ATHENIAN: Nothing as yet; but I ask generally, when the puppet is brought to the drink, what sort of result is likely to follow. I will endeavour to explain my meaning more clearly: what I am now asking is this--Does the drinking of wine heighten and increase pleasures and pains, and passions and loves? CLEINIAS: Very greatly. ATHENIAN: And are perception and memory, and opinion and prudence, heightened and increased? Do not these qualities entirely desert a man if he becomes saturated with drink? CLEINIAS: Yes, they entirely desert him. ATHENIAN: Does he not return to the state of soul in which he was when a young child? CLEINIAS: He does. ATHENIAN: Then at that time he will have the least control over himself? CLEINIAS: The least. ATHENIAN: And will he not be in a most wretched plight? CLEINIAS: Most wretched. ATHENIAN: Then not only an old man but also a drunkard becomes a second time a child? CLEINIAS: Well said, Stranger. ATHENIAN: Is there any argument which will prove to us that we ought to encourage the taste for drinking instead of doing all we can to avoid it? CLEINIAS: I suppose that there is; you at any rate, were just now saying that you were ready to maintain such a doctrine. ATHENIAN: True, I was; and I am ready still, seeing that you have both declared that you are anxious to hear me. CLEINIAS: To be sure we are, if only for the strangeness of the paradox, which asserts that a man ought of his own accord to plunge into utter degradation. ATHENIAN: Are you speaking of the soul? CLEINIAS: Yes. ATHENIAN: And what would you say about the body, my friend? Are you not surprised at any one of his own accord bringing upon himself deformity, leanness, ugliness, decrepitude? CLEINIAS: Certainly. ATHENIAN: Yet when a man goes of his own accord to a doctor's shop, and takes medicine, is he not aware that soon, and for many days afterwards, he will be in a state of body which he would die rather than accept as the permanent condition of his life? Are not those who train in gymnasia, at first beginning reduced to a state of weakness? CLEINIAS: Yes, all that is well known. ATHENIAN: Also that they go of their own accord for the sake of the subsequent benefit? CLEINIAS: Very good. ATHENIAN: And we may conceive this to be true in the same way of other practices? CLEINIAS: Certainly. ATHENIAN: And the same view may be taken of the pastime of drinking wine, if we are right in supposing that the same good effect follows? CLEINIAS: To be sure. ATHENIAN: If such convivialities should turn out to have any advantage equal in importance to that of gymnastic, they are in their very nature to be preferred to mere bodily exercise, inasmuch as they have no accompaniment of pain. CLEINIAS: True; but I hardly think that we shall be able to discover any such benefits to be derived from them.