[459a]
“By all
means.” “How, then, would the greatest benefit result?
Tell me this, Glaucon. I see that you have in your house hunting-dogs and a
number of pedigree cocks.1 Have you ever considered something
about their unions and procreations?”
“What?”2 he said. “In the first
place,” I said, “among these themselves, although they
are a select breed, do not some prove better than the rest?”
“They do.” “Do you then breed from all
indiscriminately, or are you careful to breed from the best3?”
1 Cf. Laws 789 B-C.
2 The riddling question to which the response is “what?” is a mannerism derived from tragedy, which becomes very frequent in the later style of the Sophist, Politicus and Philebus.
3 This commonplace of stirpiculture or eugenics, as it is now called, begins with Theognis 184, and has thus far got no further.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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