[479b]
to be
both beautiful in a way and ugly, and so with all the other things you asked
about.” “And again, do the many double things1 appear any the less
halves than doubles?” “None the less.”
“And likewise of the great and the small things, the light and the
heavy things—will they admit these predicates any more than their
opposites?” “No,” he said, “each of
them will always hold of, partake of, both.” “Then is
each of these multiples rather than it is not that which one affirms it to
be?” “They are like those jesters who palter with us in
a double sense at banquets,” he replied, “and resemble
the children's riddle2
1 Cf. on 524 A, B.
2 The scholiast (Hermann vi. 34) quotes the riddle in two forms. It might run in English—“A tale there is, a man not yet a man,/ Seeing, saw not, a bird and not a bird,/ Perching upon a bough and not a bough,/ And hit it—not, with a stone and not a stone.” The key words of the answer are eunuch, bat, reed, pumice-stone. Cf. also Athenaeus 448 E, 452 E, Gifford on Euthydemus 300 D. It was used in the Stoic schools of logic, and Epicurus is said to have used it to disprove Plato's statement that either the negative or the affirmative of a proposition must be true or false. Cf. Usener, Epicurea, p. 348.
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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