Complete Works

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

  ATHENIAN: So it looks as if it’s not only an old man who will go through a second childhood, but the drunkard too.

  CLINIAS: That’s well said, sir.

  ATHENIAN: Now, is there any argument that could even begin to persuade us that we ought to venture on this practice, rather than make every possible effort to avoid it?

  CLINIAS: Apparently there is; at any rate, this is what you say, and a minute ago you were ready to produce it.

  [b] ATHENIAN: A correct reminder; I’m ready still, now that you have both said you would be glad to listen to me.

  CLINIAS: We’ll be all ears, sir, if only because of your amazing paradox that a man should, on occasions, voluntarily abandon himself to extreme depravity.

  ATHENIAN: You mean spiritual depravity, don’t you?

  CLINIAS: Yes.

  ATHENIAN: And what about degradation of the body, my friend—emaciation, disfigurement, ugliness, impotence? Shouldn’t we be startled to find [c] a man voluntarily reducing himself to such a state?

  CLINIAS: Of course we should.

  ATHENIAN: We don’t suppose, do we, that those who voluntarily take themselves off to the surgery in order to drink down medicines are unaware of the fact that very soon after, for days on end, their condition will be such that, if it were to be anything more than temporary, it would make life insupportable? We know, surely, that those who resort to gymnasia for vigorous exercises become temporarily enfeebled?

  CLINIAS: Yes, we are aware of all this.

  ATHENIAN: And of the fact that they go there of their own accord, for the sake of the benefit they will receive after the initial stages?

  [d] CLINIAS: Most certainly.

  ATHENIAN: So shouldn’t we look at the other practices in the same light?

  CLINIAS: Yes indeed.

  ATHENIAN: So the same view should be taken of time spent in one’s cups—if, that is, we may think of it as a legitimate parallel.

  CLINIAS: Of course.

  ATHENIAN: Now if time so spent turned out to benefit us no less than time devoted to the body, it would have the initial advantage over physical exercises in that, unlike them, it is painless.

  [e] CLINIAS: You’re right enough in that, but I’d be surprised if we could discover any such benefit in this case.

  ATHENIAN: Then this is the point it looks as if we ought to be trying to explain. Tell me: can we conceive of two roughly opposite kinds of fear?

  CLINIAS: Which?

  ATHENIAN: These: when we expect evils to occur, we are in fear of them, I suppose?

  CLINIAS: Yes.

  ATHENIAN: And we often fear for our reputation, when we imagine we [647] are going to get a bad name for doing or saying something disgraceful. This is the fear which we, and I fancy everyone else, call ‘shame’.

  CLINIAS: Surely.

  ATHENIAN: These are the two fears I meant. The second resists pains and the other things we dread, as well as our keenest and most frequent pleasures.

  CLINIAS: Very true.

  ATHENIAN: The legislator, then, and anybody of the slightest merit, values this fear very highly, and gives it the name ‘modesty’. The feeling of confidence that is its opposite he calls ‘insolence’, and reckons it to be the biggest curse anyone could suffer, whether in his private or his public life.

  CLINIAS: True. [b]

  ATHENIAN: So this fear not only safeguards us in a lot of other crucial areas of conduct but contributes more than anything else, if we take one thing with another, to the security that follows victory in war. Two things, then, contribute to victory: fearlessness in face of the enemy, and fear of ill-repute among one’s friends.

  CLINIAS: Exactly.

  ATHENIAN: Every individual should therefore become both afraid and unafraid, for the reasons we have distinguished in each case. [c]

  CLINIAS: Certainly.

  ATHENIAN: Moreover, if we want to make an individual proof against all sorts of fears, it is by exposing him to fear, in a way sanctioned by the law, that we make him unafraid.

  CLINIAS: Evidently we do.

  ATHENIAN: But what about our attempts to make a man afraid, in a way consistent with justice? Shouldn’t we see that he enters the lists against impudence, and give him training to resist it, so as to make him conquer in the struggle with his pleasures? A man has to fight and conquer his [d] feelings of cowardice before he can achieve perfect courage; if he has no experience and training in that kind of struggle, he will never more than half realize his potentialities for virtue. Isn’t the same true of self-control? Will he ever achieve a perfect mastery here without having fought and conquered, with all the skills of speech and action both in work and play, the crowd of pleasures and desires that stimulate him to act shamelessly and unjustly? Can he afford not to have the experience of all these struggles?

  CLINIAS: It would seem hardly likely.

  ATHENIAN: Well then, has any god given me a drug to produce fear, so [e] that the more a man agrees to drink of it, the more the impression grows on him, after every draft, that he is assailed by misfortune? The effect would be to make him apprehensive about his present and future prospects, until finally even the boldest of men would be reduced to absolute terror; [648] but when he had recovered from the drink and slept it off, he would invariably be himself again.

  CLINIAS: And what drink does that, sir? There’s hardly an example we could point to anywhere in the world.

  ATHENIAN: No. But if one had cropped up, would a legislator have been able to make any use of it to promote courage? This is the sort of point we might well have put to him about it: ‘Legislator—whether your laws are to apply to Cretans or to any other people—tell us this: wouldn’t you [b] be particularly glad to have a criterion of the courage and cowardice of your citizens?

  CLINIAS: Obviously, every legislator would say ‘Yes’.

  ATHENIAN: ‘Well, you’d like a safe test without any serious risks, wouldn’t you? Or do you prefer one full of risks?’

  CLINIAS: They will all agree to this as well: safety is essential.

  ATHENIAN: ‘Your procedure would be to test these people’s reactions [c] when they had been put into a state of alarm, and by encouraging, rebuking and rewarding individuals you would compel them to become fearless. You would inflict disgrace on anyone who disobeyed and refused to become in every respect the kind of man you wanted; you would discharge without penalty anyone who had displayed the proper courage and finished his training satisfactorily; and the failures you would punish. Or would you refuse point-blank to apply the test, even though you had nothing against the drink in other respects?’

  CLINIAS: Of course he would apply it, sir.

  ATHENIAN: Anyway, my friend, compared with current practice, this training would be remarkably straightforward, and would suit individuals, [d] small groups, and any larger numbers you may want. Now if a man retreated into some decent obscurity, out of embarrassment at the thought of being seen before he is in good shape, and trained against his fears alone and in privacy, equipped with just this drink instead of all the usual paraphernalia, he would be entirely justified. But he would be no less justified if, confident that he was already well equipped by birth and breeding, he were to plunge into training with several fellow drinkers. [e] While inevitably roused by the wine, he would show himself strong enough to escape its other effects: his virtue would prevent him from committing even one serious improper act, and from becoming a different kind of person. Before getting to the last round he would leave off, fearing the way in which drink invariably gets the better of a man.

  CLINIAS: Yes, sir, even he would be prudent enough to do that.

  [649] ATHENIAN: Let’s repeat the point we were making to the legislator: ‘Agreed then: there is probably no such thing as a drug to produce fear, either by divine gift or human contrivance (I leave quacks out of account: they’re beyond the pale). But is there a drink that will banish fear and stimulate over-confidence about the wrong thing at the wrong moment? What do we say to this
?’

  CLINIAS: I suppose he’ll say ‘There is’, and mention wine.

  ATHENIAN: And doesn’t this do just the opposite of what we described a moment ago? When a man drinks it, it immediately makes him more [b] cheerful than he was before; the more he takes, the more it fills him with boundless optimism: he thinks he can do anything. Finally, bursting with self-esteem and imposing no restraint on his speech and actions, the fellow loses all his inhibitions and becomes completely fearless: he’ll say and do anything, without a qualm. Everybody, I think, would agree with us about this.

  CLINIAS: Certainly.

  ATHENIAN: Now let’s think back again to this point: we said that there were two elements in our souls that should be cultivated, one of them in order to make ourselves supremely confident, its opposite to make ourselves [c] supremely fearful.

  CLINIAS: The latter being modesty, I suppose.

  ATHENIAN: Well remembered! But in view of the fact that one has to learn to be courageous and intrepid when assailed by fears, the question arises whether the opposite quality will have to be cultivated in opposite circumstances.

  CLINIAS: Probably so.

  ATHENIAN: So the conditions in which we naturally become unusually bold and daring seem to be precisely those required for practice in reducing our shamelessness and audacity to the lowest possible level, so that we become terrified of ever venturing to say, suffer, or do anything disgraceful. [d]

  CLINIAS: Apparently.

  ATHENIAN: Now aren’t we affected in this way by all the following conditions—anger, love, pride, ignorance and cowardice? We can add wealth, beauty, strength and everything else that turns us into fools and makes us drunk with pleasure. However, we are looking for an inexpensive and less harmful test we can apply to people, which will also give us a chance to train them, and this we have in the scrutiny we can make of them when they are relaxed over a drink. Can we point to a more suitable [e] pleasure than this—provided some appropriate precautions are taken? Let’s look at it in this way. Suppose you have a man with an irritable and savage temper (this is the source of a huge number of crimes). Surely, to make contracts with him, and run the risk that he may default, is a more dangerous way to test him than to keep him company during a festival [650] of Dionysus? Or again, if a man’s whole being is dominated by sexual pleasures, it is dangerous to try him out by putting him in charge of your wife and sons and daughters; this is to scrutinize the character of his soul at the price of exposing to risk those whom you hold most dear. You could cite dozens of other instances, and still not do justice to the superiority of this wholly innocuous ‘examination by recreation’. In fact, I think neither the Cretans nor any other people would disagree if we summed it all up [b] like this: we have here a pretty fair test of each other, which for cheapness, safety and speed is absolutely unrivaled.

  CLINIAS: True so far.

  ATHENIAN: So this insight into the nature and disposition of a man’s soul will rank as one of the most useful aids available to the art which is concerned to foster a good character—the art of statesmanship, I take it?

  CLINIAS: Certainly.

  1. Odyssey xix.178–79. Minos was a legendary king of Crete.

  2. Athena, goddess of wisdom and patron of Athens in Attica.

  3. Clinias is struck by the paradox that when ‘inferior’ numbers conquer, the state is morally ‘superior’, and when ‘superior’ numbers conquer, it is morally ‘inferior’.

  4. Tyrtaeus (mid-seventh century) was noted for his poems in praise of courage in war. The Athenian quotes the first line of the poem verbatim and then summarizes the next nine; at 629e he gives a somewhat adapted quotation of lines 11 and 12. For the whole poem see J. M. Edmonds, Elegy and Iambus (Loeb), vol. I, pp. 74–77.

  5. Theognis (late sixth century) belonged to the landed gentry of Megara (probably the Megara near Athens, in spite of what is said here). He wrote lively, indignant poems from a conservative point of view about the social and political changes of his day. Some 1400 lines of his work survive: see J. M. Edmonds, Elegy and Iambus (Loeb), vol. I, pp. 216–401. The Athenian quotes lines 77–78.

  6. See Tyrtaeus 16–18.

  7. Traditional founders of the Spartan and Cretan constitutions.

  8. Plutus, the god of wealth, was traditionally represented as blind.

  9. An official organization of young Spartans, who had the job of keeping the Spartan slave class (helots) in subjection.

  10. A handsome boy carried off to be Zeus’ companion and cupbearer: see Homer, Iliad xx.231 ff.

  11. Accepting the conjecture of turous in c5.

  12. Compare our expression ‘Pyrrhic victory’, i.e., one which is more disastrous for the victors than the vanquished. Cadmus, founder of Thebes, sowed the teeth of a dragon; armed men sprang up and killed each other.

  13. A proxenos looked after the interests of a foreign state in his own country.

  14. Clinias’ chronology is a trifle confused. He thinks that Epimenides, a seer and wonderworker, lived about 500 B.C., which is 100 years later than his actual date.

  15. See 626e.

  16. Cf. 620d ff.

  Book II

  [652] ATHENIAN: It looks as if the next question we have to ask is this: is the insight we somehow get into men’s natural temperaments the only thing in favor of drinking parties? Or does a properly run drinking party confer some other substantial benefit that we ought to consider very seriously? What do we say to this? We need to be careful here: as far as I can see, our argument does tend to point to the answer ‘Yes’, but when we try to [b] discover how and in what sense, we may get tripped up by it.

  CLINIAS: Tell us why, then.

  ATHENIAN: I want to think back over our definition of correct education, [653] and to hazard the suggestion now that drinking parties are actually its safeguard, provided they are properly established and conducted on the right lines.

  CLINIAS: That’s a large claim!

  ATHENIAN: I maintain that the earliest sensations that a child feels in infancy are of pleasure and pain, and this is the route by which virtue and vice first enter the soul. (But for a man to acquire good judgment, and unshakable correct opinions, however late in life, is a matter of good luck: a man who possesses them, and all the benefits they entail, is perfect.) [b] I call ‘education’ the initial acquisition of virtue by the child, when the feelings of pleasure and affection, pain and hatred, that well up in his soul are channeled in the right courses before he can understand the reason why. Then when he does understand, his reason and his emotions agree in telling him that he has been properly trained by inculcation of appropriate habits. Virtue is this general concord of reason and emotion. But there is one element you could isolate in any account you give, and this is the [c] correct formation of our feelings of pleasure and pain, which makes us hate what we ought to hate from first to last, and love what we ought to love. Call this ‘education’, and I, at any rate, think you would be giving it its proper name.

  CLINIAS: Yes, sir, we entirely approve of what you have just said about education and that goes for your previous account, too.1

  ATHENIAN: Splendid. Education, then, is a matter of correctly disciplined feelings of pleasure and pain. But in the course of a man’s life the effect wears off, and in many respects it is lost altogether. The gods, however, [d] took pity on the human race, born to suffer as it was, and gave it relief in the form of religious festivals to serve as periods of rest from its labors. They gave us the Muses, with Apollo their leader, and Dionysus; by having these gods to share their holidays, men were to be made whole again, and thanks to them, we find refreshment in the celebration of these festivals. Now, there is a theory which we are always having dinned into our ears: let’s see if it squares with the facts or not. It runs like this: virtually all young things find it impossible to keep their bodies still and their tongues quiet. They are always trying to move around and cry out; some jump [e] and skip and do a kind of gleeful dance as they play with each other, wh
ile others produce all sorts of noises. And whereas animals have no sense of order and disorder in movement (‘rhythm’ and ‘harmony’, as we call it), we human beings have been made sensitive to both and can enjoy them. This is the gift of the same gods whom we said were given to us [654] as companions in dancing; it is the device which enables them to be our chorus-leaders and stimulate us to movement, making us combine to sing and dance—and as this naturally2 ‘charms’ us, they invented the word ‘chorus’.3 So shall we take it that this point is established? Can we assume that education comes originally from Apollo and the Muses, or not?

  CLINIAS: Yes.

  ATHENIAN: So by an ‘uneducated’ man we shall mean a man who has not been trained to take part in a chorus; and we must say that if a man [b] has been sufficiently trained, he is ‘educated’.

  CLINIAS: Naturally.

  ATHENIAN: And of course a performance by a chorus is a combination of dancing and singing?

  CLINIAS: Of course.

  ATHENIAN: And this means that the well-educated man will be able both to sing and dance well?

  CLINIAS: So it seems.

  ATHENIAN: Now let’s see just what that word implies.

  CLINIAS: What word?

  ATHENIAN: We say ‘he sings well’ or ‘he dances well’. But should we [c] expand this and say ‘provided he sings good songs and dances good dances’? Or not?

  CLINIAS: Yes, we should expand it.

  ATHENIAN: Now then, take a man whose opinion about what is good is correct (it really is good), and likewise in the case of the bad (it really is bad), and follows this judgment in practice. He may be able to represent, by word and gesture, and with invariable success, his intellectual conception of what is good, even though he gets no pleasure from it and feels no hatred for what is bad. Another man may not be very good at keeping [d] on the right lines when he uses his body and his voice to represent the good, or at trying to form some intellectual conception of it; but he may be very much on the right lines in his feelings of pleasure and pain, because he welcomes what is good and loathes what is bad. Which of these two will be the better educated musically, and the more effective member of a chorus?