228a
228b
Soc.
And we admitted a little while ago that gain is the opposite of loss, which is an evil.Fr.
I agree.Soc.
And that, being the opposite of an evil, it is good?Fr.
That was our admission.Soc.
So you see, you are attempting to deceive me, for you deliberately contradict what we agreed to just now.Fr.
No, on my honor, Socrates; on the contrary, it is you who are deceiving me, by twisting this way and that so perplexingly in your talk.Soc.
Hush, hush! Why, surely it would be wrong of me not to obey a good and wise person.Fr.
Who is that? And to what are you referring now?Soc.
I mean my and your fellow-citizen, Pisistratus’s son Hipparchus, of Philaidae, who was the eldest and wisest of Pisistratus’s sons, and who, among the many goodly proofs of wisdom that he showed, first brought the poems of Homer into this country of ours, and compelled the rhapsodes at the Panathenaea to recite them in relay, one man following on another, as 228c they still do now. He dispatched a fifty-oared galley for Anacreon of Teos , and brought him into our city. Simonides of Ceos he always had about him, prevailing on him by plenteous fees and gifts. All this he did from a wish to educate the citizens, in order that he might have subjects of the highest excellence; for he thought it not right to grudge wisdom to any, so noble and good was he. And when his people in the city had been educated and were admiring him for his wisdom, 228d he proceeded next, with the design of educating those of the countryside, to set up figures of Hermes for them along the roads in the midst of the city and every district town; and then, after selecting from his own wise lore, both learnt from others and discovered for himself, the things that he considered the wisest, he threw these into elegiac form and inscribed them on the figures as verses of his own and testimonies of his wisdom, so that in the first place 228e his people should not admire those wise Delphic legends of“Know thyself”
and
“Nothing overmuch”
, and the other sayings of the sort, but should rather regard as wise the utterances of Hipparchus; and that in the second place, through passing up and down and reading his words and acquiring a taste for his wisdom, they might resort hither from the country for the completion of their education.Hipparchus. Plato. Walter Rangeley Maitland Lamb (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1927.
Sponsored by Perseus Project, Tufts University.
Funding provided by The Annenberg CPB/Project.