as to individuals?  ’Certainly; there is a better in them which conquers or is conquered by the worse.’  Whether the worse ever really conquers the better, is a question which may be left for the present; but your meaning is, that bad citizens do sometimes overcome the good, and that the state is then conquered by herself, and that when they are defeated the state is victorious over herself.  Or, again, in a family there may be several brothers, and the bad may be a majority; and when the bad majority conquer the good minority, the family are worse than themselves.  The use of the terms ’better or worse than himself or themselves’ may be doubtful, but about the thing meant there can be no dispute.  ‘Very true.’  Such a struggle might be determined by a judge.  And which will be the better judge—­he who destroys the worse and lets the better rule, or he who lets the better rule and makes the others voluntarily obey; or, thirdly, he who destroys no one, but reconciles the two parties?  ‘The last, clearly.’  But the object of such a judge or legislator would not be war.  ‘True.’  And as there are two kinds of war, one without and one within a state, of which the internal is by far the worse, will not the legislator chiefly direct his attention to this latter?  He will reconcile the contending factions, and unite them against their external enemies.  ‘Certainly.’  Every legislator will aim at the greatest good, and the greatest good is not victory in war, whether civil or external, but mutual peace and good-will, as in the body health is preferable to the purgation of disease.  He who makes war his object instead of peace, or who pursues war except for the sake of peace, is not a true statesman.  ’And yet, Stranger, the laws both of Crete and Sparta aim entirely at war.’  Perhaps so; but do not let us quarrel about your legislators—­let us be gentle; they were in earnest quite as much as we are, and we must try to discover their meaning.  The poet Tyrtaeus (you know his poems in Crete, and my Lacedaemonian friend is only too familiar with them)—­he was an Athenian by birth, and a Spartan citizen:—­’Well,’ he says, ’I sing not, I care not about any man, however rich or happy, unless he is brave in war.’  Now I should like, in the name of us all, to ask the poet a question.  Oh Tyrtaeus, I would say to him, we agree with you in praising those who excel in war, but which kind of war do you mean?—­that dreadful war which is termed civil, or the milder sort which is waged against foreign enemies?  You say that you abominate ’those who are not eager to taste their enemies’ blood,’ and you seem to mean chiefly their foreign enemies.  ‘Certainly he does.’  But we contend that there are men better far than your heroes, Tyrtaeus, concerning whom another poet, Theognis the Sicilian, says that ’in a civil broil they are worth their weight in gold and silver.’  For in a civil war, not only courage, but justice and temperance and wisdom are required, and all virtue is better than a part.