uld be warned against meanness or
unseemliness. Sculpture and painting equally with music must conform to
the law of simplicity. He who violates it cannot be allowed to work in
our city, and to corrupt the taste of our citizens. For our guardians
must grow up, not amid images of deformity which will gradually poison
and corrupt their souls, but in a land of health and beauty where they
will drink in from every object sweet and harmonious influences. And of
all these influences the greatest is the education given by music,
which finds a way into the innermost soul and imparts to it the sense
of beauty and of deformity. At first the effect is unconscious; but when
reason arrives, then he who has been thus trained welcomes her as the
friend whom he always knew. As in learning to read, first we acquire the
elements or letters separately, and afterwards their combinations,
and cannot recognize reflections of them until we know the letters
themselves;--in like manner we must first attain the elements or
essential forms of the virtues, and then trace their combinations in
life and experience. There is a music of the soul which answers to the
harmony of the world; and the fairest object of a musical soul is the
fair mind in the fair body. Some defect in the latter may be excused,
but not in the former. True love is the daughter of temperance, and
temperance is utterly opposed to the madness of bodily pleasure. Enough
has been said of music, which makes a fair ending with love.

Next we pass on to gymnastics; about which I would remark, that the
soul is related to the body as a cause to an effect, and therefore if we
educate the mind we may leave the education of the body in her charge,
and need only give a general outline of the course to be pursued. In
the first place the guardians must abstain from strong drink, for they
should be the last persons to lose their wits. Whether the habits of
the palaestra are suitable to them is more doubtful, for the ordinary
gymnastic is a sleepy sort of thing, and if left off suddenly is apt to
endanger health. But our warrior athletes must be wide-awake dogs, and
must also be inured to all changes of food and climate. Hence they will
require a simpler kind of gymnastic, akin to their simple music; and for
their diet a rule may be found in Homer, who feeds his heroes on roast
meat only, and gives them no fish although they are living at the
sea-side, nor boiled meats which involve an apparatus