Book 10
890
Ath. The first statement, my dear sir, which these people make about the gods is that they exist by art and not by nature,—by certain legal conventionsA view ascribed to Critias. which differ from place to place, according as each tribe agreed when forming their laws. They assert, moreover, that there is one class of things beautiful by nature, and another class beautiful by conventionCp. Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1094 b 14 ff.; while as to things just, they do not exist at all by nature, but men are constantly in dispute about them and continually altering them, and whatever alteration they make at any time is at that time authoritative, though it owes its existence to art and the laws, and not in any way to nature. All these, my friends, are views which young people imbibe from men of science, both prose-writers and poets, who maintain that the height of justice is to succeed by force; whence it comes that the young people are afflicted with a plague of impiety, as though the gods were not such as the law commands us to conceive them; and, because of this, factions also arise, when these teachers attract them towards the life that is right according to nature, which consists in being master over the rest in reality, instead of being a slave to others according to legal convention.This antithesis between Nature (φύσις) and Convention (νόμος) was a familiar one in ethical and political discussion from the time of the Sophists. The supremacy of Nature, as an ethical principle, was maintained (it is said) by Hippias and Prodicus; that of Convention, by Protagoras and Gorgias: Plato goes behind both to the higher principle of Reason (νοῦς), cp. Introduction. p. xiv.
890
Clin. What a horrible statement you have described, Stranger! And what widespread corruption of the young in private families as well as publicly in the States!
