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[359a]
to avoid the
one and take the other determine that it is for their profit to make a
compact with one another neither to commit nor to suffer injustice; and that
this is the beginning of legislation and covenants between men, and that
they name the commandment of the law the lawful and the just, and that this
is the genesis and essential nature of justice—a compromise
between the best, which is to do wrong with impunity, and the worst, which
is to be wronged and be impotent to get one's revenge. Justice, they tell
us, being mid-way between the two, is accepted and approved,
[359b]
not as a real good, but as a thing honored in
the lack of vigor to do injustice, since anyone who had the power to do it
and was in reality 'a man' would never make a compact with anybody either to
wrong nor to be wronged; for he would be mad. The nature, then, of justice
is this and such as this, Socrates, and such are the conditions in which it
originates, according to the theory.“But as for the second point, that those who practise it do so
unwillingly and from want of power to commit injustice—we shall be
most likely to apprehend that if we entertain some such supposition as this
in thought:
[359c]
if we grant to each, the
just and the unjust, licence and power to do whatever he pleases, and then
accompany them in imagination and see whither his desire will conduct each.
We should then catch the just man in the very act of resorting to the same
conduct as the unjust man because of the self-advantage which every creature
by its nature pursues as a good, while by the convention of law1 it is forcibly diverted to paying honor to 'equality.'2 The
licence that I mean would be most nearly such as would result from supposing
them to have the power
[359d]
which men say
once came to the ancestor of Gyges the Lydian.3 They relate that he was a
shepherd in the service of the ruler at that time of Lydia, and that after a great deluge of
rain and an earthquake the ground opened and a chasm appeared in the place
where he was pasturing; and they say that he saw and wondered and went down
into the chasm; and the story goes that he beheld other marvels there and a
hollow bronze horse with little doors, and that he peeped in and saw a
corpse within, as it seemed, of more than mortal stature,
[359e]
and that there was nothing else but a gold ring
on its hand, which he took off and went forth. And when the shepherds held
their customary assembly to make their monthly report to the king about the
flocks, he also attended wearing the ring. So as he sat there it chanced
that he turned the collet of the ring towards himself, towards the inner
part of his hand, and when this took place they say that he became
invisible4
1 The antithesis of φύσις and νόμος, nature and law, custom or convention, is a commonplace of both Greek rhetoric and Greek ethics. Cf. the Chicago dissertation of John Walter Beardslee, The Use of φύσις in Fifth Century Greek Literature, ch. x. p. 68. Cf. Herodotus iii. 38, Pindar, quoted by Plato, Gorgias 484 B, Laws 690 B, 715 A; Euripides or Critias, Frag. of Sisyphus, Aristophanes Birds 755 ff., Plato Protagoras 337 D, Gorgias 483 E, Laws 889 C and 890 D. It was misused by ancient as it is by modern radicals. Cf. my interpretation of the Timaeus, A.J.P. vol. ix. p. 405. The ingenuity of modern philologians has tried to classify the Greek sophists as distinctly partisans of νόμος or φύσις. It cannot be done. Cf. my unsigned review of Alfred Benn in the New York Nation, July 20, 1899, p. 57.
2 Cf. Gorgias 508 A.
3 So manuscripts and Proclus. There are many emendations which the curious will find in Adam's first appendix to the book. Herodotus i. 8-13 tells a similar but not identical story of Gyges himself, in which the magic ring and many other points of Plato's tale are lacking. On the whole legend cf. the study of Kirby Flower Smith, A.J.P. vol. xxiii. pp. 261-282, 361-387, and Frazer's Paus. iii. p. 417.
4 Mr. H.G. Wells'The Invisible Man rests on a similar fancy. Cf. also the lawless fancies of Aristophanes Birds 785 ff.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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