The law of the weak and nature's justice
CalliclesSo it is for themselves and their own advantage that they lay down the laws, and praise their praises, and blame their blames. Frightening the more robust among people, those who have the power to have more, so that these will not have more than they do, they say that getting more is shameful and unjust, and that doing injustice is just this: seeking to have more than others; for they are content, I think, if they themselves have an equal share, since they are the lesser sort. That is why, by law, this is called unjust and shameful—seeking to have more than the many—and they call it doing injustice. But nature itself, I think, reveals this: that it is just for the worthier to have more than the worse, and the more powerful more than the less powerful. And it shows in many places that this is so, both among the other animals and among human beings, in whole cities and races: justice has been judged to be this, that the superior rules the inferior and has more.
For on what kind of justice was Xerxes relying when he marched against Greece, or his father against the Scythians? Or one could name countless other such cases. But these men, I think, do these things according to the nature of justice, and, yes, by Zeus, according to law—the law of nature—though not, perhaps, according to this law that we lay down. Moulding the best and most robust among ourselves, taking them young, like lions, and enchanting them and bewitching them, we make slaves of them, telling them that one must have an equal share, and that this is what is fine and just. But if, I think, a man turns out to have nature enough, then, shaking all this off, bursting through it and escaping, trampling on our writings and trickeries and enchantments and the laws against nature, every one of them, the slave rises up and is revealed as our master; and there the justice of nature shines forth.
And Pindar too seems to me to show exactly what I am saying, in the song where he says, “Law, the king of all, / mortals and immortals”; and this law, he says, “leads on, making the most violent just, / with the highest hand; I judge / by the deeds of Heracles, since—unbought—” he says something like that, for I do not know the song by heart; but he says that Heracles drove off Geryon’s cattle without buying them or being given them, on the grounds that this is what is just by nature: that cattle and all the other possessions of those who are worse and inferior belong to the one who is better and superior.