being younger
will claim to have more than his father and his mother, and if he has
spent his own share of the property, he will take a slice of theirs.

No doubt he will.

And if his parents will not give way, then he will try first of all to
cheat and deceive them.

Very true.

And if he fails, then he will use force and plunder them.

Yes, probably.

And if the old man and woman fight for their own, what then, my friend?
Will the creature feel any compunction at tyrannizing over them?

Nay, he said, I should not feel at all comfortable about his parents.

But, O heavens! Adeimantus, on account of some new-fangled love of a
harlot, who is anything but a necessary connection, can you believe that
he would strike the mother who is his ancient friend and necessary
to his very existence, and would place her under the authority of the
other, when she is brought under the same roof with her; or that, under
like circumstances, he would do the same to his withered old father,
first and most indispensable of friends, for the sake of some
newly-found blooming youth who is the reverse of indispensable?

Yes, indeed, he said; I believe that he would.

Truly, then, I said, a tyrannical son is a blessing to his father and
mother.

He is indeed, he replied.

He first takes their property, and when that fails, and pleasures are
beginning to swarm in the hive of his soul, then he breaks into a house,
or steals the garments of some nightly wayfarer; next he proceeds to
clear a temple. Meanwhile the old opinions which he had when a child,
and which gave judgment about good and evil, are overthrown by those
others which have just been emancipated, and are now the body-guard of
love and share his empire. These in his democratic days, when he was
still subject to the laws and to his father, were only let loose in
the dreams of sleep. But now that he is under the dominion of love, he
becomes always and in waking reality what he was then very rarely and in
a dream only; he will commit the foulest murder, or eat forbidden food,
or be guilty of any other horrid act. Love is his tyrant, and lives
lordly in him and lawlessly, and being himself a king, leads him on, as
a tyrant leads a State, to the performance of any reckless deed by which
he can maintain himself and the rabble of his associates, whether those
whom evil communications have brought in from without, or those whom
he himself has allowed to break loose within him by r