[420b]
“What then will be our apology you
ask?” “Yes.” “By following the same
path I think we shall find what to reply. For we shall say that while it
would not surprise us if these men thus living prove to be the most happy,
yet the object on which we fixed our eyes in the establishment of our state
was not the exceptional happiness of any one class but the greatest possible
happiness of the city as a whole. For we thought1 that in a state so constituted we should
be most likely to discover justice as we should injustice
1 Cf. 369 A.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
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.