[399a]
that are called lax.” “Will you make
any use of them for warriors?” “None at all,”
he said; “but it would seem that you have left the Dorian and the Phrygian.”
“I don't know1 the musical modes,” I said, “but leave
us that mode2 that would
fittingly imitate the utterances and the accents of a brave man who is
engaged in warfare or in any enforced business, and who, when he has failed,
either meeting wounds or death or having fallen into some other mishap,
1 Plato, like a lawyer or popular essayist, affects ignorance of the technical details; or perhaps rather he wishes to disengage his main principle from the specialists' controversy about particular modes of music and their names.
2 ἐκείνην may mean, but does not say, Dorian, which the Laches(188 D) pronounces the only true Greek harmony. This long anacoluthic sentence sums up the whole matter with impressive repetition and explicit enumeration of all types of conduct in peace and war, and implied reference to Plato's doctrine of the two fundamental temperaments, the swift and the slow, the energetic and the mild. Cf. Unity of Plato's Thought, nn. 59, 70, 481.
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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