Complete Works (188 page)

C
ALLICLES
: Yes, it is. [c]

S
OCRATES
: And if what I was saying is true, then they alone, no doubt, are in a position to offer on terms of honor the benefit they provide—without charge, as is reasonable. For somebody who had another benefit conferred on him, one who, for example, had been turned into a fast runner by a physical trainer, could perhaps deprive the man of his compensation if the trainer offered him that benefit on his honor, instead of agreeing on a fixed fee and taking his money as closely as possible to the time he [d] imparts the speed. For I don’t suppose that it’s by slowness that people act unjustly, but by injustice. Right?

C
ALLICLES
: Yes.

S
OCRATES
: So if somebody removes that very thing, injustice, he shouldn’t have any fear of being treated unjustly. For him alone is it safe to offer this benefit on terms of honor, if it’s really true that one can make people good. Isn’t that so?

C
ALLICLES
: I agree.

S
OCRATES
: This, then, is evidently why there’s nothing shameful in taking money for giving advice concerning other matters such as housebuilding or the other crafts.

C
ALLICLES
: Yes, evidently. [e]

S
OCRATES
: But as for this activity, which is concerned with how a person might be as good as possible and manage his own house or his city in the best possible way, it’s considered shameful to refuse to give advice concerning it unless somebody pays you money. Right?

C
ALLICLES
: Yes.

S
OCRATES
: For it’s clear that what accounts for this is the fact that of all the benefits this one alone makes the one who has had good done to him have the desire to do good in return, so that we think it’s a good sign of someone’s having done good by conferring this benefit that he’ll have good done to him in return, and not a good sign if he won’t. Is this how it is?

C
ALLICLES
: It is.
[521]

S
OCRATES
: Now, please describe for me precisely the type of care for the city to which you are calling me. Is it that of striving valiantly with the Athenians to make them as good as possible, like a doctor, or is it like one ready to serve them and to associate with them for their gratification? Tell me the truth, Callicles. For just as you began by speaking candidly to me, it’s only fair that you should continue speaking your mind. Tell me now, too, well and nobly.

C
ALLICLES
: In that case I say it’s like one ready to serve.

[b] S
OCRATES
: So, noblest of men, you’re calling on me to be ready to flatter.

C
ALLICLES
: Yes, if you find it more pleasant not to mince words, Socrates. Because if you don’t do this—

S
OCRATES
: I hope you won’t say what you’ve said many times, that anyone who wants to will put me to death. That way I, too, won’t repeat my claim that it would be a wicked man doing this to a good man. And don’t say that he’ll confiscate any of my possessions, either, so I won’t reply that when he’s done so he won’t know how to use them. Rather, just as he unjustly confiscated them from me, so, having gotten them, he’ll [c] use them unjustly too, and if unjustly, shamefully, and if shamefully, badly.

C
ALLICLES
: How sure you seem to me to be, Socrates, that not even one of these things will happen to you! You think that you live out of their way and that you wouldn’t be brought to court perhaps by some very corrupt and mean man.

S
OCRATES
: In that case I really am a fool, Callicles, if I don’t suppose that anything might happen to anybody in this city. But I know this well: that [d] if I do come into court involved in one of those perils which you mention, the man who brings me in will be a wicked man—for no good man would bring in a man who is not a wrongdoer—and it wouldn’t be at all strange if I were to be put to death. Would you like me to tell you my reason for expecting this?

C
ALLICLES
: Yes, I would.

S
OCRATES
: I believe that I’m one of a few Athenians—so as not to say I’m the only one, but the only one among our contemporaries—to take up the true political craft and practice the true politics. This is because the speeches I make on each occasion do not aim at gratification but at what’s [e] best. They don’t aim at what’s most pleasant. And because I’m not willing to do those clever things you recommend, I won’t know what to say in court. And the same account I applied to Polus comes back to me. For I’ll be judged the way a doctor would be judged by a jury of children if a pastry chef were to bring accusations against him. Think about what a man like that, taken captive among these people, could say in his defense, if somebody were to accuse him and say, “Children, this man has worked many great evils on you, yes, on you. He destroys the youngest among
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you by cutting and burning them, and by slimming them down and choking them he confuses them. He gives them the most bitter potions to drink and forces hunger and thirst on them. He doesn’t feast you on a great variety of sweets the way I do!” What do you think a doctor, caught in such an evil predicament, could say? Or if he should tell them the truth and say, “Yes, children, I was doing all those things in the interest of health,” how big an uproar do you think such “judges” would make? Wouldn’t it be a loud one?

C
ALLICLES
: Perhaps so.

S
OCRATES
: I should think so! Don’t you think he’d be at a total loss as to what he should say? [b]

C
ALLICLES
: Yes, he would be.

S
OCRATES
: That’s the sort of thing I know would happen to me, too, if I came into court. For I won’t be able to point out any pleasures that I’ve provided for them, ones they believe to be services and benefits, while I envy neither those who provide them nor the ones for whom they’re provided. Nor will I be able to say what’s true if someone charges that I ruin younger people by confusing them or abuse older ones by speaking bitter words against them in public or private. I won’t be able to say, that is, “Yes, I say and do all these things in the interest of justice, my ‘honored [b] judges’ ”—to use that expression you people use—nor anything else. So presumably I’ll get whatever comes my way.

C
ALLICLES
: Do you think, Socrates, that a man in such a position in his city, a man who’s unable to protect himself, is to be admired?

S
OCRATES
: Yes, Callicles, as long as he has that one thing that you’ve often agreed he should have: as long as he has protected himself against having spoken or done anything unjust relating to either men or gods. For this is the self-protection that you and I often have agreed avails the [d] most. Now if someone were to refute me and prove that I am unable to provide
this
protection for myself or for anyone else, I would feel shame at being refuted, whether this happened in the presence of many or of a few, or just between the two of us; and if I were to be put to death for lack of this ability, I really would be upset. But if I came to my end because of a deficiency in flattering oratory, I know that you’d see me bear my death with ease. For no one who isn’t totally bereft of reason and courage [e] is afraid to die; doing what’s unjust is what he’s afraid of. For to arrive in Hades with one’s soul stuffed full of unjust actions is the ultimate of all bad things. If you like, I’m willing to give you an account showing that this is so.

C
ALLICLES
: All right, since you’ve gone through the other things, go through this, too.

S
OCRATES
: Give ear then—as they put it—to a very fine account. You’ll
[523]
think that it’s a mere tale, I believe, although I think it’s an account, for what I’m about to say I will tell you as true. As Homer tells it, after Zeus, Posidon, and Pluto took over the sovereignty from their father, they divided it among themselves. Now there was a law concerning human beings during Cronus’ time, one that gods even now continue to observe, that when a man who has lived a just and pious life comes to his end, he goes to the Isles of the Blessed, to make his abode in complete happiness, beyond [b] the reach of evils, but when one who has lived in an unjust and godless way dies, he goes to the prison of payment and retribution, the one they call Tartarus. In Cronus’ time, and even more recently during Zeus’ tenure of sovereignty, these men faced living judges while they were still alive, who judged them on the day they were going to die. Now the cases were badly decided, so Pluto and the keepers from the Isles of the Blessed came to Zeus and told him that people were undeservingly making their [c] way in both directions. So Zeus said, “All right, I’ll put a stop to that. The cases are being badly decided at this time because those being judged are judged fully dressed. They’re being judged while they’re still alive. Many,” he said, “whose souls are wicked are dressed in handsome bodies, good stock and wealth, and when the judgment takes place they have many witnesses appear to testify that they have lived just lives. Now the judges [d] are awestruck by these things and pass judgment at a time when they themselves are fully dressed, too, having put their eyes and ears and their whole bodies up as screens in front of their souls. All these things, their own clothing and that of those being judged, have proved to be obstructive to them. What we must do first,” he said, “is to stop them from knowing their death ahead of time. Now they do have that knowledge. This is [e] something that Prometheus has already been told to put a stop to. Next, they must be judged when they’re stripped naked of all these things, for they should be judged when they’re dead. The judge, too, should be naked, and dead, and with only his soul he should study only the soul of each person immediately upon his death, when he’s isolated from all his kinsmen and has left behind on earth all that adornment, so that the judgment may be a just one. Now I, realizing this before you did, have already appointed my sons as judges, two from Asia, Minos and Rhadamanthus,
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and one from Europe, Aeacus. After they’ve died, they’ll serve as judges in the meadow, at the three-way crossing from which the two roads go on, the one to the Isles of the Blessed and the other to Tartarus. Rhadamanthus will judge the people from Asia and Aeacus those from Europe. I’ll give seniority to Minos to render final judgment if the other two are at all perplexed, so that the judgment concerning the passage of humankind may be as just as possible.”

[b] This, Callicles, is what I’ve heard, and I believe that it’s true. And on the basis of these accounts I conclude that something like this takes place: Death, I think, is actually nothing but the separation of two things from each other, the soul and the body. So, after they’re separated, each of them stays in a condition not much worse than what it was in when the person was alive. The body retains its nature, and the care it had received as well [c] as the things that have happened to it are all evident. If a man had a body, for instance, which was large (either by nature or through nurture, or both) while he was alive, his corpse after he has died is large, too. And if it was fat, so is the corpse of the dead man, and so on. And if a man took care to grow his hair long, his corpse will have long hair, too. And again, if a man had been a criminal whipped for his crime and showed scars, traces of beatings on his body inflicted by whips or other blows while he was alive, his body can be seen to have these marks, too, when he is dead. And if a man’s limbs were broken or twisted while he was alive, these [d] very things will be evident, too, when he is dead. In a word, however a man treated his body while he was alive, all the marks of that treatment, or most of them, are evident for some time even after he is dead. And I think that the same thing, therefore, holds true also for the soul, Callicles. All that’s in the soul is evident after it has been stripped naked of the body, both things that are natural to it and things that have happened to it, things that the person came to have in his soul as a result of his pursuit of each objective. So when they arrive before their judge—the people from Asia before Rhadamanthus—Rhadamanthus brings them to a halt and [e] studies each person’s soul without knowing whose it is. He’s often gotten hold of the Great King, or some other king or potentate, and noticed that there’s nothing sound in his soul but that it’s been thoroughly whipped
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and covered with scars, the results of acts of perjury and of injustice, things that each of his actions has stamped upon his soul. Everything was warped as a result of deception and pretense, and nothing was straight, all because the soul had been nurtured without truth. And he saw that the soul was full of distortion and ugliness due to license and luxury, arrogance and incontinence in its actions. And when he had seen it, he dismissed this soul in dishonor straight to the guardhouse, where it went to await suffering its appropriate fate.

It is appropriate for everyone who is subject to punishment rightly [b] inflicted by another either to become better and profit from it, or else to be made an example for others, so that when they see him suffering whatever it is he suffers, they may be afraid and become better. Those who are benefited, who are made to pay their due by gods and men, are the ones whose errors are curable; even so, their benefit comes to them, both here and in Hades, by way of pain and suffering, for there is no other possible way to get rid of injustice. From among those who have committed [c] the ultimate wrongs and who because of such crimes have become incurable come the ones who are made examples of. These persons themselves no longer derive any profit from their punishment, because they’re incurable. Others, however, do profit from it when they see them undergoing for all time the most grievous, intensely painful and frightening sufferings for their errors, simply strung up there in the prison in Hades as examples, visible warnings to unjust men who are ever arriving. I claim that Archelaus, [d] too, will be one of their number, if what Polus says is true, and anyone else who’s a tyrant like him. I suppose that in fact the majority of these examples have come from the ranks of tyrants, kings, potentates, and those active in the affairs of cities, for these people commit the most grievous and impious errors because they’re in a position to do so. Homer, too, is a witness on these matters, for he has depicted those undergoing eternal punishment in Hades as kings and potentates: Tantalus, Sisyphus [e] and Tityus. As for Thersites and any other private citizen who was wicked, no one has depicted him as surrounded by the most grievous punishments, as though he were incurable; he wasn’t in that position, I suppose, and for that reason he’s also happier than those who were. The fact is, Callicles, that those persons who become extremely wicked do come from the ranks
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of the powerful, although there’s certainly nothing to stop good men from turning up even among the powerful, and those who do turn up there deserve to be enthusiastically admired. For it’s a difficult thing, Callicles, and one that merits much praise, to live your whole life justly when you’ve found yourself having ample freedom to do what’s unjust. Few are those who prove to be like that. But since there
have
proved to be such people, both here and elsewhere, I suppose that there’ll be others, too, men admirable and good in that excellence of justly carrying out whatever is entrusted [b] to them. One of these, Aristides the son of Lysimachus, has proved to be very illustrious indeed, even among the rest of the Greeks. But the majority of our potentates, my good man, prove to be bad.