Seeing then that there are these three sorts of love, ought the law to prohibit and forbid them all to exist among us?
Is it not rather clear that we should wish to have in the state the love which is of virtue and which desires the beloved youth to be the best possible; and the other two, if possible, we should hinder?
What do you say, friend Megillus?
MEGILLUS: I think, Stranger, that you are perfectly right in what you have been now saying.
Athenian: I knew well, my friend, that I should obtain your assent, which I accept, and therefore have no need to analyze your custom any further.

Cleinias shall be prevailed upon to give me his assent at some other time.

Enough of this; and now let us proceed to the laws.
MEGILLUS: Very good.
ATHENIAN: Upon reflection I see a way of imposing the law, which, in one respect, is easy, but, in another, is of the utmost difficulty.
MEGILLUS: What do you mean?
ATHENIAN: We are all aware that most men, in spite of their lawless natures, are very strictly and precisely restrained from intercourse with the fair, and this is not at all against their will, but entirely with their will.
MEGILLUS: When do you mean?
ATHENIAN: When any one has a brother or sister who is fair; and about a son or daughter the same unwritten law holds, and is a most perfect safeguard, so that no open or secret connexion ever takes place between them.

Nor does the thought of such a thing ever enter at all into the minds of most of them.
MEGILLUS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: Does not a little word extinguish all pleasures of that sort?
MEGILLUS: What word?
ATHENIAN: The declaration that they are unholy, hated of God, and most infamous; and is not the reason of this that no one has ever said the opposite, but every one from his earliest childhood has heard men speaking in the same manner about them always and everywhere, whether in comedy or in the graver language of tragedy?
When the poet introduces on the stage a Thyestes or an Oedipus, or a Macareus having secret intercourse with his sister, he represents him, when found out, ready to kill himself as the penalty of his sin.
MEGILLUS: You are very right in saying that tradition, if no breath of opposition ever assails it, has a marvellous power.
ATHENIAN: Am I not also right in saying that the legislator who wants to master any of the passions which master man may easily know how to subdue them?
He will consecrate the tradition of their evil character among all, slaves and freemen, women and children, throughout the city: that will be the surest foundation of the law which he can make.
MEGILLUS: Yes; but will he ever succeed in making all mankind use the same language about them?
ATHENIAN: A good objection; but was I not just now saying that I had a way to make men use natural love and abstain from unnatural, not intentionally destroying the seeds of human increase, or sowing them in stony places, in which they will take no root; and that I would command them to abstain too from any female field of increase in which that which is sown is not likely to grow?
Now if a law to this effect could only be made perpetual, and gain an authority such as already prevents intercourse of parents and children--such a law, extending to other sensual desires, and conquering them, would be the source of ten thousand blessings.

For, in the first place, moderation is the appointment of nature, and deters men from all frenzy and madness of love, and from all adulteries and immoderate use of meats and drinks, and makes them good friends to their own wives.