and will not "let him off" on the subject of women and children.
Like Cephalus, he is limited in his point of view, and represents
the proverbial stage of morality which has rules of life rather
than principles; and he quotes Simonides as his father had quoted Pindar.
But after this he has no more to say; the answers which he
makes are only elicited from him by the dialectic of Socrates.
He has not yet experienced the influence of the Sophists like Glaucon
and Adeimantus, nor is he sensible of the necessity of refuting them;
he belongs to the pre-Socratic or pre-dialectical age.
He is incapable of arguing, and is bewildered by Socrates
to such a degree that he does not know what he is saying.
He is made to admit that justice is a thief, and that the virtues
follow the analogy of the arts. From his brother Lysias we learn
that he fell a victim to the Thirty Tyrants, but no allusion
is here made to his fate, nor to the circumstance that Cephalus
and his family were of Syracusan origin, and had migrated from Thurii
to Athens.

The "Chalcedonian giant," Thrasymachus, of whom we have already heard
in the Phaedrus, is the personification of the Sophists, according to
Plato's conception of them, in some of their worst characteristics.
He is vain and blustering, refusing to discourse unless he
is paid, fond of making an oration, and hoping thereby to escape
the inevitable Socrates; but a mere child in argument, and unable
to foresee that the next "move" (to use a Platonic expression)
will "shut him up." He has reached the stage of framing general notions,
and in this respect is in advance of Cephalus and Polemarchus.
But he is incapable of defending them in a discussion,
and vainly tries to cover his confusion in banter and insolence.
Whether such doctrines as are attributed to him by Plato were really