and other citizens, and the whole state will be happy and
prosperous. But if the legislator would persuade as well as command,
he will add prefaces to his laws which will predispose the citizens to
virtue. Even a little accomplished in the way of gaining the hearts of
men is of great value. For most men are in no particular haste to become
good. As Hesiod says:

'Long and steep is the first half of the way to virtue, But when you
have reached the top the rest is easy.'

'Those are excellent words.' Yes; but may I tell you the effect which
the preceding discourse has had upon me? I will express my meaning in
an address to the lawgiver:--O lawgiver, if you know what we ought to do
and say, you can surely tell us;--you are not like the poet, who, as you
were just now saying, does not know the effect of his own words. And the
poet may reply, that when he sits down on the tripod of the Muses he is
not in his right mind, and that being a mere imitator he may be allowed
to say all sorts of opposite things, and cannot tell which of them is
true. But this licence cannot be allowed to the lawgiver. For example,
there are three kinds of funerals; one of them is excessive, another
mean, a third moderate, and you say that the last is right. Now if I
had a rich wife, and she told me to bury her, and I were to sing of her
burial, I should praise the extravagant kind; a poor man would commend
a funeral of the meaner sort, and a man of moderate means would prefer a
moderate funeral. But you, as legislator, would have to say exactly what
you meant by 'moderate.' 'Very true.' And is our lawgiver to have no
preamble or interpretation of his laws, never offering a word of advice
to his subjects, after the manner of some doctors? For of doctors are
there not two kinds? The one gentle and the other rough, doctors who are
freemen and learn themselves and teach their pupils scientifically, and
doctor's assistants who get their knowledge empirically by attending on
their masters? 'Of course there are.' And did you ever observe that the
gentlemen doctors practise upon freemen, and that slave doctors confine
themselves to slaves? The latter go about the country or wait for the
slaves at the dispensaries. They hold no parley with their patients
about their diseases or the remedies of them; they practise by the rule
of thumb, and give their decrees in the most arbitrary manner. When they
have doctored one patient they run off to another, whom they t