from moderate potations. It is well to make abstinence the rule, but the
rule may sometimes admit of an exception. We are in a higher, as well as
in a lower sense, the better for the use of wine. The question runs up
into wider ones--What is the general effect of asceticism on human nature?
and, Must there not be a certain proportion between the aspirations of man
and his powers?--questions which have been often discussed both by ancient
and modern philosophers. So by comparing things old and new we may
sometimes help to realize to ourselves the meaning of Plato in the altered
circumstances of our own life.

Like the importance which he attaches to festive entertainments, his
depreciation of courage to the fourth place in the scale of virtue appears
to be somewhat rhetorical and exaggerated. But he is speaking of courage
in the lower sense of the term, not as including loyalty or temperance. He
does not insist in this passage, as in the Protagoras, on the unity of the
virtues; or, as in the Laches, on the identity of wisdom and courage. But
he says that they all depend upon their leader mind, and that, out of the
union of wisdom and temperance with courage, springs justice. Elsewhere he
is disposed to regard temperance rather as a condition of all virtue than
as a particular virtue. He generalizes temperance, as in the Republic he
generalizes justice. The nature of the virtues is to run up into one
another, and in many passages Plato makes but a faint effort to
distinguish them. He still quotes the poets, somewhat enlarging, as his
manner is, or playing with their meaning. The martial poet Tyrtaeus, and
the oligarch Theognis, furnish him with happy illustrations of the two
sorts of courage. The fear of fear, the division of goods into human and
divine, the acknowledgment that peace and reconciliation are better than
the appeal to the sword, the analysis of temperance into resistance of
pleasure as well as endurance of pain, the distinction between the
education which is suitable for a trade or profession, and for the whole