ld be no feeling of
irritation.

CLEINIAS: Certainly not.

ATHENIAN: I will not at present determine whether he who censures the
Cretan or Lacedaemonian polities is right or wrong. But I believe that
I can tell better than either of you what the many say about them. For
assuming that you have reasonably good laws, one of the best of them
will be the law forbidding any young men to enquire which of them are
right or wrong; but with one mouth and one voice they must all agree
that the laws are all good, for they came from God; and any one who says
the contrary is not to be listened to. But an old man who remarks any
defect in your laws may communicate his observation to a ruler or to an
equal in years when no young man is present.

CLEINIAS: Exactly so, Stranger; and like a diviner, although not
there at the time, you seem to me quite to have hit the meaning of the
legislator, and to say what is most true.

ATHENIAN: As there are no young men present, and the legislator
has given old men free licence, there will be no impropriety in our
discussing these very matters now that we are alone.

CLEINIAS: True. And therefore you may be as free as you like in your
censure of our laws, for there is no discredit in knowing what is wrong;
he who receives what is said in a generous and friendly spirit will be
all the better for it.

ATHENIAN: Very good; however, I am not going to say anything against
your laws until to the best of my ability I have examined them, but I am
going to raise doubts about them. For you are the only people known to
us, whether Greek or barbarian, whom the legislator commanded to eschew
all great pleasures and amusements and never to touch them; whereas
in the matter of pains or fears which we have just been discussing, he
thought that they who from infancy had always avoided pains and fears
and sorrows, when they were compelled to face them would run away from
those who were hardened in them, and would become their subjects. Now
the legislator ought to have considered that this was equally true of
pleasure; he should have said to himself, that if our citizens are from
their youth upward unacquainted with the greatest pleasures, and unused
to endure amid the temptations of pleasure, and are not disciplined
to refrain from all things evil, the sweet feeling of pleasure will
overcome them just as fear would overcome the former class; and in
another, and even a worse manner, they will be the slaves of t