[33] Why in ancient days did they never dine out without their sons, even when these were still but children?
Did Lycurgus introduce this custom also, and bring boys to the common meals that they might become accustomed to conduct themselves toward their pleasures, not in a brutish or disorderly way, but with discretion, since they had their elders as supervisors and spectators, as it were? No less important is the fact that the fathers themselves would also be more decorous and prudent in the presence of their sons: for “where the old are shameless,” as Plato[78] remarks, “there the young also must needs be lost to all sense of shame.”