Gorgias

​SOCRATES: And of all inquiries, Callicles, the most beautiful is that about those very things for which you rebuked me: what sort of man one ought to be, and what to practice, and up to what point, both when one is older and when one is younger. For if I do anything not rightly in my own life, know well that I do not err willingly but through my own ignorance; you, therefore, just as you began to admonish me, do not draw back, but show me sufficiently what this is which I must practice, and in what way I might acquire it; and if you catch me now agreeing with you, but in later time not doing the same things which I agreed to, consider me an utter blockhead and never admonish me any more hereafter, as one who is worth nothing. But repeat to me from the beginning: how do you and Pindar say that justice according to nature stands? That the stronger carries off by force the possessions of the weaker, and the better rules the worse, and the superior has more than the inferior? Do you say that justice is something else, or do I remember rightly? CALLICLES: Why, I was saying those things then, and now I say them. SOCRATES: And do you call the same person both ‘better’ and ‘superior’? For indeed, even then I was not able to learn from you what you might mean. Whether you call the stronger ‘superior’ and the weaker must listen to the stronger—just as you seemed to me to indicate then, that the large cities attack the small ones according to natural justice because they are superior and stronger, as if the superior, the stronger, and the better were the same thing—or is it possible to be better, but inferior and weaker, and to be superior, but more wretched? Or is the same definition applicable to both the better and the superior? Define this very thing clearly for me: are the superior, the better, and the stronger the same or different? CALLICLES: Well, I tell you clearly that it is the same. SOCRATES: Are not the many, then, superior to the one according to nature? They who indeed also set down the laws for the one, just as you yourself were saying just now. CALLICLES: Of course. SOCRATES: Therefore the regulations of the many are those of the superior. CALLICLES: Certainly. SOCRATES: Are they not, then, those of the better? For the superior are far better according to your argument. CALLICLES: Yes. SOCRATES: Are not the regulations of these, then, beautiful according to nature, since they are indeed superior? CALLICLES: I say so.