fair; and about
a son or daughter the same unwritten law holds, and is a most perfect
safeguard, so that no open or secret connexion ever takes place between
them. Nor does the thought of such a thing ever enter at all into the
minds of most of them.

MEGILLUS: Very true.

ATHENIAN: Does not a little word extinguish all pleasures of that sort?

MEGILLUS: What word?

ATHENIAN: The declaration that they are unholy, hated of God, and most
infamous; and is not the reason of this that no one has ever said
the opposite, but every one from his earliest childhood has heard men
speaking in the same manner about them always and everywhere, whether in
comedy or in the graver language of tragedy? When the poet introduces
on the stage a Thyestes or an Oedipus, or a Macareus having secret
intercourse with his sister, he represents him, when found out, ready to
kill himself as the penalty of his sin.

MEGILLUS: You are very right in saying that tradition, if no breath of
opposition ever assails it, has a marvellous power.

ATHENIAN: Am I not also right in saying that the legislator who wants
to master any of the passions which master man may easily know how to
subdue them? He will consecrate the tradition of their evil character
among all, slaves and freemen, women and children, throughout the city:
that will be the surest foundation of the law which he can make.

MEGILLUS: Yes; but will he ever succeed in making all mankind use the
same language about them?

ATHENIAN: A good objection; but was I not just now saying that I had
a way to make men use natural love and abstain from unnatural, not
intentionally destroying the seeds of human increase, or sowing them in
stony places, in which they will take no root; and that I would command
them to abstain too from any female field of increase in which that
which is sown is not likely to grow? Now if a law to this effect could
only be made perpetual, and gain an authority such as already prevents
intercourse of parents and children--such a law, extending to other
sensual desires, and conquering them, would be the source of ten
thousand blessings. For, in the first place, moderation is the
appointment of nature, and deters men from all frenzy and madness of
love, and from all adulteries and immoderate use of meats and drinks,
and makes them good friends to their own wives. And innumerable other
benefits would result if such a law could only be enforced. I can
imagine some lusty yout