twenty years of age may begin to bear children to
the State, and continue to bear them until forty; a man may begin at
five-and-twenty, when he has passed the point at which the pulse of
life beats quickest, and continue to beget children until he be
fifty-five.

Certainly, he said, both in men and women those years are the prime of
physical as well as of intellectual vigour.

Any one above or below the prescribed ages who takes part in the public
hymeneals shall be said to have done an unholy and unrighteous thing;
the child of which he is the father, if it steals into life, will have
been conceived under auspices very unlike the sacrifices and prayers,
which at each hymeneal priestesses and priest and the whole city will
offer, that the new generation may be better and more useful than their
good and useful parents, whereas his child will be the offspring of
darkness and strange lust.

Very true, he replied.

And the same law will apply to any one of those within the prescribed
age who forms a connection with any woman in the prime of life without
the sanction of the rulers; for we shall say that he is raising up a
bastard to the State, uncertified and unconsecrated.

Very true, he replied.

This applies, however, only to those who are within the specified age:
after that we allow them to range at will, except that a man may not
marry his daughter or his daughter's daughter, or his mother or his
mother's mother; and women, on the other hand, are prohibited from
marrying their sons or fathers, or son's son or father's father, and so
on in either direction. And we grant all this, accompanying the
permission with strict orders to prevent any embryo which may come into
being from seeing the light; and if any force a way to the birth, the
parents must understand that the offspring of such an union cannot be
maintained, and arrange accordingly.

That also, he said, is a reasonable proposition. But how will they
know who are fathers and daughters, and so on?

They will never know. The way will be this:--dating from the day of
the hymeneal, the bridegroom who was then married will call all the
male children who are born in the seventh and tenth month afterwards
his sons, and the female children his daughters, and they will call him
father, and he will call their children his grandchildren, and they
will call the elder generation grandfathers and grandmothers. All who
were begotten at the time when their fathers