Gorgias

​SOCRATES: Therefore, does this person happen to be the one who, committing the greatest injustices and employing the greatest injustice, manages neither to be admonished, nor disciplined, nor to pay the penalty, just as you say Archelaus has managed to do, along with the other tyrants, rhetoricians, and potentates? POLUS: It seems so. SOCRATES: For these people, my excellent friend, have achieved pretty much the same thing as someone who, being afflicted with the greatest diseases, should manage not to pay the penalty to the physicians for the errors of his body and not to be cured, fearing, like a child, cautery and surgery, because they are painful. Or does it not seem so to you as well? POLUS: I do. SOCRATES: Fearing it, as it seems, because he is ignorant of what health and excellence of the body are like. For those who flee justice, Polus, based on our current agreements, are likely doing something similar: they look only at its painful aspect, but are blind to its benefit, and are ignorant of how much more wretched it is to live with an unhealthy soul—one that is corrupt, unjust, and impious—than to live with an unhealthy body. Hence, they do everything possible so as not to pay the penalty and not to be rid of the greatest evil, providing themselves with wealth, friends, and the means to speak as persuasively as possible. But if we have agreed to what is true, Polus, do you perceive the consequences that follow from our argument? Or do you want us to reason them out together? POLUS: If it seems best to you. SOCRATES: Does it follow, then, that injustice and doing injustice are the greatest evil? POLUS: It seems so, at least. SOCRATES: And yet, was paying the penalty shown to be a riddance of this evil? POLUS: It is likely. SOCRATES: And not paying it, is it the persistence of the evil? POLUS: Yes. SOCRATES: Therefore, doing injustice is second among evils in magnitude; but doing injustice and not paying the penalty has its nature as the greatest and first of all evils. POLUS: It seems so. SOCRATES: Was it not, then, about this very point, my friend, that we disputed, you declaring Archelaus happy because, while committing the greatest injustices, he paid no penalty at all, whereas I thought the opposite—that whether it is Archelaus or any other human being whatsoever who does not pay the penalty when committing injustice, it is fitting for him to be exceptionally wretched compared to other human beings, and that the one doing injustice is always more wretched than the one suffering it, and the one not paying the penalty than the one paying it? Was this not what was said by me? POLUS: Yes. SOCRATES: Has it not, then, been proved that what was said is true? POLUS: It seems so.

SOCRATES: Very well. If, then, these things are true, Polus, what is the great utility of rhetoric? For indeed, according to our current agreements, one must guard himself above all so as not to commit injustice, knowing that he will otherwise possess a sufficient evil. Is that not so? POLUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: But if he himself should commit injustice, or anyone else for whom he cares, he must go of his own accord to where he will pay the penalty as quickly as possible, to the judge as if to the physician, hurrying so that the disease of injustice, becoming deep-seated through time, does not make his soul ulcerated and incurable. Or how do we say it, Polus, if indeed our previous agreements still stand? Is it not necessary that these consequences harmonize with those agreements in this way, and not otherwise? POLUS: Indeed, Socrates, what else can we say? SOCRATES: Therefore, Polus, for defending one’s own injustice, or that of one’s parents, companions, children, or country when it acts unjustly, rhetoric is of no use to us at all, unless indeed someone should suppose the very opposite—that one ought to accuse himself first of all, and then his relatives and anyone of his friends who happens to commit injustice, and not conceal the misdeed but bring it to light, so that he may pay the penalty and become healthy. He must force himself and others not to play the coward, but to submit with eyes closed, well and courageously, as if to a physician for cutting and cauterizing, pursuing what is good and beautiful, without taking the pain into account. If he has committed injustices worthy of stripes, he must offer himself to be beaten; if of imprisonment, to be bound; if of a fine, to pay it; if of exile, to be exiled; if of death, to die. He must be the first accuser of himself and of his other relatives, and use rhetoric for this very purpose: so that, as their injustices are made manifest, they may be rid of the greatest evil, which is injustice. Shall we say this, Polus, or shall we not? POLUS: To me, Socrates, these things seem strange, but yet they probably agree with what you said before. SOCRATES: Therefore, must we either refute those earlier agreements, or must these consequences necessarily follow? POLUS: Yes, that is indeed how it stands.