 So where the Gorgias presents a mirroring and confrontation between two complete ethical stances, the immoralist and the Socratic, the Republic depicts a complex dialectical progression from the one to the other. It also gestures towards the Calliclean alternative with Glaucon’s speech in Book II. Glaucon presents his attack on justice as a restatement of Thrasymachus’ position (358c); but it represents a considerable advance in theoretical sophistication, and the differences bring it closer to Callicles. Like Callicles, Glaucon concerns himself explicitly with the nature and origin of justice, classifying it as a merely instrumental good (or a necessary evil) and locating its origins in a social contract. By nature we are all pleonectic; but since we stand to lose more than we could gain from unbridled pleonexia we have entered into a compact neither to do nor to allow injustice. As the famous ‘ring of Gyges’ thought-experiment is supposed to show, however, nobody has any real commitment to acting justly when they think they can get away with injustice; for if someone can commit injustice undetected there is no reason for him not to. Thus Glaucon agrees with Callicles in identifying justice as a matter of convention, and in holding that it conflicts with our nature. At the same time, he remains with Thrasymachus in not articulating any alternative moral norm; and he departs from both in not relying on the dubious division of mankind into two essentially different kinds, the allegedly ‘strong’ and the ‘weak’. He thus seems to represent the immoralist challenge in a fully developed yet streamlined form, shorn of unnecessary complications and theoretical assumptions and reducible to a simple, pressing question: given the merely conventional character of justice and the constraints it places on our pleonectic nature, why should any one of us be just, whenever injustice would be to our advantage? 