CHORUS-LEADER (stepping between them as they are about to come to blows)A truce to your quarrellings and abuse! But you expound what you taught us formerly, and you, your new doctrine.Thus, after hearing each of you argue, he will be able to choose betwixt the two schools.
JUST DISCOURSE
I am quite agreeable.
UNJUST DISCOURSE
And I too.
LEADER OF THE CHORUS
Who is to speak first?
UNJUST DISCOURSE
Let it be my opponent, he has my full consent; then I shall follow upon the very ground he shall have chosen and shall shatter him with a hail of new ideas and subtle fancies; if after that he dares to breathe another word, I shall sting him in the face and in the eyes with our maxims, which are as keen as the sting of a wasp, and he will die.
CHORUS (singing)
Here are two rivals confident in their powers of oratory and in the thoughts over which they have pondered so long.Let us see which will come triumphant out of the contest.This wisdom, for which my friends maintain such a persistent fight, is in great danger.
LEADER OF THE CHORUS
Come then, you, who crowned men of other days with so many virtues, plead the cause dear to you, make yourself known to us.
JUST DISCOURSE
Very well, I will tell you what was the old education, when I used to teach justice with so much success and when modesty was held in veneration.Firstly, it was required of a child, that it should not utter a word.In the street, when they went to the music-school, all the youths of the same district marched lightly clad and ranged in good order, even when the snow was falling in great flakes.At the master's house they had to stand with their legs apart and they were taught to sing either, "Pallas, the Terrible, who overturneth cities,"or "A noise resounded from afar" in the solemn tones of the ancient harmony.If anyone indulged in buffoonery or lent his voice any of the soft inflexions, like those which to-day the disciples of Phrynis take so much pains to form, he was treated as an enemy of the Muses and belaboured with blows.In the wrestling school they would sit with outstretched legs and without display of any indecency to the curious.
When they rose, they would smooth over the sand, so as to leave no trace to excite obscene thoughts.Never was a child rubbed with oil below the belt; the rest of their bodies thus retained its fresh bloom and down, like a velvety peach.They were not to be seen approaching a lover and themselves rousing his passion by soft modulation of the voice and lustful gaze.At table, they would not have dared, before those older than themselves, to have taken a radish, an aniseed or a leaf of parsley, and much less eat fish or thrushes or cross their legs.
UNJUST DISCOURSE
What antiquated rubbish! Have we got back to the days of the festivals of Zeus Polieus, to the Buphonia, to the time of the poet Cecides and the golden cicadas?
JUST DISCOURSE
Nevertheless by suchlike teaching I built up the men of Marathon-But you, you teach the children of to-day to bundle themselves quickly into their clothes, and I am enraged when I see them at the Panathenaea forgetting Athene while they dance, and covering their tools with their bucklers.Hence, young man, dare to range yourself beside me, who follow justice and truth; you will then be able to shun the public place, to refrain from the baths, to blush at all that is shameful, to fire up if your virtue is mocked at, to give place to your elders, to honour your parents, in short, to avoid all that is evil.Be modesty itself, and do not run to applaud the dancing girls; if you delight in such scenes, some courtesan will cast you her apple and your reputation will be done for.Do not bandy words with your father, nor treat him as a dotard, nor reproach the old man, who has cherished you, with his age.
UNJUST DISCOURSE
If you listen to him, by Bacchus! you will be the image of the sons of Hippocrates and will be called mother's big ninny.
JUST DISCOURSE
No, but you will pass your days at the gymnasia, glowing with strength and health; you will not go to the public place to cackle and wrangle as is done nowadays; you will not live in fear that you may be dragged before the courts for some trifle exaggerated by quibbling.
But you will go down to the Academy to run beneath the sacred olives with some virtuous friend of your own age, your head encircled with the white reed, enjoying your ease and breathing the perfume of the yew and of the fresh sprouts of the poplar, rejoicing in the return of springtide and gladly listening to the gentle rustle of the plane tree and the elm.(With greater warmth from here on) If you devote yourself to practising my precepts, your chest will be stout, your colour glowing, your shoulders broad, your tongue short, your hips muscular, but your tool small.But if you follow the fashions of the day, you will be pallid in hue, have narrow shoulders, a narrow chest, a long tongue, small hips and a big thing; you will know how to spin forth long-winded arguments on law.You will be persuaded also to regard as splendid everything that is shameful and as shameful everything that is honourable; in a word, you will wallow in degeneracy like Antimachus.
CHORUS (singing)
How beautiful, high-souled, brilliant is this wisdom that you practise! What a sweet odour of honesty is emitted by your discourse! Happy were those men of other days who lived when you were honoured! And you, seductive talker, come, find some fresh arguments, for your rival has done wonders.
LEADER OF THE CHORUS
You will have to bring out against him all the battery of your wit, it you desire to beat him and not to be laughed out of court.
UNJUST DISCOURSE
At last! I was choking with impatience, I was burning to upset his arguments! If I am called the Weaker Reasoning in the schools, it is just because I was the first to discover the means to confute the laws and the decrees of justice.To invoke solely the weaker arguments and yet triumph is an art worth more than a hundred thousand drachmae.