hich are to be consecrated for each festival
have been already determined by us.

Having given these instructions to the Director of Music, let us now
proceed to dancing and gymnastic, which must also be taught to boys and
girls by masters and mistresses. Our minister of education will have a
great deal to do; and being an old man, how will he get through so much
work? There is no difficulty;--the law will provide him with assistants,
male and female; and he will consider how important his office is,
and how great the responsibility of choosing them. For if education
prospers, the vessel of state sails merrily along; or if education
fails, the consequences are not even to be mentioned. Of dancing and
gymnastics something has been said already. We include under the latter
military exercises, the various uses of arms, all that relates to
horsemanship, and military evolutions and tactics. There should be
public teachers of both arts, paid by the state, and women as well as
men should be trained in them. The maidens should learn the armed dance,
and the grown-up women be practised in drill and the use of arms, if
only in case of extremity, when the men are gone out to battle, and they
are left to guard their families. Birds and beasts defend their young,
but women instead of fighting run to the altars, thus degrading man
below the level of the animals. 'Such a lack of education, Stranger, is
both unseemly and dangerous.'

Wrestling is to be pursued as a military exercise, but the meaning of
this, and the nature of the art, can only be explained when action
is combined with words. Next follows dancing, which is of two kinds;
imitative, first, of the serious and beautiful; and, secondly, of the
ludicrous and grotesque. The first kind may be further divided into the
dance of war and the dance of peace. The former is called the Pyrrhic;
in this the movements of attack and defence are imitated in a direct and
manly style, which indicates strength and sufficiency of body and mind.
The latter of the two, the dance of peace, is suitable to orderly and
law-abiding men. These must be distinguished from the Bacchic dances
which imitate drunken revelry, and also from the dances by which
purifications are effected and mysteries celebrated. Such dances cannot
be characterized either as warlike or peaceful, and are unsuited to a
civilized state. Now the dances of peace are of two classes:--the first
of them is the more violent, being an