Gorgias

SOCRATES: But now, my excellent friend, since you yourself are just beginning to engage in the affairs of the city, and are encouraging and reproaching me for not doing so, shall we not examine one another? Come, has Callicles already made any of the citizens better? Is there anyone who, formerly being wicked, unjust, undisciplined, and foolish, has become noble and good through Callicles, whether stranger or citizen, slave or free man? Tell me, if someone should examine you on these things, Callicles, what will you say? Whom will you say you have made better by your company? Do you hesitate to answer, if indeed there is any work of yours while you were still in private life, before attempting to practice publicly? CALLICLES: You are a lover of victory, Socrates. SOCRATES: But I do not ask from love of victory, but from a genuine desire to know in what way indeed you think one ought to conduct public affairs among us. Or will you, on entering upon the affairs of the city, care for anything else for us than that we, the citizens, should be as good as possible? Or have we not already agreed many times that the statesman ought to do this? Have we agreed or not? Answer. We have agreed; I will answer for you. If, then, this is what the good man must prepare for his own city, now recall and tell me about those men whom you mentioned a little while ago, whether they still seem to you to have been good citizens, Pericles and Cimon and Miltiades and Themistocles. CALLICLES: To me, yes. SOCRATES: Then, if they were indeed good, it is clear that each of them made the citizens better instead of worse. Did he or not? CALLICLES: Yes. SOCRATES: Then, when Pericles began to speak before the people, were the Athenians worse than when he made his last speeches? CALLICLES: Perhaps. SOCRATES: Not “perhaps,” indeed, my excellent friend, but it is necessary from what has been agreed, if indeed he was a good citizen. CALLICLES: What of it, then? SOCRATES: Nothing; but tell me this in addition, whether the Athenians are said to have become better through Pericles, or, quite the contrary, to have been corrupted by him. For this is what I, at least, hear: that Pericles made the Athenians idle, cowardly, talkative, and avaricious, by having first established the payment of public fees. CALLICLES: You hear these things, Socrates, from those with bruised ears.

​SOCRATES: But I no longer merely hear this, but both you and I know clearly that, at first, Pericles was well-reputed and the Athenians did not pass any shameful sentence against him when they were worse; but when they had become noble and good through him, at the end of Pericles’ life, they voted him guilty of theft and came near to condemning him to death, clearly because they regarded him as a wicked man. CALLICLES: What of it? Was Pericles bad because of this? SOCRATES: At least a caretaker of donkeys and horses and cattle, being of such a sort, would have been thought bad if, having received them when they did not kick him nor butt nor bite, he showed them doing all these things because of wildness. Or does it not seem to you that any caretaker of any animal whatsoever is bad, who, having received them tamer, shows them to be wilder than when he received them? Does it seem so or not? CALLICLES: Quite so, just to please you. SOCRATES: Then please me by answering this as well: is man also one of the animals, or not? CALLICLES: How could he not be? SOCRATES: Therefore Pericles was caring for men? CALLICLES: Yes. SOCRATES: What then? Ought they not, as we were just now agreeing, to have become more just instead of more unjust through him, if indeed he cared for them as a man good in political affairs? CALLICLES: Quite so. SOCRATES: Therefore the just, at least, are tame, as Homer said. But what do you say? Is it not so? CALLICLES: Yes. SOCRATES: But yet he showed them to be wilder than when he received them, and that too against himself, whom he would least of all have wished. CALLICLES: Do you wish me to agree with you? SOCRATES: If indeed I seem to you to speak the truth. CALLICLES: Let these things be so, then. SOCRATES: Therefore, if indeed wilder, more unjust and worse? CALLICLES: Let it be. SOCRATES: Then Pericles was not good in political affairs according to this argument. CALLICLES: So you say. SOCRATES: By Zeus, nor you either, from what you were agreeing to. But tell me again about Cimon: did not these very people whom he was caring for ostracize him, so that they might not hear his voice for ten years? And did they not do these very same things to Themistocles, and punish him with exile besides? And as for Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, did they not vote to cast him into the pit, and had it not been for the prytanis, would he not have been cast in? And yet these men, if they were good men, as you say, would never have suffered these things. For surely good charioteers do not fall out of their chariots at the beginning, but then, after they have cared for the horses and become better charioteers themselves, fall out then. There is no such thing either in chariot-driving or in any other work whatsoever; or does it seem so to you? CALLICLES: To me, at least, no.