Gorgias
whom you mean, by the better?
CALLICLES: I mean the more excellent.
SOCRATES: 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?
CALLICLES: Most assuredly, I do mean the wiser.
SOCRATES: 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?
CALLICLES: 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.
SOCRATES: 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?
CALLICLES: Certainly.
SOCRATES: 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?
CALLICLES: You talk about meats and drinks and physicians and other
nonsense; I am not speaking of them.
SOCRATES: Well, but do you admit that the wiser is the better? Answer
“Yes” or “No.”
CALLICLES: Yes.
SOCRATES: And ought not the better to have a larger share?
CALLICLES: Not of meats and drinks.
SOCRATES: 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?
CALLICLES: Fudge about coats!
SOCRATES: 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?
CALLICLES: Fudge about shoes! What nonsense are you talking?
SOCRATES: 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?
CALLICLES: How you go on, always talking in the same way, Socrates!
SOCRATES: Yes, Callicles, and also about the same things.
CALLICLES: 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.
SOCRATES: 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?
CALLICLES: 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.
SOCRATES: 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?
CALLICLES: 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.
SOCRATES: But whether rulers or subjects will they or will they not
have more than themselves, my friend?
CALLICLES: What do you mean?
SOCRATES: 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?
CALLICLES: What do you mean by his “ruling over himself”?
SOCRATES: 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.
CALLICLES: What innocence! you mean those fools,—the temperate?
SOCRATES: Certainly:—any one may know that to be my meaning.
CALLICLES: 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—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. (Compare Republic.)
SOCRATES: 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?
CALLICLES: Yes; I do.
SOCRATES: Then those who want nothing are not truly said to be happy?
CALLICLES: No indeed, for then stones and dead men would be the
happiest of all.
SOCRATES: 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 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—because of its believing and make-believe nature—a vessel (An
untranslatable pun,—dia 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?
CALLICLES: The latter, Socrates, is more like the truth.
SOCRATES: 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 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?
CALLICLES: 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.
SOCRATES: But the more you pour in, the greater the waste; and the
holes must be large for the liquid to escape.
CALLICLES: Certainly.
SOCRATES: 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?
CALLICLES: Yes.
SOCRATES: And he is to be thirsting and drinking?
CALLICLES: 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.
SOCRATES: 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?
CALLICLES: What a strange being you are, Socrates! a regular