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ATHENIAN: An answer is contained in your question; and I understand and accept what you say not only as an answer, but also as a command to proceed with gymnastic.
CLEINIAS: You quite understand me; do as you say.
ATHENIAN: I will; and there will not be any difficulty in speaking intelligibly to you about a subject with which both of you are far more familiar than with music.
CLEINIAS: There will not.
ATHENIAN: Is not the origin of gymnastics, too, to be sought in the tendency to rapid motion which exists in all animals; man, as we were saying, having attained the sense of rhythm, created and invented dancing; and melody arousing and awakening rhythm, both united formed the choral art?
CLEINIAS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: And one part of this subject has been already discussed by us, and there still remains another to be discussed?
CLEINIAS: Exactly.
ATHENIAN: I have first a final word to add to my discourse about drink, if you will allow me to do so.
CLEINIAS: What more have you to say?
ATHENIAN: I should say that if a city seriously means to adopt the practice of drinking under due regulation and with a view to the enforcement of temperance, and in like manner, and on the same principle, will allow of other pleasures, designing to gain the victory over them—in this way all of them may be used. But if the State makes drinking an amusement only, and whoever likes may drink whenever he likes, and with whom he likes, and add to this any other indulgences, I shall never agree or allow that this city or this man should practise drinking. I would go further than the Cretans and Lacedaemonians, and am disposed rather to the law of the Carthaginians, that no one while he is on a campaign should be allowed to taste wine at all, but that he should drink water during all that time, and that in the city no slave, male or female, should ever drink wine; and that no magistrates should drink during their year of office, nor should pilots of vessels or judges while on duty taste wine at all, nor any one who is going to hold a consultation about any matter of importance; nor in the day-time at all, unless in consequence of exercise or as medicine; nor again at night, when any one, either man or woman, is minded to get children. There are numberless other cases also in which those who have good sense and good laws ought not to drink wine, so that if what I say is true, no city will need many vineyards. Their husbandry and their way of life in general will follow an appointed order, and their cultivation of the vine will be the most limited and the least common of their employments. And this, Stranger, shall be the crown of my discourse about wine, if you agree.
CLEINIAS: Excellent: we agree.
ATHENIAN: Enough of this. And what, then, is to be regarded as the origin of government? Will not a man be able to judge of it best from a point of view in which he may behold the progress of states and their transitions to good or evil?
CLEINIAS: What do you mean?
ATHENIAN: I mean that he might watch them from the point of view of time, and observe the changes which take place in them during infinite ages.
CLEINIAS: How so?
ATHENIAN: Why, do you think that you can reckon the time which has elapsed since cities first existed and men were citizens of them?
CLEINIAS: Hardly.
ATHENIAN: But are sure that it must be vast and incalculable?
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: And have not thousands and thousands of cities come into being during this period and as many perished? And has not each of them had every form of government many times over, now growing larger, now smaller, and again improving or declining?
CLEINIAS: To be sure.
ATHENIAN: Let us endeavour to ascertain the cause of these changes; for that will probably explain the first origin and development of forms of government.
CLEINIAS: Very good. You shall endeavour to impart your thoughts to us, and we will make an effort to understand you.
ATHENIAN: Do you believe that there is any truth in ancient traditions?
CLEINIAS: What traditions?
ATHENIAN: The traditions about the many destructions of mankind which have been occasioned by deluges and pestilences, and in many other ways, and of the survival of a remnant?
CLEINIAS: Every one is disposed to believe them.
ATHENIAN: Let us consider one of them, that which was caused by the famous deluge.
CLEINIAS: What are we to observe about it?
ATHENIAN: I mean to say that those who then escaped would only be hill shepherds,—small sparks of the human race preserved on the tops of mountains.
CLEINIAS: Clearly.
ATHENIAN: Such survivors would necessarily be unacquainted with the arts and the various devices which are suggested to the dwellers in cities by interest or ambition, and with all the wrongs which they contrive against one another.
CLEINIAS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: Let us suppose, then, that the cities in the plain and on the sea-coast were utterly destroyed at that time.
CLEINIAS: Very good.
ATHENIAN: Would not all implements have then perished and every other excellent invention of political or any other sort of wisdom have utterly disappeared?
CLEINIAS: Why, yes, my friend; and if things had always continued as they are at present ordered, how could any discovery have ever been made even in the least particular? For it is evident that the arts were unknown during ten thousand times ten thousand years. And no more than a thousand or two thousand years have elapsed since the discoveries of Daedalus, Orpheus and Palamedes,—since Marsyas and Olympus invented music, and Amphion the lyre—not to speak of numberless other inventions which are but of yesterday.
ATHENIAN: Have you forgotten, Cleinias, the name of a friend who is really of yesterday?
CLEINIAS: I suppose that you mean Epimenides.
ATHENIAN: The same, my friend; he does indeed far overleap the heads of all mankind by his invention; for he carried out in practice, as you declare, what of old Hesiod (Works and Days) only preached.
CLEINIAS: Yes, according to our tradition.
ATHENIAN: After the great destruction, may we not suppose that the state of man was something of this sort:—In the beginning of things there was a fearful illimitable desert and a vast expanse of land; a herd or two of oxen would be the only survivors of the animal world; and there might be a few goats, these too hardly enough to maintain the shepherds who tended them?
CLEINIAS: True.
