 Thrasymachus eventually proposes a resounding slogan: “Justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger” (338c2–3). He explains that each kind of regime makes laws in the interest of the ruling party: the mass of poor people in a democracy, the rich in an oligarchy, the tyrant in a tyranny. “And they declare what they have made—what is to their own advantage—to be just for their subjects…. This, then, is what I say justice is, the same in all cities, the advantage of the established regime” (338e–339a). Thanks to this gloss of the ‘stronger’ in terms of the ruling power, Thrasymachus’ position has often been interpreted as a form of ‘conventionalism’: justice in a given community is whatever the laws of that community dictate, i.e., so he cynically explains, whatever serves the ruling party’s interests. This conventionalist reading of Thrasymachus is probably not quite right, but it makes a convenient starting-point for seeing what he does have in mind. The conventionalist position can be seen as a more formal version of the Hesiodic association of just behavior with law-abidingness, and does not necessarily involve the cynical spin that Thrasymachus gives it: in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Socrates himself argues that the lawful [nomimon] and the just [dikaion] are the same (IV 4). Closer to Thrasymachus in spirit is the conventionalism to be found in the surviving fragments of On Truth by the sophist Antiphon (cf. section 6). According to Antiphon, “Justice [dikaiosunê]... is not violating the rules [nomima] of the city in which one is a citizen” (tr. Gagarin and Woodruff 1995). Antiphon goes on to contrast these rules of justice, which frustrate our nature and are only erratically enforced, with the authoritative and irresistible decrees of nature [phusis]. This contrast between nomos and phusis is a central tool of sophistic thought, used by a wide range of thinkers, Callicles included (see below, Section 4), in many different ways (see Kerferd 1981, Guthrie 1971). Thrasymachus himself, however, never uses this theoretical framework (or, unless we count his concept of the ‘real ruler’, any other)—a sign, perhaps, that he is meant to represent the immoralist position in its roughest and least theoretical form, purporting to spring directly from empirical observation of how law and justice work. 