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or
violence?” “Most certainly.” “And so
he is compelled to sweep it in from every source
1 or else be
afflicted with great travail and pain.
2” “He
is.” “And just as the new, upspringing pleasures in him
got the better of the original passions of his soul and robbed them, so he
himself, though younger, will claim the right to get the better
3 of his father and
mother, and, after spending his own share, to seize and convert to his own
use a portion of his father's estate.” “Of
course,” he said, “what else?” “And
if they resist him,
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would he not at
first attempt to rob and steal from his parents and deceive them?”
“Certainly.” “And if he failed in that, would
he not next seize it by force?” “I think so,”
he said. “And then, good sir, if the old man and the old woman
clung to it and resisted him, would he be careful to refrain from the acts
of a tyrant?” “I am not without my fears,” he
said, “for the parents of such a one.” “Nay,
Adeimantus, in heaven's name, do you suppose that, for the sake of a newly
found belle amie bound to him by no necessary tie, such a one would strike
the dear mother,
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his by necessity
4 and from his birth? Or for the sake of a blooming
new-found bel ami, not necessary to his life, he would rain blows
5 upon the aged
father past his prime, closest of his kin and oldest of his friends? And
would he subject them to those new favorites if he brought them under the
same roof?” “Yes, by Zeus,” he said.
“A most blessed lot it seems to be,” said I,
“to be the parent of a tyrant son.” “It does
indeed,” he said. “And again, when the resources of his
father and mother are exhausted
6 and fail
such a one,
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and the swarm
7 of pleasures collected in his soul is grown great, will he
not first lay hands on the wall
8 of someone's house or the cloak of someone who walks late at
night, and thereafter he will make a clean sweep
9 of some temple, and in all these actions the beliefs which
he held from boyhood about the honorable and the base, the opinions
accounted just,
10
will be overmastered by the opinions newly emancipated
11 and released, which, serving as bodyguards
of the ruling passion, will prevail in alliance with it—I mean the
opinions that formerly were freed from restraint in sleep,
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when, being still under the control of his
father and the laws, he maintained the democratic constitution in his soul.
But now, when under the tyranny of his ruling passion, he is continuously
and in waking hours what he rarely became in sleep, and he will refrain from
no atrocity of murder nor from any food or deed,