 One way to compare the two varieties of immoralism represented by Thrasymachus and Callicles is to ask why Plato chose to represent the former position in the Republic and the latter in the Gorgias. The obvious answer is that the differences between the two put them in very different relations to Socrates and his defense of justice, suitably calibrated to the ambitions of the works in question. Socrates and Callicles are antitheses: they address the same questions and give directly conflicting answers. Each offers a positive account of the real nature of justice, grounded in a broader conception of human nature and the nature of things. Indeed, viewed at a high level of abstraction, and if we allow Socrates the fuller positive theory provided in the Republic, their positions are remarkably similar. For in the Republic we see that Plato in fact agrees with Callicles that the many should be ruled by the superior few—i.e., the intelligent and courageous—and that it is only natural and just for the latter to have greater happiness and pleasure than the many. Where they differ is in the content they give to this shared schema. From the point of view of Socrates or Plato, Callicles is wrong about nature (including human nature); wrong about what intelligence and virtue actually consist in; wrong about what the point and purpose of political rule is; and wrong about the nature of the good at which the superior man aims. His version of the immoralist challenge is thus, for all its tremendous rhetorical power, less philosophically threatening than it might be; for it depends on a rather rich positive theory (of the good, human nature, human virtue, and politics) which Plato thinks he can show to be false. Thrasymachus, by contrast, presents himself as more of a social critic: while persuasively debunking justice as conventionally understood, he fails to offer any account of real virtue in its stead. The closest he comes to presenting a substitute norm is in his praise of the expertly rational real ruler—an ideal which is pursued and developed more fully both by Callicles in the Gorgias and by Socrates in the Republic itself. 