will surely grant so much?

CLEINIAS: Certainly.

ATHENIAN: And an evil life too?

CLEINIAS: I am not equally disposed to grant that.

ATHENIAN: Will he not live painfully and to his own disadvantage?

CLEINIAS: How can I possibly say so?

ATHENIAN: How! Then may Heaven make us to be of one mind, for now we are
of two. To me, dear Cleinias, the truth of what I am saying is as plain
as the fact that Crete is an island. And, if I were a lawgiver, I would
try to make the poets and all the citizens speak in this strain, and
I would inflict the heaviest penalties on any one in all the land who
should dare to say that there are bad men who lead pleasant lives, or
that the profitable and gainful is one thing, and the just another; and
there are many other matters about which I should make my citizens speak
in a manner different from the Cretans and Lacedaemonians of this age,
and I may say, indeed, from the world in general. For tell me, my good
friends, by Zeus and Apollo tell me, if I were to ask these same
Gods who were your legislators,--Is not the most just life also the
pleasantest? or are there two lives, one of which is the justest and the
other the pleasantest?--and they were to reply that there are two; and
thereupon I proceeded to ask, (that would be the right way of pursuing
the enquiry), Which are the happier--those who lead the justest, or
those who lead the pleasantest life? and they replied, Those who lead
the pleasantest--that would be a very strange answer, which I should not
like to put into the mouth of the Gods. The words will come with more
propriety from the lips of fathers and legislators, and therefore I will
repeat my former questions to one of them, and suppose him to say again
that he who leads the pleasantest life is the happiest. And to that
I rejoin:--O my father, did you not wish me to live as happily as
possible? And yet you also never ceased telling me that I should live
as justly as possible. Now, here the giver of the rule, whether he be
legislator or father, will be in a dilemma, and will in vain endeavour
to be consistent with himself. But if he were to declare that the
justest life is also the happiest, every one hearing him would enquire,
if I am not mistaken, what is that good and noble principle in life
which the law approves, and which is superior to pleasure. For what good
can the just man have which is separated from pleasure? Shall we say
that glory and fame, coming from God