which will prove to us that we ought to
encourage the taste for drinking instead of doing all we can to avoid
it?

CLEINIAS: I suppose that there is; you at any rate, were just now saying
that you were ready to maintain such a doctrine.

ATHENIAN: True, I was; and I am ready still, seeing that you have both
declared that you are anxious to hear me.

CLEINIAS: To be sure we are, if only for the strangeness of the paradox,
which asserts that a man ought of his own accord to plunge into utter
degradation.

ATHENIAN: Are you speaking of the soul?

CLEINIAS: Yes.

ATHENIAN: And what would you say about the body, my friend? Are you not
surprised at any one of his own accord bringing upon himself deformity,
leanness, ugliness, decrepitude?

CLEINIAS: Certainly.

ATHENIAN: Yet when a man goes of his own accord to a doctor's shop, and
takes medicine, is he not aware that soon, and for many days afterwards,
he will be in a state of body which he would die rather than accept
as the permanent condition of his life? Are not those who train in
gymnasia, at first beginning reduced to a state of weakness?

CLEINIAS: Yes, all that is well known.

ATHENIAN: Also that they go of their own accord for the sake of the
subsequent benefit?

CLEINIAS: Very good.

ATHENIAN: And we may conceive this to be true in the same way of other
practices?

CLEINIAS: Certainly.

ATHENIAN: And the same view may be taken of the pastime of drinking
wine, if we are right in supposing that the same good effect follows?

CLEINIAS: To be sure.

ATHENIAN: If such convivialities should turn out to have any advantage
equal in importance to that of gymnastic, they are in their very nature
to be preferred to mere bodily exercise, inasmuch as they have no
accompaniment of pain.

CLEINIAS: True; but I hardly think that we shall be able to discover any
such benefits to be derived from them.

ATHENIAN: That is just what we must endeavour to show. And let me ask
you a question:--Do we not distinguish two kinds of fear, which are very
different?

CLEINIAS: What are they?

ATHENIAN: There is the fear of expected evil.

CLEINIAS: Yes.

ATHENIAN: And there is the fear of an evil reputation; we are afraid of
being thought evil, because we do or say some dishonourable thing, which
fear we and all men term shame.

CLEINIAS: Certainly.

ATHENIAN: These are the two fears, as I called them; one of which is the
opposite of pain and other fears, and t