[375c]
we must have them
gentle to their friends and harsh to their enemies; otherwise they will not
await their destruction at the hands of others, but will be first themselves
in bringing it about.” “True,” he said.
“What, then, are we to do?” “said I.
“Where shall we discover a disposition that is at once gentle and
great-spirited? For there appears to be an opposition1 between the
spirited type and the gentle nature.” “There
does.” “But yet if one lacks either of these qualities,
a good guardian he never can be. But these requirements resemble
impossibilities, and so
1 The contrast of the strenuous and gentle temperamnets is a chief point in Platonic ethics and education. Cf. Unity of Plato's Thought, nn. 59, 70, 481.
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.