[345b]
Now it may be
that there is someone else among us who feels in this way and that I am not
the only one. Persuade us, then, my dear fellow, convince us satisfactorily
that we are ill advised in preferring justice to injustice.”
“And how am I to persuade you?”1 he said. “If you are not convinced by
what I just now was saying, what more can I do for you? Shall I take the
argument and ram2 it into your head?” “Heaven
forbid!” I said, “don't do that. But in the first place
when you have said a thing stand by it,3 or if you shift your ground change
openly and don't try to deceive us.
1 Thrasymachus has stated his doctrine. Like Dr. Johnson he cannot supply brains to understand it. Cf. Gorgias 489 C, 499 B, Meno 75 D.
2 The language is idiomatic, and the metaphor of a nurse feeding a baby, Aristophanes Eccl. 716, is rude. Cf. Shakespeare, “He crams these words into my ears against the stomach of my sense.”
3 Cf. Socrates' complaint of Callicles' shifts, Gorgias 499 B-C, but Cf. 334 E, 340 B-C.
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.