Consider, now, how wisely the other provisions have been adopted, in order to secure to the citizens the benefits of an honest and happy life; for that is, indeed, the grand object of all political association, and that which every government should endeavor to procure for the people, partly by its institutions, and partly by its laws.
Consider, in the first place, the national education of the people--a matter on which the Greeks have expended much labor in vain, and which is the only point on which Polybius, who settled among us, accuses the negligence of our institutions.

For our countrymen have thought that education ought not to be fixed, nor regulated by laws, nor be given publicly and uniformly to all classes of society.

For[347] * * * According to Tully, who says that men going to serve in the army have guardians assigned to them, by whom they are governed the first year.
IV.

[In our ancient laws, young men were prohibited from appearing] naked in the public baths, so far back were the principles of modesty traced by our ancestors.

Among the Greeks, on the contrary, what an absurd system of training youth is exhibited in their gymnasia! What a frivolous preparation for the labors and hazards of war! what indecent spectacles, what impure and licentious amours are permitted! I do not speak only of the Eleans and Thebans, among whom, in all love affairs, passion is allowed to run into shameless excesses; but the Spartans, while they permit every kind of license to their young men, save that of violation, fence off, by a very slight wall, the very exception on which they insist, besides other crimes which I will not mention.
Then Laelius said: I see, my Scipio, that on the subject of the Greek institutions, which you censure, you prefer attacking the customs of the most renowned peoples to contending with your favorite Plato, whose name you have avoided citing, especially as * * * V.So that Cicero, in his treatise on the Commonwealth, says that it was a reproach to young men if they had no lovers.
Not only as at Sparta, where boys learn to steal and plunder.
And our master Plato, even more than Lycurgus, who would have everything to be common, so that no one should be able to call anything his own property.
I would send him to the same place whither he sends Homer, crowned with chaplets and anointed with perfumes, banishing him from the city which he is describing.
VI.