Lysis

what is of that sort, not what is like it: the dry desires the wet, the cold the hot, the bitter the sweet, the sharp the blunt, the empty filling, and the full emptying, and everything else in the same way, by the same account. For the opposite is food to its opposite; for like 216a would get no enjoyment from like.” And indeed, my companion,¹ he seemed a clever fellow, saying this; for he spoke well. “And how does he seem to you two to speak?” I said. — “He speaks well,” said Menexenus, “at least as one hears it put like this.” — “Shall we say, then, that the opposite is most a friend to the opposite?” — “Very much so.” — “Very well,” I said; “is it not outlandish, Menexenus? And at once those all-wise men, the masters of contradiction, will gladly leap on us and ask whether 216b enmity is not most opposite to friendship. What shall we answer them? Or must we not agree that what they say is true?” — “Necessarily.” — “Then, they will say, is the enemy a friend to the friend, or the friend to the enemy?” — “Neither,” he said. — “Then the just to the unjust, or the temperate to the intemperate, or the good to the bad?” — “I don’t think it can be so.” — “But indeed,” I said, “if anything is a friend to anything² by way of oppositeness, these things too must be friends.” — “Necessarily.” — “Then neither is like a friend to like, nor opposite to opposite.” — “It seems not.”

216c“Let us look further into this too: whether the friend is escaping our notice still more, being in truth none of these, but what is neither good nor bad becoming in this way, at some time, a friend of the good.” — “What do you mean?” he said. — “But, by Zeus,” I said, “I don’t know, but I am really dizzy myself from the perplexity of the argument, and it looks as if, as the old proverb has it, the beautiful is a friend.³ At any rate it resembles something soft and smooth and glossy; 216d which is perhaps why it slips through and gets past us so easily, being of that kind. For I say that the good is beautiful; and you, don’t