so in regard
to pleasure we must do away with excessive desire, and in regard to
vengeance with excessive hatred of evil. For so in the former case one
will not be apathetic but temperate, and in the latter one will not be
savage or cruel but just. But if the passions were entirely removed,
supposing that to be possible, reason would become in many duller and
blunter, like the pilot in the absence of a storm. And no doubt it is
from having noticed this that legislators try to excite in states
ambition and emulation among their townsmen, and stir up and increase
their courage and pugnacity against enemies by the sound of trumpets
and flutes. For it is not only in poems, as Plato says, that he that is
inspired by the Muses, and as it were possessed by them, will laugh to
shame the plodding artist, but also in fighting battles passion and
enthusiasm will be irresistible and invincible, such as Homer makes the
gods inspire men with, as in the line,

"Thus speaking he infused great might in Hector,
The shepherd of the people."[246]

and,

"He is not mad like this without the god,"[247]

as if the god had added passion to reason as an incitement and spur. And
you may see those very persons, whose opinions I am combating,
frequently urging on the young by praises, and frequently checking them
by rebukes, though pleasure follows the one, pain the other. For rebukes
and censure produce repentance and shame, the one bringing grief, the
other fear, and these they mostly make use of for purposes of
correction. And so Diogenes, when Plato was being praised, said, "What
has he to vaunt of, who has been a philosopher so long, and yet never
gave pain to anyone?" For one could not say, to use the words of
Xenocrates, that the mathematics are such handles to philosophy as are
the emotions of young men, such as shame, desire, repentance, pleasure,
pain, ambition, whereon reason and the law laying a suitable grip
succeed in putting the young man on the right road. So that it was no
bad remark of the Lacedaemonian tutor, that he would make the boy
entrusted to his charge pleased with what was good and displeased with
what was bad,[248] for a higher or nobler aim cannot be proposed in the
education fit for a freeborn lad.

[219] See "Meno," p. 72, A.

[220] Omitting [Greek: hetera], which Reiske justly
suspects.

[221] Reading [Greek: proton] with Wyttenbach.

[222] Homer, "Odyssey," xix. 208-212.