence against the frost which surrounds it and attacks it from without. He who modelled us, considering these things, mixed earth with fire and water and blended them; and making a ferment of acid and salt, he mingled it with them and formed soft and succulent flesh. As for the sinews, he made them of a mixture of bone and unfermented flesh, attempered so as to be in a mean, and gave them a yellow colour; wherefore the sinews have a firmer and more glutinous nature than flesh, but a softer and moister nature than the bones. With these God covered the bones and marrow, binding them together by sinews, and then enshrouded them all in an upper covering of flesh. The more living and sensitive of the bones he enclosed in the thinnest film of flesh, and those which had the least life within them in the thickest and most solid flesh. So again on the joints of the bones, where reason indicated that no more was required, he placed only a thin covering of flesh, that it might not interfere with the flexion of our bodies and make them unwieldy because difficult to move; and also that it might not, by being crowded and pressed and matted together, destroy sensation by reason of its hardness, and impair the memory and dull the edge of intelligence. Wherefore also the thighs and the shanks and the hips, and the bones of the arms and the forearms, and other parts which have no joints, and the inner bones, which on account of the rarity of the soul in the marrow are destitute of reason\u2014all these are abundantly provided with flesh; but such as have mind in them are in general less fleshy, except where the creator has made some part solely of flesh in order to give sensation,\u2014as, for example, the tongue. But commonly this is not the case. For the nature which comes into being and grows up in us by a law of necessity, does not admit of the combination of solid bone and much flesh with acute perceptions. More than any other part the framework of the head would have had them, if they could have co-existed, and the human race, having a strong and fleshy and sinewy head, would have had a life twice or many times as long as it now has, and also more healthy and free from pain. But our creators, considering whether they should make a longer-lived race which was worse, or a shorter-lived race which was better, came to the conclusion that every one ought to prefer a shorter span of life, which was better, to a longer one, which was worse; and therefore they covered the head with thin bone, but not with flesh and sinews, since it had no joints; and thus the head was added, having more wisdom and sensation than the rest of the body, but also being in every man far weaker. For these reasons and after this manner God placed the sinews at the extremity of the head, in a circle round the neck, and glued them together by the principle of likeness and fastened the extremities of the jawbones to them below the face, and the other sinews he dispersed throughout the body, fastening limb to limb. The framers of us framed the mouth, as now arranged, having teeth and tongue and lips, with a view to the necessary and the good contriving the way in for necessary purposes, the way out for the best purposes; for that is necessary which enters in and gives food to the body; but the river of speech, which flows out of a man and ministers to the intelligence, is the fairest and noblest of all streams. Still the head could neither be left a bare frame of bones, on account of the extremes of heat and cold in the different seasons, nor yet be allowed to be wholly covered, and so become dull and senseless by reason of an overgrowth of flesh. The fleshy nature was not therefore wholly dried up, but a large sort of peel was parted off and remained over, which is now called the skin. This met and grew by the help of the cerebral moisture, and became the circular envelopment of the head. And the moisture, rising up under the sutures, watered and closed in the skin upon the crown, forming a sort of knot. The diversity of the sutures was caused by the power of the courses of the soul and of the food, and the more these struggled against one another the more numerous they became, and fewer if the struggle were less violent. This skin the divine power pierced all round with fire, and out of the punctures which were thus made the moisture issued forth, and the liquid and heat which was pure came away, and a mixed part which was composed of the same material as the skin, and had a fineness equal to the punctures, was borne up by its own impulse and extended far outside the head, but being too slow to escape, was thrust back by the external air, and rolled up underneath the skin, where it took root. Thus the hair sprang up in the skin, being akin to it because it is like threads of leather, but rendered harder and closer through the pressure of the cold, by which each hair, while in process of separation from the skin, is compressed and cooled. Wherefore the creator formed the head hairy, making use of the causes which I have mentioned, and reflecting also that instead of flesh the brain needed the hair to be a light covering or guard, which would give shade in summer and shelter in winter, and at the same time would not impede our quickness of perception. From the combination of sinew, skin, and bone, in the structure of the finger, there arises a triple compound, which, when dried up, takes the form of one hard skin partaking of all three natures, and was fabricated by these second causes, but designed by mind which is the principal cause with an eye to the future. For our creators well knew that women and other animals would some day be framed out of men, and they further knew that many animals would require the use of nails for many purposes; wherefore they fashioned in men at their first creation the rudiments of nails. For this purpose and for these reasons they caused skin, hair, and nails to grow at the extremities of the limbs. And now that all the parts and members of the mortal animal had come together, since its life of necessity consisted of fire and breath, and it therefore wasted away by dissolution and depletion, the gods contrived the following remedy: They mingled a nature akin to that of man with other forms and perceptions, and thus created another kind of animal. These are the trees and plants and seeds which have been improved by cultivation and are now domesticated among us; anciently there were only the wild kinds, which are older than the cultivated. For everything that partakes of life may be truly called a living being, and the animal of which we are now speaking partakes of the third kind of soul, which is said to be seated between the midriff and the navel, having no part in opinion or reason or mind, but only in feelings of pleasure and pain and the desires which accompany them. For this nature is always in a passive state, revolving in and about itself, repelling the motion from without and using its own, and accordingly is not endowed by nature with the power of observing or reflecting on its own concerns. Wherefore it lives and does not differ from a living being, but is fixed and rooted in the same spot, having no power of self-motion. Now after the superior powers had created all these natures to be food for us who are of the inferior nature, they cut various channels through the body as through a garden, that it might be watered as from a running stream. In the first place, they cut two hidden channels or veins down the back where the skin and the flesh join, which answered severally to the right and left side of the body. These they let down along the backbone, so as to have the marrow of generation between them, where it was most likely to flourish, and in order that the stream coming down from above might flow freely to the other parts, and equalize the irrigation. In the next place, they divided the veins about the head, and interlacing them, they sent them in opposite directions; those coming from the right side they sent to the left of the body, and those from the left they diverted towards the right, so that they and the skin might together form a bond which should fasten the head to the body, since the crown of the head was not encircled by sinews; and also in order that the sensations from both sides might be distributed over the whole body. And next, they ordered the water-courses of the body in a manner which I will describe, and which will be more easily understood if we begin by admitting that all things which have lesser parts retain the greater, but the greater cannot retain the lesser. Now of all natures fire has the smallest parts, and therefore penetrates through earth and water and air and their compounds, nor can anything hold it. And a similar principle applies to the human belly; for when meats and drinks enter it, it holds them, but it cannot hold air and fire, because the particles of which they consist are smaller than its own structure. These elements, therefore, God employed for the sake of distributing moisture from the belly into the veins, weaving together a network of fire and air like a weel, having at the entrance two lesser weels; further he constructed one of these with two openings, and from the lesser weels he extended cords reaching all round to the extremities of the network. All the interior of the net he made of fire, but the lesser weels and their cavity, of air. The network he took and spread over the newly-formed animal in the following manner:\u2014He let the lesser weels pass into the mouth; there were two of them, and one he let down by the air-pipes into the lungs, the other by the side of the air-pipes into the belly. The former he divided into two branches, both of which he made to meet at the channels of the nose, so that when the way through the mouth did not act, the streams of the mouth as well were replenished through the nose. With the other cavity (i.e. of the greater weel) he enveloped the hollow parts of the body, and at one time he made all this to flow into the lesser weels, quite gently, for they are composed of air, and at another time he caused the lesser weels to flow back again; and the net he made to find a way in and out through the pores of the body, and the rays of fire which are bound fast within followed the passage of the air either way, never at any time ceasing so long as the mortal being holds together. This process, as we affirm, the name-giver named inspiration and expiration. And all this movement, active as well as passive, takes place in order that the body, being watered and cooled, may receive nourishment and life; for when the respiration is going in and out, and the fire, which is fast bound within, follows it, and ever and anon moving to and fro, enters through the belly and reaches the meat and drink, it dissolves them, and dividing them into small portions and guiding them through the passages where it goes, pumps them as from a fountain into the channels of the veins, and makes the stream of the veins flow through the body as through a conduit. Let us once more consider the phenomena of respiration, and enquire into the causes which have made it what it is. They are as follows:\u2014Seeing that there is no such thing as a vacuum into which any of those things which are moved can enter, and the breath is carried from us into the external air, the next point is, as will be clear to every one, that it does not go into a vacant space, but pushes its neighbour out of its place, and that which is thrust out in turn drives out its neighbour; and in this way everything of necessity at last comes round to that place from whence the breath came forth, and enters in there, and following the breath, fills up the vacant space; and this goes on like the rotation of a wheel, because there can be no such thing as a vacuum. Wherefore also the breast and the lungs, when they emit the breath, are replenished by the air which surrounds the body and which enters in through the pores of the flesh and is driven round in a circle; and again, the air which is sent away and passes out through the body forces the breath inwards through the passage of the mouth and the nostrils. Now the origin of this movement may be supposed to be as follows. In the interior of every animal the hottest part is that which is around the blood and veins; it is in a manner an internal fountain of fire, which we compare to the network of a creel, being woven all of fire and extended through the centre of the body, while the outer parts are composed of air. Now we must admit that heat naturally proceeds outward to its own place and to its kindred element; and as there are two exits for the heat, the one out through the body, and the other through the mouth and nostrils, when it moves towards the one, it drives round the air at the other, and that which is driven round falls into the fire and becomes warm, and that which goes forth is cooled. But when the heat changes its place, and the particles at the other exit grow warmer, the hotter air inclining in that direction and carried towards its native element, fire, pushes round the air at the other; and this being affected in the same way and communicating the same impulse, a circular motion swaying to and fro is produced by the double process, which we call inspiration and expiration. The phenomena of medical cupping-glasses and of the swallowing of drink and of the projection of bodies, whether discharged in the air or bowled along the ground, are to be investigated on a similar principle; and swift and slow sounds, which appear to be high and low, and are sometimes discordant on account of their inequality, and then again harmonical on account of the equality of the motion which they excite in us. For when the motions of the antecedent swifter sounds begin to pause and the two are equalized, the slower sounds overtake the swifter and then propel them. When they overtake them they do not intrude a new and discordant motion, but introduce the beginnings of a slower, which answers to the swifter as it dies away, thus producing a single mixed expression out of high and low, whence arises a pleasure which even the unwise feel, and which to the wise becomes a higher sort of delight, being an imitation of divine harmony in mortal motions. Moreover, as to the flowing of water, the fall of the thunderbolt, and the marvels that are observed about the attraction of amber and the Heraclean stones,\u2014in none of these cases is there any attraction; but he who investigates rightly, will find that such wonderful phenomena are attributable to the combination of certain conditions\u2014the non-existence of a vacuum, the fact that objects push one another round, and that they change places, passing severally into their proper positions as they are divided or combined. Such as we have seen, is the nature and such are the causes of respiration,\u2014the subject in which this discussion originated. For the fire cuts the food and following the breath surges up within, fire and breath rising together and filling the veins by drawing up out of the belly and pouring into them the cut portions of the food; and so the streams of food are kept flowing through the whole body in all animals. And fresh cuttings from kindred substances, whether the fruits of the earth or herb of the field, which God planted to be our daily food, acquire all sorts of colours by their inter-mixture; but red is the most pervading of them, being created by the cutting action of fire and by the impression which it makes on a moist substance; and hence the liquid which circulates in the body has a colour such as we have described. The liquid itself we call blood, which nourishes the flesh and the whole body, whence all parts are watered and empty places filled. Now the process of repletion and evacuation is effected after the manner of the universal motion by which all kindred substances are drawn towards one another. For the external elements which surround us are always causing us to consume away, and distributing and sending off like to like; the particles of blood, too, which are divided and contained within the frame of the animal as in a sort of heaven, are compelled to imitate the motion of the universe. Each, therefore, of the divided parts within us, being carried to its kindred nature, replenishes the void. When more is taken away than flows in, then we decay, and when less, we grow and increase. The frame of the entire creature when young has the triangles of each kind new, and may be compared to the keel of a vessel which is just off the stocks; they are locked firmly together and yet the whole mass is soft and delicate, being freshly formed of marrow and nurtured on milk. Now when the triangles out of which meats and drinks are composed come in from without, and are comprehended in the body, being older and weaker than the triangles already there, the frame of the body gets the better of them and its newer triangles cut them up, and so the animal grows great, being nourished by a multitude of similar particles. But when the roots of the triangles are loosened by having undergone many conflicts with many things in the course of time, they are no longer able to cut or assimilate the food which enters, but are themselves easily divided by the bodies which come in from without. In this way every animal is overcome and decays, and this affection is called old age. And at last, when the bonds by which the triangles of the marrow are united no longer hold, and are parted by the strain of existence, they in turn loosen the bonds of the soul, and she, obtaining a natural release, flies away with joy. For that which takes place according to nature is pleasant, but that which is contrary to nature is painful. And thus death, if caused by disease or produced by wounds, is painful and violent; but that sort of death which comes with old age and fulfils the debt of nature is the easiest of deaths, and is accompanied with pleasure rather than with pain. Now every one can see whence diseases arise. There are four natures out of which the body is compacted, earth and fire and water and air, and the unnatural excess or defect of these, or the change of any of them from its own natural place into another, or\u2014since there are more kinds than one of fire and of the other elements\u2014the assumption by any of these of a wrong kind, or any similar irregularity, produces disorders and diseases; for when any of them is produced or changed in a manner contrary to nature, the parts which were previously cool grow warm, and those which were dry become moist, and the light become heavy, and the heavy light; all sorts of changes occur. For, as we affirm, a thing can only remain the same with itself, whole and sound, when the same is added to it, or subtracted from it, in the same respect and in the same manner and in due proportion; and whatever comes or goes away in violation of these laws causes all manner of changes and infinite diseases and corruptions. Now there is a second class of structures which are also natural, and this affords a second opportunity of observing diseases to him who would understand them. For whereas marrow and bone and flesh and sinews are composed of the four elements, and the blood, though after another manner, is likewise formed out of them, most diseases originate in the way which I have described; but the worst of all owe their severity to the fact that the generation of these substances proceeds in a wrong order; they are then destroyed. For the natural order is that the flesh and sinews should be made of blood, the sinews out of the fibres to which they are akin, and the flesh out of the clots which are formed when the fibres are separated. And the glutinous and rich matter which comes away from the sinews and the flesh, not only glues the flesh to the bones, but nourishes and imparts growth to the bone which surrounds the marrow; and by reason of the solidity of the bones, that which filters through consists of the purest and smoothest and oiliest sort of triangles, dropping like dew from the bones and watering the marrow. Now when each process takes place in this order, health commonly results; when in the opposite order, disease. For when the flesh becomes decomposed and sends back the wasting substance into the veins, then an over-supply of blood of diverse kinds, mingling with air in the veins, having variegated colours and bitter properties, as well as acid and saline qualities, contains all sorts of bile and serum and phlegm. For all things go the wrong way, and having become corrupted, first they taint the blood itself, and then ceasing to give nourishment to the body they are carried along the veins in all directions, no longer preserving the order of their natural courses, but at war with themselves, because they receive no good from one another, and are hostile to the abiding constitution of the body, which they corrupt and dissolve. The oldest part of the flesh which is corrupted, being hard to decompose, from long burning grows black, and from being everywhere corroded becomes bitter, and is injurious to every part of the body which is still uncorrupted. Sometimes, when the bitter element is refined away, the black part assumes an acidity which takes the place of the bitterness; at other times the bitterness being tinged with blood has a redder colour; and this, when mixed with black, takes the hue of grass; and again, an auburn colour mingles with the bitter matter when new flesh is decomposed by the fire which surrounds the internal flame;\u2014to all which symptoms some physician perhaps, or rather some philosopher, who had the power of seeing in many dissimilar things one nature deserving of a name, has assigned the common name of bile. But the other kinds of bile are variously distinguished by their colours. As for serum, that sort which is the watery part of blood is innocent, but that which is a secretion of black and acid bile is malignant when mingled by the power of heat with any salt substance, and is then called acid phlegm. Again, the substance which is formed by the liquefaction of new and tender flesh when air is present, if inflated and encased in liquid so as to form bubbles, which separately are invisible owing to their small size, but when collected are of a bulk which is visible, and have a white colour arising out of the generation of foam\u2014all this decomposition of tender flesh when intermingled with air is termed by us white phlegm. And the whey or sediment of newly-formed phlegm is sweat and tears, and includes the various daily discharges by which the body is purified. Now all these become causes of disease when the blood is not replenished in a natural manner by food and drink but gains bulk from opposite sources in violation of the laws of nature. When the several parts of the flesh are separated by disease, if the foundation remains, the power of the disorder is only half as great, and there is still a prospect of an easy recovery; but when that which binds the flesh to the bones is diseased, and no longer being separated from the muscles and sinews, ceases to give nourishment to the bone and to unite flesh and bone, and from being oily and smooth and glutinous becomes rough and salt and dry, owing to bad regimen, then all the substance thus corrupted crumbles away under the flesh and the sinews, and separates from the bone, and the fleshy parts fall away from their foundation and leave the sinews bare and full of brine, and the flesh again gets into the circulation of the blood and makes the previously-mentioned disorders still greater. And if these bodily affections be severe, still worse are the prior disorders; as when the bone itself, by reason of the density of the flesh, does not obtain sufficient air, but becomes mouldy and hot and gangrened and receives no nutriment, and the natural process is inverted, and the bone crumbling passes into the food, and the food into the flesh, and the flesh again falling into the blood makes all maladies that may occur more virulent than those already mentioned. But the worst case of all is when the marrow is diseased, either from excess or defect; and this is the cause of the very greatest and most fatal disorders, in which the whole course of the body is reversed. There is a third class of diseases which may be conceived of as arising in three ways; for they are produced sometimes by wind, and sometimes by phlegm, and sometimes by bile. When the lung, which is the dispenser of the air to the body, is obstructed by rheums and its passages are not free, some of them not acting, while through others too much air enters, then the parts which are unrefreshed by air corrode, while in other parts the excess of air forcing its way through the veins distorts them and decomposing the body is enclosed in the midst of it and occupies the midriff; thus numberless painful diseases are produced, accompanied by copious sweats. And oftentimes when the flesh is dissolved in the body, wind, generated within and unable to escape, is the source of quite as much pain as the air coming in from without; but the greatest pain is felt when the wind gets about the sinews and the veins of the shoulders, and swells them up, and so twists back the great tendons and the sinews which are connected with them. These disorders are called tetanus and opisthotonus, by reason of the tension which accompanies them. The cure of them is difficult; relief is in most cases given by fever supervening. The white phlegm, though dangerous when detained within by reason of the air-bubbles, yet if it can communicate with the outside air, is less severe, and only discolours the body, generating leprous eruptions and similar diseases. When it is mingled with black bile and dispersed about the courses of the head, which are the divinest part of us, the attack if coming on in sleep, is not so severe; but when assailing those who are awake it is hard to be got rid of, and being an affection of a sacred part, is most justly called sacred. An acid and salt phlegm, again, is the source of all those diseases which take the form of catarrh, but they have many names because the places into which they flow are manifold. Inflammations of the body come from burnings and inflamings, and all of them originate in bile. When bile finds a means of discharge, it boils up and sends forth all sorts of tumours; but when imprisoned within, it generates many inflammatory diseases, above all when mingled with pure blood; since it then displaces the fibres which are scattered about in the blood and are designed to maintain the balance of rare and dense, in order that the blood may not be so liquefied by heat as to exude from the pores of the body, nor again become too dense and thus find a difficulty in circulating through the veins. The fibres are so constituted as to maintain this balance; and if any one brings them all together when the blood is dead and in process of cooling, then the blood which remains becomes fluid, but if they are left alone, they soon congeal by reason of the surrounding cold. The fibres having this power over the blood, bile, which is only stale blood, and which from being flesh is dissolved again into blood, at the first influx coming in little by little, hot and liquid, is congealed by the power of the fibres; and so congealing and made to cool, it produces internal cold and shuddering. When it enters with more of a flood and overcomes the fibres by its heat, and boiling up throws them into disorder, if it have power enough to maintain its supremacy, it penetrates the marrow and burns up what may be termed the cables of the soul, and sets her free; but when there is not so much of it, and the body though wasted still holds out, the bile is itself mastered, and is either utterly banished, or is thrust through the veins into the lower or upper belly, and is driven out of the body like an exile from a state in which there has been civil war; whence arise diarrhoeas and dysenteries, and all such disorders. When the constitution is disordered by excess of fire, continuous heat and fever are the result; when excess of air is the cause, then the fever is quotidian; when of water, which is a more sluggish element than either fire or air, then the fever is a tertian; when of earth, which is the most sluggish of the four, and is only purged away in a four-fold period, the result is a quartan fever, which can with difficulty be shaken off. Such is the manner in which diseases of the body arise; the disorders of the soul, which depend upon the body, originate as follows. We must acknowledge disease of the mind to be a want of intelligence; and of this there are two kinds; to wit, madness and ignorance. In whatever state a man experiences either of them, that state may be called disease; and excessive pains and pleasures are justly to be regarded as the greatest diseases to which the soul is liable. For a man who is in great joy or in great pain, in his unreasonable eagerness to attain the one and to avoid the other, is not able to see or to hear anything rightly; but he is mad, and is at the time utterly incapable of any participation in reason. He who has the seed about the spinal marrow too plentiful and overflowing, like a tree overladen with fruit, has many throes, and also obtains many pleasures in his desires and their offspring, and is for the most part of his life deranged, because his pleasures and pains are so very great; his soul is rendered foolish and disordered by his body; yet he is regarded not as one diseased, but as one who is voluntarily bad, which is a mistake. The truth is that the intemperance of love is a disease of the soul due chiefly to the moisture and fluidity which is produced in one of the elements by the loose consistency of the bones. And in general, all that which is termed the incontinence of pleasure and is deemed a reproach under the idea that the wicked voluntarily do wrong is not justly a matter for reproach. For no man is voluntarily bad; but the bad become bad by reason of an ill disposition of the body and bad education, things which are hateful to every man and happen to him against his will. And in the case of pain too in like manner the soul suffers much evil from the body. For where the acid and briny phlegm and other bitter and bilious humours wander about in the body, and find no exit or escape, but are pent up within and mingle their own vapours with the motions of the soul, and are blended with them, they produce all sorts of diseases, more or fewer, and in every degree of intensity; and being carried to the three places of the soul, whichever they may severally assail, they create infinite varieties of ill-temper and melancholy, of rashness and cowardice, and also of forgetfulness and stupidity. Further, when to this evil constitution of body evil forms of government are added and evil discourses are uttered in private as well as in public, and no sort of instruction is given in youth to cure these evils, then all of us who are bad become bad from two causes which are entirely beyond our control. In such cases the planters are to blame rather than the plants, the educators rather than the educated. But however that may be, we should endeavour as far as we can by education, and studies, and learning, to avoid vice and attain virtue; this, however, is part of another subject. There is a corresponding enquiry concerning the mode of treatment by which the mind and the body are to be preserved, about which it is meet and right that I should say a word in turn; for it is more our duty to speak of the good than of the evil. Everything that is good is fair, and the fair is not without proportion, and the animal which is to be fair must have due proportion. Now we perceive lesser symmetries or proportions and reason about them, but of the highest and greatest we take no heed; for there is no proportion or disproportion more productive of health and disease, and virtue and vice, than that between soul and body. This however we do not perceive, nor do we reflect that when a weak or small frame is the vehicle of a great and mighty soul, or conversely, when a little soul is encased in a large body, then the whole animal is not fair, for it lacks the most important of all symmetries; but the due proportion of mind and body is the fairest and loveliest of all sights to him who has the seeing eye. Just as a body which has a leg too long, or which is unsymmetrical in some other respect, is an unpleasant sight, and also, when doing its share of work, is much distressed and makes convulsive efforts, and often stumbles through awkwardness, and is the cause of infinite evil to its own self\u2014in like manner we should conceive of the double nature which we call the living being; and when in this compound there is an impassioned soul more powerful than the body, that soul, I say, convulses and fills with disorders the whole inner nature of man; and when eager in the pursuit of some sort of learning or study, causes wasting; or again, when teaching or disputing in private or in public, and strifes and controversies arise, inflames and dissolves the composite frame of man and introduces rheums; and the nature of this phenomenon is not understood by most professors of medicine, who ascribe it to the opposite of the real cause. And once more, when a body large and too strong for the soul is united to a small and weak intelligence, then inasmuch as there are two desires natural to man,\u2014one of food for the sake of the body, and one of wisdom for the sake of the diviner part of us\u2014then, I say, the motions of the stronger, getting the better and increasing their own power, but making the soul dull, and stupid, and forgetful, engender ignorance, which is the greatest of diseases. There is one protection against both kinds of disproportion:\u2014that we should not move the body without the soul or the soul without the body, and thus they will be on their guard against each other, and be healthy and well balanced. And therefore the mathematician or any one else whose thoughts are much absorbed in some intellectual pursuit, must allow his body also to have due exercise, and practise gymnastic; and he who is careful to fashion the body, should in turn impart to the soul its proper motions, and should cultivate music and all philosophy, if he would deserve to be called truly fair and truly good. And the separate parts should be treated in the same manner, in imitation of the pattern of the universe; for as the body is heated and also cooled within by the elements which enter into it, and is again dried up and moistened by external things, and experiences these and the like affections from both kinds of motions, the result is that the body if given up to motion when in a state of quiescence is overmastered and perishes; but if any one, in imitation of that which we call the foster-mother and nurse of the universe, will not allow the body ever to be inactive, but is always producing motions and agitations through its whole extent, which form the natural defence against other motions both internal and external, and by moderate exercise reduces to order according to their affinities the particles and affections which are wandering about the body, as we have already said when speaking of the universe, he will not allow enemy placed by the side of enemy to stir up wars and disorders in the body, but he will place friend by the side of friend, so as to create health. Now of all motions that is the best which is produced in a thing by itself, for it is most akin to the motion of thought and of the universe; but that motion which is caused by others is not so good, and worst of all is that which moves the body, when at rest, in parts only and by some external agency. Wherefore of all modes of purifying and re-uniting the body the best is gymnastic; the next best is a surging motion, as in sailing or any other mode of conveyance which is not fatiguing; the third sort of motion may be of use in a case of extreme necessity, but in any other will be adopted by no man of sense: I mean the purgative treatment of physicians; for diseases unless they are very dangerous should not be irritated by medicines, since every form of disease is in a manner akin to the living being, whose complex frame has an appointed term of life. For not the whole race only, but each individual\u2014barring inevitable accidents\u2014comes into the world having a fixed span, and the triangles in us are originally framed with power to last for a certain time, beyond which no man can prolong his life. And this holds also of the constitution of diseases; if any one regardless of the appointed time tries to subdue them by medicine, he only aggravates and multiplies them. Wherefore we ought always to manage them by regimen, as far as a man can spare the time, and not provoke a disagreeable enemy by medicines. Enough of the composite animal, and of the body which is a part of him, and of the manner in which a man may train and be trained by himself so as to live most according to reason: and we must above and before all provide that the element which is to train him shall be the fairest and best adapted to that purpose. A minute discussion of this subject would be a serious task; but if, as before, I am to give only an outline, the subject may not unfitly be summed up as follows. I have often remarked that there are three kinds of soul located within us, having each of them motions, and I must now repeat in the fewest words possible, that one part, if remaining inactive and ceasing from its natural motion, must necessarily become very weak, but that which is trained and exercised, very strong. Wherefore we should take care that the movements of the different parts of the soul should be in due proportion. And we should consider that God gave the sovereign part of the human soul to be the divinity of each one, being that part which, as we say, dwells at the top of the body, and inasmuch as we are a plant not of an earthly but of a heavenly growth, raises us from earth to our kindred who are in heaven. And in this we say truly; for the divine power suspended the head and root of us from that place where the generation of the soul first began, and thus made the whole body upright. When a man is always occupied with the cravings of desire and ambition, and is eagerly striving to satisfy them, all his thoughts must be mortal, and, as far as it is possible altogether to become such, he must be mortal every whit, because he has cherished his mortal part. But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine, if he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal; and since he is ever cherishing the divine power, and has the divinity within him in perfect order, he will be perfectly happy. Now there is only one way of taking care of things, and this is to give to each the food and motion which are natural to it. And the motions which are naturally akin to the divine principle within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe. These each man should follow, and correct the courses of the head which were corrupted at our birth, and by learning the harmonies and revolutions of the universe, should assimilate the thinking being to the thought, renewing his original nature, and having assimilated them should attain to that perfect life which the gods have set before mankind, both for the present and the future. Thus our original design of discoursing about the universe down to the creation of man is nearly completed. A brief mention may be made of the generation of other animals, so far as the subject admits of brevity; in this manner our argument will best attain a due proportion. On the subject of animals, then, the following remarks may be offered. Of the men who came into the world, those who were cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have changed into the nature of women in the second generation. And this was the reason why at that time the gods created in us the desire of sexual intercourse, contriving in man one animated substance, and in woman another, which they formed respectively in the following manner. The outlet for drink by which liquids pass through the lung under the kidneys and into the bladder, which receives and then by the pressure of the air emits them, was so fashioned by them as to penetrate also into the body of the marrow, which passes from the head along the neck and through the back, and which in the preceding discourse we have named the seed. And the seed having life, and becoming endowed with respiration, produces in that part in which it respires a lively desire of emission, and thus creates in us the love of procreation. Wherefore also in men the organ of generation becoming rebellious and masterful, like an animal disobedient to reason, and maddened with the sting of lust, seeks to gain absolute sway; and the same is the case with the so-called womb or matrix of women; the animal within them is desirous of procreating children, and when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets discontented and angry, and wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of disease, until at length the desire and love of the man and the woman, bringing them together and as it were plucking the fruit from the tree, sow in the womb, as in a field, animals unseen by reason of their smallness and without form; these again are separated and matured within; they are then finally brought out into the light, and thus the generation of animals is completed. Thus were created women and the female sex in general. But the race of birds was created out of innocent light-minded men, who, although their minds were directed toward heaven, imagined, in their simplicity, that the clearest demonstration of the things above was to be obtained by sight; these were remodelled and transformed into birds, and they grew feathers instead of hair. The race of wild pedestrian animals, again, came from those who had no philosophy in any of their thoughts, and never considered at all about the nature of the heavens, because they had ceased to use the courses of the head, but followed the guidance of those parts of the soul which are in the breast. In consequence of these habits of theirs they had their front-legs and their heads resting upon the earth to which they were drawn by natural affinity; and the crowns of their heads were elongated and of all sorts of shapes, into which the courses of the soul were crushed by reason of disuse. And this was the reason why they were created quadrupeds and polypods: God gave the more senseless of them the more support that they might be more attracted to the earth. And the most foolish of them, who trail their bodies entirely upon the ground and have no longer any need of feet, he made without feet to crawl upon the earth. The fourth class were the inhabitants of the water: these were made out of the most entirely senseless and ignorant of all, whom the transformers did not think any longer worthy of pure respiration, because they possessed a soul which was made impure by all sorts of transgression; and instead of the subtle and pure medium of air, they gave them the deep and muddy sea to be their element of respiration; and hence arose the race of fishes and oysters, and other aquatic animals, which have received the most remote habitations as a punishment of their outlandish ignorance. These are the laws by which animals pass into one another, now, as ever, changing as they lose or gain wisdom and folly. We may now say that our discourse about the nature of the universe has an end. The world has received animals, mortal and immortal, and is fulfilled with them, and has become a visible animal containing the visible\u2014the sensible God who is the image of the intellectual, the greatest, best, fairest, most perfect\u2014the one only-begotten heaven. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TIMAEUS *** Updated editions will replace the previous one\u2014the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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