Republic

By this analogy, then, said I, you must conceive what we too to the best of our ability were doing when we selected our soldiers and educated them in music and exercises of the body. The sole aim of our contrivance was that they should be convinced and receive our laws like a dye as it were, so that their belief and faith might be fast-colored both about the things that are to be feared and all other things because of the fitness of their nature and nurture, and that so their dyes might not be washed out by those lyes that have such dread power to scour our faiths away, pleasure more potent than any detergent or abstergent to accomplish this, and pain and fear and desire more sure than any lye. This power in the soul, then, this unfailing conservation of right and lawful belief about things to be and not to be feared is what I call and would assume to be courage, unless you have something different to say. No, nothing, said he; for I presume that you consider mere right opinion about the same matters not produced by education, that which may manifest itself in a beast or a slave, to have little or nothing to do with law and that you would call it by another name than courage. That is most true, said I. Well then, he said, I accept this as bravery. Do so, said I, and you will be right with the reservation that it is the courage of a citizen. Some other time, if it please you, we will discuss it more fully. At present we were not seeking this but justice; and for the purpose of that inquiry I believe we have done enough. You are quite right, he said. Two things still remain, said I, to make out in our city, soberness and the object of the whole inquiry, justice. Quite so. If there were only some way to discover justice so that we need not further concern ourselves about soberness. Well, I, for my part, he said, neither know of any such way nor would I wish justice to be discovered first if that means that we are not to go on to the consideration of soberness. But if you desire to please me, consider this before that. It would certainly be very wrong of me not to desire it, said I. Go on with the inquiry then, he said. I must go on, I replied, and viewed from here it bears more likeness to a kind of concord and harmony than the other virtues did. How so? Soberness is a kind of beautiful order and a continence of certain pleasures and appetites, as they say, using the phrase master of himself I know not how; and there are other similar expressions that as it were point us to the same trail. Is that not so? Most certainly.