Republic

We were saying, if you recollect, that they must approve themselves lovers of the state when tested in pleasures and pains, and make it apparent that they do not abandon this fixed faith under stress of labors or fears or any other vicissitude, and that anyone who could not keep that faith must he rejected, while he who always issued from the test pure and intact, like gold tried in the fire, is to be established as ruler and to receive honors in life and after death and prizes as well. Something of this sort we said while the argument slipped by with veiled face in fear of starting our present debate. Most true, he said; I remember. We shrank, my friend, I said, from uttering the audacities which have now been hazarded. But now let us find courage for the definitive pronouncement that as the most perfect guardians we must establish philosophers. Yes, assume it to have been said, said he. Note, then, that they will naturally be few, for the different components of the nature which we said their education presupposed rarely consent to grow in one; but for the most part these qualities are found apart. What do you mean? he said. Facility in learning, memory, sagacity, quickness of apprehension and their accompaniments, and youthful spirit and magnificence in soul are qualities, you know, that are rarely combined in human nature with a disposition to live orderly, quiet, and stable lives; but such men, by reason of their quickness, are driven about just as chance directs, and all steadfastness is gone out of them. You speak truly, he said. And on the other hand, the steadfast and stable temperaments, whom one could rather trust in use, and who in war are not easily moved and aroused to fear, are apt to act in the same way when confronted with studies. They are not easily aroused, learn with difficulty, as if benumbed, and are filled with sleep and yawning when an intellectual task is set them. It is so, he said. But we affirmed that a man must partake of both temperaments in due and fair combination or else participate in neither the highest education nor in honors nor in rule. And rightly, he said. Do you not think, then, that such a blend will be a rare thing? Of course. They must, then, be tested in the toils and fears and pleasures of which we then spoke, and we have also now to speak of a point we then passed by, that we must exercise them in many studies, watching them to see whether their nature is capable of enduring the greatest and most difficult studies or whether it will faint and flinch as men flinch in the trials and contests of the body.