Plato, Lesser Hippias, section 374a

Home Collections/Texts Perseus Catalog Research Grants Open Source About Help

Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the line to jump to another position:

This text is part of:

Greek and Roman Materials

Search the Perseus Catalog for:

View text chunked by:

text : page
text : section

Table of Contents:

Epinomis, or Nocturnal Council

view as XML

[374a]

Socrates
And how is it in wrestling? Which is the better wrestler, he who is thrown voluntarily, or involuntarily?

Hippias
He who is thrown voluntarily, as it seems.

Socrates
But is it worse and more disgraceful in a wrestling match to be thrown or to throw one's opponent?

Hippias
To be thrown.

Socrates
In wrestling also, then, he who performs bad and disgraceful acts voluntarily is a better wrestler than he who performs them involuntarily.

Hippias
So it seems.

Socrates
And how is it in every other bodily exercise? Is not he who is the better man in respect to his body able to perform both kinds of acts, the strong and the weak, the disgraceful and the fine,

Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9 translated by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1925.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

view as XML

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.