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[546d] And when your guardians, missing this, bring together brides and bridegrooms unseasonably,1 the offspring will not be well-born or fortunate. Of such offspring the previous generation will establish the best, to be sure, in office, but still these, being unworthy, and having entered in turn2 into the powers of their fathers, will first as guardians begin to neglect us, paying too little heed to music3 and then to gymnastics, so that our young men will deteriorate in their culture; and the rulers selected from them

1 Cf. 409 D.

2 αὖ: cf. my note in Class. Phil. xxiii. (1928) pp. 285-287.

3 This does not indicate a change in Plato's attitude toward music, as has been alleged.

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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