"Would you have us raise a laugh by express statutes directing the pregnant mother to take constitutionals, to mold her infant, when she has borne it, like so much wax while it is still plastic, and to keep it swaddled for its first two years? "
— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
Author
Work Title
Date
355-347 B.C.
Metaphor
"Would you have us raise a laugh by express statutes directing the pregnant mother to take constitutionals, to mold her infant, when she has borne it, like so much wax while it is still plastic, and to keep it swaddled for its first two years? "
Metaphor in Context
ATHENIAN: Well, the point would be more readily understood by my own countrymen, thanks to the undue devotion of some of them to sport. Among us, in fact, children, and some who are no longer children, too, are in the habit of rearing young birds for the purpose of cockfighting. Now they are very far from thinking the performances in which they train these animals by pitting them against one another adequate discipline for such creatures. Over and above all this, everyone keeps birds somewhere on his person--the smaller ones in the hand, the bigger within his cloak, under the elbow--and takes walks of many furlongs, with an eye not to his own physique but to that of his beasties--a practice which at least indicates to the intelligent observer that all bodies are beneficially braced by every sort of shaking and stirring, whether due to their own movements, to the oscillations of a conveyance or a boat, the trot of a horse, or however the motion of the body may be caused. The frame is thus enabled to cope with its nutriment, solid or liquid, and presents a spectacle of health and beauty, to say nothing of robustness. Now in view of these facts, how, let me ask, shall we proceed to act? Would you have us raise a laugh by express statutes directing the pregnant mother to take constitutionals, to mold her infant, when she has borne it, like so much wax while it is still plastic, and to keep it swaddled for its first two years? And what of the nurse? Shall we compel her under legal penalties to be incessantly carrying her charges to the country, the public temples, the homes of their relatives, until they are strong enough to stand on their own feet, and ever later to persist in carrying a child about until it has completed its third year, for fear the limbs may be distorted in infancy if too much weight is thrown upon them? Shall we enact that our nurses must be the most robust we can get, and that there must be more than one for each infant, and crown our work by prescribing a penalty for the offender in case of neglect of any of these various directions? Surely not. It would be to lay ourselves open to more than enough of the consequences I have mentioned.
(789b-790a, p. 1361)
(789b-790a, p. 1361)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Hamilton, E. and Cairns, H., Eds. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Bollingen Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Date of Entry
05/09/2005
