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and attempts the one and lets the others go; and then, too, if he does
happen to trip, he is equal to correcting his error. Similarly, the unjust
man who attempts injustice rightly must be supposed to escape detection if
he is to be altogether unjust, and we must regard the man who is caught as a
bungler.
1 For the height of injustice
2 is to seem
just without being so. To the perfectly unjust man, then, we must assign
perfect injustice and withhold nothing of it, but we must allow him, while
committing the greatest wrongs, to have secured for himself the greatest
reputation for justice;
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and if he does
happen to trip,
3 we must concede to him
the power to correct his mistakes by his ability to speak persuasively if
any of his misdeeds come to light, and when force is needed, to employ force
by reason of his manly spirit and vigor and his provision of friends and
money; and when we have set up an unjust man of this character, our theory
must set the just man at his side—a simple and noble man, who, in
the phrase of Aeschylus, does not wish to seem but be good. Then we must
deprive him of the seeming.
4 For if he is going to be
thought just
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he will have honors and
gifts because of that esteem. We cannot be sure in that case whether he is
just for justice' sake or for the sake of the gifts and the honors. So we
must strip him bare of everything but justice and make his state the
opposite of his imagined counterpart.
5 Though
doing no wrong he must have the repute of the greatest injustice, so that he
may be put to the test as regards justice through not softening because of
ill repute and the consequences thereof. But let him hold on his course
unchangeable even unto death,
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361d]
seeming
all his life to be unjust though being just, that so, both men attaining to
the limit, the one of injustice, the other of justice, we may pass judgement
which of the two is the happier.”
“Bless me, my dear Glaucon,” said I, “how
strenuously you polish off each of your two men for the competition for the
prize as if it were a statue.
6” “To the best of my ability,” he
replied, “and if such is the nature of the two, it becomes an easy
matter, I fancy, to unfold the tale of the sort of life that awaits each.
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361e]
We must tell it, then; and even if
my language is somewhat rude and brutal,
7 you must
not suppose, Socrates, that it is I who speak thus, but those who commend
injustice above justice. What they will say is this: that such being his
disposition the just man will have to endure the lash, the rack, chains,