Part 39

_Soc._ 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 487 have three qualities—knowledge, 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,—What 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, 488 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 ‘dolt,’ 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?

[Sidenote: _Callicles is drawn into a contradiction._]

_Cal._ Yes; that is what I was saying, and so I still aver.

_Soc._ 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—whether 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:—this is the point which I want to have cleared up. Are the superior and better and stronger the same or different?

_Cal._ I say unequivocally that they are the same.

[Sidenote: He means the better and stronger, and therefore the many who make the laws, which are noble because they are made by the better.]

_Soc._ Then the many are by nature superior to the one, against whom, as you were saying, they make the laws?

_Cal._ Certainly.

_Soc._ Then the laws of the many are the laws of the superior?

_Cal._ Very true.

_Soc._ Then they are the laws of the better; for the superior class are far better, as you were saying?

_Cal._ Yes.

_Soc._ And since they are superior, the laws which are made by them are by nature good?

_Cal._ Yes.

[Sidenote: And the many are also of opinion that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice.]

_Soc._ And are not the many of opinion, as you were lately saying, that justice is equality, and that to do is more 489 disgraceful than to suffer injustice?—is that so or not? Answer, Callicles, and let no modesty be found to come in the way[36]; do the many think, or do they not think thus?—I 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.

[Sidenote: _He flounders impatiently._]

_Cal._ Yes; the opinion of the many is what you say.

_Soc._ 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?

[Sidenote: ‘Of course I don’t mean the mob.’]

_Cal._ 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—have 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?

_Soc._ Ho! my philosopher, is that your line?

_Cal._ Certainly.

_Soc._ I was thinking, Callicles, that something of the kind must have been in your mind, and that is why I repeated the question,—What 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.

_Cal._ You are ironical.

[Sidenote: Then once more,—Who are the better?]

_Soc._ No, by the hero Zethus, Callicles, by whose aid you were just now saying (486 A) many ironical things against me, I am not:—tell me, then, whom you mean by the better?

_Cal._ I mean the more excellent.

_Soc._ Do you not see that you are yourself using words which have no meaning and that you are explaining nothing?—will you tell me whether you mean by the better and superior the wiser, or if not, whom?

[Sidenote: _Callicles grows more and more exasperated._]

_Cal._ Most assuredly, I do mean the wiser. 490

[Sidenote: The wiser: the one wise among ten thousand fools,—he ought to rule.]

_Soc._ 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?

_Cal._ Yes; that is what I mean, and that is what I conceive to be natural justice—that the better and wiser should rule and have more than the inferior.

[Sidenote: But this is contrary to the analogy of the other arts.]

_Soc._ 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—will he not, being wiser, be also better than we are, and our superior in this matter of food?

_Cal._ Certainly.

_Soc._ 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;—his 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:—am I not right, my friend?

[Sidenote: Callicles is disgusted at the commonplace parallels of Socrates.]

_Cal._ You talk about meats and drinks and physicians and other nonsense; I am not speaking of them.

_Soc._ Well, but do you admit that the wiser is the better? Answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’

_Cal._ Yes.

_Soc._ And ought not the better to have a larger share?

_Cal._ Not of meats and drinks.

[Sidenote: _Socrates grows more and more ironical._]

_Soc._ I understand: then, perhaps, of coats the 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?

_Cal._ Fudge about coats!

_Soc._ 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?

_Cal._ Fudge about shoes! What nonsense are you talking?

_Soc._ 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?

_Cal._ How you go on, always talking in the same way, Socrates!

_Soc._ Yes, Callicles, and also about the same things. 491

_Cal._ 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.

_Soc._ 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?

_Cal._ 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.

[Sidenote: Socrates is accused of always saying the same things: he accuses Callicles of never saying the same about the same.]

_Soc._ 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?

[Sidenote: _The delights of successful wickedness._]

_Cal._ I have already told you that I mean those who are wise and courageous in the administration of a state—they ought to be the rulers of their states, and justice consists in their having more than their subjects.

_Soc._ But whether rulers or subjects will they or will they not have more than themselves, my friend?

_Cal._ What do you mean?

_Soc._ 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?

_Cal._ What do you mean by his ‘ruling over himself’?

_Soc._ 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.

_Cal._ What innocence! you mean those fools,—the temperate?

_Soc._ Certainly:—any one may know that to be my meaning.

[Sidenote: Callicles reasserts his doctrine that the esteem in which virtue and justice are held is due only to men’s fear for themselves. No man who has the power to enjoy himself practises self-control.]

[Sidenote: _The soul of the ignorant._]

_Cal._ 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 492 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—to 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?—must 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:—that luxury and intemperance and licence, if they be provided with means, are virtue and happiness—all the rest is a mere bauble, agreements contrary to nature, foolish talk of men, nothing worth[37].

_Soc._ 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:—you 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?

_Cal._ Yes; I do.

_Soc._ Then those who want nothing are not truly said to be happy?

[Sidenote: To live without pleasure or passion is to be dead.]

[Sidenote: No; the true death, as Pythagorean philosophy tells us, is to pour water out of a vessel full of holes into a colander full of holes.]

[Sidenote: _The sound and leaky vessels._]

_Cal._ No indeed, for then stones and dead men would be the happiest of all.

_Soc._ But surely life according to your view is an awful thing; and indeed I think that Euripides may have been right in saying,

‘Who knows if life be not death and death life;’

and that we are very likely dead; I have heard a philosopher 493 say that at this moment we are actually dead, and that the body (σῶμα) is our tomb (σῆμα[38]), 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—because of its believing and make-believe nature—a vessel[39], 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 (ἀειδὲς), 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?

_Cal._ The latter, Socrates, is more like the truth.

[Sidenote: The temperate man is the sound, the intemperate the leaky vessel.]

_Soc._ Well, I will tell you another image, which comes out of the same school:—Let 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:—There 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 494 pain. Such are their respective lives:—And 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?

[Sidenote: The life of desire and pleasure is not to be compared to a full vessel, but to an ever-running stream.]

_Cal._ 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.

[Sidenote: _Callicles no longer a test,_]

_Soc._ But the more you pour in, the greater the waste; and the holes must be large for the liquid to escape.

_Cal._ Certainly.

_Soc._ 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?

_Cal._ Yes.

_Soc._ And he is to be thirsting and drinking?

_Cal._ 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.

_Soc._ 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?

_Cal._ What a strange being you are, Socrates! a regular mob-orator.

_Soc._ 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.

_Cal._ I answer, that even the scratcher would live pleasantly.

_Soc._ And if pleasantly, then also happily?

_Cal._ To be sure.

_Soc._ 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?

[Sidenote: Callicles professes a virtuous indignation at the very mention of the consequences of his own doctrine.]

_Cal._ Are you not ashamed, Socrates, of introducing such topics into the argument?

_Soc._ 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 495 would still ask, whether you say that pleasure and good are the same, or whether there is some pleasure which is not a good?

[Sidenote: _because he will not say what he thinks._]

_Cal._ Well, then, for the sake of consistency, I will say that they are the same.

_Soc._ 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.

_Cal._ Why, that is what you are doing too, Socrates.