The Athenian has established drinking parties as a respectable educational device; he now goes further, and suggests they are in fact the ‘safeguard’ of education, provided they are properly run. How this can be so appears only at the end of the section, and meanwhile the Athenian launches into a discussion of the role of the arts in education.
He first describes education as the correct discipline of the feelings of pleasure and pain; this is the route by which virtue first enters the soul of a child. The arts are important because they reinforce this discipline in adult life. The assumption here – a very prominent one in Plato – is that when we enjoy the representation of men and their actions in the various art forms (whether we compose or perform ourselves, or see others performing), we are fired with the desire to imitate them. It is therefore vital that art should portray ‘good’ men attractively and ‘bad’ men unattractively, and if a poem or a play does this it is conforming to ‘good’ and ‘correct’ artistic standards. The assumption that the arts affect our moral character is not the only view it is possible to take of them, and indeed it would be widely challenged today. Even if we grant the assumption, we are faced with the further difficulty of deciding who the ‘good’ man is; but the Athenian only suggests that it will be the job of elderly, virtuous and well-educated citizens to decide canons of artistic merit, and his companions are (naturally) only too ready to agree. Plato is not in favour of allowing free choice in the adoption of artistic and moral standards; he is firmly on the side of censorship.
Once we grant the educational purpose of the arts, the conclusions of the central part of this section follow without much difficulty. (1) Obviously pleasure tout court will not be the only proper criterion of artistic merit (a view that roused Plato’s particular loathing), but the pleasure felt by the virtuous. (2) Proper artistic forms and standards, once discovered, should be finalized and consecrated, as they have been in Egypt, and the constant search for novelty abandoned. (3) The arts should never teach that an unjust man can be happy. This is a point on which Cleinias and Megillus feel very doubtful – after all, rogues do seem, in fact, to live happy enough lives. The Athenian attempts no real refutation, but merely points to the paradox of supposing that the gods make the unjust man happier and more blessed than the just. (4) The lawgiver’s job is to find the most effective means of persuading his entire community, especially children, to believe that injustice can never lead to happiness, and of embodying this doctrine in the art forms of the state.
The subject of drinking, which seemed to have been dropped, is now resumed in a rather surprising way. To show how drinking parties can ‘safeguard’ education, the Athenian introduces his ‘third chorus’. In addition to the other choruses in a state, there should be a special one composed of older men, who will sing the ‘best’ songs. If we take the hints in 666–7, we can see that this is a picturesque way of saying that the old men will lay down the artistic standards to be observed by the state at large. But the old, though wise and virtuous, tend to be unduly austere; a sober intoxication, so to speak, will ensure that they are suitably mellowed. The qualifications of this ‘third chorus’ are discussed in somewhat technical detail: its members must have an accurate knowledge of (1) what is being represented in the arts (here their age and experience will count); (2) how well it is represented – the fidelity of copy to original and the suitability of the artistic style used to represent it; (3) the moral effect of the representation. Plato’s language seems at times to imply that fidelity of copy to original is a major criterion of a work of art; in fact, he is much more concerned that it should imitate beauty and goodness itself (668dff.) by displaying the correct proportions and rhythms etc. Under (2) and (3) comes a strong attack on various contemporary artistic trends, notably the desire for striking novelties and the increasing separation of the component parts of Greek ‘music,’ i.e. song, dance and accompaniment.
Finally, the Athenian sums up and tantalizes Cleinias and Megillus with the prospect of a discussion of gymnastics. But it is soon apparent that he has no intention of meeting their wishes, and in §4 he takes up an entirely fresh topic, the origins of civilization.
NOTE ON THE MUSICAL TERMINOLOGY. The kind of Greek ‘music’ in which Plato was particularly interested consisted of a combination of singing and dancing, performed by ‘choruses’ to instrumental accompaniment; it is a difficult topic, and many of the technical details remain obscure. The Athenian analyses ‘music’ into two basic constituents, movement and sound. In the case of the body, ‘postures’ and ‘gestures’ seem too narrow to translate schemata and I prefer the flat but comprehensive term ‘movements’. ‘Harmony’ is described by the Athenian (665a) as ‘order in the vocal sounds – the combination of high and low notes’. The word harmonia was often used to mean ‘style’ or ‘mode’ (e.g. Lydian or Doric), and the various modes were commonly associated with particular kinds of theme and treatment, but as the Athenian is concerned to isolate and analyse the various elements in music, the technical term ‘harmony’ seems more appropriate than ‘mode’. ‘Rhythm’ is called ‘order in movement’, and is of course shared by both the movements of the body and the vocal sounds that accompany them (672e). For Plato’s views on music in general, see W. D. Anderson, Ethos and Education in Greek Music (Cambridge, Mass., 1966).
THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF EDUCATION (2)
ATHENIAN: It looks as if the next question we have to ask [BK 11] is this: is the insight we somehow get into men’s natural [652a] temperaments the only thing in favour 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 discover how and in what sense, we may [b] get tripped up by it.
CLEINIAS: Tell us why, then.
ATHENIAN: I want to think back over our definition of correct [653a] education, and to hazard the suggestion now that drinking parties are actually its safeguard, provided they are properly established and conducted on the right lines.
CLEINIAS: 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 judgement, and unshakeable 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.) I [b] 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 channelled 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 correct formation of our feelings of [c] 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.
CLEINIAS: Yes, sir, we entirely approve of what you have just said about education and that goes for your previous account, too.1
HOW THE ARTS SHOULD REINFORCE EDUCATION
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, took pity on the human race, [d] born to suffer as it was, and gave it relief in the form of religious festivals to serve as periods of rest from its labours. 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 [e] around and cry out; some jump and skip and do a kind of gleeful dance as they play with each other, while 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 [654a] who we said were given to us 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 naturally ‘charms’ us, they invented the word ‘chorus’.2 So shall we take it that this point is established? Can we assume that education comes originally from Apollo and the Muses, or not?
CLEINIAS: 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 has been sufficiently trained, he is [b] ‘educated’.
CLEINIAS: Naturally.
ATHENIAN: And of course a performance by a chorus is a combination of dancing and singing?
CLEINIAS: Of course.
ATHENIAN: And this means that the well-educated man will be able both to sing and dance well?
CLEINIAS: So it seems.
ATHENIAN: Now let’s see just what that word implies.
CLEINIAS: What word?
ATHENIAN: We say ‘he sings well’ or ‘he dances well’. But [c] should we expand this and say ‘provided he sings good songs and dances good dances’? Or not?
CLEINIAS: 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 judgement 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 [d] good at keeping 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?
CLEINIAS: As far as education is concerned, sir, the second is infinitely superior.
ATHENIAN: So if the three of us grasp what ‘goodness’ is in singing and dancing, we have also a sound criterion for distinguishing the educated man from the uneducated. If we fail to grasp it, we’ll never be able to make up our minds whether a safeguard for education exists, or where we ought [e] to look for it. Isn’t that so?
CLEINIAS: Yes, it is.
ATHENIAN: The next quarry we have to track down, like hounds at a hunt, will be what constitutes a ‘good’ bodily movement, tune, song and dance. But if all these notions give us the slip and get away, it will be pointless utterly to prolong our discussion of correct education, Greek or foreign.
CLEINIAS: Quite.
ATHENIAN: Good. Now, what is to be our definition of a good tune or bodily movement? Tell me – imagine a courageous soul and a cowardly soul beset by one and the same set of troubles: do similar sounds and movements of the body result [655a] in each case?
CLEINIAS: Of course not. The complexion is different, to start with.
ATHENIAN: You are absolutely right, my friend. But music is a matter of rhythm and harmony, and involves tunes and movements of the body; this means that while it is legitimate to speak of a ‘rhythmical’ or a ‘harmonious’ movement or tune, we cannot properly apply to either of them the chorus-masters’ metaphor ‘brilliantly coloured’.3 But what is the appropriate language to describe the movement and melody used to portray the brave man and the coward? The correct procedure is to call those of brave men ‘good’ and those of [b] cowards ‘disgraceful’. But let’s not have an inordinately long discussion about the details; can we say, without beating about the bush, that all movements and tunes associated with spiritual or bodily excellence (the real thing or a representation) are good? And conversely bad if they have to do with vice?
CLEINIAS: Yes, that’s a reasonable proposal. You may assume we agree.
IS PLEASURE THE PROPER CRITERION IN THE ARTS?
ATHENIAN: Here’s a further point: do we all enjoy every type of performance by a chorus to the same degree? Or is that far [c] from being true?
CLEINIAS: As far as it could be!
ATHENIAN: But can we put our finger on the cause of our confusion? Is it that ‘good’ varies from person to person? Or that it is thought to vary, although in point of fact it does not? No one, I fancy, will be prepared to say that dances portraying evil are better than those portraying virtue, or that although other people enjoy the virtuous Muse, his own personal liking is for movements expressing depravity. Yet [d] most men do maintain that the power of music to give pleasure to the soul is the standard by which it should be judged. But this is an insupportable doctrine, and it is absolute blasphemy to speak like that. More likely, though, it’s something else that’s misleading us.
CLEINIAS: What?
ATHENIAN: Performances given by choruses are representations of character, and deal with every variety of action and incident. The individual performers enact their roles partly by expressing their own characters, partly by imitating those of others. That is why, when they find that the speaking or singing or any other element in the performance of a chorus [e] appeals to their natural character or acquired habits, or both, they can’t help applauding with delight and using the term ‘good’. But sometimes they find these performances going against the grain of their natural character or their disposition or habits, in which case they are unable to take any pleasure in them and applaud them, and in this case the word they use is ‘shocking’. When a man’s natural character is as it should be, but he has acquired bad habits, or conversely when his habits are correct but his natural character is vicious, his pleasure and his approval fail to coincide: he calls the performances [656a] ‘pleasant, but depraved’. Such performers, in the company of others whose judgement they respect, are ashamed to make this kind of movement with their bodies, and to sing such songs as though they genuinely approved of them. But in their heart of hearts, they enjoy themselves.
CLEINIAS: You are quite right.
ATHENIAN: Now, does a man’s enjoyment of bad bodily movements or bad tunes do him any harm? And does it do him any good to take pleasure in the opposite kind?
CLEINIAS: Probably.
ATHENIAN: ‘Probably’? Is that all? Surely there must be a [b] precise analogy here with the man who comes into contact with depraved characters and wicked people, and who does not react with disgust, but welcomes them with pleasure, censuring them half-heartedly because he only half-realizes, as in a dream, how perverted such a state is: he just cannot escape taking on the character of what he enjoys, whether good or bad – even if he is ashamed to go so far as to applaud it. In fact we could hardly point to a greater force for good – or evil – than this inevitable assimilation of character.
CLEINIAS: No, I don’t think we could.
ARTISTIC CENSORSHIP IN EGYPT
ATHENIAN: So, in a society where the laws relating to culture, [c] education and recreation are, or will be in future, properly established, do we imagine that authors will be given a free hand? The choruses will be composed of the young children of law-abiding citizens: will the composer be free to teach them anything by way of rhythm, tune and words that amuses him when he composes, without bothering what effect he may have on them as regards virtue and vice?
CLEINIAS: That’s certainly not sensible; how could it be?
ATHENIAN: But it is precisely this that they are allowed to do [d] in virtually all states – except in Egypt.
CLEINIAS: Egypt! Well then, you’d better tell us what legislation has been enacted there.
ATHENIAN: Merely to hear about it is startling enough.4 Long ago, apparently, they realized the truth of the principle we are putting forward only now, that the movements and tunes which the children of the state are to practise in their rehearsals must be good ones. They compiled a list of them according to style, and displayed it in their temples. Painters [e] and everyone else who represent movements of the body of any kind were restricted to these forms; modification and innovation outside this traditional framework were prohibited, and are prohibited even today, both in this field and the arts in general. If you examine their art on the spot, you will find that ten thousand years ago (and I’m not speaking loosely: I mean literally ten thousand), paintings and reliefs [657a] were produced that are no better and no worse than those of today, because the same artistic rules were applied in making them.
CLEINIAS: Fantastic!
ATHENIAN: No: simply a supreme achievement of legislators and statesmen. You might, even so, find some other things to criticize there, but in the matter of music this inescapable fact deserves our attention: it has in fact proved feasible to take the kind of music that shows a natural correctness and put it on a firm footing by legislation. But it is the task of a god, or a man of god-like stature; in fact, the Egyptians do say that the [b] tunes that have been preserved for so long are compositions of Isis. Consequently, as I said, if one could get even a rough idea of what constitutes ‘correctness’ in matters musical, one ought to have no qualms about giving the whole subject systematic expression in the form of a law. It is true that the craving for pleasure and the desire to avoid tedium lead us to a constant search for novelty in music, and choral performances that have been thus consecrated may be stigmatized as out-of-date; but this does not have very much power to corrupt them. In Egypt, at any rate, it does not seem to have had a corrupting effect at all: quite the contrary.
[c] CLEINIAS: So it would seem, to judge from your account.
PROPER AND IMPROPER PLEASURES
ATHENIAN: So, equally without qualms, we can surely describe the proper conditions for festive music and performances of choruses more or less like this. When we think things are going well for us, we feel delight; and to put it the other way round, when we feel delight, we come to think that things are going well. Isn’t that so?
CLEINIAS: It is.
ATHENIAN: In addition, when we are in that state – I mean ‘delight’ – we can’t keep still.
CLEINIAS: That’s true.
ATHENIAN: Our youngsters are keen to join the dancing and [d] singing themselves, but we old men think the proper thing is to pass the time as spectators. The delight we feel comes from their relaxation and merry-making. Our agility is deserting us, and as we feel its loss we are only too pleased to provide competitions for the young, because they can best stir in us the memory of our youth and re-awaken the instincts of our younger days.
CLEINIAS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: So we’d better face the fact that there is a grain of truth in contemporary thought on the subject of holiday [e] makers. Most people say that the man who delights us most and gives us most pleasure should be highly esteemed for his skill, and deserves to be awarded first prize, because the fact that we are allowed to relax on such occasions means that we ought to lionize the man who gives most people most pleasure, so that, as I said just now, he deserves to carry off the prize. In theory that’s right, isn’t it? And wouldn’t it be equally right [658a] in practice?
CLEINIAS: Maybe.
ATHENIAN: Ah, my fine fellow, such a conclusion ‘may be’ rash! We must make some distinctions, and examine the question rather like this: suppose somebody were to arrange a competition, and were to leave its character entirely open, not specifying whether it was to be gymnastic, artistic or equestrian. Assume that he gathers together all the inhabitants of the state, and offers a prize: anyone who wishes should come and compete in giving pleasure, and this is to be the sole criterion; the competitor who gives the audience most [b] pleasure will win; he has an entirely free hand as to what method he employs, but provided he excels in this one respect he will be judged the most pleasing of the competitors and win the prize. What effect do we think such an announcement would have?
CLEINIAS: In what way do you mean?
ATHENIAN: Likely enough, I suppose, one competitor will play the Homer and present epic poetry, another will sing lyric songs to music, another will put on a tragedy and another a comedy; and it will be no surprise if somebody even reckons [c] his best chance of winning lies in putting on a puppet-show. Now, with all these competitors and thousands of others entering, can we say which would really deserve to win?
CLEINIAS: That’s an odd question! Who could answer it for you with authority before hearing the contestants, and listening to them individually on the spot?
ATHENIAN: Well then, do you want me to give you an equally odd answer?
CLEINIAS: Naturally.
ATHENIAN: Suppose the decision rests with the smallest infant children. They’ll decide for the exhibitor of puppets, won’t they?
[d] CLEINIAS: Of course.
ATHENIAN: If it rests with the older children, they will choose the producer of comedies. Young men, ladies of cultivated taste, and I dare say pretty nearly the entire populace, will choose the tragedy.
CLEINIAS: Yes, I dare say.
ATHENIAN: We old men would probably be most gratified to listen to a reciter doing justice to the Iliad or Odyssey, or an extract from Hesiod: we’d say he was the winner by a clear margin. Who, then, would be the proper winner? That’s the next question, isn’t it?
CLEINIAS: Yes.
[e] ATHENIAN: Clearly you and I are forced to say that the proper winners would be those chosen by men of our vintage. To us, from among all the customs followed in every city all over the world today, this looks like the best.5
CLEINIAS: Surely.
ATHENIAN: I am, then, in limited agreement with the man in the street. Pleasure is indeed a proper criterion in the arts, but not the pleasure experienced by anybody and everybody. The productions of the Muse are at their finest when they delight men of high calibre and adequate education – but particularly if they succeed in pleasing the single individual whose education and moral standards reach heights attained by no one [659a] else. This is the reason why we maintain that judges in these matters need high moral standards: they have to possess not only a discerning taste, but courage too. A judge won’t be doing his job properly if he reaches his verdict by listening to the audience and lets himself be thrown off balance by the yelling of the mob and his own lack of training; nor must he shrug his shoulders and let cowardice and indolence persuade him into a false verdict against his better judgement, so that he lies with the very lips with which he called upon the [b] gods when he undertook office.6 The truth is that he sits in judgement as a teacher of the audience, rather than as its pupil; his function (and under the ancient law7 of the Greeks he used to be allowed to perform it) is to throw his weight against them, if the pleasure they show has been aroused improperly and illegitimately. For instance, the law now in force in Sicily and Italy, by truckling to the majority of the audience and deciding the winner by a show of hands, has had a disastrous effect on the authors themselves, who compose to gratify the depraved tastes of their judges; the result is that in [c] effect they are taught by the audience. It has been equally disastrous for the quality of the pleasure felt by the spectators: they ought to come to experience more elevated pleasures from listening to the portrayal of characters invariably better than their own, but in fact just the opposite happens, and they have no one to thank but themselves. Well, then, now that we have finished talking about that, what conclusion is indicated? Let’s see if it isn’t this -
CLEINIAS: What?
ATHENIAN: For the third or fourth time, I think, our discussion has come full circle. Once again, education has proved to be [d] a process of attraction, of leading children to accept right principles as enunciated by the law and endorsed as genuinely correct by men who have high moral standards and are full of years and experience. The soul of the child has to be prevented from getting into the habit of feeling pleasure and pain in ways not sanctioned by the law and those who have been persuaded to obey it; he should follow in their footsteps and find pleasure and pain in the same things as the old. That [e] is why we have what we call songs, which are really ‘charms’ for the soul. These are in fact deadly serious devices for producing this concord8 we are talking about; but the souls of the young cannot bear to be serious, so we use the terms ‘recreation’ and ‘song’ for the charms, and children treat them in that spirit. We have an analogy in the sick and ailing; those in charge of feeding them try to administer the proper diet in [660a] tasty foods and drinks, and offer them unwholesome items in revolting foods, so that the patients may get into the desirable habit of welcoming the one kind and loathing the other. This is just what the true legislator will persuade (or, failing persuasion, compel) the man with a creative flair to do with his grand and marvellous language: to compose correctly by portraying, with appropriate choreography and musical setting, men who are moderate, courageous and good in every way.
[b] CLEINIAS: Good Heavens, sir, do you really think that’s how they compose nowadays in other cities? My experience is limited, but I know of no such proceeding as you describe, except among us Cretans or in Sparta. In dancing and all the other arts one novelty follows another; the changes are made not by law but are prompted by wildly changing fancies that are very far from being permanent and stable like the Egyptian tastes you’re explaining: on the contrary, they are never the [c] same from minute to minute.
ATHENIAN: Well said, Cleinias. But if I gave you the impression that I was speaking of the present day when I referred to the procedure you mention, I expect it was my own lack of clarity in expressing my thoughts that led you astray and caused me to be misunderstood. I was only saying what I want to see happen in the arts, but perhaps I used expressions that made you think I was referring to facts. It always goes against the grain to pillory habits that are irretrievably on the wrong lines, but sometimes one has to. So, seeing that we are agreed [d] in approving this custom,9 tell me this, if you will: is it more prevalent among you Cretans and the Spartans than among the other Greeks?
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: And what if it became prevalent among the others as well? Presumably we’d say that was an improvement on present practice?
CLEINIAS: Yes, I suppose it would be a tremendous improvement if they adopted the procedure of Crete and Sparta – which is also in accordance with the recommendations you made just now.
JUSTICE AND HAPPINESS GO TOGETHER
ATHENIAN: Now then, let’s make sure we understand each other in this business. The essence of the entire cultural education of your countries is surely this: you oblige your poets [e] to say that the good man, because he is temperate and just, enjoys good fortune and is happy, no matter whether he is big and strong, or small and weak, or rich, or poor; and that even if he is ‘richer than Midas or Cinyras’, and has not justice, he is a wretch, and lives a life of misery. ‘I’d not mention a man,’ says your poet,10 and how right he is, and ‘I’d take no account of him’, even if all his actions and possessions were what people commonly call ‘good’, if he were without justice, nor even if, with a character like that, he ‘attacked in [661a] close combat with the foe’. If he is unjust, I wouldn’t want him to ‘stand the sight of bloody butchery’ nor ‘outdo in speed the north wind of Thrace’, nor ever achieve any of the things that are generally said to be ‘good’. You see, these things men usually call ‘good’ are misnamed. It is commonly said that health comes first, beauty second and wealth third. The list goes on indefinitely: keen sight and hearing, and acute perception of all the objects of sensation; being a dictator and [b] doing whatever you like; and the seventh heaven is supposed to be reached when one has achieved all this and is made immortal without further ado. You and I, presumably, hold that all these things are possessions of great value to the just
and pious, but that to the unjust they are a curse, every one of them, from health all the way down the list. Seeing, hearing, [c] sensation, and simply being alive, are great evils, if in spite of having all these so-called good things a man gains immortality without justice and virtue in general; but if he survives for only the briefest possible time, the evil is less. I imagine you will persuade or compel the authors in your states to embody this doctrine of mine in the words, rhythms and ‘harmonies’ they produce for the education of your youth. Isn’t that right? [d] Look here, now: my position is quite clear. Although so-called evils are in fact evil for the just, they are good for the unjust; and so-called ‘goods’, while genuinely good for the good, are evils for the wicked. Let me ask the same question as before: are you and I in agreement, or not?
CLEINIAS: In some ways I think we are, but certainly not in others.
ATHENIAN: I expect this is where I sound implausible: suppose a man were to enjoy health and wealth and permanent absolute power – and, if you like, I’ll give him enormous strength [e] and courage as well, and exempt him from death and all the other ‘evils’, as people call them. But suppose he had in him nothing but injustice and insolence. It is obvious, I maintain, that his life is wretchedly unhappy.
CLEINIAS: True, that’s precisely where you fail to convince.
ATHENIAN: Very well, then. How should we put it now? If a man is brave, strong, handsome and rich, and enjoys a lifelong [662a] freedom to do just what he wants to, don’t you think – if he is unjust and insolent – that his life will inevitably be a disgrace? Perhaps at any rate you’d allow the term ‘disgrace’?
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: Will you go further, and say he will live ‘badly’?11
CLEINIAS: No, we’d not be so ready to admit that.
ATHENIAN: What about going further still, and saying he will live ‘unpleasantly and unprofitably’?
CLEINIAS: How could we possibly be prepared to go as far as that?
[b] ATHENIAN: ‘How’? My friend, it looks as if it would be a miracle if we ever harmonized on this point: at the moment
your tune and mine are scarcely in the same key. To me, these conclusions are inescapably true – in fact, my dear Cleinias, rather more true and obvious than that Crete is an island. If I were a lawgiver, I should try to compel the authors and every inhabitant of the state to take this line; and if anybody in the land said that there are men who live a pleasant life in spite [c] of being scoundrels, or that while this or that is useful and profitable, something else is more just, I should impose pretty nearly the extreme penalty. There are many other things I should persuade my citizens to say, which would flatly contradict what Cretans and Spartans maintain nowadays, apparently – to say nothing of the rest of the world. Zeus and Apollo! Just you imagine, my fine fellows, asking these gods who inspired your laws, ‘Is the life of supreme justice also the [d] life that gives most pleasure? Or are there two kinds of life, one being “the supremely just”, the other “the most pleasurable”?’ Suppose they replied ‘There are two. If we knew the right question to ask, we might perhaps pursue the point: ‘Which category of men should we call the most blessed by heaven? Those who live the supremely just life, or the most pleasurable?’ If they said ‘Those who live the most pleasurable life’, then that would be, for them, a curious thing to say.12 However, I am unwilling to associate the gods with such a statement; I prefer to think of it in connexion with forefathers [e] and lawgivers. So let’s suppose those first questions have been put to a forefather and lawgiver, and that he has replied that the man who lives the life of greatest pleasure enjoys the greatest happiness. This is what I’d say then: ‘Father, didn’t you want me to receive as many of the blessings of heaven as I could? Yet in spite of that you never tired of telling me to order my life as justly as possible.’ In taking up that kind of position our forefather or lawgiver will, I think, appear in rather an odd light: it will look as if he cannot speak without contradicting himself. However, if he declared that the life of supreme justice was the most blessed, I imagine that everybody who heard him would want to know what splendid benefit, superior to pleasure, was to be found in this kind of life. What was there in it that deserved the commendation of [663a]
the law? Surely, any benefit a just man got out of it would be inseparable from pleasure? Look: are we to suppose that fame and praise from gods and men are fine and good, but unpleasant (and vice versa in the case of notoriety) ? (‘My dear legislator,’ we’d say, ‘of course not’.) 13 Or, if you neither injure another nor are injured yourself by someone else, is that unpleasant, in spite of being fine and good? Is the opposite pleasant, but disgraceful and wicked?14
CLEINIAS: Certainly not.
ATHENIAN: So the argument that does not drive a wedge [b] between ‘pleasant’ on the one hand and ‘just’ and ‘fine’ and ‘good’ on the other, even if it achieves nothing else, will do something to persuade a man to live a just and pious life. This means that any teaching which denies the truth of all this is, from the lawgiver’s standpoint, a complete disgrace and his worst enemy. (Nobody would willingly agree to do something which would not bring him more pleasure than pain.)
Looking at a thing from a distance makes nearly everyone feel dizzy, especially children; but the lawgiver will alter that for us, and lift the fog that clouds our judgement: somehow [c] or other – by habituation, praise or argument – he will persuade us that our ideas of justice and injustice are like pictures drawn in perspective. Injustice looks pleasant to the enemy of justice, because he regards it from his own personal standpoint, which is unjust and evil; justice, on the other hand, looks unpleasant to him. But from the standpoint of the just man the view gained of justice and injustice is always the opposite.
CLEINIAS: So it seems.
ATHENIAN: And which of these judgements are we to say has a better claim to be the correct one? The judgement of the worse soul or the better?
[d] CLEINIAS: That of the better, certainly.
ATHENIAN: Then it is equally certain that the unjust life is not only more shocking and disgraceful, but also in fact less pleasant, than the just and holy.
CLEINIAS: On this argument, my friends, it certainly looks like it.
CHILDREN ARE EASILY PERSUADED
ATHENIAN: But just suppose that the truth had been different from what the argument has now shown it to be, and that a lawgiver, even a mediocre one, had been sufficiently bold, in the interests of the young, to tell them a lie. Could he have told a more useful lie than this, or one more effective in making everyone practise justice in everything they do, willingly [e] and without pressure?
CLEINIAS: Truth is a fine thing, sir, and it is sure to prevail, but to persuade men of it certainly seems no easy task.
ATHENIAN: Yes, but what about that fairy story about the Sidonian?15 That was well-nigh incredible, but it was easy enough to convince men of it, and of thousands of other similar stories.
CLEINIAS: What sort of stories?
ATHENIAN: The sowing of the teeth and the birth of armed men from them. This remarkable example shows the legislator that the souls of the young can be persuaded of anything; he [664a] has only to try. The only thing he must consider and discover is what conviction would do the state most good; in that connexion, he must think up every possible device to ensure that as far as possible the entire community preserves in its songs and stories and doctrines an absolute and lifelong unanimity. But if you see the matter in any other light, have no hesitation in disputing my view.
CLEINIAS: No, I don’t think either of us would be able to [b] dispute that.
THE THREE CHORUSES
ATHENIAN: Then it will be up to me to introduce the next point. I maintain that our choruses – all three of them – should charm the souls of the children while still young and tender, and uphold all the admirable doctrines we have already formulated, and any we may formulate in the future. We must insist, as the central point of these doctrines, that the gods say the best life does in fact bring most pleasure. If we do that, we shall be telling the plain truth, and we shall convince [c] those whom we have to convince more effectively than if we advanced any other doctrine.
CLEINIAS: Yes, one has to agree with what you say.
ATHENIAN: To start with, it will be only right and proper if the children’s chorus (which will be dedicated to the Muses) comes on first to sing these doctrines with all its might and main before the entire city. Second will come the chorus of those under thirty, which will call upon Apollo Paean16 to bear witness that what they say is true, and pray that he will [d] vouchsafe to convince the young. Third, there must be the songs of those between thirty and sixty. That leaves the men who are older than this, who are, of course, no longer up to singing; but they will be inspired to tell stories in which the same characters will appear.17
CLEINIAS: You mention these three choruses, sir: what are they? We are not very clear what you mean to say about them.
ATHENIAN: But the greater part of the discussion we have had so far has been precisely for their sake!
[e] CLEINIAS: We still haven’t seen the point. Could you try to elucidate still further?
ATHENIAN: If we remember, we said at the beginning of our discussion18 that all young things, being fiery and mettlesome by nature, are unable to keep their bodies or their tongues still – they are always making unco-ordinated noises and jumping about. No other animal, we said, ever develops a sense of order in either respect; man alone has a natural ability [665a] to do this. Order in movement is called ‘rhythm’, and order in the vocal sounds – the combination of high and low notes – is called ‘harmony’; and the union of the two is called ‘a performance by a chorus’. We said that the gods took pity on us and gave us Apollo and the Muses as companions and leaders of our choruses; and if we can cast our minds back, we said that their third gift to us was Dionysus.
CLEINIAS: Yes, of course we remember.
ATHENIAN: Well, we’ve mentioned the choruses of Apollo and the Muses; the remaining one, the third, must be identified as [b] belonging to Dionysus.
CLEINIAS: What! You had better explain yourself: a chorus of elderly men dedicated to Dionysus sounds a weird and wonderful idea, at any rate at first hearing. Are men of more than thirty and even fifty, up to sixty, really going to dance in honour of Dionysus?
ATHENIAN: You are absolutely right – to show how this could be reasonable in practice does need, I think, some explanation.
CLEINIAS: It certainly does.
ATHENIAN: Are we agreed on the conclusions we have reached so far?
CLEINIAS: Conclusions about what? [c]
ATHENIAN: About this – that every man and child, free man and slave, male and female – in fact, the whole state – is in duty bound never to stop repeating to each other the charms19 we have described. Somehow or other, we must see that these charms constantly change their form; at all costs they must be continually varied, so that the performers always long to sing the songs, and find perpetual pleasure in them.
CLEINIAS: Agreed: that’s exactly the arrangement we want.
ATHENIAN: This last chorus is the noblest element in our state; [d] it carries more conviction than any other group, because of the age and discernment of its members. Where, then, should it sing its splendid songs, if it is to do most good? Surely we are not going to be silly enough to leave this question undecided? After all, this chorus may well prove to be consummate masters of the noblest and most useful songs.
CLEINIAS: No; if that’s really the way the argument is going, we certainly can’t leave this undecided.
ATHENIAN: So what would be a suitable method of procedure? See if this will do.
CLEINIAS: What, then?
ATHENIAN: As he grows old, a man becomes apprehensive [e] about singing; it gives him less pleasure, and if it should happen that he cannot avoid it, it causes him an embarrassment which grows with the increasingly sober tastes of his advancing years. Isn’t that so?
CLEINIAS: Indeed it is.
ATHENIAN: So naturally he will be even more acutely embarrassed at standing up and singing in front of the varied audience in a theatre. And if men of that age were forced to sing in the same condition as members of choruses competing for a prize – lean and on a diet after a course of voice-training – then of course they would find the performance positively unpleasant and humiliating, and would lose every spark of enthusiasm.
[666a] CLEINIAS: Yes, that would be the inevitable result.
ATHENIAN: So how shall we encourage them to be enthusiastic about singing? The first law we shall pass, surely, is this: children under the age of eighteen are to keep off wine entirely. We shall teach them that they must treat the violent tendencies of youth with due caution, and not pour fire on the fire already in their souls and bodies until they come to undertake the real work of life. Our second law will permit the young man under thirty to take wine in moderation, but he must stop short of [b] drunkenness and bibulous excesses. When he reaches his thirties, he should regale himself at the common meals, and invoke the gods; in particular, he should summon Dionysus to what is at once the play-time and the prayer-time of the old, which the god gave to mankind to help cure the crabbiness of age. This is the gift he gave us to make us young again: we forget our peevishness, and our hard cast of mind becomes [c] softer and grows more malleable, just like iron thrust in a fire. Surely any man who is brought into that frame of mind would be ready to sing his songs (that is, ‘charms’, as we’ve called them often enough) with more enthusiasm and less embarrassment? I don’t mean in a large gathering of strangers, but in a comparatively small circle of friends.
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: As a method of inducing them to join us in our singing, there wouldn’t be anything you could particularly [d] object to in this.
CLEINIAS: By no means.
ATHENIAN: But what sort of philosophy of music will inspire their songs? Obviously, it will have to be one appropriate to the performers.
CLEINIAS: Of course.
ATHENIAN: And the performers are men of almost divine distinction. What notes would be appropriate for them? Those produced by the choruses?
CLEINIAS: Well, sir, we Cretans, at any rate – and the same goes for the Spartans – would hardly be up to singing any song except those we learned to sing by growing familiar with them in our choruses.
ATHENIAN: Naturally enough. In cold fact, you have failed to achieve the finest kind of song. You organize your state as [e] though it were a military camp rather than a society of people who have settled in towns, and you keep your young fellows together like a herd of colts at grass. Not a man among you takes his own colt and drags him, furiously protesting, away from the rest of the herd; you never put him in the hands of a private groom, and train him by combing him down and stroking him. You entirely fail to lavish proper care on an education which will turn him out not merely a good soldier but a capable administrator of a state and its towns. Such a man is, as we said early on, a better fighter than those of [667a] Tyrtaeus, precisely because he does not value courage as the principal element in virtue: he consistently relegates it to fourth place wherever he finds it, whether in the individual or the state.
CLEINIAS: I suspect, sir, you are being rather rude about our legislators again.
ATHENIAN: If I am, my dear fellow, it is entirely unintentionally. But if you don’t mind, we ought to follow where the argument leads us. If we know of any music that is of finer quality than the music of choruses and the public theatres, [b] we ought to try to allocate it to these older people. They are, as we said, embarrassed at the other kind; but music of the highest quality is just what they are keen to take part in.
CLEINIAS: Yes, indeed.
QUALIFICATIONS OF THE THIRD CHORUS, AND AN ATTACK ON CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN THE ARTS
ATHENIAN: The most important point about everything that has some inherent attractive quality must be either this very quality or some kind of ‘correctness’ or (thirdly) its usefulness. For instance, I maintain that eating and drinking and taking nourishment in general are accompanied by the particular attractive quality that we might call pleasure; as for their [c] usefulness and ‘correctness’, we invariably speak of the ‘wholesomeness’ of the foods we serve, and in their case the most ‘correct’ thing in them is precisely this.
CLEINIAS: Quite.
ATHENIAN: An element of attractiveness – the pleasure we feel – goes with the process of learning, too. But what gives rise to its ‘correctness’ and usefulness, its excellence and nobility, is its accuracy.
CLEINIAS: Exactly.
ATHENIAN: What about the arts of imitation, whose function [d] is to produce likenesses? When they succeed in doing this, it will be quite proper to say that the pleasure – if any – that arises out of and accompanies that success constitutes the attractive quality of these arts.
CLEINIAS: Yes.
ATHENIAN: Generally speaking, I suppose, the ‘correctness’ in such cases would depend not so much on the pleasure given, as on the accurate representation of the size and qualities of the original?
CLEINIAS: Well put.
ATHENIAN: So pleasure would be the proper criterion in one case only. A work of art may be produced with nothing to offer by way of usefulness or truth or accuracy of representation [e] (or harm, of course). It may be produced solely for the sake of this element that normally accompanies the others, the attractive one. (In fact, it is when this element is associated with none of the others that it most genuinely deserves the name ‘pleasure’.)
CLEINIAS: You mean only harmless pleasure?
ATHENIAN: Yes, and it is precisely this that I call ‘play’, when it has no particular good or bad effect that deserves serious discussion.
CLEINIAS: Quite right.
ATHENIAN: And we could conclude from all this that no imitation at all should be judged by reference to incorrect opinions about it or by the criterion of the pleasure it gives. This is particularly so in the case of representational equality. What is equal is equal and what is proportional is proportional, [668a] and this does not depend on anyone’s opinion that it is so, nor does it cease to be true if someone is displeased at the fact.20 Accuracy, and nothing else whatever, is the only permissible criterion.
CLEINIAS: Yes, that is emphatically true.
ATHENIAN: So do we hold that all music is a matter of representation and imitation?
CLEINIAS: Of course.
ATHENIAN: So when someone says that music is judged by the criterion of pleasure, we should reject his argument out of hand, and absolutely refuse to go in for such music (if any were ever produced) as a serious genre. The music we ought [b] to cultivate is the kind that bears a resemblance to its model, beauty.
CLEINIAS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: These people,21 then, who are anxious to take part in the finest possible singing, should, apparently, look not for a music which is sweet, but one which is correct; and correctness, as we said, lies in the imitation and successful reproduction of the proportions and characteristics of the model.
CLEINIAS: It does indeed.
ATHENIAN: This is certainly so in the case of music: everyone would admit that all musical compositions are matters of imitation and representation. In fact, composers, audiences [c] and actors would register universal agreement on this point, wouldn’t they?
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: So it looks as if a man who is not to go wrong about a given composition must appreciate what it is, because failure to understand its nature – what it is trying to do and what in fact it is a representation of – will mean that he gets virtually no conception of whether the author has achieved his aim correctly or not.
CLEINIAS: No, virtually none, naturally.
[d] ATHENIAN: And if he cannot gauge the correctness of the composition, surely he won’t be able to judge its moral goodness or badness? But this is all rather obscure. Perhaps this would be a clearer way of putting it.
CLEINIAS: What?
ATHENIAN: There are, of course, thousands of representations that strike the eye?
CLEINIAS: Yes.
ATHENIAN: Now, imagine someone who didn’t know the character of each of the objects that are imitated and represented. Would he ever be able to estimate the correctness of the finished article? This is the sort of point I have in mind: does it preserve the overall proportions of the body and the position of each of its various parts? Does it hit off the [e] proportions exactly and keep the parts in their proper positions relative to one another? And what of their colours and contours? Have all these features been reproduced higgledy-piggledy? Do you think that if a man did not know the character of the creature represented he would ever be able to assess these points?
CLEINIAS: Of course not.
ATHENIAN: What if we knew that the thing moulded or painted [669a] is a man, and that all his parts with their colours and contours have been caught by the artist’s skill? Suppose a man knows all that; is he without further ado necessarily ready to judge whether the work is beautiful or falls short of beauty in some respect?
CLEINIAS: In that case, sir, pretty well all of us would be judges of the quality of a representation.
ATHENIAN: You have hit the nail on the head. So anyone who is going to be a sensible judge of any representation – in painting and music and every other field – should be able to assess three points: he must know, first, what has been represented; second, how correctly it has been copied; and [b] then, third, the moral value of this or that representation, so far as language, tunes and rhythms are concerned.
CLEINIAS: Apparently so.
ATHENIAN: We ought not to fail to mention the peculiar difficulty about music, which is discussed much more than any other kind of artistic representation and needs much more careful handling than all the others. A man who goes wrong on this subject will suffer a good deal of harm because he feels attracted to evil dispositions; and his mistake is very difficult [c] to detect, because the authors hardly have the same degree of creative ability as the actual Muses. The Muses would never make the ghastly mistake of composing the speech of men to a musical idiom suitable for women, or of fitting rhythms appropriate to the portrayal of slaves and slave-like people to the tune and bodily movements used to represent free men (or again of making rhythms and movements appropriate to free men accompany a combination of tune and words that conflicted with those rhythms). Nor would they ever mix up together into one production the din of wild animals and men and musical instruments and all kinds of other noises and still [d] claim to be representing a unified theme. But human authors, in their silly way, jumble all these things together into complicated combinations; in Orpheus’ words, anyone ‘whose delight in life is in its springtime’ will find them a rich source of amusement. And in the midst of all this confusion, he will find that the authors also divorce rhythm and movement from the tune by putting unaccompanied words into metre, [e] and rob tune and rhythm of words by using stringed instruments and pipes on their own without singers. When this is done, it is extraordinarily difficult to know what the rhythm and harmony without speech are supposed to signify and what worth-while object they imitate and represent. The conclusion is inevitable: such practices appeal to the taste of the village idiot. It is this fondness for speed and dexterity (as in
reproducing the noises of wild animals) which prompts the [670a] use of pipes and lyre otherwise than as an accompaniment to dancing and singing. Using either instrument on its own is in fact sheer showmanship that has nothing to do with art. But enough of theory: what we are considering is not what sort of music our citizens over thirty and fifty should avoid, but what sort they should go in for. I think our argument so far [b] seems to point to the conclusion that the fifty-year-olds who have the duty of singing must have enjoyed an education that reached a higher standard than the music of choruses. They must, of course, have a nice appreciation of rhythms and harmonies and be able to understand them. Otherwise how could a man assess the correctness of the tunes, and tell whether the Dorian mode was appropriate or not in a given case, or judge whether the author has set the tunes to the right rhythm or not?
CLEINIAS: Clearly he couldn’t.
ATHENIAN: The belief of the general public, that they can form an adequate judgement of merit and demerit in matters of harmony and rhythm, is laughable: they have only been drilled into singing to the pipes and marching in step, and they [c] never stop to think that they do all this without the smallest understanding of it. In fact, every tune with the right elements is correct, but if it has the wrong ones, it is faulty.
CLEINIAS: Inevitably.
ATHENIAN: What about the man who doesn’t even understand what the elements are? As we said, will he ever be able to decide that any aspect of the piece is correct?
CLEINIAS: No, how could he?
ATHENIAN: So it looks as if once again we are discovering that it is virtually indispensable for these singers of ours (who are not only being encouraged to sing but compelled to do it in a [d] willing spirit, if I may put it like that), to have been educated up to at least this point: they should each be able to follow the notes of the tunes and the basic units of rhythm, so that they may examine the harmonies and rhythms and select those that men of their age and character could appropriately sing. If that is how they sing, they will give themselves harmless pleasure, and at the same time stimulate the younger generation to adopt virtuous customs with the proper enthusiasm. [e] Assuming the education of these singers reaches that level, they will have pursued a more advanced course of training than will be given to ordinary men, or even the authors themselves. The author is more or less obliged to have a knowledge of rhythm and harmony, but there is no necessity for him to be able to assess the third point – whether the imitation is a good one or not. The men we are talking about, however, must be equally competent in all three fields,22 so that they can isolate the primary and secondary degrees of goodness; otherwise they will never prove capable of charming [671a] the young in the direction of virtue.
THE EDUCATIONAL EFFECTS OF DRINKING PARTIES (2)
ATHENIAN: Our argument has done its level best: we have to consider whether it has succeeded in its original intention of showing that our defence of Dionysus’ chorus was justified. A gathering like that, of course, inevitably gets increasingly rowdier as the wine flows more freely. (In fact, our initial assumption in the present discussion of this business was that such a tendency is unavoidable.) [b]
CLEINIAS: Yes, it is unavoidable.
ATHENIAN: Everyone is taken out of himself and has a splendid time; the exuberance of his conversation is matched only by his reluctance to listen to his companions, and he thinks himself entitled to run their lives as well as his own.
CLEINIAS: He certainly does.
ATHENIAN: And didn’t we say that when this happens the souls of the drinkers get hot and, like iron in a fire, grow younger and softer, so that anyone who has the ability and skill to mould and educate them, finds them as easy to handle as [c] when they were young? The man to do the moulding is the same one as before – the good lawgiver. When our drinker grows cheerful and confident and unduly shameless and unwilling to speak and keep quiet, to drink and sing, at the proper times, the lawgiver’s job will be to lay down drinking laws which will be able to make this fellow willing to mend his ways; and to do battle with this disgraceful overconfidence [d] as soon as it appears, they will be able to send into the arena, with the blessing of justice, this divine and splendid fear we have called ‘modesty’ and ‘shame’.23
CLEINIAS: Exactly.
ATHENIAN: The cool-headed and sober should guard and co-operate with these laws by taking command of those who are not sober; fighting the enemy without cool-headed leaders is actually less dangerous than fighting drink without such help as this. If a man cannot show a willing spirit and obey these [e] commanders and the officials of Dionysus (who are upwards of sixty years of age), the dishonour he incurs must equal or even exceed that incurred by the man who disobeys the officials of the god of war.
CLEINIAS: Precisely.
ATHENIAN: So, if they drank and made merry like that, the revellers who took part in the proceedings would surely benefit? They would go their way on better terms with each other than they were before, instead of loathing each other, which is what happens nowadays; and this would be because [672a] they had rules to regulate the whole of their intercourse and had followed every instruction given by the sober to the tipsy.
CLEINIAS: Precisely – if indeed the party were to go as you describe.
ATHENIAN: So let’s not abuse the gift of Dionysus any longer in the old unqualified terms, saying that it is bad and does not deserve to be received into the state. One could, indeed, enlarge on its benefits even more. But in front of the general public I would be chary of mentioning the main benefit conferred by the gift, because people misconstrue and misunderstand [b] the explanation.
CLEINIAS: What is the benefit?
ATHENIAN: There is a little-known current of story and tradition24 which says that Dionysus was robbed of his wits by his stepmother Hera, and that he gets his revenge by stimulating us to Bacchic frenzies and all the mad dancing that results; and this was precisely the reason why he made us a present of wine. This sort of story, however, I leave to those who see no danger in speaking of the gods in such terms. But I am quite certain of this: no animal that enjoys the use [c] of reason in its maturity is ever born with that faculty, or at any rate with it fully developed. During the time in which it has not yet attained its characteristic level of intelligence, it is completely mad: it bawls uncontrollably, and as soon as it can get on its feet it jumps about with equal abandon. Let’s think back: we said that this situation gave rise to music and gymnastics.
CLEINIAS: We remember, of course.
ATHENIAN: And also that this was the source of man’s appreciation [d] of rhythm and harmony, and Apollo and the Muses and Dionysus were the gods who co-operated to implant it in us.
CLEINIAS: Yes, indeed.
ATHENIAN: In particular, it seems that according to the common story wine was given to men as a means of taking vengeance on us – it was intended to drive us insane. But our interpretation is entirely the opposite: the gift was intended to be a medicine and to produce reverence in the soul, and health and strength in the body.
CLEINIAS: Yes, sir, that’s a splendid recapitulation of the argument.
SUMMING-UP ON THE USES OF DRINK
ATHENIAN: We are now half-way through our examination of [e] singing and dancing. Shall we carry on with the other half in whatever way recommends itself, or shall we pass it over?
CLEINIAS: What halves do you mean? Where do you put your dividing-line?
ATHENIAN: We found that singing and dancing, taken together, amounted, in a sense, to education as a whole. One part of it – the vocal part – was concerned with rhythms and ‘harmonies’.
CLEINIAS: Yes.
ATHENIAN: The second part concerned the movement of the body. Here too we had rhythm, a feature shared with the movement of the voice; but the body’s movements were its [673a] own particular concern, just as in the other half the tune was the special job of the vocal movements.
CLEINIAS: True enough.
ATHENIAN: When the sound of the voice penetrates the soul, we took that to be an education in virtue, and we hazarded the term ‘music’ to describe it.
CLEINIAS: And quite rightly.
ATHENIAN: When the movements of the body, which we described as ‘dancing in delight’, are such as to result in a fine state of physical fitness, we ought to call the systematic training which does this ‘gymnastics’.
CLEINIAS: Exactly.
[b] ATHENIAN: So much, then, for music, which is roughly the half of the subject of choruses that we said we had examined and finished with; so that’s that. Shall we discuss the other half? Or what method should we follow now?
CLEINIAS: Really, my dear fellow! You are having a conversation with Cretans and Spartans, and we have discussed music thoroughly – leaving gymnastics still to come. What sort of answer do you think you’ll get to that question, from either of us?
ATHENIAN: I should say that question was a pretty unambiguous [c] answer. I take it that your question, as I said, amounts in fact to a reply, an order even, to finish off our examination of gymnastics.
CLEINIAS: You understand me perfectly: do just that.
ATHENIAN: Yes, I must. Of course, discussing a subject so familiar to you both is not very difficult. You see, you have had much more experience of this particular skill than of the other.
CLEINIAS: True enough.
ATHENIAN: Again, the origin of this form of recreation too lies [d] in the fact that every animal has the natural habit of jumping about. The human animal, as we said, acquired a sense of rhythm, and that led to the birth of dancing. The tune suggested rhythm and awakened the memory of it, and out of the union of the two was born choral singing and dancing as a recreation.25
CLEINIAS: Exactly.
ATHENIAN: We have already discussed one of these two; now we are going to set about the discussion of the other.
CLEINIAS: Yes, indeed.
ATHENIAN: However, if you are agreeable, let’s give our discussion of the use of drink its final flourish. [e]
CLEINIAS: What flourish do you mean?
ATHENIAN: Suppose a state takes this practice we are now discussing sufficiently seriously to control it by a set of rules and use it to cultivate moderate habits; suppose it permits a similar enjoyment of other pleasures on the same principle, seeing it simply as a device for mastering them. In each and every case, our method will be the one that must be followed.26 But if the state treats a drink as recreation pure and simple, and anybody who wants to can go drinking and please himself when and with whom he does it, and do whatever else he [674a] likes at the same time, then my vote would be in favour of never allowing this state or individual to take wine at all. I would go further than Cretan and Spartan practice: I would support the law of the Carthaginians,27 which forbids anyone on military service to take a drink of wine, and makes water the only permissible beverage during the entire campaign. As for civilians, it forbids slaves, male and female, ever to touch wine; it forbids magistrates during their year of office; b steersmen and jurymen on duty are absolutely prohibited from touching it, and so too is any councillor who is going to take part in an important discussion; nobody at all is permitted to drink wine during the day, except for reasons of training or health, nor at night if they intend to procreate children (this prohibition applying to men and women alike); and one could point to a great many other situations in which any sensible person with a respect for the law would find it proper not to drink wine. This kind of approach would mean [c] that no state would need many vines and as part of the regulations covering agriculture in general and the whole question of diet, the production of wine in particular would be restricted to the most modest quantities. With your permission, gentlemen, let’s take that as the final flourish to our discussion of wine.
CLEINIAS: Splendid! Permission granted.
§§1–3 dealt with the education and moral training of the individual; §§4–5 discuss the correct constitution of the state. In order to illustrate his points, the Athenian undertakes a history of mankind, starting in the remote past with the few survivors of the Flood and finishing in his own lifetime. He is extremely cavalier in his handling of events, and ‘bends’ history a good deal to suit his own purposes; by modern standards – even if we grant that absolute objectivity and impartiality in history is a mirage – the Athenian hardly begins to rate as a historian at all. Yet it could be argued in his defence that ancient standards of historiography were less rigorous than ours today: the tradition of exact and detailed research was much less well established and historians were expected to draw edifying moral lessons from their material. And in the earlier part of his account the Athenian does not in fact profess to do more than paint a plausible picture – witness the frequency of the expressions ‘it is likely’, ‘probably’, ‘it looks as if’, and the like. His history is imaginative and didactic, and it is pointless to insist on criteria and standards which he was not trying to observe. (For an appraisal of Plato as a historian, and a commentary on §§4–5, the reader should consult R. Weil, L’ ‘Archéologie’ de Platon (Paris, 1959).)
The essence of the Athenian’s method is to isolate the desirable features of a political system by examining the reasons for successful constitutions in the past, and the undesirable features by examining the causes of the failures.