[474d]
“for I
don't apprehend at all.” “That reply,
Glaucon,” said I, “befits another rather than you. It
does not become a lover to forget that all adolescents in some sort sting
and stir the amorous lover of youth and appear to him deserving of his
attention and desirable. Is not that your ‘reaction’ to
the fair? One, because his nose is tip-tilted,1 you will praise as piquant, the beak of
another you pronounce right-royal, the intermediate type you say strikes the
harmonious mean,
1 Another of the famous sentences that would be worth a monograph. Cf. Lucretius iv. 1160, Molière, Misanthrope, ii. 5, Horace, Satire i. 338. F. Brunetière, Les Epoques du théâtre francÿais, p. 76, thinks that Molière took it from Scarron, not from Lucretius. Shakespeare Much Ado, III. i. reverses the conceit, Santayana, Reason in Society, p. 25, writes prettily about it.
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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