The Complete Works of Plato

intoxicated; considering eternal drunkenness to be the finest reward of virtue. And others extend to these even longer-lasting rewards from the gods. For they say that children’s children and a lineage are left behind for the pious and those who keep their oaths. These and other such things they heap as praise upon justice; but the impious and unjust, on the other hand, they bury in a certain mire in Hades, and force them to carry water in a sieve. And while they are still alive, they bring them into evil reputations, the very punishments that Glaucon described for the just who are thought to be unjust, these they speak of for the unjust; but they have nothing else. Such, then, is the praise and blame for each. But besides these, Socrates, consider another kind of discourse regarding justice and injustice, spoken both privately and by poets. For all with one mouth sing that temperance and justice are noble, yet difficult and laborious; while licentiousness and injustice are pleasant and easy to acquire, and only shameful by reputation and law. They say that unjust dealings are for the most part more profitable than just ones; and they are willing to deem the wicked who are wealthy and possess other powers happy, and to honor them, both publicly and privately, while they dishonor and overlook those who are in any way weak or poor, even while acknowledging that they are better than the others. Most wondrous of all are the things said about the gods and virtue: that even the gods grant misfortune and an evil life to many good men, and the opposite lot to the opposite sort. Mendicant priests and seers go to the doors of the rich and persuade them that they possess a power granted by the gods, through sacrifices and incantations, to heal—with pleasures and feasts—if any injustice has been committed by them or their ancestors; and if they wish to harm some enemy, they can, with small expense, harm a just man just as easily as an unjust one with certain spells and bindings, persuading the gods, as they say, to serve them. And for all these arguments they bring forward the poets as witnesses. Some, regarding the ease of vice, provide:

Vice one may gather easily and in abundance;
The path is smooth, and it dwells very near.
But before virtue, the gods have placed sweat,

and a long and steep road. Others cite Homer as a witness to the gods being moved by men, because he too said: "Even the gods themselves are turnable; and them, men turn aside with sacrifices and gentle vows, with libations and burnt fat, beseeching them when someone has transgressed and erred."

They provide a mass of books by Musaeus and Orpheus, the offspring of the Moon and the Muses, as they say, according to which they perform their rites, persuading not only individuals but cities that there are releases and purifications from injustices through sacrifices and pleasurable amusements, both while we are still living and after we have died. These they call initiations, which deliver us from the evils of the other world; but for those who do not sacrifice, terrible things await. All these things, my dear Socrates, being said in such a manner and in such quantity about virtue and vice, and how gods and men hold them in regard, what do we suppose they do to the souls of the young who are well-endowed and capable, as if flying over all that is said, to infer from it what kind of person one should be and what path to pursue in order to live one’s life as best as possible? For one might say to oneself, in accordance with Pindar, by weighing the probabilities: "Shall I, by justice, scale the high wall, or by crooked deceits, and thus walled around, pass my life?" For regarding the things said—if I am just, but do not appear so, they say it is of no use to me, but brings only clear labors and penalties; but for the unjust man, who has acquired the reputation of justice, a divine life is promised. Since, therefore, as the wise show me, "appearing" violently forces the truth and is the master of happiness, I must turn entirely to this. I must mark out around myself a facade and outline of virtue as a shadow-painting, and drag the fox of the most wise Archilochus along behind.