[23]
“How do they beget children badly then, if, as may well happen, the fathers are good men and the mothers good women?”“Surely because it is not enough that the two parents should be good. They must also be in full bodily vigour: unless you suppose that those who are in full vigour are no more efficient as parents than those who have not yet reached that condition or have passed it.”“Of course that is unlikely.”“Which are the better then?”“Those who are in full vigour, clearly.”“Consequently those who are not in full vigour are not competent to become parents?”“It is improbable, of course.”“In that case then, they ought not to have children?”“Certainly not.”“Therefore those who produce children in such circumstances produce them wrongly?”“I think so.”“Who then will be bad fathers and mothers, if not they?”“I agree with you there too.”
Xenophon. Xenophon in Seven Volumes, 4. E. C. Marchant. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA; William Heinemann, Ltd., London. 1923.
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