ppose that courage is a part of virtue?

MEGILLUS: To be sure.

ATHENIAN: Then, now hear and judge for yourself:--Would you like to
have for a fellow-lodger or neighbour a very courageous man, who had no
control over himself?

MEGILLUS: Heaven forbid!

ATHENIAN: Or an artist, who was clever in his profession, but a rogue?

MEGILLUS: Certainly not.

ATHENIAN: And surely justice does not grow apart from temperance?

MEGILLUS: Impossible.

ATHENIAN: Any more than our pattern wise man, whom we exhibited as
having his pleasures and pains in accordance with and corresponding to
true reason, can be intemperate?

MEGILLUS: No.

ATHENIAN: There is a further consideration relating to the due and undue
award of honours in states.

MEGILLUS: What is it?

ATHENIAN: I should like to know whether temperance without the other
virtues, existing alone in the soul of man, is rightly to be praised or
blamed?

MEGILLUS: I cannot tell.

ATHENIAN: And that is the best answer; for whichever alternative you had
chosen, I think that you would have gone wrong.

MEGILLUS: I am fortunate.

ATHENIAN: Very good; a quality, which is a mere appendage of things
which can be praised or blamed, does not deserve an expression of
opinion, but is best passed over in silence.

MEGILLUS: You are speaking of temperance?

ATHENIAN: Yes; but of the other virtues, that which having this
appendage is also most beneficial, will be most deserving of honour, and
next that which is beneficial in the next degree; and so each of them
will be rightly honoured according to a regular order.

MEGILLUS: True.

ATHENIAN: And ought not the legislator to determine these classes?

MEGILLUS: Certainly he should.

ATHENIAN: Suppose that we leave to him the arrangement of details. But
the general division of laws according to their importance into a first
and second and third class, we who are lovers of law may make ourselves.

MEGILLUS: Very good.

ATHENIAN: We maintain, then, that a State which would be safe and happy,
as far as the nature of man allows, must and ought to distribute honour
and dishonour in the right way. And the right way is to place the goods
of the soul first and highest in the scale, always assuming temperance
to be the condition of them; and to assign the second place to the
goods of the body; and the third place to money and property. And if any
legislator or state departs from this rule by giving money the place of
honour, or