courage, also madden and intoxicate the soul?  What better and more innocent test of character is there than festive intercourse?  Would you make a bargain with a man in order to try whether he is honest?  Or would you ascertain whether he is licentious by putting your wife or daughter into his hands?  No one would deny that the test proposed is fairer, speedier, and safer than any other.  And such a test will be particularly useful in the political science, which desires to know human natures and characters.  ‘Very true.’

Book ii.  And are there any other uses of well-ordered potations?  There are; but in order to explain them, I must repeat what I mean by right education; which, if I am not mistaken, depends on the due regulation of convivial intercourse.  ‘A high assumption.’  I believe that virtue and vice are originally present to the mind of children in the form of pleasure and pain; reason and fixed principles come later, and happy is he who acquires them even in declining years; for he who possesses them is the perfect man.  When pleasure and pain, and love and hate, are rightly implanted in the yet unconscious soul, and after the attainment of reason are discovered to be in harmony with her, this harmony of the soul is virtue, and the preparatory stage, anticipating reason, I call education.  But the finer sense of pleasure and pain is apt to be impaired in the course of life; and therefore the Gods, pitying the toils and sorrows of mortals, have allowed them to have holidays, and given them the Muses and Apollo and Dionysus for leaders and playfellows.  All young creatures love motion and frolic, and utter sounds of delight; but man only is capable of taking pleasure in rhythmical and harmonious movements.  With these education begins; and the uneducated is he who has never known the discipline of the chorus, and the educated is he who has.  The chorus is partly dance and partly song, and therefore the well-educated must sing and dance well.  But when we say, ‘He sings and dances well,’ we mean that he sings and dances what is good.  And if he thinks that to be good which is really good, he will have a much higher music and harmony in him, and be a far greater master of imitation in sound and gesture than he who is not of this opinion.  ‘True.’  Then, if we know what is good and bad in song and dance, we shall know what education is?  ‘Very true.’  Let us now consider the beauty of figure, melody, song, and dance.  Will the same figures or sounds be equally well adapted to the manly and the cowardly when they are in trouble?  ’How can they be, when the very colours of their faces are different?’ Figures and melodies have a rhythm and harmony which are adapted to the expression of different feelings (I may remark, by the way, that the term ‘colour,’ which is a favourite word of music-masters, is not really applicable to music).  And one class of harmonies is akin to courage and all virtue, the other to cowardice and all vice.  ‘We agree.’