SOCRATES: How so?
NICIAS: Why, because he does not see that the physician's knowledge only extends to the nature of health and disease: he can tell the sick man no more than this. Do you imagine, Laches, that the physician knows whether health or disease is the more terrible to a man? Had not many a man better never get up from a sick bed? I should like to know whether you think that life is always better than death. May not death often be the better of the two?
LACHES: Yes certainly so in my opinion.
NICIAS: And do you think that the same things are terrible to those who had better die, and to those who had better live?
LACHES: Certainly not.
NICIAS: And do you suppose that the physician or any other artist knows this, or any one indeed, except he who is skilled in the grounds of fear and hope? And him I call the courageous.
SOCRATES: Do you understand his meaning, Laches?
LACHES: Yes; I suppose that, in his way of speaking, the soothsayers are courageous. For who but one of them can know to whom to die or to live is better? And yet Nicias, would you allow that you are yourself a soothsayer, or are you neither a soothsayer nor courageous?
NICIAS: What! do you mean to say that the soothsayer ought to know the grounds of hope or fear?
LACHES: Indeed I do: who but he?