Excellence and virtue

and that city which Pericles, renowned above all others for his wisdom, his justice, and his moderation, reduced with a fleet of two hundred ships and the expenditure of a thousand talents, Timotheus, without receiving from you or collecting from your allies any money whatsoever, captured after a siege of ten months with a force of eight thousand light-armed troops and thirty triremes, and he paid …

And surely you ought to find your ideal of a good general, not in one who by a single stroke of good fortune has attained, like Lysander, a success which it has been the lot of no other man to achieve, but one who, though loaded with many difficult responsibilities of all sorts, has always discharged them with honesty and wisdom.

but if, on the other hand, it is shown that he was both a good citizen and a greater general than any other within our knowledge, then I hold that you should praise him and be grateful to him, while as to this indictment against me, you should pass whatever judgement you may deem fair in the light of what I, myself, have done.

Why, cried Socrates, it is the noblest kind of excellence, the greatest of arts that you covet, for it belongs to kings and is dubbed kingly.

For you are evidently of opinion that, while gold and silver cannot make men better, the thoughts of the wise enrich their possessors with virtue.

Yes, I do, Socrates, answered Euthydemus, that kind of excellence I greatly desire.