Complete Works (306 page)

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
dis
repute 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

A
THENIAN
: 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.

C
LINIAS
: You’re quite right, it does.

A
THENIAN
: 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?

C
LINIAS
: Of course.

[d] A
THENIAN
: 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?

C
LINIAS
: Certainly.

A
THENIAN
: 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.

C
LINIAS
: That’s true.

[789]
A
THENIAN
: But we’re aware that rapid growth without frequent and appropriately graded exercises leads to a lot of trouble for the body?

C
LINIAS
: Yes, indeed.

A
THENIAN
: And isn’t it precisely when a body is getting most nourishment that it needs most exercise?

C
LINIAS
: Good Heavens, sir, are we going to demand such a thing of new-born babies and little children?

A
THENIAN
: No—I mean even earlier, when they’re getting nourishment in their mother’s body.

C
LINIAS
: What’s that you say? My dear sir! Do you really mean in the womb?

[b] A
THENIAN
: 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.

C
LINIAS
: Do so, of course.

A
THENIAN
: 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.

C
LINIAS
: You mean …

A
THENIAN
: … the tremendous ridicule we’d provoke. And the nurses (women and slaves, with characters to match) would refuse to obey us anyway.

C
LINIAS
: Then why did we insist that the rules should be specified?

A
THENIAN
: 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.

C
LINIAS
: Yes, that’s all very reasonable.

A
THENIAN
: 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.

C
LINIAS
: Good idea.

A
THENIAN
: 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

C
LINIAS
: Well then, sir, have we any particular explanation for all this?

A
THENIAN
: The reason’s not very hard to find.

C
LINIAS
: What is it?

A
THENIAN
: 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.

C
LINIAS
: Yes, indeed.

A
THENIAN
: 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.

C
LINIAS
: Of course.

[c] A
THENIAN
: Contrariwise, we’d agree that a training in courage right from infancy demands that we overcome the terrors and fears that assail us?

C
LINIAS
: Exactly.

A
THENIAN
: 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.

C
LINIAS
: Certainly.

A
THENIAN
: Further, good humor and bad humor will be a conspicuous element in a good or bad moral character respectively.

C
LINIAS
: Of course.

A
THENIAN
: 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.

C
LINIAS
: Quite so.

A
THENIAN
: 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.

C
LINIAS
: 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?

A
THENIAN
: 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.

C
LINIAS
: He certainly is.

A
THENIAN
: 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).