h to be admired.

What do you mean? I said; you should have more feeling for them. When a
man cannot measure, and a great many others who cannot measure declare
that he is four cubits high, can he help believing what they say?

Nay, he said, certainly not in that case.

Well, then, do not be angry with them; for are they not as good as a
play, trying their hand at paltry reforms such as I was describing; they
are always fancying that by legislation they will make an end of frauds
in contracts, and the other rascalities which I was mentioning, not
knowing that they are in reality cutting off the heads of a hydra?

Yes, he said; that is just what they are doing.

I conceive, I said, that the true legislator will not trouble
himself with this class of enactments whether concerning laws or the
constitution either in an ill-ordered or in a well-ordered State; for
in the former they are quite useless, and in the latter there will be no
difficulty in devising them; and many of them will naturally flow out of
our previous regulations.

What, then, he said, is still remaining to us of the work of
legislation?

Nothing to us, I replied; but to Apollo, the God of Delphi, there
remains the ordering of the greatest and noblest and chiefest things of
all.

Which are they? he said.

The institution of temples and sacrifices, and the entire service of
gods, demigods, and heroes; also the ordering of the repositories of
the dead, and the rites which have to be observed by him who would
propitiate the inhabitants of the world below. These are matters of
which we are ignorant ourselves, and as founders of a city we should be
unwise in trusting them to any interpreter but our ancestral deity. He
is the god who sits in the centre, on the navel of the earth, and he is
the interpreter of religion to all mankind.

You are right, and we will do as you propose.

But where, amid all this, is justice? son of Ariston, tell me where. Now
that our city has been made habitable, light a candle and search, and
get your brother and Polemarchus and the rest of our friends to help,
and let us see where in it we can discover justice and where injustice,
and in what they differ from one another, and which of them the man who
would be happy should have for his portion, whether seen or unseen by
gods and men.

Nonsense, said Glaucon: did you not promise to search yourself, saying
that for you not to help justice in her need would be an impiety?