[431e]
the rulers
and the ruled are of one mind as to who ought to rule, that condition will
be found in this. Don't you think so?” “I most
emphatically do,” he said. “In which class of the
citizens, then, will you say that the virtue of soberness has its seat when
this is their condition? In the rulers or in the ruled?”
“In both, I suppose,1” he said. “Do you see
then,” said I, “that our intuition was not a bad one
just now that discerned a likeness between soberness and a kind of
harmony2?” “Why so?”
“Because its operation is unlike that of courage and wisdom, which
residing in separate parts
1 που marks the slight hesitation at the deviation from the symmetry of the scheme which would lead us to expect, as Aristotle and others have taken it, that σωφροσύνη is the distinctive virtue of the lowest class. It is so practically for the lower sense of σωφροσύνη, but in the higher sense of the willingness of each to fulfil his function in due subordination to the whole, it is common to all classes.
2 Cf. 430 E. Aristotle gives this as an example of (faulty) defintion by metaphor (Topics iv. 3. 5).
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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