[359c]
if we grant to each, the
just and the unjust, licence and power to do whatever he pleases, and then
accompany them in imagination and see whither his desire will conduct each.
We should then catch the just man in the very act of resorting to the same
conduct as the unjust man because of the self-advantage which every creature
by its nature pursues as a good, while by the convention of law1 it is forcibly diverted to paying honor to 'equality.'2 The
licence that I mean would be most nearly such as would result from supposing
them to have the power
1 The antithesis of φύσις and νόμος, nature and law, custom or convention, is a commonplace of both Greek rhetoric and Greek ethics. Cf. the Chicago dissertation of John Walter Beardslee, The Use of φύσις in Fifth Century Greek Literature, ch. x. p. 68. Cf. Herodotus iii. 38, Pindar, quoted by Plato, Gorgias 484 B, Laws 690 B, 715 A; Euripides or Critias, Frag. of Sisyphus, Aristophanes Birds 755 ff., Plato Protagoras 337 D, Gorgias 483 E, Laws 889 C and 890 D. It was misused by ancient as it is by modern radicals. Cf. my interpretation of the Timaeus, A.J.P. vol. ix. p. 405. The ingenuity of modern philologians has tried to classify the Greek sophists as distinctly partisans of νόμος or φύσις. It cannot be done. Cf. my unsigned review of Alfred Benn in the New York Nation, July 20, 1899, p. 57.
2 Cf. Gorgias 508 A.
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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