hen present in such
manner as we have described, will accomplish?

Certainly.

Then we have made an enactment not only possible but in the highest
degree beneficial to the State?

True.

Then let the wives of our guardians strip, for their virtue will be
their robe, and let them share in the toils of war and the defence of
their country; only in the distribution of labours the lighter are to
be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other
respects their duties are to be the same. And as for the man who
laughs at naked women exercising their bodies from the best of motives,
in his laughter he is plucking

A fruit of unripe wisdom,

and he himself is ignorant of what he is laughing at, or what he is
about;--for that is, and ever will be, the best of sayings, That the
useful is the noble and the hurtful is the base.

Very true.

Here, then, is one difficulty in our law about women, which we may say
that we have now escaped; the wave has not swallowed us up alive for
enacting that the guardians of either sex should have all their
pursuits in common; to the utility and also to the possibility of this
arrangement the consistency of the argument with itself bears witness.

Yes, that was a mighty wave which you have escaped.

Yes, I said, but a greater is coming; you will of this when you see the
next.

Go on; let me see.

The law, I said, which is the sequel of this and of all that has
preceded, is to the following effect,--'that the wives of our guardians
are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is
to know his own child, nor any child his parent.'

Yes, he said, that is a much greater wave than the other; and the
possibility as well as the utility of such a law are far more
questionable.

I do not think, I said, that there can be any dispute about the very
great utility of having wives and children in common; the possibility
is quite another matter, and will be very much disputed.

I think that a good many doubts may be raised about both.

You imply that the two questions must be combined, I replied. Now I
meant that you should admit the utility; and in this way, as I thought;
I should escape from one of them, and then there would remain only the
possibility.

But that little attempt is detected, and therefore you will please to
give a defence of both.

Well, I said, I submit to my fate. Yet grant me a little favour: let
me feast my mind with the