Gorgias

​CALLICLES: Most certainly, Socrates. For how could a man be happy if he is a slave to anything? But this is what is naturally noble and just, which I now speak to you with frankness: that he who is to live rightly must allow his desires to be as great as possible and not restrain them, and must be capable of serving them, being as great as they are, through courage and wisdom, and of satisfying whatever the desire may be at any time. But this, I think, is not possible for the many; hence they blame such people out of shame, concealing their own weakness, and they say that licentiousness is shameful, as I said before, enslaving those who are better by nature; and being themselves unable to procure fulfillment for their pleasures, they praise temperance and justice because of their own lack of manhood. For to those who had from the beginning the advantage of being sons of kings, or who were themselves capable by nature of procuring some rule, tyranny, or power, what in truth could be more shameful and worse than temperance and justice for these men, who, when it is open to them to enjoy good things and nothing is in their way, should themselves introduce over themselves as master the law, the speech, and the censure of the many? Or how could they fail to have been made miserable by the beauty of justice and temperance, sharing no more with their own friends than with their enemies, and that too while ruling in their own city? But in truth, Socrates, which you say you pursue, the case is thus: luxury, licentiousness, and freedom, if they have support, this is virtue and happiness, and all these other things are mere embellishments, agreements of men contrary to nature, nonsense and worth nothing. SOCRATES: Not ignobly, Callicles, do you pursue the argument with frankness; for you now clearly say what others think but are unwilling to say. I therefore beg you on no account to give way, so that it may really become clear how we ought to live. And tell me: you say that the desires must not be restrained if one is to be as one ought, but that, allowing them to be as great as possible, one must prepare fulfillment for them from somewhere or other, and that this is virtue? CALLICLES: I say so. SOCRATES: Then those who need nothing are not correctly said to be happy. CALLICLES: For in that way stones and the dead would be most happy.

​SOCRATES: But indeed, even as you say, life is a strange thing. For I should not wonder if Euripides speaks the truth in these lines, saying: “Who knows if to live is to be dead, and to be dead is to live?” and we are indeed perhaps dead; for I once heard from the wise that we are now dead and our body is a tomb for us, and that part of the soul in which the desires are happens to be such as to be easily persuaded and to shift up and down. And this, then, some clever man, speaking mythologically, perhaps a Sicilian or an Italian, playing on the name because of its credulous and persuasive nature, called a jar, and the foolish he called the uninitiated; and of the foolish, that part of the soul where the desires are, its licentious and non-watertight part, he compared to a perforated jar, because of its insatiability. On the contrary to you, Callicles, he indicates that of those in Hades—meaning the unseen—these would be the most miserable, the uninitiated, and they would carry water into the perforated jar with another such perforated sieve. And the sieve, indeed, as he who spoke to me said, is the soul; and he compared the soul of the foolish to a sieve as being perforated, since it is unable to hold anything through disbelief and forgetfulness. These things are, on the whole, somewhat strange, yet they make clear what I want to show you, so that if I can, I may persuade you to change your mind, and instead of a life that is insatiable and licentious, to choose one that is orderly and content and satisfied with what is at hand. But do I persuade you at all to change your mind and believe that the orderly are happier than the licentious, or even if I tell many other such myths, will you change your mind none the more? CALLICLES: The latter is truer, Socrates. SOCRATES: Come then, let me tell you another image from the same school as the present one. For consider if you say something like this about each of the two lives, the temperate and the licentious, as if two men had each many jars, and for one of them they were sound and full, one of wine, another of honey, another of milk, and many others of many things, but the inflows of each of these were rare and difficult, and procured only with many and hard labors;