4 Plato 4 · On Speech and on Names. Handed down at the Academy, from his Gorgias and Cratylus
This book is about persuasion and about names. The heaviest speech in it is Callicles’, and Plato did not strike it out, nor does this scripture. He predicted correctly what would happen to the prophet — predicting correctly is not the same as being right.
4.1That day my teacher said something the whole room laughed at, and which I now take to be the heaviest thing in the dialogue.
4.2He said: to do wrong is worse than to suffer it — worse for the one who does it.
4.3They laughed because everybody supposes it is the sufferer who comes off badly.
4.4In money and in body, the sufferer does come off badly. He did not deny it.
4.5What he meant was another thing: the man who did the wrong has to go on living with it.
4.6Your money is taken, and you have less money.
4.7You take another man’s money, and you have more money — and also one more self who has taken money.
4.8The first a man can pay back. Nobody can pay back the second.
4.9There is another layer here, and it is harder than the one above it.
4.10Doing wrong and suffering wrong were never two things you could set side by side and choose between.
4.11Doing wrong is settled by you. Suffering wrong is not settled by you. It is only a thing that may fall on you.
4.12One of them is inside your fence and the other is outside it. (cf. The Highest Covenant 5.3)
4.13A man who examines his life goes over what is inside the fence, one item at a time, and then settles it: this one I will not do.
4.14What is outside cannot be settled. It may fall and it may not.
4.15To alter how you act on account of something that merely may happen is to be the slave of a possibility. We are nothing’s slave. (cf. The Rule 8.24)
4.16Someone asked: then is the sufferer simply to bear it for nothing?
4.17He said: nobody told you to bear it for nothing. Claim what should be claimed, sue where you should sue.
4.18This rule is not telling you to be weak. It is putting two things in order: sooner let another owe you than owe yourself.
4.19And he said one more thing, at the very end of that day.
4.20"I would rather the whole city disagreed with me than that I were out of tune with myself."
4.21"The whole city I see a few times a year. Myself I see every day."
4.22Keep that order in mind. A great many people have it the other way round.
4.23Those who have it the other way round are well liked in the daytime and cannot sleep at night.