[336e]
I glanced at him first, so that I became capable of
answering him and said with a light tremor: “Thrasymachus, don't
be harsh1 with us. If I and my
friend have made mistakes in the consideration of the question, rest assured
that it is unwillingly that we err. For you surely must not suppose that
while2 if our quest were for gold3 we would never
willingly truckle to one another and make concessions in the search and so
spoil our chances of finding it, yet that when we are searching for justice,
a thing more precious than much fine gold, we should then be so foolish as
to give way to one another and not rather do our serious best to have it
discovered. You surely must not suppose that, my friend. But you see it is
our lack of ability that is at fault. It is pity then that we should far
more reasonably receive
1 For similar irony Cf. Gorgias 461 C-D, 489 D.
2 For this type of a fortiori or ex contrario argument cf. 589 E, 600 C-D, Crito 46 D, Laws 647 C, 931 C, Protagoras 325 B-C, Phaedo 68 A, Thompson on Meno 91 E.
3 Cf. Heracleitus fr. 22 Diels, and Ruskin, King's Treasuries“The physical type of wisdom, gold,”Psalms xix. 10.
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.