and showing no gratitude for
their services. Yet what can be more absurd than that men who have
become just and good, and whose injustice has been taken away from them,
and who have had justice implanted in them by their teachers, should act
unjustly by reason of the injustice which is not in them? Can anything
be more irrational, my friends, than this? You, Callicles, compel me to
be a mob-orator, because you will not answer.

CALLICLES: And you are the man who cannot speak unless there is some one
to answer?

SOCRATES: I suppose that I can; just now, at any rate, the speeches
which I am making are long enough because you refuse to answer me. But
I adjure you by the god of friendship, my good sir, do tell me whether
there does not appear to you to be a great inconsistency in saying that
you have made a man good, and then blaming him for being bad?

CALLICLES: Yes, it appears so to me.

SOCRATES: Do you never hear our professors of education speaking in this
inconsistent manner?

CALLICLES: Yes, but why talk of men who are good for nothing?

SOCRATES: I would rather say, why talk of men who profess to be rulers,
and declare that they are devoted to the improvement of the city, and
nevertheless upon occasion declaim against the utter vileness of the
city:--do you think that there is any difference between one and the
other? My good friend, the sophist and the rhetorician, as I was saying
to Polus, are the same, or nearly the same; but you ignorantly fancy
that rhetoric is a perfect thing, and sophistry a thing to be despised;
whereas the truth is, that sophistry is as much superior to rhetoric
as legislation is to the practice of law, or gymnastic to medicine. The
orators and sophists, as I am inclined to think, are the only class who
cannot complain of the mischief ensuing to themselves from that which
they teach others, without in the same breath accusing themselves of
having done no good to those whom they profess to benefit. Is not this a
fact?

CALLICLES: Certainly it is.

SOCRATES: If they were right in saying that they make men better, then
they are the only class who can afford to leave their remuneration
to those who have been benefited by them. Whereas if a man has been
benefited in any other way, if, for example, he has been taught to run
by a trainer, he might possibly defraud him of his pay, if the trainer
left the matter to him, and made no agreement with him that he should
receive money as soon