MEGILLUS: Impossible.
ATHENIAN: Any more than our pattern wise man, whom we exhibited as having his pleasures and pains in accordance with and corresponding to true reason, can be intemperate?
MEGILLUS: No.
ATHENIAN: There is a further consideration relating to the due and undue award of honours in states.
MEGILLUS: What is it?
ATHENIAN: I should like to know whether temperance without the other virtues, existing alone in the soul of man, is rightly to be praised or blamed?
MEGILLUS: I cannot tell.
ATHENIAN: And that is the best answer; for whichever alternative you had chosen, I think that you would have gone wrong.
MEGILLUS: I am fortunate.
ATHENIAN: Very good; a quality, which is a mere appendage of things which can be praised or blamed, does not deserve an expression of opinion, but is best passed over in silence.