Platos Gorgias
CALLICLES: Very likely.
SOCRATES: Why, surely you would say that he was a bad manager of asses or horses or oxen, who had received them SOCRATES: Nay, my friend, likely is not the word; for if originally neither kicking nor butting nor biting him, and he was a good citizen, the inference is certain.
implanted in them all these savage tricks? Would he not be a bad manager of any animals who received them gentle, CALLICLES: And what difference does that make?
and made them fiercer than they were when he received them? What do you say?
SOCRATES: None; only I should like further to know whether the Athenians are supposed to have been made CALLICLES: I will do you the favour of saying yes.
better by Pericles, or, on the contrary, to have been corrupted by him; for I hear that he was the first who gave the SOCRATES: And will you also do me the favour of saying people pay, and made them idle and cowardly, and en-whether man is an animal?
couraged them in the love of talk and money.
CALLICLES: Certainly he is.
CALLICLES: You heard that, Socrates, from the laconising set who bruise their ears.
SOCRATES: And was not Pericles a shepherd of men?
SOCRATES: But what I am going to tell you now is not CALLICLES: Yes.
mere hearsay, but well known both to you and me: that at first, Pericles was glorious and his character unimpeached SOCRATES: And if he was a good political shepherd, ought by any verdict of the Atheniansthis was during the time not the animals who were his subjects, as we were just now ac-when they were not so goodyet afterwards, when they had knowledging, to have become more just, and not more unjust?
been made good and gentle by him, at the very end of his life they convicted him of theft, and almost put him to death, CALLICLES: Quite true.
clearly under the notion that he was a malefactor.
SOCRATES: And are not just men gentle, as Homer says?
CALLICLES: Well, but how does that prove Pericles badness?
or are you of another mind?