reasonable proposition. But how will they know
who are fathers and daughters, and so on?

They will never know. The way will be this:--dating from the day of the
hymeneal, the bridegroom who was then married will call all the male
children who are born in the seventh and tenth month afterwards his
sons, and the female children his daughters, and they will call him
father, and he will call their children his grandchildren, and they will
call the elder generation grandfathers and grandmothers. All who were
begotten at the time when their fathers and mothers came together will
be called their brothers and sisters, and these, as I was saying, will
be forbidden to inter-marry. This, however, is not to be understood as
an absolute prohibition of the marriage of brothers and sisters; if the
lot favours them, and they receive the sanction of the Pythian oracle,
the law will allow them.

Quite right, he replied.

Such is the scheme, Glaucon, according to which the guardians of our
State are to have their wives and families in common. And now you would
have the argument show that this community is consistent with the rest
of our polity, and also that nothing can be better--would you not?

Yes, certainly.

Shall we try to find a common basis by asking of ourselves what ought
to be the chief aim of the legislator in making laws and in the
organization of a State,--what is the greatest good, and what is the
greatest evil, and then consider whether our previous description has
the stamp of the good or of the evil?

By all means.

Can there be any greater evil than discord and distraction and plurality
where unity ought to reign? or any greater good than the bond of unity?

There cannot.

And there is unity where there is community of pleasures and
pains--where all the citizens are glad or grieved on the same occasions
of joy and sorrow?

No doubt.

Yes; and where there is no common but only private feeling a State is
disorganized--when you have one half of the world triumphing and the
other plunged in grief at the same events happening to the city or the
citizens?

Certainly.

Such differences commonly originate in a disagreement about the use of
the terms 'mine' and 'not mine,' 'his' and 'not his.'

Exactly so.

And is not that the best-ordered State in which the greatest number of
persons apply the terms 'mine' and 'not mine' in the same way to the
same thing?

Quite true.

Or that again which most nearly a