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[753e] Who, then, are the men, O Clinias and Megillus, who shall establish in our State all these regulations concerning magisterial offices and tests? We perceive (do we not?) that for States that are thus getting into harness for the first time some such persons there must necessarily be; but who they can be, before any officials exist, it is impossible to see. Yet somehow or other they must be there—and men, too, of no mean quality, but of the highest quality possible. For, as the saying goes, “well begun is half done,”1 and every man always commends a good beginning; but it is truly, as I think, something more than the half, and no man has ever yet commended as it deserves

1 Literally, “the beginning is the half of every work.”

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