of them, and go
about clothed in the best and finest of them?

CALLICLES: Fudge about coats!

SOCRATES: Then the skilfullest and best in making shoes ought to have
the advantage in shoes; the shoemaker, clearly, should walk about in the
largest shoes, and have the greatest number of them?

CALLICLES: Fudge about shoes! What nonsense are you talking?

SOCRATES: Or, if this is not your meaning, perhaps you would say that
the wise and good and true husbandman should actually have a larger
share of seeds, and have as much seed as possible for his own land?

CALLICLES: How you go on, always talking in the same way, Socrates!

SOCRATES: Yes, Callicles, and also about the same things.

CALLICLES: Yes, by the Gods, you are literally always talking of
cobblers and fullers and cooks and doctors, as if this had to do with
our argument.

SOCRATES: But why will you not tell me in what a man must be superior
and wiser in order to claim a larger share; will you neither accept a
suggestion, nor offer one?

CALLICLES: I have already told you. In the first place, I mean by
superiors not cobblers or cooks, but wise politicians who understand the
administration of a state, and who are not only wise, but also valiant
and able to carry out their designs, and not the men to faint from want
of soul.

SOCRATES: See now, most excellent Callicles, how different my charge
against you is from that which you bring against me, for you reproach
me with always saying the same; but I reproach you with never saying the
same about the same things, for at one time you were defining the better
and the superior to be the stronger, then again as the wiser, and now
you bring forward a new notion; the superior and the better are now
declared by you to be the more courageous: I wish, my good friend, that
you would tell me, once for all, whom you affirm to be the better and
superior, and in what they are better?

CALLICLES: I have already told you that I mean those who are wise and
courageous in the administration of a state--they ought to be the rulers
of their states, and justice consists in their having more than their
subjects.

SOCRATES: But whether rulers or subjects will they or will they not have
more than themselves, my friend?

CALLICLES: What do you mean?

SOCRATES: I mean that every man is his own ruler; but perhaps you think
that there is no necessity for him to rule himself; he is only required
to rule others?

CALLICLES: What d