Laws
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,