(B. Jowett)
In Book 8 of The Laws, too, Plato discusses a variety of subjects, among them festivals and contests in which men and women meet together. This topic introduces the question of the sexes, and Plato makes definitive statements in this respect. Licentiousness, he declares, is abominable. Men ought to live under controlled moderation. That is what nature herself enjoins. Man otherwise would fall below the level of beasts. Here the laws should be restrictive. But if that is not possible, there must at least be some adherence to decent mores.
Lust and desire are discussed in Book 6 of The Laws and in the Greater Hippias. The three universal appetites are food, drink, and lust of procreation, which is linked with the imperious sexual frenzy and its concomitant excitements. Sexual desire, the necessities of love, overflowing into excesses, may be harmful to the welfare of the state. Excesses must therefore be stemmed and controlled by laws. In this manner evil may be diminished and the good of the state as a whole will be promoted.
With regard to exhausted capacity and the loss of passion as a corollary to old age, Plato says, in Book I of The Republic:
I will tell you, Socrates, he said, what my own feeling is. Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says; and at our meetings the tale of my acquaintance commonly is—I can not eat, I can not drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away; there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life. Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations, and they will tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the cause. But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really at fault. For if old age were the cause, I too being old, and every other old man, would have felt as they do. But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known. How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, How does love suit with age, Sophocles,—are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped from a mad and furious master. His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men’s characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.
Of sexual appetite Plato declares, in Book 8 of The Republic:
Are not necessary pleasures those of which we can not get rid, and of which the satisfaction is a benefit to us? And they are rightly called so, because we are framed by nature to desire both what is beneficial and what is necessary, and can not help it.
True.
We are not wrong therefore in calling them necessary?