and old men; and these he will treat as errors, and will make laws
accordingly for those who commit them, which will be the mildest and
most merciful of all laws.

CLEINIAS: You are perfectly right.

ATHENIAN: We all of us remark of one man that he is superior to pleasure
and passion, and of another that he is inferior to them; and this is
true.

CLEINIAS: Certainly.

ATHENIAN: But no one was ever yet heard to say that one of us is
superior and another inferior to ignorance.

CLEINIAS: Very true.

ATHENIAN: We are speaking of motives which incite men to the fulfilment
of their will; although an individual may be often drawn by them in
opposite directions at the same time.

CLEINIAS: Yes, often.

ATHENIAN: And now I can define to you clearly, and without ambiguity,
what I mean by the just and unjust, according to my notion of them:
When anger and fear, and pleasure and pain, and jealousies and desires,
tyrannize over the soul, whether they do any harm or not--I call all
this injustice. But when the opinion of the best, in whatever part
of human nature states or individuals may suppose that to dwell, has
dominion in the soul and orders the life of every man, even if it be
sometimes mistaken, yet what is done in accordance therewith, and the
principle in individuals which obeys this rule, and is best for the
whole life of man, is to be called just; although the hurt done by
mistake is thought by many to be involuntary injustice. Leaving the
question of names, about which we are not going to quarrel, and having
already delineated three sources of error, we may begin by recalling
them somewhat more vividly to our memory: One of them was of the painful
sort, which we denominate anger and fear.

CLEINIAS: Quite right.

ATHENIAN: There was a second consisting of pleasures and desires, and a
third of hopes, which aimed at true opinion about the best. The latter
being subdivided into three, we now get five sources of actions, and for
these five we will make laws of two kinds.

CLEINIAS: What are the two kinds?

ATHENIAN: There is one kind of actions done by violence and in the light
of day, and another kind of actions which are done in darkness and with
secret deceit, or sometimes both with violence and deceit; the laws
concerning these last ought to have a character of severity.

CLEINIAS: Naturally.

ATHENIAN: And now let us return from this digression and complete the
work of legislation. Laws have been alre