the benefit of his own state, allow me to recall to you
the names of those whom you were just now mentioning, Pericles, and
Cimon, and Miltiades, and Themistocles, and ask whether you still think
that they were good citizens.

CALLICLES: I do.

SOCRATES: But if they were good, then clearly each of them must have
made the citizens better instead of worse?

CALLICLES: Yes.

SOCRATES: And, therefore, when Pericles first began to speak in the
assembly, the Athenians were not so good as when he spoke last?

CALLICLES: Very likely.

SOCRATES: Nay, my friend, 'likely' is not the word; for if he was a good
citizen, the inference is certain.

CALLICLES: And what difference does that make?

SOCRATES: None; only I should like further to know whether the Athenians
are supposed to have been made better by Pericles, or, on the contrary,
to have been corrupted by him; for I hear that he was the first who gave
the people pay, and made them idle and cowardly, and encouraged them in
the love of talk and money.

CALLICLES: You heard that, Socrates, from the laconising set who bruise
their ears.

SOCRATES: But what I am going to tell you now is not mere hearsay, but
well known both to you and me: that at first, Pericles was glorious
and his character unimpeached by any verdict of the Athenians--this was
during the time when they were not so good--yet afterwards, when they
had been made good and gentle by him, at the very end of his life they
convicted him of theft, and almost put him to death, clearly under the
notion that he was a malefactor.

CALLICLES: Well, but how does that prove Pericles' badness?

SOCRATES: Why, surely you would say that he was a bad manager of asses
or horses or oxen, who had received them originally neither kicking nor
butting nor biting him, and implanted in them all these savage tricks?
Would he not be a bad manager of any animals who received them gentle,
and made them fiercer than they were when he received them? What do you
say?

CALLICLES: I will do you the favour of saying 'yes.'

SOCRATES: And will you also do me the favour of saying whether man is an
animal?

CALLICLES: Certainly he is.

SOCRATES: And was not Pericles a shepherd of men?

CALLICLES: Yes.

SOCRATES: And if he was a good political shepherd, ought not the animals
who were his subjects, as we were just now acknowledging, to have become
more just, and not more unjust?

CALLICLES: Quite true.

SOCRATES: And are not j