Why, said I, and so they ought. Let us, however, proceed with our scheme. We were saying that the parents should be in the prime of life?
Very true.
[E] And what is the prime of life? May it not be defined as a period of about twenty years in a woman’s life, and thirty in a man’s?
Which years do you mean to include?
A woman to bear children from twenty to forty; a man to beget them from twenty-five to fifty-five. A woman, I said, at 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 155 point at which the pulse of life beats quickest, and continue to beget children until he be fifty-five.
[461] 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 [B]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.