endeavour to explain my meaning more clearly: what I am now asking
is this-Does the drinking of wine heighten and increase pleasures
and pains, and passions and loves?

  Cle. Very greatly.

  Ath. And are perception and memory, and opinion and prudence,
heightened and increased? Do not these qualities entirely desert a man
if he becomes saturated with drink?

  Cle. Yes, they entirely desert him.

  Ath. Does he not return to the state of soul in which he was when
a young child?

  Cle. He does.

  Ath. Then at that time he will have the least control over himself?

  Cle. The least.

  Ath. And will he not be in a most wretched plight?

  Cle. Most wretched.

  Ath. Then not only an old man but also a drunkard becomes a second
time a child?

  Cle. Well said, Stranger.

  Ath. Is there any argument which will prove to us that we ought to
encourage the taste for drinking instead of doing all we can to
avoid it?

  Cle. I suppose that there is; you at any rate, were just now
saying that you were ready to maintain such a doctrine.

  Ath. True, I was; and I am ready still, seeing that you have both
declared that you are anxious to hear me.

  Cle. To sure we are, if only for the strangeness of the paradox,
which asserts that a man ought of his own accord to plunge into
utter degradation.

  Ath. Are you speaking of the soul?

  Cle. Yes.

  Ath. And what would you say about the body, my friend? Are you not
surprised at any one of his own accord bringing upon himself
deformity, leanness, ugliness, decrepitude?

  Cle. Certainly.

  Ath. Yet when a man goes of his own accord to a doctor's shop, and
takes medicine, is he not aware that soon, and for many days
afterwards, he will be in a state of body which he would die rather
than accept as the permanent condition of his life? Are not those
who train in gymnasia, at first beginning reduced to a state of
weakness?

  Cle. Yes, all that is well known.

  Ath. Also that they go of their own accord for the sake of the
subsequent benefit?

  Cle. Very good.

  Ath. And we may conceive this to be true in the same way of other
practices?

  Cle. Certainly.

  Ath. And the same view may be taken of the pastime of drinking wine,
if we are right in supposing that the same good effect follows?

  Cle. To be sure.

  Ath. If such convivialities should turn out to have any advantage
equal in importance to that of gymnastic, they are in their very
nature to be preferred to mere bodily exercise, inasmuch as they
have no accompaniment of pain.

  Cle. True; but I hardly think that we shall be able to discover
any such benefits to be derived from them.

  Ath. That is just what we must endeavour to show. And let me ask you
a question:-Do we not distinguish two kinds of fear, which are very
different?

  Cle. What are they?

  Ath. There is the fear of expected evil.

  Cle. Yes.

   Ath. And there is the fear of an evil reputation; we are afraid
of being thought evil, because we do or say some dishonourable
thing, which fear we and all men term shame.