Gorgias

Pastry baking has put on the mask of medicine, and pretends to know the foods that are best for the body, so that if a pastry baker and a doctor had to compete in front of children, or in front of men just as foolish as children, to determine which of the two, the doctor or the pastry baker, had expert knowledge of good food and bad, the doctor would die of starvation. I call this flattery, and I say that such a thing is shameful, Polus—it’s you I’m saying this to—because it guesses at what’s pleasant with no consideration for what’s best. And I say that it isn’t a craft, but a knack, because it has no account of the nature of whatever things it applies by which it applies them, so that it’s unable to state the cause of each thing. And I refuse to call anything that lacks such an account a craft.

SOCRATES: I take it that these people have managed to accomplish pretty much the same thing as a person who has contracted very serious illnesses, but, by avoiding treatment manages to avoid paying what’s due to the doctors for his bodily faults, fearing, as would a child, cauterization or surgery because they’re painful. Don’t you think so, too?

POLUS: Yes, I do.

SOCRATES: It’s because he evidently doesn’t know what health and bodily excellence are like. For on the basis of what we’re now agreed on, it looks as though those who avoid paying what is due also do the same sort of thing, Polus. They focus on its painfulness, but are blind to its benefit and are ignorant of how much more miserable it is to live with an unhealthy soul than with an unhealthy body, a soul that’s rotten with injustice and impiety.

SOCRATES: If these things are true then, Polus, what is the great use of oratory? For on the basis of what we’re agreed on now, what a man should guard himself against most of all is doing what’s unjust, knowing that he will have trouble enough if he does. Isn’t that so?

POLUS: Yes, that’s right.

SOCRATES: And if he or anyone else he cares about acts unjustly, he should voluntarily go to the place where he’ll pay his due as soon as possible; he should go to the judge as though he were going to a doctor, anxious that the disease of injustice shouldn’t be protracted and cause his soul to fester incurably.

As it is, you see that there are three of you, the wisest of the Greeks of today—you, Polus, and Gorgias—and you’re not able to prove that there’s any other life one should live than the one which will clearly turn out to be advantageous in that world, too. So, listen to me and follow me to where I am, and when you’ve come here you’ll be happy both during life and at its end, as the account indicates. Let someone despise you as a fool and throw dirt on you, if he likes. And, yes, by Zeus, confidently let him deal you that demeaning blow. Nothing terrible will happen to you if you really are an admirable and good man, one who practices excellence.