666–667
Athenian
Ath. What manner of song will the men raise? Will it not, evidently, be one that suits their own condition in every case?
Athenian
Ath. What song, then, would suit godlike men? Would a choric song i.e. a song suited for singing by a chorus at a festival or other public occasion.?
Clinias
Clin. At any rate, Stranger, we and our friends here would be unable to sing any other song than that which we learnt by practice in choruses.
Athenian
Ath. Naturally; for in truth you never attained to the noblest singing. For your civic organization is that of an army rather than that of city-dwellers, and you keep your young people massed together like a herd of colts at grass:
10
Ath. none of you takes his own colt, dragging him away from his fellows, in spite of his fretting and fuming, and puts a special groom in charge of him, and trains him by rubbing him down and stroking him and using all the means proper to child-nursing, that so he may turn out not only a good soldier, but able also to manage a State and cities—in short, a man who (as we said at the first) is more of a warrior than the warriors of Tyrtaeus, inasmuch as always and everywhere, both in States and in individuals, he esteems courage as the fourth in order of the virtues, not the first.
Clinias
Clin. Once again, Stranger, you are—in a sort of a way—disparaging our lawgivers.