[479d]
nor brighter
than being that they should still more be.” “Most
true,” he said. “We would seem to have found, then, that
the many conventions1 of the
many about the fair and honorable and other things are tumbled about in2 the mid-region between that
which is not and that which is in the true and absolute sense.”
“We have so found it.” “But we agreed in
advance that, if anything of that sort should be discovered, it must be
denominated opinable, not knowable, the wanderer between being caught by the
faculty that is betwixt and between.” “We
did.” “We shall affirm, then, that those who view many
beautiful things
1 A further thought is developed here, suggested in 479 A, B. Just as the many particular horses, trees, or tables shift and change, and are and are not in comparision with the unchanging multitude of each, so the many opinions of the multitude about justice and the good and the beautiful and other moral conceptions change, and both are and are not in comparison with the unalterable ideas of justice and beauty, which the philosopher more nearly apprehends. Thus, for the purposes of this contrast, notions, opinions, and what English usage would call ideas, fall into the same class as material objects. Cf. Euthyphro 6 D, Phaedo 78 D, Parmenides 131 D, Gorgias 488 Dτὰ τῶν πολλῶν ἄρα νόμιμα, Laws 715 Bτὰ τούτων δίκαια, 860 Cτοῖς μὲν τοίνυν πολλοῖς etc., 962 Dτὰ τῶν πόλεων(of states)νόμιμα. The practical truth of this distinction is unaffected by our metaphysics. Plato is speaking of what he elsewhere calls the εἴδωλα of justice, beauty and the like. Cf. 517 D, 532 D, Theaetetus 150 B, and “The Idea of Good in Plato's Republic,”University of Chicago Studies in Classical Philology, i. p. 238.
2 Cf. Phaedrus 275 E, Phaedo 81 C, 82 E. Isocrates uses καλινδέομαι in similar contemptuous connotation, v. 82, xiii. 20, xv. 30.
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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