e members of free communities do
pass laws in their respective countries for self-protection against
wrong-doing. Over and above their personal connections, they provide
themselves with a host of friends; they gird their cities about with
walls and battlements; they collect armaments to ward off evil-doers;
and to make security doubly sure, they furnish themselves with allies
from foreign states. In spite of all which defensive machinery these
same free citizens do occasionally fall victims to injustice. But you,
who are without any of these aids; you, who pass half your days on the
high roads where iniquity is rife; (20) you, who, into whatever city
you enter, are less than the least of its free members, and moreover are
just the sort of person whom any one bent on mischief would single out
for attack--yet you, with your foreigner's passport, are to be
exempt from injury? So you flatter yourself. And why? Will the state
authorities cause proclamation to be made on your behalf: "The person
of this man Aristippus is secure; let his going out and his coming in
be free from danger"? Is that the ground of your confidence? or do you
rather rest secure in the consciousness that you would prove such a
slave as no master would care to keep? For who would care to have in
his house a fellow with so slight a disposition to work and so strong
a propensity to extravagance? Suppose we stop and consider that very
point: how do masters deal with that sort of domestic? If I am not
mistaken, they chastise his wantonness by starvation; they balk his
thieving tendencies by bars and bolts where there is anything to steal;
they hinder him from running away by bonds and imprisonment; they drive
the sluggishness out of him with the lash. Is it not so? Or how do you
proceed when you discover the like tendency in one of your domestics?

(18) Or, "Well foiled!" "A masterly fall! my prince of wrestlers."

(19) For these mythical highway robbers, see Diod. iv. 59; and for
Sciron in particular, Plut. "Theseus," 10.

(20) Or, "where so many suffer wrong."

Ar. I correct them with all the plagues, till I force them to serve me
properly. But, Socrates, to return to your pupil educated in the royal
art, (21) which, if I mistake not, you hold to be happiness: how, may I
ask, will he be better off than others who lie in evil case, in spite
of themselves, simply because they suffer perforce, but in his case the
hunger and the thirst, the cold shi