Greek Texts & Translations

Your training, Stranger, has certainly, as it seems to me, given you an excellent understanding of the legal practices of Crete. But tell me this more clearly still: by the definition you have given of the well-constituted State 626cyou appear to me to imply that it ought to be organized in such a way as to be victorious in war over all other States. Is that so?

Certainly it is; and I think that our friend here shares my opinion.

No Lacedaemonian, my good sir, could possibly say otherwise.

If this, then, is the right attitude for a State to adopt towards a State, is the right attitude for village towards village different?

By no means.

It is the same, you say?

Yes.

Well then, is the same attitude right also for one house in the village towards another, and for each man towards every other?

It is. 626d

And must each individual man regard himself as his own enemy? Or what do we say when we come to this point?

O Stranger of Athens, for I should be loth to call you a man of Attica, since methinks you deserve rather to be named after the goddess Athena, seeing that you have made the argument more clear by taking it back again to its starting-point; whereby you will the more easily discover the justice of our recent statement that, in the mass, all men are both publicly and privately the enemies of all, and individually also each man is his own enemy. 626e

What is your meaning, my admirable sir?

It is just in this war, my friend, that the victory over self is of all victories the first and best while self-defeat is of all defeats at once the worst and the most shameful. For these phrases signify that a war against self exists within each of us. ^note

Now let us take the argument back in the reverse direction. Seeing that individually each of us is partly superior to himself 627aand partly inferior, are we to affirm that the same condition of things exists in house and village and State, or are we to deny it?

Do you mean the condition of being partly self-superior and partly self-inferior?

Yes.

That, too, is a proper question; for such a condition does most certainly exist, and in States above all. Every State in which the better class is victorious over the populace and the lower classes would rightly be termed “self-superior,” and would be praised most justly for a victory of this kind; and conversely, when the reverse is the case. 627b

Well then, leaving aside the question as to whether the worse element is ever superior to the better (a question which would demand a more lengthy discussion), what you assert, as I now perceive, is this,—that sometimes citizens of one stock and of one State who are unjust and numerous may combine together and try to enslave by force those who are just but fewer in number, and wherever they prevail such a State would rightly be termed “self-inferior” and bad, but “self-superior” and good wherever they are worsted. 627c

This statement is indeed most extraordinary, Stranger; none the less we cannot possibly reject it.

Stay a moment: here too is a case we must further consider. Suppose there were a number of brothers, all sons of the same parents, it would not be at all surprising if most of them were unjust and but few just.

It would not.

And, moreover, it would ill beseem you and me to go a-chasing after this form of expression, that if the bad ones conquered the whole of this family and house should be called “self-inferior,”