soul;--these are, poverty, disease, injustice; and
the foulest of these is injustice, the evil of the soul, because that
brings the greatest hurt. And there are three arts which heal these
evils--trading, medicine, justice--and the fairest of these is justice.
Happy is he who has never committed injustice, and happy in the second
degree he who has been healed by punishment. And therefore the criminal
should himself go to the judge as he would to the physician, and purge
away his crime. Rhetoric will enable him to display his guilt in proper
colours, and to sustain himself and others in enduring the necessary
penalty. And similarly if a man has an enemy, he will desire not to
punish him, but that he shall go unpunished and become worse and worse,
taking care only that he does no injury to himself. These are at least
conceivable uses of the art, and no others have been discovered by us.

Here Callicles, who has been listening in silent amazement, asks
Chaerephon whether Socrates is in earnest, and on receiving the
assurance that he is, proceeds to ask the same question of Socrates
himself. For if such doctrines are true, life must have been turned
upside down, and all of us are doing the opposite of what we ought to be
doing.

Socrates replies in a style of playful irony, that before men can
understand one another they must have some common feeling. And such a
community of feeling exists between himself and Callicles, for both
of them are lovers, and they have both a pair of loves; the beloved of
Callicles are the Athenian Demos and Demos the son of Pyrilampes; the
beloved of Socrates are Alcibiades and philosophy. The peculiarity of
Callicles is that he can never contradict his loves; he changes as his
Demos changes in all his opinions; he watches the countenance of both
his loves, and repeats their sentiments, and if any one is surprised
at his sayings and doings, the explanation of them is, that he is not a
free agent, but must always be imitating his two loves. And this is the
explanation of Socrates' peculiarities also. He is always repeating what
his mistress, Philosophy, is saying to him, who unlike his other love,
Alcibiades, is ever the same, ever true. Callicles must refute her, or
he will never be at unity with himself; and discord in life is far worse
than the discord of musical sounds.

Callicles answers, that Gorgias was overthrown because, as Polus said,
in compliance with popular prejudice he had admitt