Timaeus — Plato

point at which the pulse of life beats quickest, and continue to beget children until he be fifty-five. 461 Certainly, he said, both in men and women those years are the prime of physical as well as of intellectual vigour.

Any one above or below the prescribed ages who takes part in the public hymeneals shall be said to have done an unholy and unrighteous thing ; the child of which he is the father, if it steals into life, will have been conceived under auspices very unlike the sacrifices and prayers, which at each hymeneal priestesses and priests and the whole city will offer, that the new generation may be better and more useful than their good and useful parents, whereas his child will be the offspring of darkness and strange lust.

Very true, he replied. And the same law will apply to any one of those within the prescribed age who forms a connection with any women in the prime of life without the sanction of the rulers ; for we shall say that he is raising up a bastard to the State, uncertified and unconsecrated. Very true, he replied.

This applies, however, only to those who are within the specified age : after that we allow them to range at will, except that a man may not marry his daughter or his daughter's daughter, or his mother or his mother's mother; and women, on the other hand, are prohibited from marrying their sons or fathers, or son's son or father's father, and so on in either direction.

And we grant all this, accompanying the permission with strict orders to prevent any embryo which may come into being from seeing the light ; and if any force a way to the birth, the parents must understand that the offspring of such an union cannot be maintained, and arrange accordingly. That also, he said, is a 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 the 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

Republic V. Socrates, Glaucon. twenty to forty ; a man to beget them from twenty-five to fifty-five.

After the prescribed age has been passed, more licence is allowed : but all who were born after certain hymeneal festivals at which their parents or grandparents came together must be kept separate.

p. 156

'Meiiin and tuum.^

Republic V. sockates, Glaucon.

The greatest good of States, unity; the greatest evil, discord. The one the result of public, the other of private feelings.

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 intermarry.

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 feehng 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