Gorgias
Plato (428–347 BC)
Plato's Gorgias in the Greek text edited by John Burnet.
Section 447
Section 448
Section 449
Section 450
Section 451
Section 452
Section 453
Section 454
Section 455
Section 456
Section 457
Section 458
Section 459
Section 460
Section 461
Section 462
Section 463
Section 464
Section 465
Section 466
Section 467
Section 468
Section 469
Section 470
Section 471
Section 472
Section 473
Section 474
Section 475
Section 476
Section 477
Section 478
[478] POLUS: Very true.
SOCRATES: And what from vice and injustice? If you are not able to answer at once, ask yourself whither we go with the sick, and to whom we take them.
POLUS: To the physicians, Socrates.
SOCRATES: And to whom do we go with the unjust and intemperate?
POLUS: To the judges, you mean.
SOCRATES: —Who are to punish them?
POLUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: And do not those who rightly punish others, punish them in accordance with a certain rule of justice?
POLUS: Clearly.
SOCRATES: Then the art of money-making frees a man from poverty; medicine from disease; and justice from intemperance and injustice?
POLUS: That is evident.
SOCRATES: Which, then, is the best of these three?
POLUS: Will you enumerate them?
SOCRATES: Money-making, medicine, and justice.
POLUS: Justice, Socrates, far excels the two others.
SOCRATES: And justice, if the best, gives the greatest pleasure or advantage or both?
POLUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: But is the being healed a pleasant thing, and are those who are being healed pleased?
POLUS: I think not.
SOCRATES: A useful thing, then?
POLUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: Yes, because the patient is delivered from a great evil; and this is the advantage of enduring the pain—that you get well?
POLUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: And would he be the happier man in his bodily condition, who is healed, or who never was out of health?
POLUS: Clearly he who was never out of health.
SOCRATES: Yes; for happiness surely does not consist in being delivered from evils, but in never having had them.
POLUS: True.
SOCRATES: And suppose the case of two persons who have some evil in their bodies, and that one of them is healed and delivered from evil, and another is not healed, but retains the evil—which of them is the most miserable?
POLUS: Clearly he who is not healed.
SOCRATES: And was not punishment said by us to be a deliverance from the greatest of evils, which is vice?
POLUS: True.
SOCRATES: And justice punishes us, and makes us more just, and is the medicine of our vice?
POLUS: True.
SOCRATES: He, then, has the first place in the scale of happiness who has never had vice in his soul; for this has been shown to be the greatest of evils.
POLUS: Clearly.
SOCRATES: And he has the second place, who is delivered from vice?
POLUS: True.
SOCRATES: That is to say, he who receives admonition and rebuke and punishment?
POLUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: Then he lives worst, who, having been unjust, has no deliverance from injustice?
POLUS: Certainly.