Page:Plato (IA platocollins00colliala).pdf/98
"You see," I replied, "that here I am."
"The report was," said he, "that the fighting was very severe, and that several of our acquaintance had fallen."
"That was too nearly the truth," replied I.
"I suppose you were there?" said he.
"I was."
"Then sit down and tell us the whole story."—J.
So Socrates sits down between Chærephon and Critias, and answers their eager inquiries after absent friends. Then there enters a group of youths, laughing and talking noisily, and among them is Charmides, a cousin of Critias, tall and handsome, and (so say his friends) "as fair and good within as he is without." He comes and sits near Socrates, who professes to know a charm that will cure a headache of which he has been complaining. This charm is a talisman given to Socrates (as he tells Charmides) by Zamolxis, physician to the king of Thrace; but which he is only allowed to use on the condition of his never attempting to cure the body without first curing the soul, and then temperance in the one will produce health in the other. But the question is, "What is Temperance?" It is not always what Charmides understands by it, the quietness of a gentleman who is never flurried and never noisy; nor is it exactly modesty, though very like it; nor is it (as Critias defines it) "doing one's own business," even though our work as men be nobly and usefully done. Nor, again, is it true that the golden characters on the gates of Delphi, "Know thyself," simply meant, "Be temperate;" nor is it a "science of sciences," as Critias again explains it—or rather, the knowledge of what a man knows and does not know.