[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 women1 and men?”
“There is not.” “And this, music and
gymnastics
1 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.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.