and pains; and so further discussion would have
been unnecessary. And now I want to know whether I may depart; or will
you keep me here until midnight? I fancy that I may obtain my release
without many words;--if I promise that to-morrow I will give you an
account of all these cases. But at present I would rather sail in
another direction, and go to other matters which remain to be settled,
before the judgment can be given which Philebus demands.

PROTARCHUS: Very good, Socrates; in what remains take your own course.

SOCRATES: Then after the mixed pleasures the unmixed should have their
turn; this is the natural and necessary order.

PROTARCHUS: Excellent.

SOCRATES: These, in turn, then, I will now endeavour to indicate; for
with the maintainers of the opinion that all pleasures are a cessation
of pain, I do not agree, but, as I was saying, I use them as witnesses,
that there are pleasures which seem only and are not, and there are
others again which have great power and appear in many forms, yet
are intermingled with pains, and are partly alleviations of agony and
distress, both of body and mind.

PROTARCHUS: Then what pleasures, Socrates, should we be right in
conceiving to be true?

SOCRATES: True pleasures are those which are given by beauty of colour
and form, and most of those which arise from smells; those of
sound, again, and in general those of which the want is painless and
unconscious, and of which the fruition is palpable to sense and pleasant
and unalloyed with pain.

PROTARCHUS: Once more, Socrates, I must ask what you mean.

SOCRATES: My meaning is certainly not obvious, and I will endeavour
to be plainer. I do not mean by beauty of form such beauty as that of
animals or pictures, which the many would suppose to be my meaning; but,
says the argument, understand me to mean straight lines and circles,
and the plane or solid figures which are formed out of them by
turning-lathes and rulers and measurers of angles; for these I affirm
to be not only relatively beautiful, like other things, but they are
eternally and absolutely beautiful, and they have peculiar pleasures,
quite unlike the pleasures of scratching. And there are colours which
are of the same character, and have similar pleasures; now do you
understand my meaning?

PROTARCHUS: I am trying to understand, Socrates, and I hope that you
will try to make your meaning clearer.

SOCRATES: When sounds are smooth and clear, and have a single