ATHENIAN: There seems to be a difficulty, Stranger, with regard to
states, in making words and facts coincide so that there can be no
dispute about them. As in the human body, the regimen which does good in
one way does harm in another; and we can hardly say that any one course
of treatment is adapted to a particular constitution. Now the gymnasia
and common meals do a great deal of good, and yet they are a source of
evil in civil troubles; as is shown in the case of the Milesian, and
Boeotian, and Thurian youth, among whom these institutions seem always
to have had a tendency to degrade the ancient and natural custom of love
below the level, not only of man, but of the beasts. The charge may be
fairly brought against your cities above all others, and is true also
of most other states which especially cultivate gymnastics. Whether
such matters are to be regarded jestingly or seriously, I think that
the pleasure is to be deemed natural which arises out of the intercourse
between men and women; but that the intercourse of men with men, or of
women with women, is contrary to nature, and that the bold attempt was
originally due to unbridled lust. The Cretans are always accused of
having invented the story of Ganymede and Zeus because they wanted
to justify themselves in the enjoyment of unnatural pleasures by the
practice of the god whom they believe to have been their lawgiver.
Leaving the story, we may observe that any speculation about laws turns
almost entirely on pleasure and pain, both in states and in individuals:
these are two fountains which nature lets flow, and he who draws from
them where and when, and as much as he ought, is happy; and this
holds of men and animals--of individuals as well as states; and he who
indulges in them ignorantly and at the wrong time, is the reverse of
happy.
MEGILLUS: I admit, Stranger, that your words are well spoken, and I
hardly know what to say in answer to you; but still I think that the
Spartan lawgiver was quite right in forbidding pleasure. Of the Cretan
laws, I shall leave the defence to my Cnosian friend. But the laws of
Sparta, in as far as they relate to pleasure, appear to me to be the
best in the world; for that which leads mankind in general into the
wildest pleasure and licence, and every other folly, the law has clean
driven out; and neither in the country nor in towns which are under the
control of Sparta, will you find revelries and the many incitements of
every kind of pleasure which accompany them; and any one who meets a
drunken and disorderly person, will immediately have him most severely
punished, and will not let him off on any pretence, not even at the time
of a Dionysiac festival; although I have remarked that this may happen
at your performances 'on the cart,' as they are called; and among our
Tarentine colonists I have seen the whole city drunk at a Dionysiac
festival; but nothing of the sort happens among us.