[4]
“Very well, then,” said Callias, “I will now tell you what I take greatest pride in. It is that I believe I have the power to make men better.”“How?” asked Antisthenes. “By teaching them some manual trade, or by teaching nobility of character?”“The latter, if righteousness1 is the same thing as nobility.”“Certainly it is,” replied Antisthenes, “and the least debatable kind, too; for though courage and wisdom appear at times to work injury both to one's friends and to the state, righteousness and unrighteousness never overlap at a single point.”
This text is part of:
1 The word δικαιοσύνη, translated here by “righteousness,” is sometimes well represented by justice or honesty. It is the virtue discussed by Plato in the Republic and by Aristotle in the fifth book of his Ethics.
Xenophon. Xenophon in Seven Volumes, 4. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA; William Heinemann, Ltd., London. 1979.
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.