Cleinias:  Having what in view do you ask that question?

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?