Plato, Laws

Megillus
A good suggestion! And begin with our friend here, the panegyrist of Zeus—try first to put him to the test.

Athenian
Try I will, and to test you too and myself; for the argument concerns us all alike. Tell me then: do we assert that the common meals and the gymnasia were devised by the lawgiver with a view to war?

Megillus
Yes.

Athenian
And is there a third institution of the kind, and a fourth? For probably one ought to employ this method of enumeration also in dealing with the subdivisions (or whatever we ought to call them) of the other forms of goodness, if only one makes oneÕs meaning clear. [633b]

Megillus
The third thing he devised was hunting: so I and every Lacedaemonian would say.

Athenian
Let us attempt also to state what comes fourth,—and fifth too, if possible.

Megillus
The fourth also I may attempt to state: it is the training, widely prevalent amongst us, in hardy endurance of pain, by means both of manual contests and of robberies carried out every time at the risk of a sound drubbing; moreover, the “Crypteia,”¹ as it is called, affords a wonderfully severe training [633c] in hardihood, as the men go bare-foot in winter and sleep without coverlets and have no attendants, but wait on themselves and rove through the whole countryside both by night and by day. Moreover in our games,² we have severe tests of endurance, when men unclad do battle with the violence of the heat,—and there are other instances so numerous that the recital of them would be well-nigh endless.

Athenian
Splendid, O Stranger of Lacedaemon! But come now, as to courage, how shall we define it? Shall we define it quite simply as battling against fears and pains only, [633d] or as against desires also and pleasures, with their dangerous enticements and flatteries, which melt men's hearts like wax—even men most reverenced in their own conceit.

Megillus
The latter definition is, I think, the right one: courage is battling against them all.

Athenian
Earlier in our discourse (if I am not mistaken) Clinias here used the expression “self-inferior” of a State or an individual: did you not do so, O Stranger of Cnosus?

Clinias
Most certainly. [633e]

Athenian
At present do we apply the term “bad” to the man who is inferior to pains, or to him also who is inferior to pleasures?

Clinias
To the man who is inferior to pleasures more than to the other, in my opinion. All of us, indeed, when we speak of a man who is shamefully self-inferior, mean one who is mastered by pleasures rather than one who is mastered by pains.