The nature of the virtues is to run up into one another, and in many passages Plato makes but a faint effort to distinguish them.

He still quotes the poets, somewhat enlarging, as his manner is, or playing with their meaning.

The martial poet Tyrtaeus, and the oligarch Theognis, furnish him with happy illustrations of the two sorts of courage.

The fear of fear, the division of goods into human and divine, the acknowledgment that peace and reconciliation are better than the appeal to the sword, the analysis of temperance into resistance of pleasure as well as endurance of pain, the distinction between the education which is suitable for a trade or profession, and for the whole of life, are important and probably new ethical conceptions.

Nor has Plato forgotten his old paradox (Gorgias) that to be punished is better than to be unpunished, when he says, that to the bad man death is the only mitigation of his evil.