[456a]
and warlike and another
unwarlike and averse to gymnastics?” “I think
not.” “And again, one a lover, another a hater, of
wisdom? And one high-spirited, and the other lacking spirit?”
“That also is true.” “Then it is likewise true
that one woman has the qualities of a guardian and another not. Were not
these the natural qualities of the men also whom we selected for
guardians?” “They were.” “The women
and the men, then, have the same nature in respect to the guardianship of
the state, save in so far as the one is weaker, the other
stronger.” “Apparently.”
[456b]
“Women of this
kind, then, must be selected to cohabit with men of this kind and to serve
with them as guardians since they are capable of it and akin by
nature.” “By all means.” “And to the
same natures must we not assign the same pursuits?” “The
same.” “We come round,1 then, to our previous
statement, and agree that it does not run counter to nature to assign music
and gymnastics to the wives of the guardians.”
[456c]
“By all means.” “Our
legislation, then, was not impracticable or utopian,2 since the law we proposed accorded with
nature. Rather, the other way of doing things, prevalent today, proves, as
it seems, unnatural.” “Apparently.”
“The object of our inquiry was the possibility and the
desirability3 of what we were proposing.” “It
was.” “That it is possible has been admitted.”
“Yes.” “The next point to be agreed upon is
that it is the best way.” “Obviously.”
“For the production of a guardian, then, education will not be one
thing for our men and another for our women, especially since
[456d]
the nature which we hand over to it is the
same.” “There will be no difference.”
“How are you minded, now, in this matter?” “In
what?” “In the matter of supposing some men to be better
and some worse,4
or do you think them all alike?” “By no
means.” “In the city, then, that we are founding, which
do you think will prove the better men, the guardians receiving the
education which we have described or the cobblers educated by the art of
cobbling5?”
“An absurd question,” he said.
[456e]
“I understand,” said I;
“and are not these the best of all the citizens?”
“By far.” “And will not these women be the
best of all the women?” “They, too, by far.”
“Is there anything better for a state than the generation in it of
the best possible women6 and men?”
“There is not.” “And this, music and
gymnastics
1 Cf. Gorgias 517 C.
2 Cf. on 450 D.
3 Cf. Introduction p. xvii.
4 This is only a more complicated case of the point of style noted on 349 D. Cf. Cratylus 386 A, Sophist 247 A.
5 Cf. on 421 A. We should not press this incidental phrase to prove that Plato would not educate all the citizens, as he in fact does in the Laws and by implication in the Politicus.
6 Cf. Morley, Voltaire, p. 103: “It has been rather the fashion to laugh at the Marquise de Châtelet, for no better reason than that she, being a woman, studied Newton. . . . There is probably nothing which would lead to so rapid and marked an improvement in the world as a large increase of the number of women in it with the will and the capacity to master Newton as thoroughly as she did.”
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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