Complete Works

by Plato, Cooper, John M. , Hutchinson, D. S.

  CALLICLES: You’re being ironic, Socrates. [e]

  SOCRATES: No I’m not, Callicles, by Zethus—the character you were invoking in being ironic with me so often just now! But come and tell me: whom do you mean by the better?

  CALLICLES: I mean the worthier.

  SOCRATES: So do you see that you yourself are uttering words, without making anything clear? Won’t you say whether by the better and the superior you mean the more intelligent, or some others?

  CALLICLES: Yes, by Zeus, they’re very much the ones I mean.

  SOCRATES: So on your reasoning it will often be the case that a single [490] intelligent person is superior to countless unintelligent ones, that this person should rule and they be ruled, and that the one ruling should have a greater share than the ones being ruled. This is the meaning I think you intend—and I’m not trying to catch you with a phrase—if the one is superior to these countless others.

  CALLICLES: Yes, that’s what I do mean. This is what I take the just by nature to be: that the better one, the more intelligent one, that is, both rules over and has a greater share than his inferiors.

  SOCRATES: Hold it right there! What can your meaning be this time? [b] Suppose we were assembled together in great numbers in the same place, as we are now, and we held in common a great supply of food and drink, and suppose we were a motley group, some strong and some weak, but one of us, being a doctor, was more intelligent about these things. He would, very likely, be stronger than some and weaker than others. Now this man, being more intelligent than we are, will certainly be better and superior in these matters?

  CALLICLES: Yes, he will.

  SOCRATES: So should he have a share of this food greater than ours [c] because he’s better? Or should he be the one to distribute everything because he’s in charge, but not to get a greater share to consume and use up on his own body if he’s to escape being punished for it? Shouldn’t he, instead, have a greater share than some and a lesser one than others, and if he should happen to be the weakest of all, shouldn’t the best man have the least share of all, Callicles? Isn’t this so, my good man?

  [d] CALLICLES: You keep talking of food and drink and doctors and such nonsense. That’s not what I mean!

  SOCRATES: Don’t you mean that the more intelligent one is the better one? Say yes or no.

  CALLICLES: Yes, I do.

  SOCRATES: But not that the better should have a greater share?

  CALLICLES: Not of food or drink, anyhow.

  SOCRATES: I see. Of clothes, perhaps? Should the weaver have the biggest garment and go about wearing the greatest number and the most beautiful clothes?

  CALLICLES: What do you mean, clothes?

  SOCRATES: But when it comes to shoes, obviously the most intelligent, [e] the best man in that area should have the greater share. Perhaps the cobbler should walk around with the largest and greatest number of shoes on.

  CALLICLES: What do you mean, shoes? You keep on with this nonsense!

  SOCRATES: Well, if that’s not the sort of thing you mean, perhaps it’s this. Take a farmer, a man intelligent and admirable and good about land. Perhaps he should have the greater share of seed and use the largest possible quantity of it on his own land.

  CALLICLES: How you keep on saying the same things, Socrates!

  SOCRATES: Yes, Callicles, not only the same things, but also about the same subjects.

  [491] CALLICLES: By the gods! You simply don’t let up on your continual talk of shoemakers and cleaners, cooks and doctors, as if our discussion were about them!

  SOCRATES: Won’t you say whom it’s about, then? What does the superior, the more intelligent man have a greater share of, and have it justly? Will you neither bear with my promptings nor tell me yourself?

  CALLICLES: I’ve been saying it all along. First of all, by the ones who are the superior I don’t mean cobblers or cooks, but those who are intelligent [b] about the affairs of the city, about the way it’s to be well managed. And not only intelligent, but also brave, competent to accomplish whatever they have in mind, without slackening off because of softness of spirit.

  SOCRATES: Do you see, my good Callicles, that you and I are not accusing each other of the same thing? You claim that I’m always saying the same things, and you criticize me for it, whereas I, just the opposite of you, claim that you never say the same things about the same subjects. At one [c] time you were defining the better and the superior as the stronger, then again as the more intelligent, and now you’ve come up with something else again: the superior and the better are now said by you to be the braver. But tell me, my good fellow, once and for all, whom you mean by the better and the superior, and what they’re better and superior in.

  CALLICLES: But I’ve already said that I mean those who are intelligent in the affairs of the city, and brave, too. It’s fitting that they should be the [d] ones who rule their cities, and what’s just is that they, as the rulers, should have a greater share than the others, the ruled.

  SOCRATES: But what of themselves, my friend?

  CALLICLES: What of what?

  SOCRATES: Ruling or being ruled?

  CALLICLES: What do you mean?

  SOCRATES: I mean each individual ruling himself. Or is there no need at all for him to rule himself, but only to rule others?

  CALLICLES: What do you mean, rule himself?

  SOCRATES: Nothing very subtle. Just what the many mean: being self-controlled and master of oneself, ruling the pleasures and appetites [e] within oneself.

  CALLICLES: How delightful you are! By the self-controlled you mean the stupid ones!

  SOCRATES: How so? There’s no one who’d fail to recognize that I mean no such thing.

  CALLICLES: Yes you do, Socrates, very much so. How could a man prove to be happy if he’s enslaved to anyone at all? Rather, this is what’s admirable and just by nature—and I’ll say it to you now with all frankness—that the man who’ll live correctly ought to allow his own appetites to get as large as possible and not restrain them. And when they are as large as [492] possible, he ought to be competent to devote himself to them by virtue of his bravery and intelligence, and to fill them with whatever he may have an appetite for at the time. But this isn’t possible for the many, I believe; hence, they become detractors of people like this because of the shame they feel, while they conceal their own impotence. And they say that lack of discipline is shameful, as I was saying earlier, and so they enslave men who are better by nature, and while they themselves lack the ability to provide for themselves fulfillment for their pleasures, their own lack of [b] courage leads them to praise self-control and justice. As for all those who were either sons of kings to begin with or else naturally competent to secure some position of rule for themselves as tyrants or potentates, what in truth could be more shameful and worse than self-control and justice for these people who, although they are free to enjoy good things without any interference, should bring as master upon themselves the law of the many, their talk, and their criticism? Or how could they exist without becoming miserable under that “admirable” regime of justice and self-control, [c] allotting no greater share to their friends than to their enemies, and in this way “rule” in their cities? Rather, the truth of it, Socrates—the thing you claim to pursue—is like this: wantonness, lack of discipline, and freedom, if available in good supply, are excellence and happiness; as for these other things, these fancy phrases, these contracts of men that go against nature, they’re worthless nonsense!

  [d] SOCRATES: The way you pursue your argument, speaking frankly as you do, certainly does you credit, Callicles. For you are now saying clearly what others are thinking but are unwilling to say. I beg you, then, not to relax in any way, so that it may really become clear how we’re to live. Tell me: are you saying that if a person is to be the kind of person he should be, he shouldn’t restrain his appetites but let them become as large as possible and then should procure their fulfillment from some source or [e] other, and that this is excellence?


  CALLICLES: Yes, that’s what I’m saying.

  SOCRATES: So then those who have no need of anything are wrongly said to be happy?

  CALLICLES: Yes, for in that case stones and corpses would be happiest.

  SOCRATES: But then the life of those people you call happiest is a strange one, too. I shouldn’t be surprised that Euripides’ lines are true when he says:

  But who knows whether being alive is being dead

  And being dead is being alive?

  [493] Perhaps in reality we’re dead. Once I even heard one of the wise men say that we are now dead and that our bodies are our tombs, and that the part of our souls in which our appetites reside is actually the sort of thing to be open to persuasion and to shift back and forth. And hence some clever man, a teller of stories, a Sicilian, perhaps, or an Italian, named this part a jar [pithos], on account of its being a persuadable [pithanon] and [b] suggestible thing, thus slightly changing the name. And fools [anoētoi] he named uninitiated [amuētoi], suggesting that that part of the souls of fools where their appetites are located is their undisciplined part, one not tightly closed, a leaking jar, as it were. He based the image on its insatiability. Now this man, Callicles, quite to the contrary of your view, shows that of the people in Hades—meaning the unseen [aïdes]—these, the uninitiated ones, would be the most miserable. They would carry water into the leaking jar using another leaky thing, a sieve. That’s why by the sieve he means [c] the soul (as the man who talked with me claimed). And because they leak, he likened the souls of fools to sieves; for their untrustworthiness and forgetfulness makes them unable to retain anything. This account is on the whole a bit strange; but now that I’ve shown it to you, it does make clear what I want to persuade you to change your mind about if I can: to choose the orderly life, the life that is adequate to and satisfied with its circumstances at any given time instead of the insatiable, undisciplined [d] life. Do I persuade you at all, and are you changing your mind to believe that those who are orderly are happier than those who are undisciplined, or, even if I tell you many other such stories, will you change it none the more for that?

  CALLICLES: The latter thing you said is the truer, Socrates.

  SOCRATES: Come then, and let me give you another image, one from the same school as this one. Consider whether what you’re saying about each life, the life of the self-controlled man and that of the undisciplined one, is like this: Suppose there are two men, each of whom has many jars. The jars belonging to one of them are sound and full, one with wine, another [e] with honey, a third with milk, and many others with lots of other things. And suppose that the sources of each of these things are scarce and difficult to come by, procurable only with much toil and trouble. Now the one man, having filled up his jars, doesn’t pour anything more into them and gives them no further thought. He can relax over them. As for the other one, he too has resources that can be procured, though with difficulty, but his containers are leaky and rotten. He’s forced to keep on filling them, [494] day and night, or else he suffers extreme pain. Now since each life is the way I describe it, are you saying that the life of the undisciplined man is happier than that of the orderly man? When I say this, do I at all persuade you to concede that the orderly life is better than the undisciplined one, or do I not?

  CALLICLES: You do not, Socrates. The man who has filled himself up has no pleasure any more, and when he’s been filled up and experiences neither joy nor pain, that’s living like a stone, as I was saying just now. Rather, [b] living pleasantly consists in this: having as much as possible flow in.

  SOCRATES: Isn’t it necessary, then, that if there’s a lot flowing in, there should also be a lot going out and that there should be big holes for what’s passed out?

  CALLICLES: Certainly.

  SOCRATES: Now you’re talking about the life of a stonecurlew13 instead of that of a corpse or a stone. Tell me, do you say that there is such a thing as hunger, and eating when one is hungry?

  CALLICLES: Yes, there is.

  SOCRATES: And thirst, and drinking when one is thirsty? [c]

  CALLICLES: Yes, and also having all other appetites and being able to fill them and enjoy it, and so live happily.

  SOCRATES: Very good, my good man! Do carry on the way you’ve begun, and take care not to be ashamed. And I evidently shouldn’t shrink from being ashamed, either. Tell me now first whether a man who has an itch and scratches it and can scratch to his heart’s content, scratch his whole life long, can also live happily.

  CALLICLES: What nonsense, Socrates. You’re a regular crowd pleaser. [d]

  SOCRATES: That’s just how I shocked Polus and Gorgias and made them be ashamed. You certainly won’t be shocked, however, or be ashamed, for you’re a brave man. Just answer me, please.

  CALLICLES: I say that even the man who scratches would have a pleasant life.

  SOCRATES: And if a pleasant one, a happy one, too?

  CALLICLES: Yes indeed.

  [e] SOCRATES: What if he scratches only his head—or what am I to ask you further? See what you’ll answer if somebody asked you one after the other every question that comes next. And isn’t the climax of this sort of thing, the life of a catamite,14 a frightfully shameful and miserable one? Or will you have the nerve to say that they are happy as long as they have what they need to their hearts’ content?

  CALLICLES: Aren’t you ashamed, Socrates, to bring our discussion to such matters?

  SOCRATES: Is it I who bring them there, my splendid fellow, or is it the man who claims, just like that, that those who enjoy themselves, however [495] they may be doing it, are happy, and doesn’t discriminate between good kinds of pleasures and bad? Tell me now too whether you say that the pleasant and the good are the same or whether there is some pleasure that isn’t good.

  CALLICLES: Well, to keep my argument from being inconsistent if I say that they’re different, I say they’re the same.

  SOCRATES: You’re wrecking your earlier statements, Callicles, and you’d no longer be adequately inquiring into the truth of the matter with me if you speak contrary to what you think.

  [b] CALLICLES: And you’re wrecking yours, too, Socrates.

  SOCRATES: In that case, it isn’t right for me to do it, if it’s what I do, or for you either. But consider, my marvelous friend, surely the good isn’t just unrestricted enjoyment. For both those many shameful things hinted at just now obviously follow if this is the case, and many others as well.

  CALLICLES: That’s your opinion, Socrates.

  SOCRATES: Do you really assert these things, Callicles?

  CALLICLES: Yes, I do.

  [c] SOCRATES: So we’re to undertake the discussion on the assumption that you’re in earnest?

  CALLICLES: Most certainly.

  SOCRATES: All right, since that’s what you think, distinguish the following things for me: There is something you call knowledge, I take it?

  CALLICLES: Yes.

  SOCRATES: Weren’t you also saying just now that there is such a thing as bravery with knowledge?

  CALLICLES: Yes, I was.

  SOCRATES: Was it just on the assumption that bravery is distinct from knowledge that you were speaking of them as two?

  CALLICLES: Yes, very much so.

  SOCRATES: Well now, do you say that pleasure and knowledge are the same or different?

  [d] CALLICLES: Different of course, you wisest of men.

  SOCRATES: And surely that bravery is different from pleasure, too?

  CALLICLES: Of course.

  SOCRATES: All right, let’s put this on the record: Callicles from Acharnae says that pleasant and good are the same, and that knowledge and bravery are different both from each other and from what’s good.

  CALLICLES: And Socrates from Alopece doesn’t agree with us about this. Or does he?

  SOCRATES: He does not. And I believe that Callicles doesn’t either when [e] he comes to see himself rightly. Tell me: don’t you think that those who do well have the opposite experience
of those who do badly?

  CALLICLES: Yes, I do.

  SOCRATES: Now since these experiences are the opposites of each other, isn’t it necessary that it’s just the same with them as it is with health and disease? For a man isn’t both healthy and sick at the same time, I take it, nor does he get rid of both health and disease at the same time.

  CALLICLES: What do you mean?

  SOCRATES: Take any part of the body you like, for example, and think [496] about it. A man can have a disease of the eyes, can’t he, to which we give the name “eye disease”?

  CALLICLES: Of course.

  SOCRATES: But then surely his eyes aren’t also healthy at the same time?

  CALLICLES: No, not in any way.

  SOCRATES: What if he gets rid of his eye disease? Does he then also get rid of his eyes’ health and so in the end he’s rid of both at the same time?

  CALLICLES: No, not in the least.

  SOCRATES: For that, I suppose, is an amazing and unintelligible thing to [b] happen, isn’t it?

  CALLICLES: Yes, it very much is.

  SOCRATES: But he acquires and loses each of them successively, I suppose.

  CALLICLES: Yes, I agree.

  SOCRATES: Isn’t it like this with strength and weakness, too?

  CALLICLES: Yes.

  SOCRATES: And with speed and slowness?

  CALLICLES: Yes, that’s right.

  SOCRATES: Now, does he acquire and get rid of good things and happiness, and their opposites, bad things and misery, successively too?

  CALLICLES: No doubt he does.

  SOCRATES: So if we find things that a man both gets rid of and keeps at [c] the same time, it’s clear that these things wouldn’t be what’s good and what’s bad. Are we agreed on that? Think very carefully about it and tell me.

  CALLICLES: Yes, I agree most emphatically.

  SOCRATES: Go back, now, to what we’ve agreed on previously. You mentioned hunger—as a pleasant or a painful thing? I mean the hunger itself.