REPUBLIC(BOOKII) 67
injustice, from anyone in the way I want it. I want to hear it itself by itself praised, and
I assume that I’d hear this most of all from you.
“That’s why I’ll strain myself to speak in praise of the unjust life, and as I speak
I’ll point out to you in what way I want to hear you in turn condemn injustice and praise
justice. But see if what I’m saying is to your liking.”
“Most of all,” I said, “for what would anyone who has any sense enjoy more to
talk about and hear about repeatedly?”
“You’re speaking most beautifully,” he said. “Listen then to what I said I’d talk
about first, what sort of thing justice is and where it comes from. People claim that
doing injustice is by its nature good and suffering injustice is bad, but that suffering
injustice crosses over farther into bad than doing injustice does into good, so that
when people both do injustice to and suffer it from each other and get a taste of both,
it seems profitable to the ones who don’t have the power to avoid the latter and
choose the former to make a contract with each other neither to do injustice nor suf-
fer it. And from then on they begin to set up laws and agreements among themselves
and to name what’s commanded by the law both lawful and just, and so this is the
origin and being of justice, being in the middle between what is best, if one could do
injustice and not pay a penalty, and what is worst, if one were powerless to take
revenge when suffering injustice. What’s just, being at a mean between these two
things, is something to be content with not as something good, but as something
honored out of weakness at doing injustice, since someone with the power to do it
and who was truly a man would never make a contract with anyone neither to do nor
suffer injustice. He’d be insane.
“So, Socrates, it’s the nature of justice to be this and of this sort, and these are the
sorts of things it comes from by its nature, as the argument goes. The fact that those who
pursue it pursue it unwillingly from a lack of power to do injustice, we might perceive
most clearly if we were to do something like this in our thinking: by giving to each of
them, the just and the unjust, freedom to do whatever he wants, we could then follow
along and see where his desire will lead each one. Then we could catch the just person
in the act of going the same route as the unjust one because of greed for more, which is
what every nature, by its nature, seeks as good, though it’s forcibly pulled aside by law
to respect for equality.
“The sort of freedom I’m talking about would be most possible if the sort of
power ever came to them that people say came to the ancestor of Gyges the Lydian.
They say he was a shepherd working as a hired servant to the one who then ruled
Lydia, when a big storm came up and an earthquake broke open the earth, and there
was a chasm in the place where he was pasturing the sheep. Seeing it and marveling,
he went down and saw other marvels people tell legends about as well as a bronze
horse, hollowed out, that had windows in it, and when he stooped down to look
through them he saw a dead body inside that appeared bigger than a human being.
And this body had on it nothing else but a gold ring around its finger, which he took
off and went away.
“And when the customary gathering of the shepherds came along, so that they
could report each month to the king about his flocks, he too came and had on the ring.
Then while he was sitting with the others, he happened to turn the stone setting of the
ring around toward himself into the inside of his hand, and when this happened he
became invisible to those sitting beside him, and they talked about him as though he’d
gone away. He marveled, and running his hand over the ring again he twisted the stone
setting outward, and when he had twisted it he became visible. And reflecting on this,
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