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him if their orators could carry the day. He knew what the people wanted, yet always did what he believed was best. But there were no pollsters back then.
     
 
    A college student I met once gave me the politically correct answer in a startlingly politically incorrect form. “There is no such thing,” she said, and then gave an example. “What was good for the Nazis, was good for the Nazis. It’s all a matter of opinion.”
     
    That was the single falsehood Plato gave his life’s work to put to rout. Is good simply a matter of material advantage—of the survival of the fattest ? As we saw in Oedipus at Colonus , Theseus should welcome the aged Oedipus into the holy grove, because Oedipus is a man humbled by unimaginable suffering. So Theseus does, though he knows the Thebans will hate him for it. The good cannot depend on what gives most pleasure to the greatest number of people at the lowest cost of suffering, since the good directs what we should find pleasure in, not the other way around. Handsome Alcibiades wants to make love to Socrates. He wouldn’t be harming anyone by it, and besides, he might gain a little wisdom. But Socrates knows it would be better for Alcibiades if he learned to desire things nobler than sexual pleasure. “For anything that had happened between us when I got up after sleeping with Socrates,” says Alcibiades, “I might have been sleeping with my father or my elder brother” (Plato, Symposium 219d).
     
    Even if what we delight in is innocent, it might prevent us from knowing the good. A man may spend his days jittering his fingers at a video game, or playing checkers with his friend Cleon. If he does little more, he is hardly a man, and no judge of the good. It would be better for him to master an art, and even better, to pursue wisdom. That is both a moral and an aesthetic judgment: as a man who throws the javelin in the fields against well-trained opponents will have a more beautiful, well-proportioned body than one who indulges himself always in the low pleasures of drink and ease.
     
    The good of man, for both Plato and his brilliant pupil Aristotle, must involve perfection, the result of difficult moral training. This holds true for the State as well as for the individual. Here again we touch upon lessons that modern man has forgotten—lessons that Sophocles attempted to remind his fellow Athenians to heed. When, in the Republic , Plato’s Socrates is asked to define justice, he contends that an analogy must be drawn between the microcosmos of an individual man and the cosmos of the city. He notices that there are three principal faculties in man: the intellect, by which man judges what is true; the “spirit” or “drive” by which he is moved to possess and enjoy what is noble and beautiful, and the appetite, by which he desires what seems good at the moment, such as food or sexual release. 21
     
    Now in a virtuous man these faculties must cooperate in a hierarchical harmony. No slovenly egalitarianism here. The appetite should not govern, since it does not look ahead, and does not judge the better and the best, but only seeks to gratify itself with what is present. The intellect must rule, but it cannot rule effectively without the energy of the ambition and the appetite. The “spirit” is the passion that bridges intellect and appetite. It is a reason-loving movement of the heart, full of fire and zeal.
     
    So if you’re going to raise a virtuous child, you must not only teach him what happens to be good, you have to train him to long to possess the good. You fire his imagination with accounts of noble deeds. You set before his sight a beautiful soul: Achilles thirsting for glory, Socrates thirsting for the beautiful. Such training in virtue must prevail in the just state. Eros must be enlisted not in the pursuit of a Helen of Troy, or the wealth of Croesus, or the power of the Persian king, Xerxes. It must be enlisted in the pursuit of the justice that knits