and is in doubt between the two principles; the one exhorting him to enjoy the beauty of youth, and the other forbidding him.  For the one is a lover of the body, and hungers after beauty, like ripe fruit, and would fain satisfy himself without any regard to the character of the beloved; the other holds the desire of the body to be a secondary matter, and looking rather than loving and with his soul desiring the soul of the other in a becoming manner, regards the satisfaction of the bodily love as wantonness; he reverences and respects temperance and courage and magnanimity and wisdom, and wishes to live chastely with the chaste object of his affection.  Now the sort of love which is made up of the other two is that which we have described as the third.  Seeing then that there are these three sorts of love, ought the law to prohibit and forbid them all to exist among us?  Is it not rather clear that we should wish to have in the state the love which is of virtue and which desires the beloved youth to be the best possible; and the other two, if possible, we should hinder?  What do you say, friend Megillus?

Megillus:  I think, Stranger, that you are perfectly right in what you have been now saying.

Athenian:  I knew well, my friend, that I should obtain your assent, which I accept, and therefore have no need to analyze your custom any further.  Cleinias shall be prevailed upon to give me his assent at some other time.  Enough of this; and now let us proceed to the laws.

Megillus:  Very good.

Athenian:  Upon reflection I see a way of imposing the law, which, in one respect, is easy, but, in another, is of the utmost difficulty.

Megillus:  What do you mean?

Athenian:  We are all aware that most men, in spite of their lawless natures, are very strictly and precisely restrained from intercourse with the fair, and this is not at all against their will, but entirely with their will.

Megillus:  When do you mean?

Athenian:  When any one has a brother or sister who is fair; and about a son or daughter the same unwritten law holds, and is a most perfect safeguard, so that no open or secret connexion ever takes place between them.  Nor does the thought of such a thing ever enter at all into the minds of most of them.

Megillus:  Very true.

Athenian:  Does not a little word extinguish all pleasures of that sort?

Megillus:  What word?

Athenian:  The declaration that they are unholy, hated of God, and most infamous; and is not the reason of this that no one has ever said the opposite, but every one from his earliest childhood has heard men speaking in the same manner about them always and everywhere, whether in comedy or in the graver language of tragedy?  When the poet introduces on the stage a Thyestes or an Oedipus, or a Macareus having secret intercourse with his sister, he represents him, when found out, ready to kill himself as the penalty of his sin.