Plato

they almost made me forget who I was—so persuasively did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth.

May I succeed, if to succeed be for my good and yours, or likely to avail me in my cause!

Evenus the Parian

yet I corrupt him, and intentionally, too—so you say, although neither I nor any other human being is ever likely to be convinced by you. But either I do not corrupt them, or I corrupt them unintentionally; and on either view of the case you lie. If my offence is unintentional, the law has no cognizance of unintentional offences: you ought to have taken me privately, and warned and admonished me; for if I had been better advised, I should have left off doing what I only did unintentionally—no doubt I should; but you would have nothing to say to me and refused to teach me. And now you bring me up in this court, which is a place not of instruction, but of punishment.

Anaxagoras the Clazomenian, which are full of them

conclusion of the whole

Vice in abundance is easy to get.

The road is smooth and begins beside you,

But the gods have put sweat between us and virtue,

and a tedious and uphill road.

We are thus led on to the conception of a higher State, in which "no man calls anything his own," and in which there is neither "marrying nor giving in marriage," and "kings are philosophers" and "philosophers are kings;" and there is another and higher education, intellectual as well as moral and religious, of science as well as of art, and not of youth only but of the whole of life.

"And in that case they will be right in doing good to the evil and evil to the good?"

"But see the consequence; Many a man who is ignorant of human nature has friends who are bad friends, and in that case he ought to do harm to them; and he has good enemies whom he ought to benefit; but, if so, we shall be saying the very opposite of that which we affirmed to be the meaning of Simonides."