tly in the case of dainty food, people very much attracted by
it, if they find out at the time or learn afterwards that they have
eaten what is unclean or unlawful, not only suffer distress and grief
in their imagination, but even their very body is upset by the notion,
and violent retchings and vomitings follow.[223] I fear I should seem to
be introducing merely novel and enticing arguments, if I were to
enumerate stringed instruments and lyres, and harps and flutes, and
other harmonious musical instruments, which, although inanimate, yet
speak to man's passions, rejoicing with him, and mourning with him, and
chiming in with him, and rioting with him,--in a word, falling in with
the vein and emotions and characters of those that play on them. And
they say that Zeno on one occasion, going into the theatre when
Amoebeus[224] was playing on the harp, said to the pupils, "Let us go
and learn what music can be produced by guts and nerves and wood and
bones, when they preserve proportion and time and order." But passing
these things over, I would gladly learn from them, if, when they see
dogs and horses and birds domesticated, and by habit and training
uttering sounds that can be understood, and making obedient movements
and gestures, and acting quietly and usefully to us, and when they
notice that Achilles in Homer cheers on horses as well as men to the
fight,[225] they still wonder and doubt, whether the passionate and
emotional and painful and pleasurable elements in us are by nature
obedient to the voice of reason, and influenced and affected by it,
seeing that those elements are not apart from us or detached from us, or
formed from outside, or hammered into us by force, but are innate in us,
and ever associate with us, and are nourished within us, and abound in
us through habit. Accordingly moral character is well called by the
Greeks [Greek: ethos], for it is, to speak generally, a quality of the
unreasoning element in man, and is called [Greek: ethos] because the
unreasoning element moulded by reason receives this quality and
difference by habit, which is called [Greek: ethos].[226] Not that
reason wishes to expel passion altogether (that is neither possible,
nor advisable), but only to keep it within bounds and order, and to
engender the moral virtues, which are not apathetic, but hold the due
proportion and mean in regard to passion. And this she does by reducing
the power of passion to a good habit. For there are sai