Socrates asks Cephalus what the greatest good might be from possessing wealth. Socrates notes that men who inherit money tend not to value it, but men who earn their money tend to value it twice as much (speaking nothing else but of wealth). We then discover that Cephalus was a moneymaker. Socrates counters Cephalus by suggesting that many people, or the masses, no doubt claim Cephalus’s ease with old age is not due to character, but rather to his wealth, or his great “substance.” Cephalus agrees, but he also notes that a decent man cannot bear old age in poverty nor in great wealth. This causes Socrates to be “full of wonder”. If men are orderly and content within themselves, old age is only moderately troublesome. Cephalus claims that the character of human beings is the just cause of difficulties in age or in youth. Old age is preferred because it enforces moderation. The unplanned discussion of justice begins with a question from Socrates to Cephalus: ‘Is it a hard time of life’ when one embarks on the threshold of old age? Cephalus begins by disagreeing with his older contemporaries, but he agrees with the poet Sophocles when he claims that old age is preferred because it frees one from the enslaving passions of youth -drinking, sex, and the pleasures of the body. Cephalus does not return in the dialogue.

Cephalus is the center of the discussion, but he leaves the dialogue after it has only just begun, in order to continue making sacrifices and pray to the god. Cephalus represents the old order, or the most natural authority. The group goes to sit in a circle around Cephalus. Socrates notes that Cephalus is very old, seated on a cushion stool, having only just made sacrifices. Among the others was Lysias, a classical Athens orator who later played a significant role in the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants, and also Cleitophon, for whom there is a short Socratic dialogue in which the teaching of virtue by Socrates is compared to that of Thrasymachus. At any rate, upon arrival at Cephalus’s home, they find another group of foreigners, most of whom remain silent throughout the dialogue, excluding a rhetorician named Thrasymachus. A “metic” was a stranger to Athens, not a citizen but one who pays taxes and is not granted civil rights. Cephalus is the wealthy, old metic from Syracuse.

Adeimantus and Polemarchus persuade Glaucon, and also thereby Socrates, to remain in the Piraeus, at the house of Cephalus (father of Polemarchus).

Plato the republic book 1