And now, having provided buildings, and having married our citizens, we will proceed to speak of their mode of life.  In a well-constituted state, individuals cannot be allowed to live as they please.  Why do I say this?  Because I am going to enact that the bridegroom shall not absent himself from the common meals.  They were instituted originally on the occasion of some war, and, though deemed singular when first founded, they have tended greatly to the security of states.  There was a difficulty in introducing them, but there is no difficulty in them now.  There is, however, another institution about which I would speak, if I dared.  I may preface my proposal by remarking that disorder in a state is the source of all evil, and order of all good.  Now in Sparta and Crete there are common meals for men, and this, as I was saying, is a divine and natural institution.  But the women are left to themselves; they live in dark places, and, being weaker, and therefore wickeder, than men, they are at the bottom of a good deal more than half the evil of states.  This must be corrected, and the institution of common meals extended to both sexes.  But, in the present unfortunate state of opinion, who would dare to establish them?  And still more, who can compel women to eat and drink in public?  They will defy the legislator to drag them out of their holes.  And in any other state such a proposal would be drowned in clamour, but in our own I think that I can show the attempt to be just and reasonable.  ’There is nothing which we should like to hear better.’  Listen, then; having plenty of time, we will go back to the beginning of things, which is an old subject with us.  ‘Right.’  Either the race of mankind never had a beginning and will never have an end, or the time which has elapsed since man first came into being is all but infinite.  ‘No doubt.’  And in this infinity of time there have been changes of every kind, both in the order of the seasons and in the government of states and in the customs of eating and drinking.  Vines and olives were at length discovered, and the blessings of Demeter and Persephone, of which one Triptolemus is said to have been the minister; before his time the animals had been eating one another.  And there are nations in which mankind still sacrifice their fellow-men, and other nations in which they lead a kind of Orphic existence, and will not sacrifice animals, or so much as taste of a cow—­they offer fruits or cakes moistened with honey.  Perhaps you will ask me what is the bearing of these remarks?  ‘We would gladly hear.’  I will endeavour to explain their drift.  I see that the virtue of human life depends on the due regulation of three wants or desires.  The first is the desire of meat, the second of drink; these begin with birth, and make us disobedient to any voice other than that of pleasure.  The third and fiercest and greatest need is felt latest; this is love, which is a madness setting men’s whole nature on fire.  These three disorders of mankind we must endeavour to restrain by three mighty influences—­fear, and law, and reason, which, with the aid of the Muses and the Gods of contests, may extinguish our lusts.