and children: for we think that friendship is the greatest good which
can happen to any city, as nothing so much prevents seditions: and amity
in a city is what Socrates commends above all things, which appears
to be, as indeed he says, the effect of friendship; as we learn from
Aristophanes in the Erotics, who says, that those who love one another
from the excess of that passion, desire to breathe the same soul, and
from being two to be blended into one: from whence it would necessarily
follow, that both or one of them must be destroyed. But now in a city
which admits of this community, the tie of friendship must, from that
very cause, be extremely weak, when no father can say, this is my son;
or son, this is my father; for as a very little of what is sweet, being
mixed with a great deal of water is imperceptible after the mixture, so
must all family connections, and the names they go by, be necessarily
disregarded in such a community, it being then by no means necessary
that the father should have any regard for him he called a son, or
the brothers for those they call brothers. There are two things which
principally inspire mankind with care and love of their offspring,
knowing it is their own, and what ought to be the object of their
affection, neither of which can take place in this sort of community. As
for exchanging the children of the artificers and husbandmen with those
of the military, and theirs reciprocally with these, it will occasion
great confusion in whatever manner it shall be done; for of necessity,
those who carry the children must know from whom they took and to whom
they gave them; and by this means those evils which I have already
mentioned will necessarily be the more likely to happen, as blows,
incestuous love, murders, and the like; for those who are given from
their own parents to other citizens, the military, for instance, will
not call them brothers, sons, fathers, or mothers. The same thing
would happen to those of the military who were placed among the other
citizens; so that by this means every one would be in fear how to act
in consequence of consanguinity. And thus let us determine concerning a
community of wives and children.
CHAPTER V