[490d]
the objection that though everybody will be compelled to admit our
statements,1
yet, if we abandoned mere words and fixed our eyes on the persons to whom
the words referred, everyone would say that he actually saw some of them to
be useless and most of them base with all baseness, it was in our search for
the cause of this ill-repute that we came to the present question: Why is it
that the majority are bad? And, for the sake of this, we took up again the
nature of the true philosophers and defined what it must necessarily
be?”
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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