with you.’  Then may heaven give us the spirit of agreement, for I am as convinced of the truth of what I say as that Crete is an island; and, if I were a lawgiver, I would exercise a censorship over the poets, and I would punish them if they said that the wicked are happy, or that injustice is profitable.  And these are not the only matters in which I should make my citizens talk in a different way to the world in general.  If I asked Zeus and Apollo, the divine legislators of Crete and Sparta,—­’Are the just and pleasant life the same or not the same’?—­and they replied,—­’Not the same’; and I asked again—­’Which is the happier’?  And they said’—­’The pleasant life,’ this is an answer not fit for a God to utter, and therefore I ought rather to put the same question to some legislator.  And if he replies ‘The pleasant,’ then I should say to him, ’O my father, did you not tell me that I should live as justly as possible’? and if to be just is to be happy, what is that principle of happiness or good which is superior to pleasure?  Is the approval of gods and men to be deemed good and honourable, but unpleasant, and their disapproval the reverse?  Or is the neither doing nor suffering evil good and honourable, although not pleasant?  But you cannot make men like what is not pleasant, and therefore you must make them believe that the just is pleasant.  The business of the legislator is to clear up this confusion.  He will show that the just and the unjust are identical with the pleasurable and the painful, from the point of view of the just man, of the unjust the reverse.  And which is the truer judgment?  Surely that of the better soul.  For if not the truth, it is the best and most moral of fictions; and the legislator who desires to propagate this useful lie, may be encouraged by remarking that mankind have believed the story of Cadmus and the dragon’s teeth, and therefore he may be assured that he can make them believe anything, and need only consider what fiction will do the greatest good.  That the happiest is also the holiest, this shall be our strain, which shall be sung by all three choruses alike.  First will enter the choir of children, who will lift up their voices on high; and after them the young men, who will pray the God Paean to be gracious to the youth, and to testify to the truth of their words; then will come the chorus of elder men, between thirty and sixty; and, lastly, there will be the old men, and they will tell stories enforcing the same virtues, as with the voice of an oracle.  ’Whom do you mean by the third chorus?’ You remember how I spoke at first of the restless nature of young creatures, who jumped about and called out in a disorderly manner, and I said that no other animal attained any perception of rhythm; but that to us the Gods gave Apollo and the Muses and Dionysus to be our playfellows.  Of the two first choruses I have already spoken, and I have now to speak of the third, or Dionysian chorus, which is composed of those who are between thirty