Socrates : That’s what it is, Hippias, to be a truly wise and PERFECT MAN ! For you are both in your private capacity able to earn much money from the young (281c) and to confer upon them still greater benefits than you receive, and in public affairs you are able to benefit your own state, as a man must who is to be not despised but held in high repute among the many. And yet, Hippias, what in the world is the reason why those men of old whose names are called great in respect to wisdom — Pittacus, and Bias, and the Milesian Thales with his followers and also the later ones, down to Anaxagoras, are all, (281d) or most of them, found to refrain from affairs of state ? GREATER HIPPIAS
And by reason of all these affections, the soul, when encased in a mortal body, now, as in the beginning, is at first without intelligence ; but when the flood of growth and nutriment abates, and the courses of the soul, calming down, go their own way and become steadier as time goes on, then the several circles return to their natural form, and their revolutions are corrected, and they call the same and the other by their right names, and make the possessor of them to become a rational being. And if these combine in him with any true nurture or education, he attains the fulness and health of the PERFECT MAN, and escapes the worst disease of all ; but if he neglects education he walks lame to the end of his life, and returns imperfect and good for nothing to the world below. This, however, is a later stage ; at present we must treat more exactly the subject before us, which involves a preliminary enquiry into the generation of the body and its members, and as to how the soul was created — for what reason and by what providence of the gods ; and holding fast to probability, we must pursue our way. TIMAEUS
Ath. Pleasure and pain I maintain to be the first perceptions of children, and I say that they are the forms under which virtue and vice are originally present to them. As to wisdom and true and fixed opinions, happy is the man who acquires them, even when declining in years ; and we may say that he who possesses them, and the blessings which are contained in them, is a PERFECT MAN. Now I mean by education that training which is given by suitable habits to the first instincts of virtue in children ; — when pleasure, and friendship, and pain, and hatred, are rightly implanted in souls not yet capable of understanding the nature of them, and who find them, after they have attained reason, to be in harmony with her. This harmony of the soul, taken as a whole, is virtue ; but the particular training in respect of pleasure and pain, which leads you always to hate what you ought to hate, and love what you ought to love from the beginning of life to the end, may be separated off ; and, in my view, will be rightly called education. LAWS BOOK II