previous next

[138a] Well now, when one is a man, and does not know the good and bad men, one surely cannot know whether one is good or wicked oneself, since one is a man also oneself?

He granted this.

And is “not knowing oneself” being temperate,1 or not being temperate?

Not being temperate.

So “knowing oneself” is being temperate?

I agree, he said.

So this is the message, it seems, of the Delphic inscription—that one is to practise temperance and justice.

It seems so.

And it is by this same art that we know also how to punish rightly?

Yes.

Then that whereby we know how to punish rightly


1 Cf. Charmides(Introduction and 164)for the connection in thought and language between temperance and self-knowledge.

Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 8 translated by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1955.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1903)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: