Page - 195 - in The Complete Plato

from evils, but in never having had them. POLUS: True. SOCRATES: And suppose the case of two persons who have some evil in their bodies, and that one of them is healed and delivered from evil, and another is not healed, but retains the evil—which of them is the most miserable? POLUS: Clearly he who is not healed. SOCRATES: And was not punishment said by us to be a deliverance from the greatest of evils, which is vice? POLUS: True. SOCRATES: And justice punishes us, and makes us more just, and is the medicine of our vice? POLUS: True. SOCRATES: He, then, has the first place in the scale of happiness who has never had vice in his soul; for this has been shown to be the greatest of evils. POLUS: Clearly. SOCRATES: And he has the second place, who is delivered from vice? POLUS: True. SOCRATES: That is to say, he who receives admonition and rebuke and punishment? POLUS: Yes. SOCRATES: Then he lives worst, who, having been unjust, has no deliverance from injustice? POLUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: That is, he lives worst who commits the greatest crimes, and who, being the most unjust of men, succeeds in escaping rebuke or correction or punishment; and this, as you say, has been accomplished by Archelaus and other tyrants and rhetoricians and potentates? (Compare Republic.) POLUS: True. SOCRATES: May not their way of proceeding, my friend, be compared to the conduct of a person who is afflicted with the worst of diseases and yet contrives not to pay the penalty to the physician for his sins against his constitution, and will not be cured, because, like a child, he is afraid of the pain of being burned or cut:—Is not that a parallel case? 195