y were impregnated: such was the mare
called Just, in Pharsalia.

CHAPTER IV

Besides, those who contrive this plan of community cannot easily avoid
the following evils; namely, blows, murders involuntary or voluntary,
quarrels, and reproaches, all which it would be impious indeed to be
guilty of towards our fathers and mothers, or those who are nearly
related to us; though not to those who are not connected to us by any
tie of affinity: and certainly these mischiefs must necessarily happen
oftener amongst those who do not know how they are connected to each
other than those who do; and when they do happen, if it is among the
first of these, they admit of a legal expiation, but amongst the latter
that cannot be done. It is also absurd for those who promote a
community of children to forbid those who love each other from indulging
themselves in the last excesses of that passion, while they do not
restrain them from the passion itself, or those intercourses which are
of all things most improper, between a Father and a son, a brother and
a brother, and indeed the thing itself is most absurd. It is also
ridiculous to prevent this intercourse between the nearest relations,
for no other reason than the violence of the pleasure, while they think
that the relation of father and daughter, the brother and sister, is of
no consequence at all. It seems also more advantageous for the state,
that the husbandmen should have their wives and children in common than
the military, for there will be less affection [1262b] among them
in that case than when otherwise; for such persons ought to be under
subjection, that they may obey the laws, and not seek after innovations.
Upon the whole, the consequences of such a law as this would be directly
contrary to those things which good laws ought to establish, and which
Socrates endeavoured to establish by his regulations concerning women
and children: for we think that friendship is the greatest good which
can happen to any city, as nothing so much prevents seditions: and amity
in a city is what Socrates commends above all things, which appears
to be, as indeed he says, the effect of friendship; as we learn from
Aristophanes in the Erotics, who says, that those who love one another
from the excess of that passion, desire to breathe the same soul, and
from being two to be blended into one: from whence it would necessarily
follow, that both or one of them must be destroyed. But now in a c