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:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
What conduct, then, is dear to God and in his steps? One kind of conduct, expressed in one ancient phrase,1 namely, that “like is dear to like” when it is moderate, whereas immoderate things are dear neither to one another nor to things moderate. In our eyes God will be “the measure of all things” in the highest degree—a degree much higher than is any “man” they talk of.2 He, then, that is to become dear to such an one must needs become, so far as he possibly can, of a like character; and, according to the present argument, he amongst us that is temperate is dear to God,
1 Cp. Hom. Od. 17.218:ὡς αἰεὶ τὸν ὁμοῖον ἄγει θεὸς ὡς τὸν ὁμοῖον. The expression “like to like” became proverbial, like our “Birds of a feather,” etc. Usually it was applied more to the bad than to the good (or “moderate”) to which Plato here restricts it.
2 An allusion to the dictum of the sophist Protagoras—“Man is the measure of all things,” cp.Cratylus386 A ff.;Theaetetus152 A.
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.
View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.
Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.