About this text
A quarrel about rhetoric that turns into a quarrel about how to live. Socrates argues that persuasion without knowledge is flattery, that it is worse to do wrong than to suffer it, and that a man who escapes punishment for injustice is the unluckiest of all. Callicles tells him plainly that philosophy is a game for boys.
More from this thinker
Apology
Plato's account of Socrates' defense at his trial. Not an apology in the modern sense but a defiant argument that the examined life is the only life worth living.
Crito
Socrates sits in prison, awaiting execution. His old friend Crito arrives before dawn to urge him to escape. Socrates refuses, arguing that one must never do wrong, even in return for wrong done to oneself.
Euthyphro
Socrates meets a confident young priest on the courthouse steps and asks him what holiness is. Euthyphro offers five answers and loses each one, and the dialogue ends without a definition — leaving the question that has followed it ever since: is a thing good because the gods love it, or do they love it because it is good?
Protagoras
Socrates goes before dawn to meet the most famous teacher in Greece and asks whether virtue can be taught. Protagoras says it can and tells a myth to prove it; Socrates says it cannot, then argues himself into the opposite position. Both men end holding the view they came to refute.