and has attained the perfection
of goodness and therefore of happiness, and the intemperate whom you
approve is the opposite of all this and is wretched. He therefore who
would be happy must pursue temperance and avoid intemperance, and if
possible escape the necessity of punishment, but if he have done wrong
he must endure punishment. In this way states and individuals should
seek to attain harmony, which, as the wise tell us, is the bond of
heaven and earth, of gods and men. Callicles has never discovered the
power of geometrical proportion in both worlds; he would have men aim
at disproportion and excess. But if he be wrong in this, and if
self-control is the true secret of happiness, then the paradox is true
that the only use of rhetoric is in self-accusation, and Polus was right
in saying that to do wrong is worse than to suffer wrong, and Gorgias
was right in saying that the rhetorician must be a just man. And you
were wrong in taunting me with my defenceless condition, and in saying
that I might be accused or put to death or boxed on the ears with
impunity. For I may repeat once more, that to strike is worse than to
be stricken--to do than to suffer. What I said then is now made fast in
adamantine bonds. I myself know not the true nature of these things, but
I know that no one can deny my words and not be ridiculous. To do wrong
is the greatest of evils, and to suffer wrong is the next greatest evil.
He who would avoid the last must be a ruler, or the friend of a ruler;
and to be the friend he must be the equal of the ruler, and must also
resemble him. Under his protection he will suffer no evil, but will he
also do no evil? Nay, will he not rather do all the evil which he can
and escape? And in this way the greatest of all evils will befall him.
'But this imitator of the tyrant,' rejoins Callicles, 'will kill any
one who does not similarly imitate him.' Socrates replies that he is
not deaf, and that he has heard that repeated many times, and can
only reply, that a bad man will kill a good one. 'Yes, and that is the
provoking thing.' Not provoking to a man of sense who is not studying
the arts which will preserve him from danger; and this, as you say, is
the use of rhetoric in courts of justice. But how many other arts are
there which also save men from death, and are yet quite humble in their
pretensions--such as the art of swimming, or the art of the pilot? Does
not the pilot do men at least as much service as t