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Well then, I will speak, although I really know not how to look

you in the face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction,

which I propose to communicate gradually, first to the rulers,

then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. They are to be

told that their youth was a dream, and the education and training

which they received from us, an appearance only; in reality

during all that time they were being formed and fed in the womb

of the earth, where they themselves and their arms and

appurtenances were manufactured; when they were completed, the

earth, their mother, sent them up; and so, their country being

their mother and also their nurse, they are bound to advise for

her good, and to defend her against attacks, and her citizens

they are to regard as children of the earth and their own

brothers.

You had good reason, he said, to be ashamed of the lie which you

were going to tell.