[330a]
but to the city from which he came, replied that neither
would he himself ever have made a name if he had been born in Seriphus nor
the other if he had been an Athenian. And the same principle applies
excellently to those who not being rich take old age hard; for neither would
the reasonable man find it altogether easy to endure old age conjoined with
poverty, nor would the unreasonable man by the attainment of riches ever
attain to self-contentment and a cheerful temper.” “May
I ask, Cephalus,” said I, “whether you inherited most of
your possessions or acquired them yourself?” “Acquired,
eh?” he said.
[330b]
“As a
moneymaker, I hold a place somewhere halfway between my grandfather and my
father. For my grandfather and namesake1 inherited about
as much property as I now possess and multiplied it many times, my father
Lysanias reduced it below the present amount, and I am content if I shall
leave the estate to these boys not less but by some slight measure more than
my inheritance.” “The reason I asked,” I said,
is that you appear to me not to be over-fond of money.
[330c]
And that is generally the case with those who have not
earned it themselves.2 But those who have themselves acquired it have a double
reason in comparison with other men for loving it. For just as poets feel
complacency about their own poems and fathers about their own sons,3 so men who have
made money take this money seriously as their own creation and they also
value it for its uses as other people do. So they are hard to talk to since
they are unwilling to commend anything except wealth.”
[330d]
“You
are right,” he replied. “I assuredly am,” said
I. “But tell me further this. What do you regard as the greatest
benefit you have enjoyed from the possession of property?”
“Something,” he said, “which I might not
easily bring many to believe if I told them.4 For let me tell you,
Socrates,” he said, “that when a man begins to realize
that he is going to die, he is filled with apprehensions and concern about
matters that before did not occur to him. The tales that are told of the
world below and how the men who have done wrong here must pay the penalty
there,5 though he may have laughed them
down6 hitherto,
[330e]
then begin
to torture his soul with the doubt that there may be some truth in them. And
apart from that the man himself7 either from the weakness of old
age or possibly as being now nearer to the things beyond has a somewhat
clearer view of them. Be that as it may, he is filled with doubt, surmises,
and alarms and begins to reckon up and consider whether he has ever wronged
anyone. Now he to whom the ledger of his life shows an account of many evil
deeds starts up8 even from his dreams like children again and
again in affright and his days are haunted by anticipations of worse to
come. But on him who is conscious of no wrong
1 Cephalus, Lysanias, Cephalus, and so frequently.
2 Aristotle makes a similar observation, Eth. Nic. iv. 1.20, Rhet. i. 11. 26, ii. 16. 4. For nouveaux riches, γενναῖοι ἐκ βαλλαντίου, see Starkie on Aristophanes Wasps, 1309.
3 Cf. Theaetetus 160 E, Symposium 209 C, Phaedrus 274 E, with Epaminondas' saying, that Leuctra and Mantineia were his children.
4 Perhaps the earliest positive expression of faith in future life and judgement for sin is Pindar's Second Olympian. See Rohde's Psyche and Adam in Cambridge Praelections. The Epicureans and sometimes the Stoics unfairly reprobated Plato's appeal here to this motive, which he disregards in his main argument and returns to only in the tenth book. Cf. 363 C-D, 386 B, 613 E ff., also 496 E, 498 D, 608 D.
5 Cf. 498 C and Pindar Ol. ii. 64. But 500 D, “there” is the realm of Platonic ideas.
6 Cf. Gorgias 523 A, 527 A.
7 The conclusion logically expected, “is more credulous,” shifts to the alternative preferred by Plato.ὥσπερ marks the figurative sense of “nearer.”καθοπᾷ is not “takes a more careful view of it” (Goodwin) but wins a glimpse, catches sight of those obscure things, as a sailor descries land. So often in Plato. Cf. Epin. 985 C.
8 Polyb. v. 52. 13, and for the thought Iamblichus, Protrepticus 127 A, Job iv. 13-14. Tennyson, Vastness ix.—“Pain, that has crawl'd from the corpse of Pleasure, a worm which writhes all day, and at night/ Stirs up again in the heart of the sleeper, and stings him back to the curse of the light.”
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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