Did the Great Statesmen Make Athens Better, or Only Bigger?
Socrates
But now, best of men — since you are just now starting to handle the city's affairs yourself, while you keep urging me on and reproaching me for not taking part — come, let's examine each other: has Callicles by now made any citizen better? Is there anyone — foreigner or citizen, slave or free — who was wicked before, unjust and undisciplined and foolish, and has become fine and good because of Callicles? Tell me — if someone were to question you on this, Callicles — what will you say? Who will you say you have made better by keeping company with you? Are you reluctant to answer, if there is some deed of yours from when you were still a private citizen, before you attempted public life?
Callicles
You're a contentious man, Socrates.
Socrates
No, I'm not asking out of contentiousness, but because I genuinely want to know in what manner you think one ought to conduct politics among us. Or is it something else you'll take care of for us once you turn to the city's affairs, rather than making the citizens as good as possible? Or haven't we already agreed many times over that this is what the political man must do? Have we agreed, or not? Answer. We have agreed — I'll answer on your behalf. So if this is what a good man must provide for his own city, think back now and tell me about those men you were mentioning a little earlier — whether you still think they turned out to be good citizens — Pericles, Cimon, Miltiades, and Themistocles.
Callicles
I do.
Socrates
Then if they were good, clearly each of them made the citizens better instead of worse. Did he, or not?
Callicles
Yes.
Socrates
So when Pericles first began speaking before the assembly, were the Athenians worse than when he was giving his last speeches?
Callicles
Perhaps.
Socrates
Not perhaps, best of men, but a necessity from what we've agreed, if he really was a good citizen.
Callicles
What of it, then?
Socrates
Nothing — but tell me this too: whether the Athenians are said to have become better because of Pericles, or, on the contrary, to have been utterly ruined by him. For this is what I hear — that Pericles made the Athenians idle and cowardly and talkative and money-loving, by being the first to establish paid service.
Callicles
You're hearing that from the men with the battered ears, Socrates.
Socrates
But this I no longer merely hear — both you and I know clearly that Pericles was well regarded at first, and the Athenians voted no shameful conviction against him while they were worse; but once they had become fine and good because of him, at the end of Pericles's life, they convicted him of theft, and came close to sentencing him to death — clearly because they thought him wicked.
Callicles
What of it? Was Pericles bad because of that?
Socrates
Well, a keeper of donkeys or horses or cattle, at any rate, would be thought a bad one if this were his record — if he took them over not kicking or butting or biting him, and turned them into animals doing all of that out of savageness. Or don't you think any keeper of any animal whatever is a bad one, if he takes over gentler creatures and turns them out wilder than he received them? Do you think so, or not?
Callicles
Certainly — just to indulge you.
Socrates
Then indulge me on this too, and answer: is man one of the animals, or not?
Callicles
Of course he is.
Socrates
So Pericles was taking care of human beings?
Callicles
Yes.
Socrates
What then? Shouldn't they, as we just agreed, have become more just instead of more unjust because of him, if he really was taking care of them as a man good in political matters?
Callicles
Certainly.
Socrates
Now the just are gentle, as Homer said — but what do you say? Isn't that so?
Callicles
Yes.
Socrates
And yet he made them come out wilder than he received them — and toward himself, of all people, whom he'd least have wished it.
Callicles
Do you want me to agree with you?
Socrates
If you think I'm telling the truth.
Callicles
All right, let it be so.
Socrates
Then if wilder, also more unjust and worse?
Callicles
Let it be.
Socrates
Then by this argument Pericles was not good at politics.
Callicles
Not by your account, anyway.
Socrates
No, by Zeus, nor by yours either, from what you've agreed. Now tell me again about Cimon — didn't the very men he served ostracize him, so as not to hear his voice for ten years? And didn't they do the same to Themistocles, and add exile as punishment? And didn't they vote to throw Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, into the pit, and if not for the presiding officer, wouldn't he have gone in? And yet if these men were good, as you claim, they would never have suffered any of this. Good charioteers, surely, don't fall out of their chariots at the start and then fall out later, once they've trained their horses and become better drivers themselves — that isn't how it works, either in chariot-driving or in any other line of work — or do you think it is?
Callicles
Not to me.
Socrates
So it seems our earlier arguments were true, that we know of no man who has turned out good at politics in this city. You agreed there was none among the men of today, but there was among the men of the past, and you picked out these particular men — but they've turned out to be no better than the men of today, so that, if they were orators, they used neither the true rhetoric — for then they wouldn't have fallen — nor the flattering kind.
Callicles
But it's far from the case, Socrates, that any man alive today could accomplish deeds like the ones any of these men — whichever one you please — accomplished.
Socrates
My good man, I'm not faulting them as servants of the city either — they seem to me to have been more capable servants than the men of today, and better able to supply the city with what it desired. But when it comes to redirecting people's desires instead of indulging them, persuading and compelling the citizens toward whatever would actually make them better — in that, they differed from the men of today, one might say, not at all; and that is the one task of a good citizen. As for ships and walls and dockyards and plenty of other things of that kind, I grant you those men were cleverer at supplying them. So you and I are doing something absurd in our discussion — the whole time we've been talking, we haven't stopped circling back to the same point, each failing to grasp what the other is saying. At any rate, I think you've many times agreed and recognized that this business, whether concerning the body or the soul, comes in two kinds: one of them is a service, capable of supplying, if our bodies are hungry, food, if thirsty, drink, if cold, clothes, bedding, shoes, or whatever else bodies come to desire — and I'm deliberately using the same images with you, so you'll follow more easily. For being able to supply any of these things — whether as a shopkeeper or a merchant or a craftsman of one of them, a baker or a cook or a weaver or a shoemaker or a tanner — it's no wonder that a man of that kind seems, both to himself and to others, to be a caretaker of the body, to anyone who doesn't know that there is, apart from all these, one craft, physical training together with medicine, which really is the caretaking of the body, and which rightly ought to rule over all these crafts and make use of their products, because it alone knows what is good and bad among foods and drinks for the excellence of the body, while all the others are ignorant of this — which is why these other crafts, in dealing with the body, are slavish and servile and unfree, while physical training and medicine are, by right, their mistresses. That the same holds for the soul as well — at times you seem to me to understand what I'm saying, and agree as though you know what I mean; but a little later you come round saying that men have become fine and good citizens in the city, and when I ask which men, you seem to me to be putting forward, for politics, men of exactly the same stripe as if, when I asked about physical training who has become or is a good caretaker of bodies, you told me quite in earnest, Thearion the baker, and Mithaecus, who wrote the book on Sicilian cookery, and Sarambus the wine-merchant — that these men have turned out to be wonderful caretakers of bodies, one preparing wonderful bread, another relish, another wine. Well, perhaps you'd be indignant if I told you: my good man, you understand nothing about physical training — you're telling me about servants, men who supply desires, with no understanding of anything fine and good about the matter, who, if it so happens, stuff and fatten people's bodies, get praised for it, and along the way destroy their old flesh too; while the people themselves, in their inexperience, won't blame the ones who feasted them as the cause of their sicknesses and the loss of their old flesh, but rather whoever happens to be present at the time offering some advice, once that earlier overindulgence brings on sickness a good while later, arriving as it does with no regard for health — these are the ones they'll blame and censure and do some harm to, if they can, while praising those earlier men, the actual causes of the trouble, to the skies. And that, Callicles, is exactly what you're doing now — you praise men who have feasted the citizens, filling them up with whatever they wanted. And people say these men made the city great — but that it's swollen and festering underneath because of those men of old, that they don't perceive. For without moderation and justice they've filled the city with harbors and dockyards and walls and tribute and nonsense of that kind; so when this collapse of its weakness comes, they'll blame whoever happens to be advising at the time, and praise Themistocles and Cimon and Pericles, the actual causes of the trouble — and perhaps they'll take hold of you too, if you aren't careful, and of my friend Alcibiades, once they start losing even the old possessions along with what they've newly gained — though you two aren't the causes of the trouble, only perhaps its accomplices. And yet I see a foolish thing happening even now, and I hear the same about the men of old. For I notice that whenever the city takes some political man to task as a wrongdoer, they grow indignant and complain bitterly at the terrible treatment they're suffering — as if, having done the city many good services, they're now being unjustly destroyed by it, or so their story goes. But the whole thing is a lie — no leader of a city could ever be unjustly destroyed by the very city he leads. It seems the same holds for all who claim to be statesmen as for all who claim to be sophists. For the sophists too, wise as they are in other respects, do this absurd thing — claiming to be teachers of virtue, they often accuse their own students of wronging them, cheating them of their fees and paying back no other gratitude either, after having been well treated by them. And what could be more unreasonable than this claim — that men who have become good and just, who have had injustice removed from them by their teacher and have acquired justice instead, should do wrong by means of something they no longer have? Doesn't that strike you as absurd, my friend? You've truly forced me into giving a speech, Callicles, by refusing to answer.
Callicles
And you wouldn't be able to talk, if no one answered you?
The True Political Craft, and a Trial Foreseen
Socrates
So it seems — at any rate, I'm stretching out long speeches now, since you refuse to answer. But, my good man, tell me, in Zeus's name, god of friendship — don't you think it's unreasonable for someone who claims to have made a person good to then blame that same person, made good and being good through him, for afterward turning out wicked?
Callicles
I think so.
Socrates
Now don't you hear men who claim to educate people in virtue saying things like that?
Callicles
I do — but why would you talk about men who aren't worth anything?
Socrates
Then why would you talk about those men who claim to lead the city and take care that it becomes as good as possible, and then turn around and accuse it, whenever it suits them, of being utterly wicked? Do you think these men are any different from the others? The sophist and the orator, my dear fellow, are the same thing, or nearly the same and closely related, as I was telling Polus — but out of ignorance you think one of them, rhetoric, is something altogether splendid, while you look down on the other. But in truth sophistry is as much finer than rhetoric as legislation is finer than the administration of justice, and physical training finer than medicine — and I, for my part, thought it was only public speakers and sophists who had no room to blame the very thing they teach as bad for its practitioners, or else, in that same breath, to accuse themselves of never having benefited the very people they claim to benefit. Isn't that how it is?
Callicles
Certainly.
Socrates
And surely, then, giving that benefit for free, as one would expect, was possible only for these men, if they were telling the truth. For with any other benefit, someone who's received it — say, made swift by a trainer — might perhaps cheat him of his due gratitude, if the trainer let him go without first striking a bargain for pay and taking the money at the very moment he passed on the speed — since it's not slowness, I imagine, that makes men do wrong, but injustice — isn't that so?
Callicles
Yes.
Socrates
So if someone removes this very thing, injustice itself, there's no danger of his ever being wronged, but for him alone it's safe to give away this particular benefit for free, if someone really could make people good. Isn't that so?
Callicles
I agree.
Socrates
That's why, it seems, there's nothing shameful in taking money for giving other kinds of advice — about building houses, say, or the other crafts.
Callicles
So it seems.
Socrates
But when it comes to this particular business — by what means someone might become as good as possible and best manage his own household or city — it's considered shameful to refuse to give advice unless someone pays for it. Isn't that so?
Callicles
Yes.
Socrates
Clearly the reason is that this, alone among benefits, makes the one who has received it want to do good in return — so it seems a fine sign, if a man who has done this particular good is treated well in return; and if not, not. Is that how things stand?
Callicles
It is.
Socrates
So which kind of care for the city are you calling me to — define it for me: the kind that fights hard with the Athenians so that they'll become as good as possible, like a doctor, or the kind that serves them and speaks to please them? Tell me the truth, Callicles — it's only fair, since you began speaking frankly with me, that you keep on saying what you actually think. So speak up now, clearly and nobly.
Callicles
Well then, I say the kind that serves them.
Socrates
So you're calling me, noblest of men, to a life of flattering them.
Callicles
If you'd rather call it playing the Mysian, Socrates — because if you won't do that—
Socrates
Don't say what you've said so often — that anyone who wants to can kill me — so that I don't in turn say, a wicked man killing a good one; nor that he'll take my property if I have any, so that I don't in turn say, but having taken it he won't know what to do with it, but just as he took it from me unjustly, so too he'll use it unjustly once he has it, and if unjustly, shamefully, and if shamefully, badly.
Callicles
You really do seem to me, Socrates, to be confident that none of this could happen to you — as if you lived out of harm's way and could never be hauled into court by some thoroughly rotten and worthless man.
Socrates
Then I really am a fool, Callicles, if I don't think that in this city anyone at all, whoever it happens to be, could suffer that. But this much I know well — that if I do go into court facing danger over one of the things you're talking about, the man bringing me in will be some scoundrel, since no decent man would bring in someone who's done no wrong — and it wouldn't be at all strange if I died for it. Do you want me to tell you why I expect this?
Callicles
Certainly.
Socrates
I think that I, along with a few Athenians — not to say alone — am attempting the true political craft, and that I'm the only man alive today practicing politics; so since the speeches I make each time aren't spoken to please, but aim at the best, not at the most pleasant, and since I'm unwilling to do those clever tricks you recommend, I'll have nothing to say for myself in court. The same argument comes back to me that I made to Polus — I'll be judged the way a doctor would be judged before a jury of children, prosecuted by a cook. Just think what a man like that could say in his own defense, caught in that position, if someone brought a charge against him, saying: children, this man here has done a great deal of harm to you, to you yourselves — he ruins your youngest with cutting and burning, and by starving and choking you leaves you at a loss, giving you the bitterest draughts and forcing hunger and thirst on you, not like me, who feasted you on all sorts of good things — what do you think a doctor, caught in that bind, could find to say? Or if he told the truth — that he did all of this for your health, children — how loud a cry do you think jurors like that would raise? Wouldn't it be loud?
Callicles
Perhaps — one should assume so, at least.
Socrates
So don't you think he'd be at a complete loss for what he ought to say?
Callicles
Certainly.
Socrates
And that, I know well, is just the kind of thing I would suffer if I went into court. For I won't be able to point to any pleasures I've supplied them with, the kind they count as benefits and services, and I envy neither the men who supply them nor those they're supplied to; and if someone claims I corrupt the young by putting them at a loss, or that I slander my elders with bitter words in private or in public, I'll have no way to say the true thing — that I say all of this justly, and that I'm acting, gentlemen of the jury, in your own interest — nor anything else at all; so whatever happens to come, that, I suppose, is what I'll suffer.
Callicles
So does it seem to you, Socrates, to be a fine thing, for a man in a city to be in such a state, and unable to help himself?
Socrates
Yes — provided he has that one thing, Callicles, which you've agreed to many times: provided he has already helped himself, by having neither said nor done anything unjust, whether toward men or toward gods. For this kind of help to oneself has often been agreed between us to be the strongest kind there is. Now if someone were to prove me unable to give this kind of help, to myself or to anyone else, I'd be ashamed, whether refuted before a crowd or a few, or alone by one man alone, and if I died because of that incapacity, I'd be indignant — but if I should die for lack of the flattering kind of rhetoric, I know well you would see me bear my death easily. For dying itself is feared by no one, unless he's utterly unreasoning and unmanly — what's feared is doing wrong, since arriving in Hades with a soul crammed full of wrongdoing is the worst of all evils. And if you like, I'm willing to tell you a story showing that this is so.
Callicles
Well, since you've finished everything else, finish this too.
The Myth of Judgment
Socrates
Listen, then, they say, to a very fine account — one you'll take for a myth, I imagine, but I take for a true story; for I'll tell you what I'm about to tell you as something that actually happened. As Homer tells it, Zeus and Poseidon and Pluto divided up the rule between them, once they had taken it over from their father. Now there was this law about human beings under Cronus, and it still holds among the gods even now: that whoever has lived out his life justly and piously should, once he dies, depart to the islands of the blessed and dwell there in complete happiness, free of evils, while whoever has lived unjustly and impiously should go to the prison of retribution and justice, the place they call Tartarus. The judges of these cases, under Cronus and still recently under Zeus's rule, were living men judging the living, on the very day each person was due to die — and so the cases were judged badly. So Pluto and the overseers coming from the islands of the blessed kept telling Zeus that men were arriving on both sides who didn't belong there. So Zeus said: well, I'll put a stop to this happening. For right now the cases are being judged badly. The ones being judged, he said, are judged still clothed — for they're judged while alive. Now many people, he said, with wicked souls are dressed up in fine bodies and lineages and riches, and when the judgment comes, plenty of witnesses show up for them, ready to testify that they've lived justly; so the judges are overawed by these witnesses, and at the same time they themselves judge while still clothed, with their own eyes and ears and whole body screening off their soul. So all of this stands in their way — their own coverings and the coverings of the men being judged alike. So first of all, he said, they must stop knowing their death beforehand, since right now they know it in advance. That much, in fact, has already been told to Prometheus, so he'll stop them from knowing it. Next, they must be judged stripped of all of that — for they must be judged while dead. And the judge too must be naked — dead himself — studying the soul itself with his own soul alone, the moment each person dies, stripped of all his kin and having left behind on earth all that finery, so that the judgment may be just. So having recognized this before you did, I made judges of my own sons — two from Asia, Minos and Rhadamanthus, and one from Europe, Aeacus — and once they themselves have died, they'll hold court in the meadow, at the fork from which the two roads lead off, one toward the islands of the blessed, the other toward Tartarus. Rhadamanthus will judge those from Asia, and Aeacus those from Europe, and to Minos I'll give the privilege of deciding whenever the other two are at a loss over some point, so that the judgment on people's journey may be as just as possible.
This, Callicles, is what I've heard and believe to be true — and from this account I reckon something like the following follows. Death, it seems to me, is nothing other than the separation of two things, soul and body, from each other; and once they've been separated from one another, each of the two keeps its own condition not much less than it had while the person was alive, the body keeping its own nature, and all its treatments and sufferings plainly visible. For instance, if someone's body was large, whether by nature or by feeding or by both while he was alive, then his corpse is large once he's died too, and if fat, fat also once dead, and so on for the rest — and if in turn he made a practice of wearing his hair long, his corpse is long-haired too. Again, if someone was a whipped man and carried, while living, the traces of blows as scars on his body, whether from whips or other wounds, one can see his corpse bearing these same marks too; and if someone's limbs were broken or twisted in life, these same things are plainly visible in death as well. In a word, whatever condition the body had been prepared to have in life, these same features remain visible after death too, either all of them or most of them, for a certain span of time. The very same thing, then, seems to me to hold for the soul as well, Callicles — once it's stripped of the body, everything is plainly visible in the soul, both its natural features and the conditions the person's soul acquired through his practice of each particular thing. So whenever they arrive before their judge, those from Asia before Rhadamanthus, Rhadamanthus stops each of them and studies his soul, not knowing whose it is — but often, laying hold of the Great King or some other king or potentate, he finds nothing sound in the soul at all, but one flogged raw and covered with scars from perjuries and injustice, which each of his actions has smeared into the soul, and everything crooked from lying and pretension, nothing straight, because it was raised without truth; and he sees the soul crammed with disproportion and ugliness from unchecked power and luxury and violence and unrestrained conduct; and seeing it in this state, he sends it off in disgrace, straight to its place of confinement, where it's bound to go and undergo the sufferings it deserves. Now it's fitting for everyone undergoing punishment, when rightly punished by another, either to become better and benefit from it, or to become an example to others, so that others, seeing him suffer whatever he suffers, may grow better out of fear. Those who benefit and pay their penalty at the hands of gods and men are the ones who have committed curable wrongs; but even so, the benefit comes to them only through pain and suffering, both here and in Hades — for there's no other way to be rid of injustice. But those who have committed the worst wrongs, and through such crimes have become incurable, from these come the examples — and while these men themselves no longer benefit at all, being incurable, others benefit, who see them suffering, on account of their crimes, the greatest and most painful and most terrifying sufferings for all time, hung up there in Hades in the prison, quite literally as examples, sights and warnings for whichever wrongdoers keep on arriving. And I say Archelaus will be one of these, if Polus is telling the truth, and so will any other tyrant of that kind — and I think most of these examples turn out to have come from tyrants and kings and potentates and men who've handled the affairs of cities, since it's their power that lets them commit the greatest and most unholy crimes. Homer bears witness to this too — for he portrays kings and potentates as the ones punished in Hades for all time, Tantalus and Sisyphus and Tityus, while Thersites, or any other private person who was wicked, no poet has ever portrayed as gripped by great punishments as incurable — no doubt because it wasn't open to him to sin on that scale, which is why he was happier than those to whom it was open — but the truth is, Callicles, that it's from among the powerful that the utterly wicked men tend to come; nothing, however, stops good men from arising among these too, and it's very much worth admiring the ones who do; for it's hard, Callicles, and worthy of great praise, for a man given great scope to do wrong to live his life out justly. Few such men come to exist — though both here and elsewhere there have been, and I think there will go on being, men fine and good in this particular virtue, that of justly managing whatever's entrusted to them; and one has even become quite renowned among the rest of the Greeks, Aristides son of Lysimachus — but most men in power, my excellent friend, turn out wicked. So, as I was saying, whenever Rhadamanthus gets hold of someone of that kind, he knows nothing else about him — not who he is, nor whose son — only that he's some wicked man; and having seen this, he sends him off to Tartarus, marking him as to whether he seems curable or incurable, and once he arrives there he suffers what he deserves. But sometimes, catching sight of another soul that has lived piously and with truthfulness, that of a private man or someone else — most of all, I'd say, Callicles, a philosopher's, one who has minded his own business and not meddled in others' affairs during his life — he's filled with admiration and sends it off to the islands of the blessed. Aeacus does the very same — each of the two holds a rod as he judges — while Minos sits overseeing them, alone holding a golden scepter, as Homer's Odysseus says he saw him—
So I, Callicles, am persuaded by this account, and I'm looking to how I might show the judge a soul as healthy as possible — so, letting go of the honors most men prize, and practicing truth, I'll try, as best I can, to actually be as good as possible both in living and, when I come to die, in dying. And I call on all other people too, as far as I'm able, and I call on you especially, in return, to this life and this contest, which I say stands in place of all the contests here — and I reproach you with this: that you'll be unable to help yourself, when your trial and judgment comes, the one I was just now describing, but instead, going before that judge, the son of Aegina, once he takes hold of you and leads you off, you'll gape and grow dizzy there no less than I do here, and someone will perhaps strike you on the side of the head in utter disgrace, and treat you with contempt in every way.
Now perhaps all this seems to you to be told like an old wives' tale, and you look down on it — and there'd be nothing strange in looking down on it, if we could search and find something better and truer than this somewhere; but as it is, you can see that the three of you, the wisest of the Greeks alive today, you and Polus and Gorgias, cannot show that one ought to live any other life than this one, which also turns out to serve us well in that other place. But out of so many arguments, with all the others refuted, this one alone stands firm: that one must guard against doing wrong more than against suffering it, and that above everything else a man must practice, in private and in public alike, not seeming to be good but being it; and if anyone turns out bad in some respect, he must be corrected, and this is the second-best good, after being just — becoming just by being corrected and paying the penalty; and every kind of flattery, both toward oneself and toward others, whether toward the few or toward the many, must be avoided; and rhetoric, just like every other activity, must always be used toward what's just. So trust me, and follow this path, arriving at which you'll be happy both in life and in death, as the argument shows. And let someone look down on you as a fool and treat you with contempt, if he wants to, and yes, by Zeus, confidently let him strike you with that disgraceful blow — for you'll suffer nothing terrible, if you're truly fine and good, practicing virtue. And then, once we've practiced it together in this way, at that point, if it still seems we should, we'll take up politics, or whatever else seems best to us — and we'll decide then, being better at deciding than we are now. For it's shameful, in the state we plainly find ourselves in right now, to go on swaggering as though we were somebody, when we can never agree with ourselves twice over about the very same things, and that about the most important matters — to such a depth of ignorance have we sunk — so let's take as our guide the argument that has now come to light, which shows us that this way of life is the best, practicing justice and the rest of virtue both in living and in dying. Let's follow this one, then, and call on others to follow it too, rather than the one you trust in and use to call on me — for that one, Callicles, is worth nothing at all.