Page - 1023 - in The Complete Plato

cannot. And if so, you people who know all things should pity us and not be angry with us. How characteristic of Socrates! he replied, with a bitter laugh; that’s your ironical style! Did I not foresee—have I not already told you, that whatever he was asked he would refuse to answer, and try irony or any other shuffle, in order that he might avoid answering? You are a philosopher, Thrasymachus, I replied, and well know that if you ask a person what numbers make up twelve, taking care to prohibit him whom you ask from answering twice six, or three times four, or six times two, or four times three, “for this sort of nonsense will not do for me”—then obviously, if that is your way of putting the question, no one can answer you. But suppose that he were to retort: ” Thrasymachus, what do you mean? If one of these numbers which you interdict be the true answer to the question, am I falsely to say some other number which is not the right one?—is that your meaning?”—How would you answer him? Just as if the two cases were at all alike! he said. Why should they not be? I replied; and even if they are not, but only appear to be so to the person who is asked, ought he not to say what he thinks, whether you and I forbid him or not? I presume then that you are going to make one of the interdicted answers? I dare say that I may, notwithstanding the danger, if upon reflection I approve of any of them. But what if I give you an answer about justice other and better, he said, than any of these? What do you deserve to have done to you? Done to me!—as becomes the ignorant, I must learn from the wise—that is what I deserve to have done to me. What, and no payment! A pleasant notion! I will pay when I have the money, I replied. But you have, Socrates, said Glaucon: and you, Thrasymachus, need be under no anxiety about money, for we will all make a contribution for Socrates. Yes, he replied, and then Socrates will do as he always does —refuse to answer himself, but take and pull to pieces the answer of someone else. Why, my good friend, I said, how can anyone answer who knows, and says that he knows, just nothing; and who, even if he has some faint notions of his own, is told by a man of authority not to utter them? The natural thing is, that 1023