Republic

By no means.But is there between pleasure and insolence and licence?Most assuredly.Do you know of greater or keener pleasure than that associated with Aphrodite?I don’t, he said, nor yet of any more insane. But is not the right love a sober and harmonious love of the orderly and the beautiful? It is indeed, said he. Then nothing of madness, nothing akin to licence, must be allowed to come nigh the right love? No. Then this kind of pleasure may not come nigh, nor may lover and beloved who rightly love and are loved have anything to do with it? No, by heaven, Socrates, he said, it must not come nigh them. Thus, then, as it seems, you will lay down the law in the city that we are founding, that the lover may kiss[*](Cf. 468 B-C.) and pass the time with and touch the beloved as a father would a son, for honorable ends, if he persuade him. But otherwise he must so associate with the objects of his care that there should never be any suspicion of anything further, on penalty of being stigmatized for want of taste and true musical culture. Even so, he said. Do you not agree, then, that our discourse on music has come to an end? It has certainly made a fitting end, for surely the end and consummation of culture be love of the beautiful. I concur, he said. After music our youth are to be educated by gymnastics? Certainly. In this too they must be carefully trained from boyhood through life, and the way of it is this, I believe; but consider it yourself too. For I, for my part, do not believe that a sound body by its excellence makes the soul good, but on the contrary that a good soul by its virtue renders the body the best that is possible.[*](The dependence of body on soul, whether in a mystical, a moral, or a medical sense, is a favorite doctrine of Plato and the Platonists. Cf. Charmides 156-157, Spenser, An Hymn in Honour of Beauty: For of the soul the body form doth take,For soul is form, and doth the body make, and Shelley, The Sensitive Plant: A lady, the wonder of her kind,Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind,Which dilating had moulded her mien and her motionLike a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean. Cf. also Democr. fr. B. 187 Diels.) What is your opinion? I think so too. Then if we should sufficiently train the mind and turn over to it the minutiae of the care of the body, and content ourselves with merely indicating the norms or patterns, not to make a long story of it, we should acting rightly? By all means. From intoxication[*](Cf. 398 E. There is no contradiction between this and the half-serious proposal of the Laws to use supervised drinking-bouts as a safe test of character (Laws 641).) we said that they must abstain. For a guardian is surely the last person in the world to whom it is allowable to get drunk and not know where on earth he is. Yes, he said, it would absurd that a guardian[*](γε emphasizes what follows from the very meaning of the word. Cf. 379 B, 389 B, 435 A.) should need a guard. What next about their food? These men are athletes in the greatest of contests,[*](Cf. 543 B, 621 D, Laches 182 A, Laws 830 A, Demosthenes xxv. 97 ἀθληταὶ τῶν καλῶν ἔργων.) are they not? Yes.

Is, then, the bodily habit of the athletes we see about us suitable for such?Perhaps.Nay, said I, that is a drowsy habit and precarious for health. Don’t you observe that they sleep away their lives,[*](Cf. Ἐράσται 132 C καθεύδων πάντα τὸν βίον. Xenophanes, Euripides, Aristotle, and the medical writers, like Plato, protest against the exaggerated honor paid to athletes and the heavy sluggishness induced by overfeeeding and overtraining.) and that if they depart ever so little from their prescribed regimen these athletes are liable to great and violent diseases? I do. Then, said I, we need some more ingenious form of training for our athletes of war, since these must be as it were sleepless hounds, and have the keenest possible perceptions of sight and hearing, and in their campaigns undergo many changes[*](Laws 797 D. Cf. 380 E. Aristotle’s comment on μεταβολή, Eth. Nic. 1154 b 28 ff., is curiously reminiscent of Plato, including the phrase ἁπλῆ οὐδ’ ἐπιεικής.) in their drinking water, their food, and in exposure to the heat of the sun and to storms,[*](Perhaps in the context cold.) without disturbance of their health. I think so. Would not, then, the best gymnastics be akin to the music that we were just now describing? What do you mean? It would be a simple and flexible[*](Literally equitable, if we translate ἐπιεικής by its later meaning, that is, not over-precise or rigid in conformity to rule. Adam is mistaken in saying that ἐπιεικής is practically synonymous with ἀγαθή. It sometimes is, but not here. Cf. Plutarch, De san. 13 ἀκριβὴς . . . καὶ δι’ ὄνυχος.) gymnastic, and especially so in the training for war. In what way? One could learn that, said I, even from Homer.[*](So Laws 706 D. The καί is perhaps merely idiomatic in quotation.) For you are aware that in the banqueting of the heroes on campaign he does not feast them on fish,[*](Homer’s ignoring of fish diet, except in stress of starvation, has been much and idly discussed both in antiquity and by modern scholars. Modern pseudo-science has even inferred from this passage that Plato placed a taboo on fish, though they are at the sea-side on the Hellespont, which Homer calls fish-teeming, Iliad ix. 360.) nor on boiled meat, but only on roast, which is what soldiers could most easily procure. For everywhere, one may say, it is of easier provision to use the bare fire than to convey pots and pans[*](Cf. Green, History of English People, Book II. chap. ii., an old description of the Scotch army: They have therefore no occasion for pots and pans, for they dress the flesh of the cattle in their skins after they have flayed them, etc. But cf. Athenaeus, i. 8-9 (vol. i. p. 36 L.C.L.), Diogenes Laertius viii. 13 ὥστε εὐπορίστους αὐτοῖς εἶναι τὰς τροφάς.) along. Indeed it is. Neither, as I believe, does Homer ever make mention of sweet meats. Is not that something which all men in training understand—that if one is to keep his body in good condition he must abstain from such things altogether? They are right, he said, in that they know it and do abstain. Then, my friend, if you think this is the right way, you apparently do not approve of a Syracusan table[*](Proverbial, like the Corinthian maid and the Attic pastry. Cf. Otto, Sprichw. d. Rom. p. 321, Newman, Introduction to Aristotle’s Politics, p. 302. Cf. also Phaedrus 240 B.) and Sicilian variety of made dishes. I think not. You would frown, then, on a little Corinthian maid as the chère amie of men who were to keep themselves fit? Most certainly. And also on the seeming delights of Attic pastry? Inevitably. In general, I take it, if we likened that kind of food and regimen to music and song expressed in the pan-harmonic mode and in every variety of rhythm it would be a fair comparison. Quite so. And here variety engendered licentiousness, did it not, but here disease? While simplicity in music begets sobriety in the souls, and in gymnastic training it begets health in bodies. Most true, he said.

And when licentiousness and disease multiply in a city, are not many courts of law and dispensaries opened, and the arts of chicane[*](δικανική: more contemptuous than δικαστική.) and medicine give themselves airs when even free men in great numbers take them very seriously?How can they help it? he said. Will you be able to find a surer proof of an evil and shameful state of education in a city than the necessity of first-rate physicians and judges, not only for the base and mechanical, but for those who claim to have been bred in the fashion of free men? Do you not think it disgraceful and a notable mark of bad breeding to have to make use of a justice imported from others, who thus become your masters and judges, from lack of such qualities in yourself[*](I have given the sense. The contruction is debated accordingly as we read ἀπορία or ἀπορίᾳ. Cf. Phaedrus 239 D, of the use of cosmetics, χήτει οἰκείων. The καί with ἀπορίᾳ is awkward or expresses the carelessness of conversation.)? The most shameful thing in the world. Is it? said I, or is this still more shameful[*](Plato likes to emphasize by pointing to a lower depth or a higher height beyond the superlative.)—when a man only wears out the better part of his days in the courts of law as defendant or accuser, but from the lack of all true sense of values[*](There is no exact English equivalent for ἀπειροκαλία, the insensitiveness to the καλόν of the banausic, the nouveau riche and the Philistine.) is led to plume himself on this very thing, as being a smart fellow to put over an unjust act and cunningly to try every dodge and practice,[*](The phrasing of this passage recalls passages of Aristophanes’ Clouds, and the description of the pettifogging lawyer and politician in the Theaetetus 172 E. Cf. 519, also Euthydemus 302 B, and Porphyry, De abstinentia, i. 34. The metaphors are partly from wrestling.) every evasion, and wriggle[*](Cf. Blaydes on Aristophanes Knights 263.) out of every hold in defeating justice, and that too for trifles and worthless things, because he does not know how much nobler and better it is to arrange his life so as to have no need[*](Cf. Gorgias 507 D, Thucydides iii. 82, Isocrates Antidosis 238, Antiphanes, fr. 288 Kock ὁ μηδὲν ἀδικῶν οὐδενὸς δεῖται νόμου.) of a nodding juryman? That is, said he, still more shameful than the other. And to require medicine, said I, not merely for wounds or the incidence of some seasonal maladies, but, because of sloth and such a regimen as we described, to fill one’s body up with winds and humors like a marsh and compel the ingenious sons of Aesculapius to invent for diseases such names as fluxes and flatulences—don’t you think that disgraceful?[*](Plato ridicules the unsavory metaphors required to describe the effects of auto-intoxication. There is a similar bit of somewhat heavier satire in Spencer’s Social Statics, 1868, p. 32: Carbuncled noses, cadaverous faces, foetid breaths, and plethoric bodies meet us at every turn; and our condolences are prepetually asked for headaches, flatulences, nightmare, heartburn, and endless other dyspeptic symptoms.) Those surely are, he said, new-fangled and monstrous strange names of diseases. There was nothing of the kind, I fancy, said I, in the days of Aesculapius. I infer this from the fact that at Troy his sons did not find fault with the damsel who gave to the wounded Eurypylus[*](Plato is probably quoting from memory. In our text, Iliad xi. 624, Hecamede gives the draught to Machaon and Nestor as the Ion (538 B) correctly states.) to drink a posset of Pramnian wine plentifully sprinkled with barley and gratings of cheese, inflammatory ingredients of a surety, nor did they censure Patroclus, who was in charge of the case.