and sixty years old.  ’Let us hear.’  We are agreed (are we not?) that men, women, and children should be always charming themselves with strains of virtue, and that there should be a variety in the strains, that they may not weary of them?  Now the fairest and most useful of strains will be uttered by the elder men, and therefore we cannot let them off.  But how can we make them sing?  For a discreet elderly man is ashamed to hear the sound of his own voice in private, and still more in public.  The only way is to give them drink; this will mellow the sourness of age.  No one should be allowed to taste wine until they are eighteen; from eighteen to thirty they may take a little; but when they have reached forty years, they may be initiated into the mystery of drinking.  Thus they will become softer and more impressible; and when a man’s heart is warm within him, he will be more ready to charm himself and others with song.  And what songs shall he sing?  ‘At Crete and Lacedaemon we only know choral songs.’  Yes; that is because your way of life is military.  Your young men are like wild colts feeding in a herd together; no one takes the individual colt and trains him apart, and tries to give him the qualities of a statesman as well as of a soldier.  He who was thus trained would be a greater warrior than those of whom Tyrtaeus speaks, for he would be courageous, and yet he would know that courage was only fourth in the scale of virtue.  ’Once more, I must say, Stranger, that you run down our lawgivers.’  Not intentionally, my good friend, but whither the argument leads I follow; and I am trying to find some style of poetry suitable for those who dislike the common sort.  ‘Very good.’  In all things which have a charm, either this charm is their good, or they have some accompanying truth or advantage.  For example, in eating and drinking there is pleasure and also profit, that is to say, health; and in learning there is a pleasure and also truth.  There is a pleasure or charm, too, in the imitative arts, as well as a law of proportion or equality; but the pleasure which they afford, however innocent, is not the criterion of their truth.  The test of pleasure cannot be applied except to that which has no other good or evil, no truth or falsehood.  But that which has truth must be judged of by the standard of truth, and therefore imitation and proportion are to be judged of by their truth alone.  ‘Certainly.’  And as music is imitative, it is not to be judged by the criterion of pleasure, and the Muse whom we seek is the muse not of pleasure but of truth, for imitation has a truth.  ‘Doubtless.’  And if so, the judge must know what is being imitated before he decides on the quality of the imitation, and he who does not know what is true will not know what is good.  ‘He will not.’  Will any one be able to imitate the human body, if he does not know the number, proportion, colour, or figure of the limbs?  ‘How can he?’ But suppose we know some picture or figure to be an exact resemblance