e understand me; do as you say.

ATHENIAN: I will; and there will not be any difficulty in speaking
intelligibly to you about a subject with which both of you are far more
familiar than with music.

CLEINIAS: There will not.

ATHENIAN: Is not the origin of gymnastics, too, to be sought in the
tendency to rapid motion which exists in all animals; man, as we were
saying, having attained the sense of rhythm, created and invented
dancing; and melody arousing and awakening rhythm, both united formed
the choral art?

CLEINIAS: Very true.

ATHENIAN: And one part of this subject has been already discussed by us,
and there still remains another to be discussed?

CLEINIAS: Exactly.

ATHENIAN: I have first a final word to add to my discourse about drink,
if you will allow me to do so.

CLEINIAS: What more have you to say?

ATHENIAN: I should say that if a city seriously means to adopt the
practice of drinking under due regulation and with a view to the
enforcement of temperance, and in like manner, and on the same
principle, will allow of other pleasures, designing to gain the victory
over them--in this way all of them may be used. But if the State makes
drinking an amusement only, and whoever likes may drink whenever he
likes, and with whom he likes, and add to this any other indulgences,
I shall never agree or allow that this city or this man should practise
drinking. I would go further than the Cretans and Lacedaemonians, and am
disposed rather to the law of the Carthaginians, that no one while he is
on a campaign should be allowed to taste wine at all, but that he should
drink water during all that time, and that in the city no slave, male
or female, should ever drink wine; and that no magistrates should drink
during their year of office, nor should pilots of vessels or judges
while on duty taste wine at all, nor any one who is going to hold a
consultation about any matter of importance; nor in the day-time at all,
unless in consequence of exercise or as medicine; nor again at night,
when any one, either man or woman, is minded to get children. There are
numberless other cases also in which those who have good sense and good
laws ought not to drink wine, so that if what I say is true, no city
will need many vineyards. Their husbandry and their way of life in
general will follow an appointed order, and their cultivation of the
vine will be the most limited and the least common of their employments.
And this, Strange