Book 3
405
And when licentiousness and disease multiply in a city, are not many courts of law and dispensaries opened, and the arts of chicaneδικανική: more contemptuous than δικαστική. and medicine give themselves airs when even free men in great numbers take them very seriously? How can they help it? he said. Will you be able to find a surer proof of an evil and shameful state of education in a city than the necessity of first-rate physicians and judges, not only for the base and mechanical, but for those who claim to have been bred in the fashion of free men? Do you not think it disgraceful and a notable mark of bad breeding to have to make use of a justice imported from others, who thus become your masters and judges, from lack of such qualities in yourselfI have given the sense. The contruction is debated accordingly as we read ἀπορία or ἀπορίᾳ. Cf. Phaedrus 239 D, of the use of cosmetics, χήτει οἰκείων. The καί with ἀπορίᾳ is awkward or expresses the carelessness of conversation.? The most shameful thing in the world. Is it? said I, or is this still more shamefulPlato likes to emphasize by pointing to a lower depth or a higher height beyond the superlative.—when a man only wears out the better part of his days in the courts of law as defendant or accuser, but from the lack of all true sense of valuesThere is no exact English equivalent for ἀπειροκαλία, the insensitiveness to the καλόν of the banausic, the nouveau riche and the Philistine. is led to plume himself on this very thing, as being a smart fellow to put over an unjust act and cunningly to try every dodge and practice,The phrasing of this passage recalls passages of Aristophanes’ Clouds, and the description of the pettifogging lawyer and politician in the Theaetetus 172 E. Cf. 519, also Euthydemus 302 B, and Porphyry, De abstinentia, i. 34. The metaphors are partly from wrestling. every evasion, and wriggleCf. Blaydes on Aristophanes Knights 263. out of every hold in defeating justice, and that too for trifles and worthless things, because he does not know how much nobler and better it is to arrange his life so as to have no needCf. Gorgias 507 D, Thucydides iii. 82, Isocrates Antidosis 238, Antiphanes, fr. 288 Kock ὁ μηδὲν ἀδικῶν οὐδενὸς δεῖται νόμου. of a nodding juryman? That is, said he, still more shameful than the other. And to require medicine, said I, not merely for wounds or the incidence of some seasonal maladies, but, because of sloth and such a regimen as we described, to fill one’s body up with winds and humors like a marsh and compel the ingenious sons of Aesculapius to invent for diseases such names as fluxes and flatulences—don’t you think that disgraceful?Plato ridicules the unsavory metaphors required to describe the effects of auto-intoxication. There is a similar bit of somewhat heavier satire in Spencer’s Social Statics, 1868, p. 32: Carbuncled noses, cadaverous faces, foetid breaths, and plethoric bodies meet us at every turn; and our condolences are prepetually asked for headaches, flatulences, nightmare, heartburn, and endless other dyspeptic symptoms. Those surely are, he said, new-fangled and monstrous strange names of diseases. There was nothing of the kind, I fancy, said I, in the days of Aesculapius. I infer this from the fact that at Troy his sons did not find fault with the damsel who gave to the wounded EurypylusPlato is probably quoting from memory. In our text, Iliad xi. 624, Hecamede gives the draught to Machaon and Nestor as the Ion (538 B) correctly states. to drink a posset of Pramnian wine plentifully sprinkled with barley and gratings of cheese, inflammatory ingredients of a surety, nor did they censure Patroclus, who was in charge of the case.
