[365b]
all the
character and the path whereby a man would lead the best life? Such a
youth1 would most likely put
to himself the question Pindar asks, “‘Is it by justice or by crooked deceit that I the higher
tower shall scale and so live my life out in fenced and guarded
security?’”Pindar, Fr. The
consequences of my being just are, unless I likewise seem so, not
assets,2 they say, but
liabilities, labor and total loss; but if I am unjust and have procured
myself a reputation for justice a godlike life is promised. Then
1 Cf. Unity of Plato's Thought, p. 25: “His (Plato's) imagination was beset by the picture of some brilliant young Alcibiades standing at the crossways of life and debating in his mind whether the best chance for happiness lay in accepting the conventional moral law that serves to police the vulgar or in giving rein to the instincts and appetites of his own stronger nature. To confute the one, to convince the other, became to him the main problem of moral philosophy.” Cf. Introduction x-xi; also “The Idea of Good in Plato's Republic,” p. 214.
2 φανερὰ ζημία is familiar and slightly humorous. Cf. Starkie on Aristoph. Ach. 737.
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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