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His father, Ariston, was descended—or so legend has it—from Codrus, the last king of Athens; his mother, Perictione, was related to Solon, the first architect of the Athenian constitution.
my aged friend, Socrates, whom I wouldn’t hesitate to call the most just man of his time,
I didn’t cease to consider ways of improving this particular situation, however, and, indeed, of reforming the whole constitution.
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It is not bold to surmise that Socrates' sentencing was the pivotal point to the intensifying of Plato's political participation. This plays to the key of the Gomburza execution playing a key role in the Philippine revolution against the Spaniards.
while these burdens are eased by wealth, it is people’s character and habits that really determine whether or not their lives are hard to bear, not their age.
“How are you as far as sex goes, Sophocles? Can you still make love with a woman?” “Quiet, [c] {4} man,” the poet replied, “I am very glad to have escaped from all that, like a slave who has escaped from a savage and tyrannical master.”
A good person wouldn’t easily bear old age if he were poor, but a bad one wouldn’t be at peace with himself even if he were wealthy.
when someone thinks his end is near, he becomes frightened and concerned about things he didn’t fear before. It’s then that the stories we’re told about Hades, about how people who’ve been unjust here must pay the penalty there—stories he used to make fun of—twist his soul this way and that for fear they’re true.
when someone lives a just and pious life Sweet hope is in his heart, Nurse and companion to his age.
can those who are just make people unjust through justice? In a word, can those who are good make people bad through virtue? [d] They cannot.
it’s the right, the beneficial, the profitable, the gainful, or the advantageous,
if you ask someone how much twelve is, and, as you ask, you warn him by saying “Don’t tell me, man, that twelve is twice six, or three [b] times four, or six times two, or four times three, for I won’t accept such nonsense,” then you’ll see clearly, I think, that no one could answer a question framed like that.
every kind of rule, insofar as it rules, doesn’t seek anything other than what is best for the things it rules and cares for, and this is true both of public and private kinds of rule.
the greatest punishment, if one isn’t willing to rule, is to be ruled by someone worse than oneself.
justice is virtue and wisdom and that injustice is vice and ignorance,
Injustice, Thrasymachus, causes civil war, hatred, and fighting among themselves, while justice brings friendship and a sense of common purpose.
injustice has the power, first, to make whatever it arises in—whether it is a city, a family, an army, or anything else—incapable of achieving anything as a unit, because of the civil wars and [352] differences it creates, and, second, it makes that unit an enemy to itself and to what is in every way its opposite,
even in a single individual, it has by its nature the very same effect. First, it makes him incapable of achieving anything, because he is in a state of civil war and not of one mind; second, it makes him his own enemy, as well as the enemy of just people.
there must have been some sort of justice in them that at least prevented them from doing injustice among themselves at the same time as they were doing it to others.
no ordinary topic but the way we ought to live.
First, I’ll state what kind of thing people consider justice to be and what its origins are. Second, [c] I’ll argue that all who practice it do so unwillingly, as something necessary, not as something good. Third, I’ll argue that they have good reason to act as they do, for the life of an unjust person is, they say, much better than that of a just one.
the origin and essence of justice. It is intermediate between the best and the worst. The best is to do injustice without paying the penalty; the worst is to suffer it without being able to take revenge. Justice is a mean between these two extremes.
like a god among humans.
one is never just willingly but only when compelled to be.
wherever either person thinks he can do injustice with impunity, he does it.
the gods can be influenced by humans,
let’s first find out what sort of thing justice is in a city and afterwards look for it in the individual, [369]
a city comes to be because none of us is self-sufficient, but we all need many things.
beyond what is necessary for a city—hunters, for example, and artists or imitators, many of whom work with shapes and colors, many with music. And there’ll be poets and their assistants, actors, choral dancers, contractors, and makers of all kinds of devices, including, among other things, those needed for the adornment of women.
the origins of war. It comes from those same desires {49} that are most of all responsible for the bad things that happen to cities and the individuals in them.
Then we must first of all, it seems, supervise the storytellers. We’ll select their stories whenever they are fine or beautiful and reject them when they aren’t. And we’ll persuade nurses and mothers to tell their [c] children the ones we have selected, since they will shape their children’s souls with stories much more than they shape their bodies by handling them.
which ones you’re calling major. Those that Homer, Hesiod,
if we want the guardians of our city to think that it’s shameful to be easily provoked into hating one another, we mustn’t allow any stories about gods warring, fighting, or plotting against one another, for they [c] aren’t true. The battles of gods and giants, and all the various stories of the gods hating their families or friends, should neither be told nor even woven in embroideries. If we’re to persuade our people that no citizen has ever hated another and that it’s impious to do so, then that’s what should be told to children from the beginning by old men and women; and as these children
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Whether in epic, lyric, or tragedy, a god must always be represented as he is.
bad men, it seems, who are cowards and are doing the opposite of what we described earlier, namely, libelling and ridiculing each other, using shameful language while drunk or sober, or wronging themselves and others, whether in word or deed, in the various other ways that are typical of such people.
a song consists of three elements—words, harmonic mode, and rhythm. [d]
They’re useless even to decent women, let alone to men.
Drunkenness, softness, and idleness are also most inappropriate for our guardians.
we’ve been purifying the city we recently said was luxurious.
simplicity of character—and I do not mean this in the sense in which we use “simplicity” [e] as a euphemism for “simple-mindedness’’—but I mean the sort of fine and good character that has developed in accordance with an intelligent plan.
Is it, then, only poets we have to supervise, compelling them to make [b] an image of a good character in their poems or else not to compose them among us? Or are we also to give orders to other craftsmen, forbidding them to represent—whether in pictures, buildings, or any other works—a character that is vicious, unrestrained, slavish, and graceless? Are we to allow someone who cannot follow these instructions to work among us, so that our guardians will be brought up on images of evil, as if in a meadow [c] of bad grass, where they crop and graze in many different places every day until,
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Can you think of a greater or keener pleasure than sexual pleasure? I can’t—or a madder one either.
It seems to me that a fit body doesn’t by its own virtue make the soul good, but instead that the opposite is true—a good soul by its own virtue makes the body as good as possible.
Then our warrior athletes need a more sophisticated kind of training. They must be like sleepless hounds, able to see and hear as keenly as possible and to endure frequent changes of water and food, as well as summer and winter weather on their campaigns, without faltering [b] in health.
once you have the means of life, you must practice virtue.
The cleverest doctors are those who, in addition to learning their craft, have had contact with the greatest number of very sick bodies from childhood on, have themselves experienced every illness, and aren’t very healthy by nature, for they don’t treat bodies with their bodies, I suppose—[e] if they did, we wouldn’t allow their bodies to be or become bad. Rather they treat the body with their souls, and it isn’t possible for the soul to treat anything well, if it is or has been bad itself.
decent people appear simple and easily deceived by unjust ones when they are young. It’s because they have no models in themselves of the evil experiences of [b] the vicious to guide their judgments.
a good judge must not be a young person but an old one, who has learned late in life what injustice is like and who has become aware of it not as something at home in his own soul, but as something alien and present in others, someone who, after a long time, has recognized that injustice is bad by nature, not from his own experience of it, but through knowledge.
The clever and suspicious person, on the other {86} hand, who has committed many injustices himself and thinks himself a wise villain, appears clever in the company of those like himself, because he’s on his guard and is guided by the models within himself. But when he meets with good older people, he’s seen to be stupid, distrustful at the wrong time, and ignorant of what a sound character is, since he has no model of this within himself. But since he meets vicious people more often [d] than good ones, he seems to be clever rather than unlearned, both to himself and to others.
a naturally virtuous person, when educated, will in time acquire knowledge of both virtue and vice. And it is someone like that who becomes wise, in my view, and not the bad person.
those who devote themselves exclusively to physical training turn out to be more savage than they should, while those who devote themselves to music and poetry turn out to be softer than is good for them?
