the gods, he need not, the sophists said, give himself much trouble about them, for they could be propitiated with sacrifices, and kept quiet by means of a few grains of frankincense. In this way the sophists endeavoured to make out that injustice might be a real good to its possessor while justice might prove a real evil. Or, at any rate, they argued that men were just merely because they found it to redound to their advantage, in a worldly point of view, to be so, and that if they could procure the same or greater advantages by being unjust, unjust they would undoubtedly be. They argued very much in the spirit of Hobbes, that men were deterred from committing injustice merely by their dislike of suffering injustice, and knowing that if they perpetrated wrong on others they must be prepared to endure wrong from others in return.
44. In Book i. p. 359, the explanation which the sophists gave of law and justice (and which you will see resembles very closely the doctrine of Hobbes) is set forth, and the argument illustrated by the story of the ring which the ancestor of Gyges had possessed. Thus the sophists argued that if every man had the ring of Gyges, by which he could make himself invisible at pleasure, then every man would do wrong whenever he felt inclined, and would do right only in so far as it would promote his own happiness. So that the life of an unjust man who can perfectly conceal his motives (as many men can
