ATHENIAN: Splendid. Let’s turn our attention to the bridal pair, and instruct them in the manner and method by which they should produce children. (And if we fail to persuade them, we’ll threaten them with a law or two.)
CLINIAS: How do you mean?
ATHENIAN: The bride and groom should resolve to present the state with [e] the best and finest children they can produce. Now, when human beings co-operate in any project, and give due attention to its planning and execution, the results they achieve are always of the best and finest quality; but if they act carelessly, or are incapable of intelligent action in the first place, the results are deplorable. So the bridegroom had better deal with his wife and approach the task of begetting children with a sense of responsibility, and the bride should do the same, especially during the period when no [784] children have yet been born to them. They should be supervised by women whom we have chosen19 (several or only a few—the officials should appoint the number they think right, at times within their discretion). These women must assemble daily at the temple of Eileithuia20 for not more than a third of the day, and when they have convened each must report to her colleagues any wife or husband of childbearing age she has seen who is concerned with anything but the duties imposed on him or her at the time of the [b] sacrifices and rites of their marriage. If children come in suitable numbers, the period of supervised procreation should be ten years and no longer. But if a couple remain childless throughout this period, they should part, and call in their relatives and the female officials to help them decide terms of divorce that will safeguard the interests of them both. If some dispute arises about the duties and interests of the parties, they must choose ten [c] of the Guardians of the Laws as arbitrators, and abide by their decisions on the points referred to them. The female officials must enter the homes of the young people and by a combination of admonition and threats try to make them give up their ignorant and sinful ways. If this has no effect, they must go and report the case to the Guardians of the Laws, who must resort to sterner methods. If even the Guardians prove ineffective, they should make the case public and post up the relevant name, swearing on their oath that they are unable to reform so-and-so.
[d] 18. (a) Unless the person whose name is posted up succeeds in convicting in court those who published the notice,
he must be deprived of the privilege of attending weddings and parties celebrating the birth of children.
19. If he persists in attending,
anyone who wishes should chastise him by beating him, and not be punished for it.
18. (b) If a woman misbehaves and her name is posted up, and she fails to win the day in court,
the same regulations are to apply to her too: she must be excluded from female processions and distinctions, and be forbidden to attend weddings and parties celebrating the birth of children.
20. When children have been produced as demanded by law, if a man [e] has intercourse with another woman, or a woman with another man, and the other party is still procreating,
they must suffer the same penalty as was specified for those who are still having children.
21. After the period of child-bearing, the chaste man or woman should be highly respected;
the promiscuous should be held in the opposite kind of ‘repute’ (though disrepute would be a better word).
When the majority of people conduct themselves with moderation in [785] sexual matters, no such regulations should be mentioned or enacted; but if there is misbehavior, regulations should be made and enforced after the pattern of the laws we’ve just laid down.
Our first year is the beginning of our whole life, and every boy’s and girl’s year of birth should be recorded in their family shrines under the heading ‘born’. Alongside, on a whitened wall, should be written up in every brotherhood the sequence-numbers of the officials who facilitate the numbering of the years. The names of the living members of the brotherhood [b] should be inscribed nearby, and those of the deceased expunged.
The age limits for marriage shall be: for a girl, from sixteen to twenty (these will be the extreme limits specified), and for a man, from thirty to thirty-five. A woman may hold office from the age of forty, a man from thirty. Service in the armed forces shall be required of a man from twenty to sixty. As for women, whatever military service it may be thought necessary to impose (after they have finished bearing children) should be performed up to the age of fifty; practicable and appropriate duties should be specified for each individual.
1. Cf. 735a; after the preliminaries of 735b–750e, the Athenian now resumes his discussion of political offices.
2. Deleting te in c9 and reading pros to in d1.
3. Reading treis in d5.
4. Alternatively, “ … ‘Guards-in-Chief’, who will be allowed to choose from their own tribe …” On the translation in the text there will be 60 assistant guards; on this alternative translation, 12.
5. See 758a ff.
6. Deleting eis to prosthen in c6.
7. See 738b–e.
8. See 659e.
9. See 721b–d.
10. See 742c.
11. ‘Nomes’: the same pun as in 700b, 722d–e.
12. The Spartan helots were a numerous class of state serfs, in part the descendants of the original non-Doric population conquered by the Dorian settlers (c. 1000 B.C.); see 633b above.
13. Odyssey xvii.322–23.
14. We do not know the poet referred to, but the sentiment is fairly common: see e.g. Aeschylus, Persians 349.
15. See 760e.
16. See 676a ff.
17. Grains.
18. The Orphics held that a human soul could be reborn in the body of another human being or an animal, and the soul of an animal in another animal or a human being. Hence they strictly prohibited killing and meat-eating.
19. No such women have been mentioned. (In other ways too the state of the text hereabouts suggests a lack of revision.)
20. Goddess of childbirth.
Book VII
ATHENIAN: Now that the boys and girls have been born, I suppose their [788] education and training will be the most suitable topic to deal with next. This is not something we can leave on one side: that would be out of the question. However, we shall clearly do better to confine our remarks to advice and instruction, and not venture on precise regulations. In the privacy of family life, you see, a great many trivial activities never get publicity, and under the stimulus of feelings of pleasure or pain or desire [b] they can all too easily fly in the face of the lawgiver’s recommendations and produce citizens whose characters are varied and conflicting, which is a social evil. Now although these activities are so trivial and so common that one cannot decently arrange to punish them by law, they do tend to undermine the written statutes, because men get into the habit of repeatedly [c] breaking rules in small matters. That’s why in spite of all the difficulties of legislating on such points, we can’t simply say nothing about them. But I must try to clarify my point by showing you some samples, as it were. At the moment, I expect it looks as if I’m rather concealing my meaning.
CLINIAS: You’re quite right, it does.
ATHENIAN: I take it we were justified in asserting that if an education is to qualify as ‘correct’, it simply must show that it is capable of making our souls and bodies as fine and as handsome as they can be?
CLINIAS: Of course.
[d] ATHENIAN: And I suppose (to take the most elementary requirement), that if a person is going to be supremely good-looking, his posture must be as erect as possible, right from his earliest years?
CLINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: Well now, we observe, don’t we, that the earliest stages of growth of every animal are by far the most vigorous and rapid? That’s why a lot of people actually maintain that in the case of man, the first five years of life see more growth than the next twenty.
CLINIAS: That’s true.
[789] ATHENIAN: But we’re aware that rapid growth without frequent an
d appropriately graded exercises leads to a lot of trouble for the body?
CLINIAS: Yes, indeed.
ATHENIAN: And isn’t it precisely when a body is getting most nourishment that it needs most exercise?
CLINIAS: Good Heavens, sir, are we going to demand such a thing of new-born babies and little children?
ATHENIAN: No—I mean even earlier, when they’re getting nourishment in their mother’s body.
CLINIAS: What’s that you say? My dear sir! Do you really mean in the womb?
[b] ATHENIAN: Yes, I do. But it’s hardly surprising you haven’t heard of these athletics of the embryo. It’s a curious subject, but I’d like to tell you about it.
CLINIAS: Do so, of course.
ATHENIAN: It’s something it would be easier to understand in Athens, where some people go in for sport more than they should. Not only boys, but some elderly men as well, rear young birds and set them to fight one [c] another. But they certainly don’t think just pitting them one against another will give such creatures adequate exercise. To supplement this, each man keeps birds somewhere about his person—a small one in the cup of his hand, a larger one under his arm—and covers countless stades in walking about, not for the sake of his own health, but to keep these animals in good shape. To the intelligent person, the lesson is obvious: all bodies find it helpful and invigorating to be shaken by movements and joltings of all [d] kinds, whether the motion is due to their own efforts or they are carried on a vehicle or boat or horse or any other mode of conveyance. All this enables the body to assimilate its solid and liquid food, so that we grow healthy and handsome and strong into the bargain. In view of all this, can we say what our future policy should be? If you like, we could lay down [e] precise rules (and how people would laugh at us!): (1) A pregnant woman should go for walks, and when her child is born she should mold it like wax while it is still supple, and keep it well wrapped up for the first two years of its life. (2) The nurses must be compelled under legal penalty to contrive that the children are always being carried to the country or temples or relatives, until they are sturdy enough to stand on their own feet. (3) Even then, the nurses should persist in carrying the child around until it’s three, to keep it from distorting its young limbs by subjecting them to too much pressure. (4) The nurses should be as strong as possible, and there must be plenty of them—and we could provide written penalties for each [790] infringement of the rules. But no! That would lead to far too much of what I mentioned just now.
CLINIAS: You mean …
ATHENIAN: … the tremendous ridicule we’d provoke. And the nurses (women and slaves, with characters to match) would refuse to obey us anyway.
CLINIAS: Then why did we insist that the rules should be specified?
ATHENIAN: For this reason. A state’s free men and masters have quite [b] different characters to the nurses’, and there’s a chance that if they hear these regulations they may be led to the correct conclusion: the state’s general code of laws will never rest on a firm foundation as long as private life is badly regulated, and it’s silly to expect otherwise. Realizing the truth of this, they may themselves spontaneously adopt our recent suggestions as rules, and thereby achieve the happiness that results from running their households and their state on proper lines.
CLINIAS: Yes, that’s all very reasonable.
ATHENIAN: Still, let’s not abandon this style of legislation yet. We started [c] to talk about young children’s bodies: let’s use the same sort of approach to explain how to shape their personalities.
CLINIAS: Good idea.
ATHENIAN: So let’s take this as our basic principle in both cases: all young children, and especially very tiny infants, benefit both physically and mentally from being nursed and kept in motion, as far as practicable, throughout the day and night; indeed, if only it could be managed, they ought to live as though they were permanently on board ship. But as that’s impossible, we must aim to provide our new-born infants with the closest possible approximation to this ideal. [d]
Here’s some further evidence, from which the same conclusions should be drawn: the fact that young children’s nurses, and the women who cure Corybantic conditions,1 have learned this treatment from experience and have come to recognize its value. And I suppose you know what a mother does when she wants to get a wakeful child to sleep. Far from keeping [e] him still, she takes care to move him about, rocking him constantly in her arms, not silently, but humming a kind of tune. The cure consists of movement, to the rhythms of dance and song; the mother makes her child ‘pipe down’ just as surely as the music of the pipes bewitches the frenzied Bacchic reveler.2
CLINIAS: Well then, sir, have we any particular explanation for all this?
ATHENIAN: The reason’s not very hard to find.
CLINIAS: What is it?
ATHENIAN: Both these conditions are a species of fear, and fear is the result [791] of some inadequacy in the personality. When one treats such conditions by vigorous movement, this external motion, by canceling out the internal agitation that gives rise to the fear and frenzy, induces a feeling of calm and peace in the soul, in spite of the painful thumping of the heart experienced by each patient. The result is very gratifying. Whereas the wakeful children are sent to sleep, the revelers (far from asleep!), by being set to dance to the music of the pipes, are restored to mental health after their [b] derangement, with the assistance of the gods to whom they sacrifice so propitiously. This explanation, brief as it is, is convincing enough.
CLINIAS: Yes, indeed.
ATHENIAN: Well then, seeing how effective these measures are, here’s an other point to notice about the patient.3 Any man who has experienced terrors from his earliest years will be that much more likely to grow up timid. But no one will deny that this is to train him to be a coward, not a hero.
CLINIAS: Of course.
[c] ATHENIAN: Contrariwise, we’d agree that a training in courage right from infancy demands that we overcome the terrors and fears that assail us?
CLINIAS: Exactly.
ATHENIAN: So we can say that exercising very young children by keeping them in motion contributes a great deal towards the perfection of one aspect of the soul’s virtue.
CLINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: Further, good humor and bad humor will be a conspicuous element in a good or bad moral character respectively.
CLINIAS: Of course.
ATHENIAN: So how can we instil into the new-born child, right from the [d] start, whichever of these two characteristics we want? We must try to indicate how far they are within our control, and the methods we have to use.
CLINIAS: Quite so.
ATHENIAN: I belong to the school of thought which maintains that luxury makes a child bad-tempered, irritable, and apt to react violently to trivial things. At the other extreme, unduly savage repression turns children into cringing slaves and puts them so much at odds with the world that they become unfit to be members of a community.
CLINIAS: So how should the state as a whole set about bringing up [e] children who are as yet unable to understand what is said to them or respond to any attempt to educate them?
ATHENIAN: More or less like this. Every new-born animal is apt to give a sort of loud yell—especially the human child, who in addition to yelling is also exceptionally prone to tears.
CLINIAS: He certainly is.
ATHENIAN: So if a nurse is trying to discover what a child wants, she [792] judges from these reactions to what it is offered. Silence, she thinks, means she is giving it the right thing, whereas crying and bawling indicate the wrong one. Clearly these tears and yells are the child’s way of signaling his likes and dislikes—and ominous signs they are, too, because this stage lasts at least three years, and that’s quite a large part of one’s life to spend badly (or well).
CLINIAS: You’re right.
ATHENIAN: Now don’t you two think that a morose and ungenial fellow [b] will on the whole be more of a moaner and a grumbler than a good man has any
right to be?
CLINIAS: Yes, I think so, at any rate.
ATHENIAN: Well then, suppose you do your level best during these years to shelter him from distress and fright and any kind of pain at all. Shouldn’t we expect that child to be educated into a more cheerful and genial disposition?
CLINIAS: Certainly, and especially, sir, if one surrounded him with lots [c] of pleasures.
ATHENIAN: Now here, my dear sir, is just where Clinias no longer carries me with him. That’s the best way to ruin a child, because the corruption invariably sets in at the very earliest stages of his education. But perhaps I’m wrong about this: let’s see.
CLINIAS: Tell us what you mean.
ATHENIAN: I mean that we’re now discussing a topic of great importance. So you too, Megillus, see what your views are, and help us to make up our minds. My position is this: the right way of life is neither a single-minded pursuit of pleasure nor an absolute avoidance of pain, but a genial [d] (the word I used just now) contentment with the state between those extremes—precisely the state, in fact, which we always say is that of God himself (a conjecture that’s reasonable enough, supported as it is by the statements of the oracles). Similarly if one of us aspires to live like a god, this is the state he must try to attain. He must refuse to go looking for pleasure on his own account, aware that this is not a way of avoiding pain; nor must he allow anyone else to behave like that, young or old, [e] male or female—least of all newly-born children, if he can help it, because that’s the age when habits, the seeds of the entire character, are most effectively implanted. I’d even say, at the risk of appearing flippant, that all expectant mothers, during the year of their pregnancy, should be supervised more closely than other women, to ensure that they don’t experience frequent and excessive pleasures, or pains either. An expectant mother should think it important to keep calm and cheerful and sweet-tempered throughout her pregnancy.
[793] CLINIAS: There’s no need to ask Megillus which of us two has made the better case, sir. I agree with you that everyone should avoid a life of extreme pleasure and pain, and always take the middle course between them. Your point has been well and truly put, and you’ve heard it well and truly endorsed.
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