Complete Works

by Plato, Cooper, John M. , Hutchinson, D. S.

  CLINIAS: Well then, sir, where do we go from here?

  ATHENIAN: I think we ought to go back and start again. As before, we [e] should consider first the activities that promote courage; then, if you like, we’ll work through the other kinds of virtue, one by one. We’ll take the way we deal with the first as a model, and try to while away the journey by discussing the others in the same way. Then after dealing with virtue as a whole, we shall show, God willing, that the regulations we have just listed had this in view.

  MEGILLUS: A splendid idea! Our friend here is an admirer of Zeus, so [633] try examining him, to start with.

  ATHENIAN: I’ll try to examine not only him, but you and myself as well—we all have a stake in the discussion. Tell me, then, you two: do we maintain that the common meals and gymnastic exercises have been invented by your legislator for the purpose of war?

  MEGILLUS: Yes.

  ATHENIAN: What about a third such institution, and a fourth? To make a full list like this will probably be the right procedure in the case of the other ‘parts’ of virtue, too (or whatever the right terminology is: no matter, so long as one’s meaning is clear).

  MEGILLUS: I—and any Spartan, for that matter—would mention the legislator’s [b] invention of hunting as the third item.

  ATHENIAN: Let’s have a shot at adding a fourth, and a fifth too, if we can.

  MEGILLUS: Well, I might try to add a fourth: the endurance of pain. This is a very conspicuous feature of Spartan life. You find it in our boxing matches, and also in our ‘raids’, which invariably lead to a severe whipping. There is also the ‘Secret Service’,9 as it is called, which involves a great deal of hard work, and is a splendid exercise in endurance. In winter, its [c] members go barefoot and sleep without bedclothes. They dispense with orderlies and look after themselves, ranging night and day over the whole country. Next, in the ‘Naked Games’, men display fantastic endurance, contending as they do with the full heat of summer. There are a great many other practices of the same kind, but if you produced a detailed list it would go on pretty well forever.

  ATHENIAN: You’ve put it all very well, my Spartan friend. But what is [d] to be our definition of courage? Are we to define it simply in terms of a fight against fears and pains only, or do we include desires and pleasures, which cajole and seduce us so effectively? They mold the heart like wax—even the hearts of those who loftily believe themselves superior to such influences.

  MEGILLUS: Yes, I think so—the fight is against all these feelings.

  ATHENIAN: Now, if we remember aright what was said earlier on, our friend from Cnossus spoke of a city and an individual as ‘conquered by’ themselves. Isn’t that right?

  CLINIAS: Surely.

  [e] ATHENIAN: Well, shall we call ‘bad’ only the man who is ‘conquered by’ pains, or shall we include the victim of pleasures as well?

  CLINIAS: The term ‘bad’ we apply, I think, to the victim of pleasures even more than to the other. When we say that a man has been shamefully ‘conquered by’ himself, we are all, I fancy, much more likely to mean someone defeated by pleasures than by pains.

  [634] ATHENIAN: But the legal code of those lawgivers (inspired as they are by Zeus and Apollo) certainly did not envisage a courage with one hand tied behind its back, able to hit out on the left, but powerless in face of the cunning and seductive blandishments from the right. Surely it was supposed to resist in both directions?

  CLINIAS: Yes, both, I think.

  ATHENIAN: We ought to mention next what practices exist in your two cities that give a man a taste of pleasure rather than teach him how to avoid it—you remember how a man could not avoid pains, but was surrounded by them, and then forced, or persuaded by awards of honor, to [b] get the better of them. Now where in your codes of law is the institution that does the same for pleasure? Could you say, please, what institution you have that makes one and the same body of citizens courageous in face of pains and of pleasures alike, so that they conquer where they ought to conquer and never fall victims to these their most intimate and dangerous enemies?

  MEGILLUS: I was certainly able to point to a good many laws that were [c] designed to counteract pains, stranger, but I doubt if I should find it so easy to give striking and clear examples in the case of pleasures. I might have some success, perhaps, in finding minor cases.

  CLINIAS: No more would I be able to find an obvious illustration of this sort of thing in the laws of Crete.

  ATHENIAN: My dear sirs, this should not surprise us. (I hope, by the way, that if in his desire to discover goodness and truth any of us is led to criticize some legal detail in the homeland of either of his companions, we shall receive such criticism from each other tolerantly and without truculence.)

  CLINIAS: You have put it quite fairly, my Athenian friend. We must do as you say.

  ATHENIAN: Truculence, Clinias, would be hardly the thing for men of [d] our age.

  CLINIAS: No indeed.

  ATHENIAN: The criticisms people bring against the way Sparta and Crete are run may be right or wrong: that is another issue. At any rate, I am probably better able than either of you to report what most people generally say. However, granted that your codes of law have been composed with reasonable success, as indeed they have been, one of the best regulations you have is the one which forbids any young man to inquire into the relative merits of the laws; everyone has to agree, with one heart and [e] voice, that they are all excellent and exist by divine fiat; if anyone says differently, the citizens must absolutely refuse to listen to him. If an old man has some point to make about your institutions, he must make such remarks to an official, or someone of his own age when no young man is present.

  CLINIAS: That’s absolutely right, sir—you must be a wizard! You are far removed in time from the legislator who laid down these laws, but I think you have hit on his intentions very nicely, and state them with [635] perfect accuracy.

  ATHENIAN: Well, there are no young men here now. In view of our age, the legislator surely grants us the indulgence of having a private discussion on these topics without giving offense.

  CLINIAS: So be it: don’t hesitate to criticize our laws. There is no disgrace in being told of some blemish—indeed, if one takes criticism in good part, without being ruffled by it, it commonly leads one to a remedy. [b]

  ATHENIAN: Splendid. But criticism of your laws is not what I propose: that can wait until we have scrutinized them exhaustively. I shall simply mention my difficulties. Among all the Greek and foreign peoples who have come to my knowledge, you are unique in that you have been instructed by your lawgiver to keep away from the most attractive entertainments and pleasures, and to refrain from tasting them. Yet when it came to pains and fears, your legislator reckoned that if a man ran away from them on every occasion from his earliest years and was then faced with hardships, pains [c] and fears he could not avoid, he would likewise run away from any enemies who had received such a training, and become their slaves. I think this same lawgiver ought to have taken this same line in the case of pleasures too. He ought to have said to himself: ‘If our citizens grow up without any experience of the keenest pleasures, and if they are not trained to stand firm when they encounter them, and to refuse to be pushed into any disgraceful action, their fondness for pleasure will bring them to the [d] same bad end as those who capitulate to fear. Their slavery will be of a different kind, but it will be more humiliating: they will become the slaves of those who are able to stand firm against the onslaughts of pleasure and who are past-masters in the art of temptation—utter scoundrels, sometimes. Spiritually, our citizens will be part slave, part free, and only in a limited sense will they deserve to be called courageous and free.’ Just consider this argument: do you think it has any relevance at all?

  [e] CLINIAS: Yes, I think it has, at first blush. But it is a weighty business, and to jump to confident conclusions so quickly may well be childish and naive.

  ATHENIAN: Well then, Clinias and our friend from Sparta, let�
�s turn to the next item we put on the agenda: after courage, let’s discuss self-control. We found, in the case of war, that your two political systems were superior to those of states with a more haphazard mode of government. Where’s [636] the superiority in the case of self-control?

  MEGILLUS: That’s rather a difficult question. Still, I should think the common meals and the gymnastic exercises are institutions well calculated to promote both virtues.

  ATHENIAN: Well, my friends, I should think the real difficulty is to make political systems reflect in practice the trouble-free perfection of theory. (The human body is probably a parallel. One cannot rigidly prescribe a given regimen for a given body, because any regimen will invariably turn [b] out, in some respects, to injure our bodies at the same time as it helps them in others.) For instance, these gymnastic exercises and common meals, useful though they are to a state in many ways, are a danger in their encouragement of revolution—witness the example of the youth of Miletus, Boeotia and Thurii. More especially, the very antiquity of these practices seems to have corrupted the natural pleasures of sex, which are common to man and beast. For these perversions, your two states may well be the [c] first to be blamed, as well as any others that make a particular point of gymnastic exercises. Circumstances may make you treat this subject either light-heartedly or seriously; in either case you ought to bear in mind that when male and female come together in order to have a child, the pleasure they experience seems to arise entirely naturally. But homosexual intercourse and lesbianism seem to be unnatural crimes of the first rank, and are committed because men and women cannot control their desire for pleasure. It is the Cretans we all hold to blame for making up the story [d] of Ganymede:10 they were so firmly convinced that their laws came from Zeus that they saddled him with this fable, in order to have a divine ‘precedent’ when enjoying that particular pleasure. That story, however, we may dismiss, but not the fact that when men investigate legislation, they investigate almost exclusively pleasures and pains as they affect society and the character of the individual. Pleasure and pain, you see, flow like two springs released by nature. If a man draws the right amount from the right [e] one at the right time, he lives a happy life; but if he draws unintelligently at the wrong time, his life will be rather different. State and individual and every living being are on the same footing here.

  MEGILLUS: Well, sir, I suppose that what you say is more or less right; at any rate, we’re baffled to find an argument against it. But in spite of that I still think the legislator of Sparta is right to recommend a policy of avoiding pleasure (our friend here will come to the rescue of the laws of Cnossus, if he wants to). The Spartan law relating to pleasures seems to [637] me the best you could find anywhere. It has completely eliminated from our country the thing which particularly prompts men to indulge in the keenest pleasures, so that they become unmanageable and make every kind of a fool of themselves: drinking parties, with all their violent incitements to every sort of pleasure, are not a sight you’ll see anywhere in Sparta, either in the countryside or in the towns under her control. None of us would fail to inflict there and then the heaviest punishment on any tipsy merry-maker [b] he happened to meet; he would not let the man off even if he had the festival of Dionysus as his excuse. Once, I saw men in that condition on wagons in your country, and at Tarentum, among our colonials, I saw the entire city drunk at the festival of Dionysus. We don’t have anything like that.

  ATHENIAN: My Spartan friend, all this sort of thing is perfectly laudable in men with a certain strength of character; it is when they cannot stop themselves that it becomes rather silly. A countryman of mine could soon [c] come back at you tit for tat by pointing to the easy virtue of your women. There is one answer, however, which in Tarentum and Athens and Sparta too is apparently thought to excuse and justify all such practices. When a foreigner is taken aback at seeing some unfamiliar custom there, the reply he gets on all hands is this: ‘There is no need to be surprised, stranger: this is what we do here; probably you handle these things differently.’ Still, my friends, the subject of this conversation is not mankind in general [d] but only the merits and faults of legislators. In fact, there is a great deal more we ought to say on the whole subject of drinking: it is a custom of some little importance, and needs a legislator of some little skill to understand it properly. I am not talking about merely drinking wine or totally abstaining from it: I mean drunkenness. How should we deal with it? One policy is that adopted by the Scythians and Persians, as well as by the Carthaginians, Celts, Iberians and Thracians—belligerent races, all of them. [e] Or should we adopt your policy? This, as you say, is one of complete abstention, whereas the Scythians and Thracians (the women as well as the men) take their wine neat, and tip it down all over their clothes; in this they reckon to be following a glorious and splendid custom. And the Persians indulge on a grand scale (though with more decorum) in these and other luxuries which you reject.

  [638] MEGILLUS: Oh, but my fine sir, when we get weapons in our hands we rout the lot of them.

  ATHENIAN: Oh, but my dear sir, you must not say that. Many a time an army has been defeated and routed in the past, and will be in the future, without any very obvious reason. Merely to point to victory or defeat in battle is hardly to advance a clear and indisputable criterion of the merits [b] or demerits of a given practice. Larger states, you see, defeat smaller ones in battle, and the Syracusans enslave the Locrians, the very people who are supposed to be governed by the best laws you could find in those parts; the Athenians enslave the Ceians, and we could find plenty of other similar instances. It is by discussing the individual practice itself that we should try to convince ourselves of its qualities: for the moment, we ought to leave defeats and victories out of account, and simply say that such-and-such a practice is good and such-and-such is bad. First, though, listen to my explanation of the correct way to judge the relative value of these practices.

  [c] MEGILLUS: Well then, let’s have the explanation.

  ATHENIAN: I think that everyone who sets out to discuss a practice with the intention of censuring it or singing its praises as soon as it is mentioned is employing quite the wrong procedure. You might as well condemn cheese11 out of hand when you heard somebody praising its merits as a food, without stopping to ask about what effect it has and how it is taken (by which I mean such questions as how it should be given, who should take it, what should go with it, in what condition it should be served, and [d] the state of health required of those who eat it). But this is just what I think we are doing in our discussion. We have only to hear the word ‘drunkenness’, and one side immediately disparages it while the other praises it—a pointless procedure if there ever was one. Each puts up enthusiastic witnesses to endorse its recommendations: one side thinks that the number of its witnesses clinches the matter, the other points to the sight of the teetotalers conquering in battle—not that the facts of the case are beyond dispute even here. Now, if this is the way we are going [e] to work one by one through the other customs, I for one shall find it goes against the grain. I want to discuss our present subject, drunkenness, by following a different—and, I think, correct—procedure, to see if I can demonstrate the right way to conduct an inquiry into such matters as these in general. Thousands and thousands of states, you see, differ from your pair of states in their view of these things, and would be prepared to fight it out in discussion.

  [639] MEGILLUS: Certainly, if a correct method of inquiry into such matters is available, we ought not to shy away from hearing what it is.