this, Socrates, how can a man who has
any superiority of mind or person or rank or wealth, be willing to
honour justice; or indeed to refrain from laughing when he hears
justice praised? And even if there should be some one who is able to
disprove the truth of my words, and who is satisfied that justice is
best, still he is not angry with the unjust, but is very ready to
forgive them, because he also knows that men are not just of their own
free will; unless, peradventure, there be some one whom the divinity
within him may have inspired with a hatred of injustice, or who has
attained knowledge of the truth--but no other man. He only blames
injustice who, owing to cowardice or age or some weakness, has not the
power of being unjust. And this is proved by the fact that when he
obtains the power, he immediately becomes unjust as far as he can be.

The cause of all this, Socrates, was indicated by us at the beginning
of the argument, when my brother and I told you how astonished we were
to find that of all the professing panegyrists of justice--beginning
with the ancient heroes of whom any memorial has been preserved to us,
and ending with the men of our own time--no one has ever blamed
injustice or praised justice except with a view to the glories,
honours, and benefits which flow from them. No one has ever adequately
described either in verse or prose the true essential nature of either
of them abiding in the soul, and invisible to any human or divine eye;
or shown that of all the things of a man's soul which he has within
him, justice is the greatest good, and injustice the greatest evil.
Had this been the universal strain, had you sought to persuade us of
this from our youth upwards, we should not have been on the watch to
keep one another from doing wrong, but every one would have been his
own watchman, because afraid, if he did wrong, of harbouring in himself
the greatest of evils. I dare say that Thrasymachus and others would
seriously hold the language which I have been merely repeating, and
words even stronger than these about justice and injustice, grossly, as
I conceive, perverting their true nature. But I speak in this vehement
manner, as I must frankly confess to you, because I want to hear from
you the opposite side; and I would ask you to show not only the
superiority which justice has over injustice, but what effect they have
on the possessor of them which makes the one to be a good and the other
an ev