 So Plato’s characters inherit a complex and not wholly coherent moral tradition. Fifth-century moral debates were powerfully shaped by the problematic relation of these ‘functional’ and ‘Hesiodic’ ideas about the virtues (see Adkins 1960); and the Gorgias and Book I of the Republic locate Callicles and Thrasymachus in just this context. In the Gorgias, Socrates’ first interlocutor is the rhetorician Gorgias, who is led into self-contradiction by his unclarity on the question of whether his profession includes the teaching and practice of justice. His student Polus repudiates Gorgias’ pretensions to justice, and claims that while it may be more admirable than injustice, injustice is more beneficial to its practitioner. Socrates shows that Polus’ position too is ultimately incoherent, and thus the stage is set for Callicles to reject justice (as conventionally understood) altogether, arguing that it is neither admirable nor beneficial. The Republic depicts a strikingly similar dialectical progression, again from age to youth and from respectability to ruthlessness. It begins with a discussion between Socrates and the elderly, decent-seeming businessman Cephalus, who offers (or at any rate assents to Socrates’ suggestion of) a markedly ‘Hesiodic’ account of justice as telling the truth and returning what one owes (331c). But Cephalus’ son Polemarchus, on ‘inheriting’ the argument, glosses returning what one owes in Meno-esque terms: justice is rendering help to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies (332a–b). We seem to move instantly from Hesiod to a degenerate version of the ‘functional’ conception, expressive of Athenian politics in an era of brutal, almost gangster-like factional strife. Neither Cephalus nor Polemarchus seems to notice the conflict, but it runs deep: justice cannot be at the same time (1) the Hesiodic virtue of the good neighbour and solid citizen, involving obedience to law and the restraint of pleonexia, and (2) a part of aretê functionally understood, in a society in which pleonexia and factional ruthlesssness are seen as the keys to success. In sum, both the Gorgias and Book I of the Republic reveal a society in some moral disorder, vulnerable to moral conflict and instability, with generational change used to dramatize a crumbling of Hesiodic norms. In both cases the upshot, to which Socrates must respond, is a fully formed challenge to justice traditionally conceived. 