[1262a]
[1]
Again, each speaks
of one of his fellow-citizens who is prospering or getting on badly as
‘my son’ only in the sense of the fractional part which he
forms of the whole number—that is, he says ‘my
son’ or ‘so-and-so's son,’ specifying as the
father any individual of the thousand citizens or whatever the number be of
which the state consists, and even this dubiously, for it is uncertain who has
chanced to have had a son born to him and when born safely reared. Yet which is the better way to use the
word ‘mine’—this way, each of two thousand or ten
thousand people applying it to the same thing, or rather the way in which they
say ‘mine’ in the actual states now? for the same person is
called ‘my son’ by one man and ‘my
brother’ by another, and another calls him
‘nephew,’ or by some other relationship, whether of blood or
by affinity and marriage, the speaker's own in the first place, or that of his
relations; and in addition someone else calls him
‘fellow-clansman’ or ‘fellow-tribesman.’
For it is better for a boy to be one's own private nephew than one's son in the
way described. Moreover it would
also be impossible to avoid men's supposing certain persons to be their real
brothers and sons and fathers and mothers; for they would be bound to form their
belief about each other by the resemblances which occur between children and
parents. This indeed is said by some of those who write of travels round the
world1 actually to occur;
[20]
they say that some of the people of Upper
Libya have their wives in common, yet the children born are divided among them
according to their personal resemblances. And there are some females both of the
human race and of the other animals, for instance horses and cattle, who have a
strong natural tendency to produce off-spring resembling the male parents, as
was the case with the mare at Pharsalus
named Honest Lady.2
Moreover it is not easy for those who institute this communism to guard
against such objectionable occurrences as outrage, involuntary and in some cases
voluntary homicide, fights, abusive language; all of which are violations of
piety when committed against fathers, mothers and near relatives as if they were
not relatives; but these are bound to occur more frequently when people do not
know their relations than when they do, and also, when they do occur, if the
offenders know their relationship it is possible for them to have the customary
expiations performed, but for those who do not no expiation is possible.
Also it is curious that a
theorist who makes the sons common property only debars lovers from intercourse
and does not prohibit love, nor the other familiarities, which between father
and son or brother and brother are most unseemly, since even the fact of love
between them is unseemly. And it is also strange that he deprives them of
intercourse for no other reason except because the pleasure is too violent; and
that he thinks it makes no difference that the parties are in the one case
father or son and in the other case brothers of one another. And it seems that
this community of wives and sons is more serviceable for the Farmer class than
for the Guardians;
1 Books of geography, founded on travellers' reports—a famous one by Hecataeus, scoffed at by Hdt. 4.36.
2 Or possibly ‘Docile’ ( Jackson), cf. Xen. Hunt. 7.4.
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