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 *366E* 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 *367A* 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
*367B* 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 evil to him. And please, as Glaucon requested of you, to {47}
exclude reputations; for unless you take away from each of them his true
reputation and add on the false, we shall say that you do not praise
justice, but the appearance of it; *367C* we shall think that you are only
exhorting us to keep injustice dark, and that you really agree with
Thrasymachus in thinking that justice is another's good and the interest
of the stronger, and that injustice is a man's own profit and interest,
though injurious to the weaker. Now as you have admitted that justice is
one of that highest class of goods which are desired indeed for their
results, but in a far greater *367D* degree for their own sakes--like
sight or hearing or knowledge or health, or any other real and natural and
not merely conventional good--I would ask you in your praise of justice to
regard one point only: I mean the essential good and evil which justice
and injustice work in the possessors of them. Let others praise justice
and censure injustice, magnifying the rewards and honours of the one and
abusing the other; that is a manner of arguing which, coming from them,
I am ready to tolerate, but from you who have spent your whole life in the
consideration of this question, unless I hear *367E* the contrary from
your own lips, I expect something better. And therefore, I say, not only