vain, and which
is the only point on which Polybius, who settled among us, accuses the
negligence of our institutions. For our countrymen have thought that
education ought not to be fixed, nor regulated by laws, nor be given
publicly and uniformly to all classes of society. For[347] * * *

According to Tully, who says that men going to serve in the
army have guardians assigned to them, by whom they are
governed the first year.

IV. [In our ancient laws, young men were prohibited from appearing]
naked in the public baths, so far back were the principles of modesty
traced by our ancestors. Among the Greeks, on the contrary, what an
absurd system of training youth is exhibited in their gymnasia! What a
frivolous preparation for the labors and hazards of war! what indecent
spectacles, what impure and licentious amours are permitted! I do not
speak only of the Eleans and Thebans, among whom, in all love affairs,
passion is allowed to run into shameless excesses; but the Spartans,
while they permit every kind of license to their young men, save that
of violation, fence off, by a very slight wall, the very exception on
which they insist, besides other crimes which I will not mention.

Then Laelius said: I see, my Scipio, that on the subject of the Greek
institutions, which you censure, you prefer attacking the customs of
the most renowned peoples to contending with your favorite Plato, whose
name you have avoided citing, especially as * * *

V. So that Cicero, in his treatise on the Commonwealth, says
that it was a reproach to young men if they had no lovers.

Not only as at Sparta, where boys learn to steal and plunder.

And our master Plato, even more than Lycurgus, who would have
everything to be common, so that no one should be able to
call anything his own property.

I would send him to the same place whither he sends Homer,
crowned with chaplets and anointed with perfumes, banishing
him from the city which he is describing.

VI. The judgment of the censor inflicts scarcely anything
more than a blush on the man whom he condemns. Therefore as
all that adjudication turns solely on the name (_nomen_), the
punishment is called ignominy.

Nor should a prefect be set over women, an officer who is
created among the Greeks; but there should be a censor to
teach husbands to manage their wives.

So the discipline of modes