108 PLATO
“And won’t the officials set up for this purpose take over the offspring born on
each occasion, male or female officials or both, since, of course, the ruling offices are
shared among the women and men?”
“Yes.”
“So I expect they’ll take those born to the good ones into the fold and turn them
over to some sort of nurses who live separately in a certain part of the city; but the off-
spring of the worse sort of people, and any of the others that might have been born with
defects, they’ll hide away in a place not spoken of and not seen, as is fitting.”
“If indeed the race of the guardians is going to be pure,” he said.
“Won’t these officials also be in charge of the feeding, bringing the mothers to the
fold when they’re swollen with milk, contriving every sort of means so that none of
them will recognize her own child, and providing other women who have milk if they
don’t have enough, and see to it that the mothers themselves suckle for a moderate time,
but turn over the watchfulness and other work to wet nurses and nurses?”
“You’re describing a great ease of childbearing,” he said, “for the women among
the guardians.”
“And it’s appropriate,” I said. “Let’s go on to the next thing we proposed, since we
claimed that the offspring ought to be born particularly from those in their prime.”
“True.”
“Then do you share my opinion that twenty years is the average time of the prime
of life for a woman, and thirty for a man?”
“Which of the years?” he said.
“Starting from her twentieth and up to her fortieth, for a woman to bear children
for the city,” I said, “and for a man, once he passes his swiftest peak at running, to beget
children for the city from then until his fifty-fifth.”
“For them both,” he said, “that’s certainly their prime both in body and in
intelligence.”
“Then if someone older or younger than that engages in generating offspring into
the community, we’ll claim it’s a transgression that’s not pious or just, since it produces
for the city a child that, if it escapes notice, will have been brought forth without being
born with the sacrifices and prayers that would be offered at every marriage by priest-
esses, priests, and the whole city together, that from good and beneficial people better
and more beneficial offspring might always come forth; instead, it will have been born
under cover of darkness in the presence of terrible unrestraint.”
“We’ll rightly make that claim,” he said.
“And the same law applies,” I said, “if any of the men still propagating has sexual
contact with any of the women who are of childbearing age when a ruler hasn’t joined
him with her; we’ll charge him with bringing a bastard child into the city, unsanctioned
and unconsecrated.”
“Quite rightly,” he said.
“But, I imagine, when both the women and the men get beyond the age to repro-
duce, we’ll no doubt leave them free to have sex with anyone they want, except with a
daughter, a mother, a daughter’s children, a mother’s parent, or the women with a son or
his children or with a father or his parent, and all that only after it’s been insisted that
they take the most zealous care not to bring forth even a single fetus into the light of
day, if one is conceived, and if any is forced on them, to handle it on the understanding
that there’s to be no raising of such a child.”
“These things too are reasonably said,” he said; “but how are they going to distin-
guish their fathers and daughters, and the others you just mentioned, one from another?”cde461a
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