erect your stage in
the agora, or introduce the fair voices of your actors, speaking above
our own, and permit you to harangue our women and children, and the
common people, about our institutions, in language other than our own,
and very often the opposite of our own. For a state would be mad which
gave you this licence, until the magistrates had determined whether your
poetry might be recited, and was fit for publication or not. Wherefore,
O ye sons and scions of the softer Muses, first of all show your songs
to the magistrates, and let them compare them with our own, and if they
are the same or better we will give you a chorus; but if not, then,
my friends, we cannot. Let these, then, be the customs ordained by law
about all dances and the teaching of them, and let matters relating
to slaves be separated from those relating to masters, if you do not
object.

CLEINIAS: We can have no hesitation in assenting when you put the matter
thus.

ATHENIAN: There still remain three studies suitable for freemen.
Arithmetic is one of them; the measurement of length, surface, and depth
is the second; and the third has to do with the revolutions of the stars
in relation to one another. Not every one has need to toil through all
these things in a strictly scientific manner, but only a few, and who
they are to be we will hereafter indicate at the end, which will be the
proper place; not to know what is necessary for mankind in general, and
what is the truth, is disgraceful to every one: and yet to enter into
these matters minutely is neither easy, nor at all possible for every
one; but there is something in them which is necessary and cannot be
set aside, and probably he who made the proverb about God originally had
this in view when he said, that 'not even God himself can fight against
necessity;' he meant, if I am not mistaken, divine necessity; for as to
the human necessities of which the many speak, when they talk in this
manner, nothing can be more ridiculous than such an application of the
words.

CLEINIAS: And what necessities of knowledge are there, Stranger, which
are divine and not human?

ATHENIAN: I conceive them to be those of which he who has no use nor any
knowledge at all cannot be a God, or demi-god, or hero to mankind, or
able to take any serious thought or charge of them. And very unlike a
divine man would he be, who is unable to count one, two, three, or
to distinguish odd and even numbers, or is unable to c