r most intimate
friends, I have a sufficient evidence of your real good-will to me. And
of the frankness of your nature and freedom from modesty I am assured by
yourself, and the assurance is confirmed by your last speech. Well then,
the inference in the present case clearly is, that if you agree with me
in an argument about any point, that point will have been sufficiently
tested by us, and will not require to be submitted to any further test.
For you could not have agreed with me, either from lack of knowledge or
from superfluity of modesty, nor yet from a desire to deceive me, for
you are my friend, as you tell me yourself. And therefore when you and
I are agreed, the result will be the attainment of perfect truth. Now
there is no nobler enquiry, Callicles, than that which you censure
me for making,--What ought the character of a man to be, and what his
pursuits, and how far is he to go, both in maturer years and in
youth? For be assured that if I err in my own conduct I do not err
intentionally, but from ignorance. Do not then desist from advising me,
now that you have begun, until I have learned clearly what this is which
I am to practise, and how I may acquire it. And if you find me assenting
to your words, and hereafter not doing that to which I assented, call
me 'dolt,' and deem me unworthy of receiving further instruction. Once
more, then, tell me what you and Pindar mean by natural justice: Do you
not mean that the superior should take the property of the inferior by
force; that the better should rule the worse, the noble have more than
the mean? Am I not right in my recollection?

CALLICLES: Yes; that is what I was saying, and so I still aver.

SOCRATES: And do you mean by the better the same as the superior? for I
could not make out what you were saying at the time--whether you
meant by the superior the stronger, and that the weaker must obey the
stronger, as you seemed to imply when you said that great cities attack
small ones in accordance with natural right, because they are superior
and stronger, as though the superior and stronger and better were the
same; or whether the better may be also the inferior and weaker, and the
superior the worse, or whether better is to be defined in the same way
as superior:--this is the point which I want to have cleared up. Are the
superior and better and stronger the same or different?

CALLICLES: I say unequivocally that they are the same.

SOCRATES: Then the many ar