4 Plato 2 · On Speech and on Names. Handed down at the Academy, from his Gorgias and Cratylus
From the Gorgias and the Cratylus. The first is on persuasion: it separates flattery from healing, and the cook and the physician come from there. Callicles argues in it that the strong should take what they can take, and argues it with a ferocity rare in any age; Plato did not strike him out. The second asks whether names are natural or agreed. For the man, see the Gospel of Plato. What Callicles says weighs heaviest, and the Order does not strike it out either — he foretold correctly what becomes of the one who tells the truth. Foretelling correctly is not the same as being right.
2.1Polus said: this makes no sense. The skilled speaker has the most power in the city.
2.2He said: he wants a man dead, and the man dies; he wants a house seized, and the house is gone.
2.3My teacher said: those things they can do.
2.4But let me ask: does it count as what they want?
2.5Polus said: how not? They do exactly what they mean to do.
2.6My teacher said: when a man takes medicine, is medicine the thing he wants?
2.7It is not. He wants to get well. The medicine is the road he thinks leads there.
2.8If the medicine in fact makes him worse, then what he swallowed was not the thing he wanted.
2.9It is the same with everything men do. A man does what he takes to be good. What he wants is the good.
2.10If he is wrong about what is good, then everything he brings off carries him further from what he wanted.
2.11So he has force, and he has no power.
2.12Force is getting a thing done. Power is getting the thing you want done.
2.13The further a man is from knowing what is good, the further his strength carries him away.
2.14Polus would not have it. He said: so you are telling me the tyrant is the most pitiable man alive?
2.15My teacher said: yes. And he does not know it, which makes him more pitiable still.
2.16I write this passage down not because it is agreeable but because it is not.
2.17Agreeable reasoning fades overnight. I have kept this one for forty years.