As Hesiod says: 'Long and steep is the first half of the way to virtue, But when you have reached the top the rest is easy.' 'Those are excellent words.' Yes; but may I tell you the effect which the preceding discourse has had upon me?
I will express my meaning in an address to the lawgiver:--O lawgiver, if you know what we ought to do and say, you can surely tell us;--you are not like the poet, who, as you were just now saying, does not know the effect of his own words.

And the poet may reply, that when he sits down on the tripod of the Muses he is not in his right mind, and that being a mere imitator he may be allowed to say all sorts of opposite things, and cannot tell which of them is true.

But this licence cannot be allowed to the lawgiver.

For example, there are three kinds of funerals; one of them is excessive, another mean, a third moderate, and you say that the last is right.

Now if I had a rich wife, and she told me to bury her, and I were to sing of her burial, I should praise the extravagant kind; a poor man would commend a funeral of the meaner sort, and a man of moderate means would prefer a moderate funeral.