elf; then I shall be satisfied, and you are the person from whom
I think that I am most likely to hear this; and therefore I will praise
the unjust life to the utmost of my power, and my manner of speaking
will indicate the manner in which I desire to hear you too praising
justice and censuring injustice. Will you say whether you approve of my
proposal?

Indeed I do; nor can I imagine any theme about which a man of sense
would oftener wish to converse.

I am delighted, he replied, to hear you say so, and shall begin by
speaking, as I proposed, of the nature and origin of justice.

They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice,
evil; but that the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have
both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not
being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they
had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise
laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed
by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of
justice;--it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is
to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to
suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at
a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as
the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do
injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit
to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he
did. Such is the received account, Socrates, of the nature and origin of
justice.

Now that those who practise justice do so involuntarily and because they
have not the power to be unjust will best appear if we imagine something
of this kind: having given both to the just and the unjust power to do
what they will, let us watch and see whither desire will lead them;
then we shall discover in the very act the just and unjust man to be
proceeding along the same road, following their interest, which all
natures deem to be their good, and are only diverted into the path of
justice by the force of law. The liberty which we are supposing may be
most completely given to them in the form of such a power as is said
to have been possessed by Gyges, the ancestor of Croesus the Lydian.
According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of
the king of Lydia; there wa