I Socrates narrates in the first person, as in the Charmides and Lysis ; see Introduction p. vii, Hirzel, Der Dialog , i. p. 84. Demetrius, On Style , 205, cites this sentence as an example of trimeter members. Editors give references for the anecdote that it was found in Plato’s tablets with many variations. For Plato’s description of such painstaking Cf. Phaedrus 278 D. Cicero De sen. . 5. 13 scribens est mortuus. went down yesterday to the Peiraeus Cf. 439 E; about a five-mile walk. with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to pay my devotions Plato and Xenophon represent Socrates as worshipping the gods, νόμῳ πόλεως . Athanasius, Contra gentes , 9, censures Plato for thus adoring an Artemis made with hands, and the fathers and medieval writers frequently cite the passage for Plato’s regrettable concessions to polytheism— persuasio civilis as Minucius Felix styles it. Cf. Eusebius Praep. Evang . xiii. 13. 66. to the Goddess, Presumably Bendis (354 A), though, as the scholiast observes, Athena is ἡ θεός for an Athenian. For foreign cults at the Peiraeus see Holm, History of Greece , iii. p. 189. and also because I wished to see how they would conduct the festival since this was its inauguration. See Introduction. I thought the procession of the citizens very fine, but it was no better than the show, made by the marching of the Thracian contingent. 
 
 After we had said our prayers and seen the spectacle we were starting for town when Polemarchus, the son of Cephalus, caught sight of us from a distance as we were hastening homeward Headed homeward is more exact and perhaps better. and ordered his boy A Greek gentleman would always be so attended. Cf. Charmides 155 A, Meno 82 B, Protagoras 310 C, Demosthenes xlvii. 36. run and bid us to wait The bounder in Theophrastus, Char . xi. (xvii.), if he sees persons in a hurry will ask them to wait. for him, and the boy caught hold Charmides 153 B, Parmenides 126 A, 449 B. of my himation from behind and said, Polemarchus wants you to wait. And I turned around and asked where his master Ipse, Cf. Protagoras 314 D; ipse dixit; Now you are not ipse, for I am he. —Shakes. was. There he is, he said, behind you, coming this way. Wait for him. So we will, said Glaucon, and shortly after Polemarchus came up and Adeimantus, the brother of Glaucon, and Niceratus, the son of Nicias, and a few others apparently from the procession. Whereupon Polemarchus said, Socrates, you appear to have turned your faces townward and to be going to leave us. Not a bad guess, said I. But you see how many we are? he said. Surely. You must either then prove yourselves the better men Cf. the playful threat in Philebus 16 A, Phaedrus 236 C, Horace, Satire i. 4. 142. or stay here. Why, is there not left, said I, the alternative of our persuading For the characteristic Socratic contrast between force and persuasion cf. 411 D, and the anecdote in Diogenes Laertius vii. 24. you that you ought to let us go? But could you persuade us, said he, if we refused to listen? Nohow, said Glaucon. Well, we won’t listen, and you might as well make up your minds to it. Do you mean to say, interposed Adeimantus, that you haven’t heard that there is to be a torchlight race See Sterrett in AJP xxii. p. 393. The torch was passed down the lines which competed as wholes. Cf. Swinburne, Hymn of Man : Where the runners outwear each other, but running with lampless hands, No man takes light from his brother, till blind at the goal he stands. For the metaphorical transmission of the torch of life cf. Plato, Laws , 776 B, Lucretius ii. 79. this evening on horseback in honor of the Goddess? On horseback? said I. That is a new idea. Will they carry torches and pass them along to one another as they race with the horses, or how do you mean? That’s the way of it, said Polemarchus, and, besides, there is to be a night festival which will be worth seeing. For after dinner we will get up Rise from the table. This is forgotten. and go out and see the sights and meet a lot of the lads there and have good talk. So stay and do as we ask. In American, the colloquial Greek means be a sport. It looks as if we should have to stay, said Glaucon. Well, said I, if it so be, so be it. 
 So we went with them to Polemarchus’s house, and there we found Lysias and Euthydemus, the brothers of Polemarchus, yes, and The particles single out Thrasymachus for ironical emphasis. Proclus in Tim. 3 E preserves them in his enumeration of the dramatis personae. Thrasymachus, too, of Chalcedon, and Charmantides of the deme of Paeania, and Kleitophon the son of Aristonymus. And the father of Polemarchus, Cephalus, was also at home. 
 And I thought him much aged, for it was a long time since I had seen him. He was sitting on a sort of couch with cushions and he had a chaplet A companion picture to the fair vision of the youthful Lysis ( Lysis , 207 A). The wreath was worn at the sacrifice. on his head, for he had just finished sacrificing in the court. So we went and sat down beside him, for there were seats there disposed in a circle. For the seats compare Protagoras 317 D-E, Cicero Laelius 1. 2 in hemicyclio sedentem. As soon as he saw me Cephalus greeted me and said, You are not a very frequent The language recalls the Homeric formula, πάρος γε μὲν οὔτι θαμίζεις , Iliad xviii. 386, Odyssey v. 88, Jebb on O.C. 672. Cephalus’ friendly urgency to Socrates is in the tone of Laches 181 C. visitor, Socrates. You don’t often come down to the Peiraeus to see us. That is not right. For if I were still able to make the journey up to town easily there would be no need of your resorting hither, but we would go to visit you. But as it is you should not space too widely your visits here. For I would have you know that, for my part, as the satisfactions of the body decay, Plato characteristically contrasts the transitory pleasures of the body with the enduring joys of the mind. Phaedrus 258 E. Anaximenes imitates and expands the passage, Stobaeus, 117. 5. Pleasures are not strictly speaking of the body, but in or relating to it. See my Unity of Plato’s Thought , p. 45. in the same measure my desire for the pleasures of good talk and my delight in them increase. Don’t refuse then, but be yourself a companion to these lads and make our house your resort and regard us as your very good friends and intimates. Why, yes, Cephalus, said I, and I enjoy talking with the very aged. For to my thinking we have to learn of them as it were from wayfarers Much of this passage, including the comparison of old men to travellers, is copied by Cicero, De sen . 3 ff. who have preceded us on a road on which we too, it may be, must some time fare—what Cf. Horace, Epistles i. 11 Quid tibi visa Chios ? The vague neuter and the slight anacoluthon give a colloquial turn to the sentence. it is like—is it rough Hesiod, Works and Days 290, says that the path of virtue is rough at first and then grows easy. and hard going or easy and pleasant to travel. And so now I would fain learn of you what you think of this thing, now that your time has come to it, the thing that the poets call the threshold This, whatever its precise meaning, was a familiar phrase like our One foot in the grave. Cf. Leaf on Iliad xxii. 60, xxiv 487; Hyperides (i. xx. 13) employs it without apology in prose. of old age. Is it a hard part of life to bear or what report have you to make of it? Yes, indeed, Socrates, he said, I will tell you my own feeling about it. For it often happens that some of us elders of about the same age come together and verify Lit. preserving . For the reverse Cf. Symposium 174 B. Cicero renders, similes cum similibus veteri proverbio facile congregantur. The proverb is ἧλιξ ἥλικα τέρπει Phaedrus 240 C, or, as in Lysis 214 A, Protagoras 337 D, Symposium 195 B, the reference may be to Homer’s ὡς αἰεὶ τὸν ὁμοῖον ἄγει θεὸς ὡς τὸν ὁμοῖον , Odyssey xvii. 218. Milton, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce , x., The ancient proverb in Homer . . . entitles this work of leading each like person to his like, peculiarly to God, himself. the old saw of like to like. At these reunions most of us make lament, longing for the lost joys of youth and recalling to mind the pleasures of wine, women, and feasts, and other things thereto appertaining, and they repine in the belief that the greatest things have been taken from them and that then they lived well and now it is no life at all. The sentiment of the sensualist from Mimnermus to Byron; cf. also Simonides fr. 71, Sophocles Antigone 1165, Antiphanes, in Stobaeus 63. 12. For the application to old age Cf. Anth. Pal . ix. 127, Horace Epistles ii. 2. 55, and the ψόγος γήρως in Stobaeus, 116. And some of them complain of the indignities that friends and kinsmen put upon old age and thereto recite a doleful litany For such a litany cf. Sophocles O. C. 1235. of all the miseries for which they blame old age. But in my opinion, Socrates, they do not put the blame on the real cause. This suggests Aristotle’s fallacy of the false cause, Soph. El. 167 b 21. Cf. Philebus 28 A and Isocrates xv. 230. For if it were the cause I too should have had the same experience so far as old age is concerned, and so would all others who have come to this time of life. But in fact I have ere now met with others who do not feel in this way, and in particular I remember hearing Sophocles the poet greeted by a fellow who asked, How about your service of Aphrodite, Sophocles—is your natural force still unabated? And he replied, Hush, man, most gladly have I escaped this thing you talk of, as if I had run away from a raging and savage beast of a master. Allusions to the passage are frequent. Theon, Progymn . ii. 66 (Spengel), turns to the anecdote in an edifying χρεία . Ammianus Marcellinus xxv. 4. 2 tells us that the chastity of the emperor Julian drew its inspiration hence. Schopenhauer often dwelt on the thought, cf. Cicero Cato M. 14, Plutarch, De cupid. divit. 5, An seni p. 788, Athen. xii. p. 510, Philostr. Vit. Apoll . 1. 13. I thought it a good answer then and now I think so still more. For in very truth there comes to old age a great tranquillity in such matters and a blessed release. When the fierce tensions Cf. Phaedo 86 C, Philebus 47 A, Laws 645 B, 644 E σπῶσι . of the passions and desires relax, then is the word of Sophocles approved, and we are rid of many and mad Cf. Euripides I. A. 547 μαινομένων οἴστρων . masters. But indeed in respect of these complaints and in the matter of our relations with kinsmen and friends there is just one cause, Socrates—not old age, but the character of the man. For if men are temperate and cheerful For Sophocles as εὔκολος cf. Aristophanes Frogs 82, and on this quality, Laws 791 C. even old age is only moderately burdensome. But if the reverse, old age, Socrates, and youth are hard for such dispositions. 
 And I was filled with admiration Cephalus prefigures the old age of the righteous, infra 612-613. There is then no parody of Antisthenes as Joel fancies. for the man by these words, and desirous of hearing more I tried to draw him out and said, I fancy, Cephalus, that most people, when they hear you talk in this way, are not convinced but think that you bear old age lightly not because of your character but because of your wealth. For the rich, they say, have many consolations. Cf. Teles. (Hense, pp.9-10), Philemon in Plutarch p. 358, Musonius, Stobaeus 117. 8. A fragment of Anaxandrides in Stobaeus Florileg . 68. 1 is almost a paraphrase of this passage. Thucydides ii. 44 says that honour, not money, is the consolation of old age. You are right, he said. They don’t accept my view and there is something in their objection, though not so much as they suppose. But the retort of Themistocles comes in pat here, who, when a man from the little island of Seriphus Lit. the Seriphean of the anecdote, which, however, Herodotus (viii. 125) tells of another. Cicero Cato M. 8 Seriphio cuidam. grew abusive and told him that he owed his fame not to himself but to the city from which he came, replied that neither would he himself ever have made a name if he had been born in Seriphus nor the other if he had been an Athenian. And the same principle applies excellently to those who not being rich take old age hard; for neither would the reasonable man find it altogether easy to endure old age conjoined with poverty, nor would the unreasonable man by the attainment of riches ever attain to self-contentment and a cheerful temper. May I ask, Cephalus, said I, whether you inherited most of your possessions or acquired them yourself? Acquired, eh? he said. As a moneymaker, I hold a place somewhere halfway between my grandfather and my father. For my grandfather and namesake Cephalus, Lysanias, Cephalus, and so frequently. inherited about as much property as I now possess and multiplied it many times, my father Lysanias reduced it below the present amount, and I am content if I shall leave the estate to these boys not less but by some slight measure more than my inheritance. The reason I asked, I said, is that you appear to me not to be over-fond of money. And that is generally the case with those who have not earned it themselves. Aristotle makes a similar observation, Eth. Nic. iv. 1.20, Rhet. i. 11. 26, ii. 16. 4. For nouveaux riches, γενναῖοι ἐκ βαλλαντίου , see Starkie on Aristophanes Wasps , 1309. But those who have themselves acquired it have a double reason in comparison with other men for loving it. For just as poets feel complacency about their own poems and fathers about their own sons, Cf. Theaetetus 160 E, Symposium 209 C, Phaedrus 274 E, with Epaminondas’ saying, that Leuctra and Mantineia were his children. so men who have made money take this money seriously as their own creation and they also value it for its uses as other people do. So they are hard to talk to since they are unwilling to commend anything except wealth. 
 You are right, he replied. I assuredly am, said I. But tell me further this. What do you regard as the greatest benefit you have enjoyed from the possession of property? Something, he said, which I might not easily bring many to believe if I told them. Cf. Walter Scott’s Be a good man, my dear; nothing else will give you any comfort, when you come to lie here. Perhaps the earliest positive expression of faith in future life and judgement for sin is Pindar’s Second Olympian . See Rohde’s Psyche and Adam in Cambridge Praelections . The Epicureans and sometimes the Stoics unfairly reprobated Plato’s appeal here to this motive, which he disregards in his main argument and returns to only in the tenth book. Cf. 363 C-D, 386 B, 613 E ff., also 496 E, 498 D, 608 D. For let me tell you, Socrates, he said, that when a man begins to realize that he is going to die, he is filled with apprehensions and concern about matters that before did not occur to him. The tales that are told of the world below and how the men who have done wrong here must pay the penalty there, Cf. 498 C and Pindar Ol. ii. 64. But 500 D, there is the realm of Platonic ideas. though he may have laughed them down Cf. Gorgias 523 A, 527 A. hitherto, then begin to torture his soul with the doubt that there may be some truth in them. And apart from that the man himself The conclusion logically expected, is more credulous, shifts to the alternative preferred by Plato. ὥσπερ marks the figurative sense of nearer . καθορᾷ is not takes a more careful view of it (Goodwin) but wins a glimpse, catches sight of those obscure things, as a sailor descries land. So often in Plato. Cf. Epin . 985 C. Sir Thomas Browne, Christ. Morals , iii. 22 And having been long tossed in the Ocean of the world, he will by that time feel the draught of another. Waller on the Divine Poems— The Soul's Dark Cottage, batter'd and decay'd, Lets in new light through chinks that time has made . . . Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view That stand upon the threshold of the new. Rabelais, iii. 21 Aussi les anges, les heroes, les bons demons (selon la doctrine des Platonicques) voyans les humains prochains de mort comme deport très sceur et salutaire—les saluent les consolent, parlent avec eux et ja commencement leur communicquer art de divination. either from the weakness of old age or possibly as being now nearer to the things beyond has a somewhat clearer view of them. Be that as it may, he is filled with doubt, surmises, and alarms and begins to reckon up and consider whether he has ever wronged anyone. Now he to whom the ledger of his life shows an account of many evil deeds starts up Polyb. v. 52. 13, and for the thought Iamblichus, Protrepticus 127 A, Job iv. 13-14. Tennyson, Vastness ix.— Pain, that has crawl’d from the corpse of Pleasure, a worm which writhes all day, and at night Stirs up again in the heart of the sleeper, and stings him back to the curse of the light. even from his dreams like children again and again in affright and his days are haunted by anticipations of worse to come. But on him who is conscious of no wrong that he has done a sweet hope The better hope of the initiated, often mentioned in connection with the mysteries, blends with the better hope of the righteous (Isocrates i. 39, iv. 20, viii. 34, Schmidt, Ethik der Griechen , ii. 73), and in the conclusion of the Pindar passage almost becomes the hope against which Greek moralists warn us. Cf. Pindar Nem . xi. in fine , Sophocles Antigone 615, Thuc. 2.62 , Thuc. 3.45 . ever attends and a goodly to be nurse of his old age, as Pindar Pindar, Fragment 214, L.C.L. Edition. too says. For a beautiful saying it is, Socrates, of the poet that when a man lives out his days in justice and piety sweet companion with him, to cheer his heart and nurse his old age, accompanies Hope, who chiefly rules the changeful mind of mortals. Pindar Frag. 214, Loeb That is a fine saying and an admirable. It is for this, then, that I affirm that the possession of wealth is of most value not it may be to every man but to the good man. Not to cheat any man even unintentionally or play him false, not remaining in debt to a god Cf. the famous, We owe a cock to Aesculapius, Phaedo 118 A. Cf. further, Browne, Christian Morals , i. 26 Well content if they be but rich enough to be honest, and to give every man his due. for some sacrifice or to a man for money, so to depart in fear to that other world—to this result the possession of property contributes not a little. It has also many other uses. But, setting one thing against another, I would lay it down, Socrates, that for a man of sense this is the chief service of wealth. An admirable sentiment, Cephalus, said I. But speaking of this very thing, justice, are we to affirm thus without qualification It is Platonic Doctrine that no act is per se good or bad. Plat. Sym. 181a . This opens the door to casuistry, Xen. Mem. 4.2.12 , Cic. De offic. 3.25 . For the argument cf. Xen. Mem. 4.2.18 , Cic. De offic. 3.25 . For the proverb, a knife to a child or a madman cf. Athen. 5.52 , Iambl. Protrep. 18k, Jebb’s Bentley , p. 69, where Jebb misses Bentley’s allusion to it. that it is truth-telling and paying back what one has received from anyone, or may these very actions sometimes be just and sometimes unjust? I mean, for example, as everyone I presume would admit, if one took over weapons from a friend who was in his right mind and then the lender should go mad and demand them back, that we ought not to return them in that case and that he who did so return them would not be acting justly—nor yet would he who chose to speak nothing but the truth to one who was in that state. You are right, he replied. Then this is not the definition of justice: to tell the truth and return what one has received. Nay, but it is, Socrates, said Polemarchus breaking in, if indeed we are to put any faith in Simonides. Very well, said Cephalus, indeed I make over the whole argument The argument, or one side of it, is often treated as a thesis which may be thus transferred. Cf. Philebus 12 A, Charmides 162 E, Protagoras 331 A. to you. For it is time for me to attend the sacrifices. Well, said I, is not Polemarchus the heir of everything that is yours? Certainly, said he with a laugh, and at the same time went out to the sacred rites. Cicero Ad Att . iv. 16 Credo Platonem vix putasse satis consonum fore, si hominem id aetatis in tam longo sermone diutius retinuisset, Bagehot, Hartley Coleridge , It (metaphysical debate) attracts the scorn of middle-aged men, who depart πρὸς τὰ ἱερά , etc. 
 Tell me, then, you the inheritor of the argument, what it is that you affirm that Simonides says and rightly says about justice. That it is just, he replied, to render to each his due. The defintion is not found in the fragments of Simonides. Cf. 433 E, and the Roman Jurists’ Iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas suum cuique tribuens. For the various meanings of the Greek word cf. my Articles Righteousness and Theognis in Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics . In saying this I think he speaks well.