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[430a] 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 be1 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 dread2 power to scour our faiths away, pleasure more potent than any detergent or abstergent

1 γίγνοιτο is process;ἐκπλύναι(aorist) is a single event (μή).

2 δεινά: it is not fanciful to feel the unity of Plato's imagination as well as of his thought in the recurrence of this word in the δεινὰ καὶ ἀναγκαῖα of the mortal soul in Timaeus 69 C.

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