[452c]
and culture, and most of all about the bearing of arms
and the bestriding of horses.” “You're right,”
he said. “But since we have begun we must go forward to the rough
part of our law,1 after begging these fellows not to mind their
own business2 but to be serious, and
reminding them that it is not long since the Greeks thought it disgraceful
and ridiculous, as most of the barbarians3 do now,
for men to be seen naked. And when the practice of athletics began, first
with the Cretans
1 For a variation of this image cf. 568 D.
2 Plato plays on his own favorite phrase. The proper business of the wit is to raise a laugh. Cf. Symposium 189 B.
3 Cf. Thucydides i. 6, Herodotus i. 10. Sikes in Anthropolgy and the Classics says this was borrowed from Thucydides, whom Wilamowitz says Plato never read. Cf. Dio Chrys. xiii. 226 M. For ἐξ οὗ cf. Demosthenes iv. 3, Isocrates v. 47.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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