puts out the fire of their lusts.
'What is it?' The declaration that such things are hateful to the Gods,
and most abominable and unholy. The reason is that everywhere, in jest
and earnest alike, this is the doctrine which is repeated to all
from their earliest youth. They see on the stage that an Oedipus or a
Thyestes or a Macareus, when undeceived, are ready to kill themselves.
There is an undoubted power in public opinion when no breath is heard
adverse to the law; and the legislator who would enslave these enslaving
passions must consecrate such a public opinion all through the city.
'Good: but how can you create it?' A fair objection; but I promised to
try and find some means of restraining loves to their natural objects. A
law which would extirpate unnatural love as effectually as incest is
at present extirpated, would be the source of innumerable blessings,
because it would be in accordance with nature, and would get rid of
excess in eating and drinking and of adulteries and frenzies, making men
love their wives, and having other excellent effects. I can imagine that
some lusty youth overhears what we are saying, and roars out in abusive
terms that we are legislating for impossibilities. And so a person
might have said of the syssitia, or common meals; but this is refuted by
facts, although even now they are not extended to women. 'True.' There
is no impossibility or super-humanity in my proposed law, as I shall
endeavour to prove. 'Do so.' Will not a man find abstinence more easy
when his body is sound than when he is in ill-condition? 'Yes.' Have we
not heard of Iccus of Tarentum and other wrestlers who abstained wholly
for a time? Yet they were infinitely worse educated than our citizens,
and far more lusty in their bodies. And shall they have abstained for
the sake of an athletic contest, and our citizens be incapable of a
similar endurance for the sake of a much nobler victory,--the victory
over pleasure, which is true happiness? Will not the fear of impiety
enable them to conquer that which many who were inferior to them have
conquered? 'I dare say.' And therefore the law must plainly declare
that our citizens should not fall below the other animals, who live all
together in flocks, and yet remain pure and chaste until the time of
procreation comes, when they pair, and are ever after faithful to their
compact. But if the corruption of public opinion is too great to allow
our first law to be carried out, then