Kitap 3
403
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 kissCf. 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 motion Like 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 intoxicationCf. 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 guardianγε 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.
