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Why in ancient days did they never dine out
without their sons, even when these were still but
children?
Did Lycurgus introduce this custom also, and bring
boys to the common meals that they might become
accustomed to conduct themselves toward their pleasures, not in a brutish or disorderly way, but with
discretion, since they had their elders as supervisors
and spectators, as it were? No less important is the
fact that the fathers themselves would also be more
decorous and prudent in the presence of their sons ;
for ‘where the old are shameless,’ as Plato1 remarks,
‘there the young also must needs be lost to all sense
of shame.’
1 Laws, 729 c; also cited or referred to Moralia, 14 b, 71 b, 144 f.
Plutarch. Moralia. with an English Translation by. Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1936. 4.
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