[469e]
Do you see any difference between such conduct and that
of the dogs1 who
snarl at the stones that hit them but don't touch the thrower?”
“Not the slightest.” “We must abandon, then,
the plundering of corpses and the refusal to permit their burial.2” “By
heaven, we certainly must,” he said.“And again, we will not take weapons to the temples for
dedicatory3
offerings, especially the weapons of Greeks,
1 Quoted by Aristotle, Rhet. 1406 b. Epictetus iii. 19. 4 complains that nurses encourage children to strike the stone on which they stumble. Cf. also Lucan vi. 220-223. Otto, Sprichwörter der Römer, p. 70, cites Pliny, N.H. xxix. 102, and Pacuv. v. 38, Ribb.Trag. Cf. Montaigne i. 4, “Ainsin emporte les bestes leur rage à s'attaquer à la pierre et au fer qui les a blecées.”
2 Plato as a boy may have heard of the Thebans' refusal to allow the Athenians to bury their dead after Delium. Cf. Thucydides iv. 97-101, and Euripides Supplices.
3 For the practice cf. Aeschylus Septem 275-279 and Agamemnon 577-579. Italian cities and American states have restored to one another the flags so dedicated from old wars. Cf. Cicero De inventione ii. 70 “at tamen aeternum inimicitiarum monumentum Graios de Graiis statuere non oportet.”
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.