Spartan and Cretan laws, then, excel in making a man resist fear, but they fail when it comes to resisting the temptations of pleasure; they give a man courage, but not self-control. The smug remark of Megillus, that Sparta does not tolerate drunkenness, now gives the Athenian the opportunity to suggest – to the scandalized amazement of his companions – that a degree of inebriation may in fact be a valuable educational tool, in two ways: (1) a man reveals his true character under the influence of wine; (2) just as Sparta and Crete trained their young men to be fearless by encouraging them to resist their fears in conditions in which they would be likely to be moderately afraid (e.g. various athletic and military exercises), so a man can be made to acquire self-control by being exposed to conditions in which he is likely to be particularly licentious – the drinking party. Being taught by encouragement and threats to resist temptation when mildly drunk is a valuable exercise in self-control. Drinking parties are therefore eminently ‘educational’, because education is essentially a training in virtue (not simply in a given trade or vocation), as the digression on the nature and purpose of education makes clear.
The theme that Spartan and Cretan institutions are inadequate is not dropped, but develops into something more positive. Courage (the resistance to fear), besides being harmful when overstressed, is not the only virtue necessary; self-control, which the Spartans and Cretans achieved, if at all, only by a total repression of the desire for pleasure, is more effectively cultivated by moderate indulgence.
TEETOTALLERS MISGUIDED
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 Cnossos, if he wants to). The Spartan law relating to pleasures seems to me the best you could find anywhere. It has completely [637a] 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 merrymaker he happened [b] 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,1 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 come back at you tit for [c] 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 [d] general 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 – [e] belligerent races, all of them. 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.
[638a] 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 or demerits of a given practice. Larger states, you see, defeat smaller ones in [b] 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 cheese 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 the state of health required of those who eat it). But this is just what I think we are [d] 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 teetotallers 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.
MEGILLUS: Certainly, if a correct method of inquiry into such matters is available, we ought not to shy away from hearing [639a] what it is.
ATHENIAN: Let us conduct the inquiry more or less like this: suppose somebody were to praise goat-keeping, and commended the goat as a valuable article of possession; suppose somebody else were to disparage goats because he had seen some doing damage to cultivated land by grazing on it without a goatherd, and were to find similar fault with every animal he saw under incompetent control or none at all. What do we think of the censure of someone like that? Does it carry any weight at all?
MEGILLUS: Hardly.
ATHENIAN: If a man possesses only the science of navigation, can we say that he will be a useful captain on board a ship, and ignore the question whether he suffers from sea-sickness [b] or not? Can we say that, or can’t we?
MEGILLUS: Certainly not, at any rate if, for all his skill, he’s prone to the complaint you mention.
ATHENIAN: What about the commander of an army? Is he capable of taking command just by virtue of military skill, in spite of being a coward in face of danger? The ‘sea-sickness’ in this case is produced by being, as it were, drunk with terror.
MEGILLUS: Hardly a capable commander, that.
ATHENIAN: And what if he combines cowardice with incompetence?
MEGILLUS: You are describing a downright useless fellow – a commander of the daintiest of dainty women, not of men at all.
[c] ATHENIAN: Take any social gathering you like, which functions naturally under a leader and serves a useful purpose under his guidance: what are we to think of the observer who praises or censures it although he has never seen it gathered together and running properly under its leader, but always with bad leaders or none at all? Given that kind of observer and that kind of gathering, do we reckon that his blame or praise will have any value?
MEGILLUS: How could it, when he has never seen or joined [d] any of these gatherings run in the proper way?
ATHENIAN: Hold on a moment. There are many kinds of gatherings, and presumably we’d say drinkers and drinking parties were one?
MEGILLUS: Of course.
ATHENIAN: Has anyone ever seen such a gathering run in the proper way? You two, of course, find the answer easy: ‘Never, absolutely never’; drinking parties are just not held in your countries, besides being illegal. But I have come across a great many, in different places, and I have investigated pretty nearly [e] all of them. However, I have never seen or heard of one that was properly conducted throughout; one could approve of a few insignificant details, but most of them were mismanaged virtually all the time.
CLEINIAS: What are you getting at, sir? Be a little more explicit. As you said, we have no experience of such events, so that even if we did find ourselves at one we would probably be [640a] unable to tell off-hand which features were correct and which not.
ATHENIAN: Very likely. But you can try to understand from my explanation. You appreciate that each and every assembly and gathering for any purpose whatever should invariably have a leader?
CLEINIAS: Of course.
ATHENIAN: We said a moment ago that if it is a case of men fighting, their leader must be brave.
CLEINIAS: Yes, indeed.
ATHENIAN: And a brave man, surely, is less thrown off balance by fears than cowards are.
CLEINIAS: That too is true enough. [b]
ATHENIAN: If there were some device by which we could put in charge of an army a commander who was completely fearless and imperturbable, this is what we should make every effort to do, surely?
CLEINIAS: It certainly is.
ATHENIAN: But the man we are discussing now is not going to take the lead in hostile encounters as between enemies, but in the peaceful meetings of friends with friends, gathering to foster mutual goodwill.
CLEINIAS: Exactly.
ATHENIAN: But we can assume that this sort of assembly will [c] get rather drunk, so it won’t be free of a certain amount of disturbance, I suppose.
CLEINIAS: Of course not – I imagine precisely the opposite.
ATHENIAN: To start with, then, the members of the gathering will need a leader?
CLEINIAS: Of course they will, more than anybody else.
ATHENIAN: Presumably we should if possible equip them with a leader who can keep his head?
CLEINIAS: Naturally.
ATHENIAN: And he should also, presumably, be a man who knows how to handle a social gathering, because his duty is not only to preserve the existing friendliness among its members, but to see that it is strengthened as a result of the [d] party.
CLEINIAS: Quite true.
ATHENIAN: So, when men become merry with drink, don’t they need someone put in charge of them who is sober and discreet rather than the opposite? If the man in charge of the revellers were himself a drinker, or young and indiscreet, he ought to thank his lucky stars if he managed to avoid starting some serious trouble.
CLEINIAS: Lucky? I’ll say so!
ATHENIAN: Consequently, an attack on such gatherings in cities where they are conducted impeccably might not in itself amount to unjustified criticism, provided the critic were [e] attacking the institution itself. But if he abuses the institution simply because he sees every possible mistake being made in running it, he clearly does not realize, first, that this is a case of mismanagement, and secondly that any and every practice will appear in the same light if it is carried on without a sober leader to control it. Surely you appreciate that a drunken [641a] steersman, or any commander of anything, will always make a total wreck of his ship or chariot or army, or whatever else he may be directing?
CAN DRINKING PARTIES BE EDUCATIONAL?
CLEINIAS: Yes, sir, there’s truth in that, certainly. But the next step is for you to tell us what conceivable benefit this custom of drinking parties would be to us, given proper management. For instance, to take our example of a moment ago, if an army were properly controlled, its soldiers would win the war and this would be a considerable benefit, and the same reasoning applies to our other instances. But what solid [b] benefit would it be to individuals or the state to instruct a drinking party how to behave itself?
ATHENIAN: Well, what solid benefit are we to say it is to the state when just one lad or just one chorus2 of them has been properly instructed? If the question were put like that, we should say that the state gets very little benefit from just one; but ask in general what great benefit the state derives from the training by which it educates its citizens, and the reply will be perfectly straightforward. The good education they have received will make them good men, and being good they will achieve success in other ways, and even conquer their [c] enemies in battle. Education leads to victory; but victory, on occasions, results in the loss of education, because men often swell with pride when they have won a victory in war, and this pride fills them with a million other vices. Men have won many ‘Cadmeian victories’, and will win many more, but there has never been such a thing as ‘Cadmeian education’.3
CLEINIAS: It looks to us, my friend, as if you mean to imply that passing the time with friends over a drink – provided we behave ourselves – is a considerable contribution to education. [d]
ATHENIAN: Most certainly.
CLEINIAS: Well then, could you now produce some justification for this view?
ATHENIAN: Justification? Only a god, sir, would be entitled to insist that this view is correct – there are so many conflicting opinions. But if necessary I am quite prepared to give my own, now that we have launched into a discussion of laws and political organizations.
CLEINIAS: This is precisely what we are trying to discover – your own opinion of the business we are now debating. [e]
INTERLUDE: THE ATHENIAN PRESSED FOR AN ANSWER
ATHENIAN: Well then, let that be our agenda: you have to direct your efforts to understanding the argument, while I direct mine to expounding it as clearly as I can. But first listen to this, by way of preface: you’ll find every Greek takes it for granted that my city likes talking and does a great deal of it, whereas Sparta is a city of few words and Crete cultivates the intellect rather than the tongue. I don’t want to make you feel that I am saying an awful lot about a triviality, if I deal [642a] exhaustively and at length with such a limited topic as drinking. In fact, the genuinely correct way to regulate drinking can hardly be explained adequately and clearly except in the context of a correct theory of culture; and it is impossible to explain this without considering the whole subject of education. That calls for a very long discussion indeed. So what do you think we ought to do now? What about skipping all [b] this for the moment, and passing on to some other legal topic?
MEGILLUS: As it happens, sir – perhaps you haven’t heard – my family represents the interests of your state, Athens, in Sparta. I dare say all children, when they learn they are proxeni4 of a state, conceive a liking for it from their earliest years; each of us thinks of the state he represents as a fatherland, second only to his own country. This is exactly my [c] own experience now. When the Spartans were criticizing or praising the Athenians, I used to hear the little children say, ‘Megillus, your state has done the dirty on us’, or, ‘it has done us proud.’ By listening to all this and constantly resisting on your behalf the charges of Athens’ detractors, I acquired a whole-hearted affection for her, so that to this day I very much enjoy the sound of your accent. It is commonly said that when an Athenian is good, he is ‘very very good’, and I’m sure that’s right. They are unique in that they are good not because of any compulsion, but spontaneously, by grace [d] of heaven; it is all so genuine and unfeigned. So you’re welcome to speak as long as you like, so far as I’m concerned.
CLEINIAS: I endorse your freedom to say as much as you like, sir: you’ll see that when you’ve heard what I have to say, too. You have probably heard that Epimenides, a man who was divinely inspired, was born hereabouts. He was connected [e] with my family, and ten years before the Persian attack he obeyed the command of the oracle to go to Athens,5 where he performed certain sacrifices which the god had ordered. He told the Athenians, who were apprehensive at the preparations the Persians were making, that the Persians would not come for ten years, and that when they did, they would go back with all their intentions frustrated, after sustaining greater losses than they had inflicted. That was when my ancestors formed ties of friendship with you Athenians, and ever since then my forebears and I have held you in affection. [643a]
THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF EDUCATION (1)
ATHENIAN: Well then, on your part you are prepared to listen, apparently; on my side, I am ready and willing to go ahead, but the job will certainly tax my abilities. Still, the effort must be made. To assist the argument, we ought to take the preliminary step of defining education and its potentialities, because we have ventured on a discussion which is intended to lead us to the god of wine, and we are agreed that education is as it were the route we have to take.
CLEINIAS: Certainly let’s do that, if you like.
ATHENIAN: I am going to explain how one should describe [b] education: see if you approve of my account.
CLEINIAS: Your explanation, then, please.
ATHENIAN: It is this: I insist that a man who intends to be good at a particular occupation must practise it from childhood: both at work and at play he must be surrounded by the special ‘tools of the trade’. For instance, the man who intends to be a good farmer must play at farming, and the man who is to be a good builder must spend his playtime building toy houses; [c] and in each case the teacher must provide miniature tools that copy the real thing. In particular, in this elementary stage they must learn the essential elementary skills. For example, the carpenter must learn in his play how to handle a rule and plumb-line, and the soldier must learn to ride a horse (either by actually doing it, in play, or by some similar activity).6 We should try to use the children’s games to channel their pleasures and desires towards the activities in which they will have to engage when they are adult. To sum up, we say that the correct way to bring up and educate a child is to use his [d] playtime to imbue his soul with the greatest possible liking for the occupation in which he will have to be absolutely perfect when he grows up. Now, as I suggested, consider the argument so far: do you approve of my account?
CLEINIAS: Of course.
ATHENIAN: But let’s not leave our description of education in the air. When we abuse or commend the upbringing of individual people and say that one of us is educated and the other uneducated, we sometimes use this latter term of men who have in fact had a thorough education – one directed [e] towards petty trade or the merchant-shipping business, or something like that. But I take it that for the purpose of the present discussion we are not going to treat this sort of thing as ‘education’; what we have in mind is education from childhood in virtue, a training which produces a keen desire to become a perfect citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled [644a] as justice demands. I suppose we should want to mark off this sort of training from others and reserve the title ‘education’ for it alone. A training directed to acquiring money or a robust physique, or even to some intellectual facility not guided by reason and justice, we should want to call coarse and illiberal, and say that it had no claim whatever to be called education. Still, let’s not quibble over a name; let’s stick to the proposition we agreed on just now: as a rule, men with a correct education become good, and nowhere in the world [b] should education be despised, for when combined with great virtue, it is an asset of incalculable value. If it ever becomes corrupt, but can be put right again, this is a lifelong task which everyone should undertake to the limit of his strength.
CLEINIAS: True. We agree with your description.
ATHENIAN: Here is a further point on which we agreed some time ago:7 those who can control themselves are good, those who cannot are bad.
CLEINIAS: Perfectly correct.
ATHENIAN: Let’s take up this point again and consider even [c] more closely just what we mean. Perhaps you’ll let me try to clarify the issue by means of an illustration.
CLEINIAS: By all means.
ATHENIAN: Are we to assume, then, that each of us is a single individual?
CLEINIAS: Yes.
ATHENIAN: But that he possesses within himself a pair of witless and mutually antagonistic advisers, which we call pleasure and pain?
CLEINIAS: That is so.
ATHENIAN: In addition to these two, he has opinions about the future, whose general name is ‘expectations’. Specifically, the anticipation of pain is called ‘fear’, and the anticipation of the opposite is called ‘confidence’. Over and against all [d] these we have ‘calculation’, by which we judge the relative merits of pleasure and pain, and when this is expressed as a public decision of a state, it receives the title ‘law’.
CLEINIAS: I can scarcely follow you; but assume I do, and carry on with what comes next.
MEGILLUS: Yes, I’m in the same difficulty.
ATHENIAN: I suggest we look at the problem in this way: let’s imagine that each of us living beings is a puppet of the gods. Whether we have been constructed to serve as their plaything, or for some serious reason, is something beyond our ken, but what we certainly do know is this: we have these emotions in [e] us, which act like cords or strings and tug us about; they work in opposition, and tug against each other to make us perform actions that are opposed correspondingly; back and forth we go across the boundary line where vice and virtue meet. One of these dragging forces, according to our argument, demands our constant obedience, and this is the one we have to hang on to, come what may; the pull of the other cords we must resist. This cord, which is golden and holy, transmits the [645a] power of ‘calculation’, a power which in a state is called the public law; being golden, it is pliant, while the others, whose composition resembles a variety of other substances, are tough and inflexible. The force exerted by law is excellent, and one should always co-operate with it, because although ‘calculation’ is a noble thing, it is gentle, not violent, and its efforts need assistants, so that the gold in us may prevail over the other substances. If we do give our help, the moral point of this fable, in which we appear as puppets, will have been [b] well and truly made; the meaning of the terms ‘self-superior’ and ‘self-inferior’8 will somehow become clearer, and the duties of state and individual will be better appreciated. The latter must digest the truth about these forces that pull him, and act on it in his life; the state must get an account of it either from one of the gods or from the human expert we’ve mentioned, and incorporate it in the form of a law to govern both its internal affairs and its relations with other states. A further result will be a clearer distinction between virtue and [c] vice; the light cast on that problem will perhaps in turn help to clarify the subject of education and the various other practices, particularly the business of drinking parties. It may well be thought that this is a triviality on which a great deal too much has been said, but equally it may turn out that the topic really does deserve this extended discussion.
THE EDUCATIONAL EFFECT OF DRINKING PARTIES (1)
CLEINIAS: You are quite right; we certainly ought to give full consideration to anything that deserves our attention in the ‘symposium’ we are having now.
[d] ATHENIAN: Well then, tell me: if we give drink to this puppet of ours, what effect do we have on it?
CLEINIAS: What’s your purpose in harking back to that question?
ATHENIAN: No particular purpose, for the moment. I’m just asking, in a general way, what effect is had on something when it is associated with something else. I’ll try to explain my meaning even more clearly. This is what I’m asking; does drinking wine make pleasures and pains, anger and love, more intense?
CLEINIAS: Very much so.
[e] ATHENIAN: What about sensations, memory, opinions and thought? Do these too become more intense? Or rather, don’t they entirely desert a man if he fills himself with drink?
CLEINIAS: Yes, they desert him entirely.
ATHENIAN: So he reverts to the mental state he was in as a young child?
CLEINIAS: Indeed.
ATHENIAN: And it’s then that his self-control would be at its lowest?
CLEINIAS: Yes, at its lowest. [646a]
ATHENIAN: A man in that condition, we agree, is very bad indeed.9
CLEINIAS: Very.
ATHENIAN: So it looks as if it’s not only an old man who will go through a second childhood, but the drunkard too.
CLEINIAS: 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?
CLEINIAS: Apparently there is; at any rate, this is what you say, and a minute ago you were ready to produce it.
ATHENIAN: A correct reminder; I’m ready still, now that you [b] have both said you would be glad to listen to me.
CLEINIAS: 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?
CLEINIAS: Yes.
ATHENIAN: And what about degradation of the body, my friend – emaciation, disfigurement, ugliness, impotence? Shouldn’t we be startled to find a man voluntarily reducing himself to such a state? [c]
CLEINIAS: 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?
CLEINIAS: 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] CLEINIAS: Most certainly.
ATHENIAN: So shouldn’t we look at the other practices in the same light?
CLEINIAS: 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.
CLEINIAS: 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] CLEINIAS: 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?
CLEINIAS: Which?
ATHENIAN: These: when we expect evils to occur, we are in fear of them, I suppose?
CLEINIAS: Yes.
ATHENIAN: And we often fear for our reputation, when we imagine we are going to get a bad name for doing or saying [647a] something disgraceful. This is the fear which we, and I fancy everyone else, call ‘shame’.
CLEINIAS: 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.10
CLEINIAS: 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 [b] could suffer, whether in his private or his public life.
CLEINIAS: True.
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.
CLEINIAS: Exactly.
ATHENIAN: Every individual should therefore become both afraid and unafraid, for the reasons we have distinguished in [c] each case.
CLEINIAS: 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.
CLEINIAS: 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 feelings of cowardice before he can achieve perfect courage; if he has no [d] 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?
CLEINIAS: It would seem hardly likely.
ATHENIAN: Well then, has any god given men a drug to produce [e] fear, so that the more a man agrees to drink of it, the more the impression grows on him, after every draught, 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 [648a] terror; but when he had recovered from the drink and slept it off, he would invariably be himself again.
CLEINIAS: 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 be particularly [b] glad to have a criterion of the courage and cowardice of your citizens?’
CLEINIAS: 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?’
CLEINIAS: They will all agree to this as well: safety is essential.
ATHENIAN: ‘Your procedure would be to test these people’s reactions when they had been put into a state of alarm, [c] 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?’
CLEINIAS: 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, small groups and any larger numbers [d] 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. While inevitably roused [e] 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.
CLEINIAS: Yes, sir, even he would be prudent enough to do that.
ATHENIAN: Let’s repeat the point we were making to the legislator: ‘Agreed then: there is probably no such thing as a [649a] 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?’
CLEINIAS: 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?11 When a man drinks it, it immediately makes him more cheerful than he was before; [b] 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.
CLEINIAS: 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 supremely [c] fearful.
CLEINIAS: 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.12
CLEINIAS: 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 [d] venturing to say, suffer, or do anything disgraceful.
CLEINIAS: Apparently.
ATHENIAN: Now aren’t we affected in this way13 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 [e] more suitable 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 [650a] during a festival 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 [b] any other people would disagree if we summed it all up like this: we have here a pretty fair test of each other, which for cheapness, safety and speed is absolutely unrivalled.
CLEINIAS: 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?
CLEINIAS: Certainly.