Laws

Meg. What you say, Stranger, is excellent, I suppose; nonetheless I am at a loss to know what reply I should make to it. Still, in my opinion, the Lacedaemonian lawgiver was right in ordaining the avoidance of pleasures, while as to the laws of Cnosus—our friend Clinias, if he thinks fit, will defend them. The rules about pleasures at Sparta seem to me the best in the world. For our law banished entirely from the land that institution which gives the most occasion for men to fall into excessive pleasures and riotous and follies of every description; neither in the country nor in the cities controlled by Spartiates is a drinking-club to be seen nor any of the practices which belong to such and foster to the utmost all kinds of pleasure. Indeed there is not a man who would not punish at once and most severely any drunken reveller he chanced to meet with, nor would even the feast of Dionysus serve as an excuse to save him—a revel such as I once upon a time witnessed on the wagons[*](At the Feast of Dionysus in Athens it was customary for revellers mounted on wagons to indulge in scurrilous language during the processions.) in your country; and at our colony of Tarentum, too, saw the whole city drunk at the Dionysia. But with us no such thing is possible.

Ath. O Stranger of Lacedaemon, all such indulgences are praiseworthy where there exists a strain of firm moral fiber, but where this is relaxed they are quite stupid. An Athenian in self-defence might at once retaliate by pointing to the looseness of the women in your country. Regarding all such practices, whether in Tarentum, Athens or Sparta, there is one answer that is held to vindicate their propriety. The universal answer to the stranger who is surprised at seeing in a State some unwonted practice is this: Be not surprised, O Stranger: such is the custom with us: with you, perhaps, the custom in these matters is different. But, my dear Sirs, our argument now is not concerned with the rest of mankind but with the goodness or badness of the lawgivers themselves. So let us deal more fully with the subject of drunkenness in general for it is a practice of no slight importance, and it requires no mean legislator to understand it. I am now referring not to the drinking or non-drinking of wine generally, but to drunkenness pure and simple, and the question is—ought we to deal with it as the Scythians and Persians do and the Carthaginians also, and Celts, Iberians and Thracians, who are all warlike races, or as you Spartans do; for you, as you say, abstain from it altogether, whereas the Scythians and Thracians, both men and women, take their wine neat and let it pour down over their clothes, and regard this practice of theirs as a noble and splendid practice; and the Persians indulge greatly in these and other luxurious habits which you reject, albeit in a more orderly fashion than the others.

Meg. But we, my good Sir, when we take arms in our hands, put all these people to rout.

Ath. Say not so, my dear Sir; for there have been, in fact, in the past and there will be in the future many a flight and many a pursuit which are past explaining, so that victory or defeat in battle could never be called a decisive, but rather a questionable, test of the goodness or badness of an institution. Larger States, for example, are victorious in battle over smaller States, and we find the Syracusans subjugating the Locrians, who are reputed to have been the best-governed of the peoples in that part of the world: and the Athenians the Ceians,—and we could find countless other instances of the same kind. So let us leave victories and defeats out of account for the present, and discuss each several institution on its own merits in the endeavor to convince ourselves, and explain in what way one kind is good and another had. And to begin with, listen to my account of the right method of inquiring into the merits and demerits of institutions.

Meg. What is your account of it?

Ath. In my opinion all those who take up an institution for discussion and propose, at its first mention, to censure it or commend it, are proceeding in quite the wrong way. Their action is like that of a man who, when he hears somebody praising cheese as a good food, at once starts to disparage it, without having learnt either its effects or its mode of administration—in what form it should be administered and by whom and with what accompaniments, and in what condition and to people in what condition. This, as it seems to me, is exactly what we are now doing in our discourse. At the first mention of the mere name of drunkenness, straightway we fall, some of us to blaming it, others to praising it; which is most absurd. Each party relies on the aid of witnesses, and while the one party claims that its statement is convincing on the ground of the large number of witnesses produced, the other does so on the ground that those who abstain from wine are seen to be victorious in battle; and then this point also gives rise to a dispute. Now it would not be at all to my taste to go through all the rest of the legal arrangements in this fashion; and about our present subject, drunkenness, I desire to speak in quite another fashion (in my opinion, the right fashion), and I shall endeavor, if possible, to exhibit the correct method for dealing with all such subjects for indeed the view of them adopted by your two States would be assailed and controverted by thousands upon thousands of nations.

Meg. Assuredly, if we know of a right method of investigating these matters, we are bound to give it a ready hearing.

Ath. Let us adopt some such method as this. Suppose that a man were to praise the rearing of goats, and the goat itself as a fine thing to own, and suppose also that another man, who had seen goats grazing without a herd and doing damage on cultivated land, were to run them down, and find fault equally with every animal he saw that was without a master or under a bad master,—would such a man’s censure, about any object whatsoever, be of the smallest value?

Meg. Certainly not.

Ath. Do we call the man who possesses only nautical science, whether or not he suffers from sea-sickness, a good commander on a ship—or what?

Meg. By no means good, if along with his skill he suffers in the way you say.

Ath. And how about the army commander? Is a man fit for command, provided that he has military science, even though he be a coward and sea-sick with a kind of tipsy terror when danger comes?

Meg. Certainly not.

Ath. And suppose he has no military skill, besides being a coward?

Meg. You are describing an utterly worthless fellow, not a commander of men at all, but of the most womanish of women.

Ath. Now take the case of any social institution whatsoever which naturally has a commander and which, under its commander, is beneficial; and suppose that someone, who had never seen the conduct of the institution under its commander, but seen it only when with no commander or bad commanders, were to commend the institution or censure it: do we imagine that either the praise or the blame of such an observer of such an institution is of any value?

Meg. Certainly not, when the man has never seen nor shared in an institution of the kind that was properly conducted.

Ath. Now stay a moment! Shall we lay it down that, of the numerous kinds of social institutions, that of banqueters and banquetings forms one?

Meg. Most certainly.

Ath. Now has anyone ever yet beheld this institution rightly conducted? Both of you can easily make answer—Never yet at all, for with you this institution is neither customary nor legal; but I have come across many modes of banqueting in many places, and I have also inquired into nearly all of them, and I have scarcely seen or heard of a single one that was in all points rightly conducted; for if any were right at all, it was only in a few details, and most of them were almost entirely on the wrong lines.

Clin. What do you mean by that, Stranger? Explain yourself more clearly; for since we are (as you observed) without any experience of such institutions, even if we did come across them, we would probably fail to see at once what was right in them and what wrong.

Ath. That is very probable. Try, however, to learn from my description. This you understand—that in all gatherings and associations for any purpose whatsoever it is right that each group should always have a commander.

Clin. Of course.

Ath. Moreover, we have recently said that the commander of fighting men must be courageous.

Clin. Of course.

Ath. The courageous man is less perturbed by alarms than the coward.

Clin. That is true, too.

Ath. Now if there had existed any device for putting an army in charge of a general who was absolutely impervious to fear or perturbation, should we not have made every effort to do so?

Clin. Most certainly.

Ath. But what we are discussing now is not the man who is to command an army in time of war, in meetings of foe with foe, but the man who is to command friends in friendly association with friends in time of peace.

Clin. Quite so.

Ath. Such a gathering, if accompanied by drunkenness, is not free from disturbance, is it?

Clin. Certainly not; quite the reverse, I imagine.

Ath. So those people also need, in the first place, a commander?

Clin. Undoubtedly—they above all.

Ath. Should we, if possible, provide them with a commander who is imperturbable?

Clin. Certainly.

Ath. Naturally, also, he should be wise about social gatherings. For he has both to preserve the friendliness which already exists among the company and to see that the present gathering promotes it still further.

Clin. Very true.

Ath. Then the commander we set over drunken men should be sober and wise, rather than the opposite? For a commander of drunkards who was himself drunken, young, and foolish would be very lucky if he escaped doing some serious mischief.

Clin. Uncommonly lucky.

Ath. Suppose, then, that a man were to find fault with such institutions in States where they are managed in the best possible way, having an objection to the institution in itself, he might perhaps be right in doing so but if a man abuses an institution when he sees it managed in the worst way possible, it is plain that he is ignorant, first, of the fact that it is badly conducted, and secondly, that every institution will appear similarly bad when it is carried on without a sober ruler and commander.

Ath.For surely you perceive that a sea-captain, and every commander of anything, if drunk, upsets everything, whether it be a ship or a chariot or an army or anything else that under his captaincy.

Clin. What you say, Stranger, is perfectly true. In the next place, then, tell us this:—suppose this institution of drinking were rightly conducted, of what possible benefit would it be to us? Take the case of an army, which we mentioned just now: there, given a right leader, his men will win victory in war, which is no small benefit; and so too with the other cases: but what solid advantage would accrue either to individuals or to a State from the right regulation of a wine-party?

Ath. Well, what great gain should we say would accrue to the State from the right control of one single child or even of one band of children? To the question thus put to us we should reply that the State would benefit but little from one; if, however, you are putting a general question as to what solid advantage the State gains from the education of the educated, then it is quite simple to reply that well-educated men will prove good men, and being good they will conquer their foes in battle, besides acting nobly in other ways. Thus, while education brings also victory, victory sometimes brings lack of education for men have often grown more insolent because of victory in war, and through their insolence they have become filled with countless other vices; and whereas education has never yet proved to be Cadmeian,[*](i.e. involving more loss than gain—a proverbial expression, possibly derived from the fate of the Sparti (sprung from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus, founder of Thebes) who slew one another: cp. Pyrrhic victory.) the victories which men win in war often have been, and will be, Cadmeian.

Clin. You are implying, my friend, as it seems to us, that the convivial gathering, when rightly conducted, is an important element in education.

Ath. Assuredly.

Clin. Could you then show us, in the next place, how this statement is true?

Ath. The truth of my statement, which is disputed by many, it is for God to assert; but I am quite ready to give, if required, my own opinion, now that we have, in fact, embarked on a discussion of laws and constitutions.

Clin. Well, it is precisely your opinion about the questions now in dispute that we are trying to learn.

Ath. Thus, then, we must do,—you must brace yourself in the effort to learn the argument, and I to expound it as best I can. But, first of all, I have a preliminary observation to make: our city, Athens, is, in the general opinion of the Greeks, both fond of talk and full of talk, but Lacedaemon is scant of talk, while Crete is more witty[*](A polite way of alluding to the proverbial mendacity of the Cretans (cp. Ep. Titus i. 12: κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται).) than wordy;

Ath. so I am afraid of making you think that I am a great talker about a small matter, if I spin out a discourse of prodigious length about the small matter of drunkenness. But the fact is that the right ordering of this could never be treated adequately and clearly in our discourse apart from rightness in music, nor could music, apart from education as a whole; and these require lengthy discussions. Consider, then, what we are to do: suppose we leave these matters over for the present, and take up some other legal topic instead.

Meg. O Stranger of Athens, you are not, perhaps, aware that our family is, in fact, a proxenus[*](A proxenus was a native who acted as official representative of a foreign State.) of your State. It is probably true of all children that, when once they have been told that they are proxeni of a certain State, they conceive an affection for that State even from infancy, and each of them regards it as a second mother-land, next after his own country. That is precisely the feeling I now experience. For through hearing mere children crying out— whenever they, being the Lacedaemonians, were blaming the Athenians for anything or praising them—Your State, Megillus, has done us a bad turn or a good one,—through hearing such remarks, I say, and constantly fighting your battles against those who were thus decrying your State, I acquired a deep affection for it; so that now not only do I delight in your accent, but I regard as absolutely true the common saying that good Athenians are always incomparably good, for they alone are good not by outward compulsion but by inner disposition. Thus, so far as I am concerned, you may speak without fear and say all you please.

Clin. My story, too, Stranger, when you hear it, will show you that you may boldly say all you wish. You have probably heard how that inspired man Epimenides, who was a family connection of ours, was born in Crete; and how ten years[*](Epimenides really lived about 600 B.C.) before the Persian War, in obedience to the oracle of the god, he went to Athens and offered certain sacrifices which the god had ordained; and how, moreover, when the Athenians were alarmed at the Persians’ expeditionary force, he made this prophecy—They will not come for ten years, and when they do come, they will return back again with all their hopes frustrated, and after suffering more woes than they inflict.

Clin. Then our forefathers became guest-friends of yours, and ever since both my fathers and I myself have cherished an affection for Athens.

Ath. Evidently, then, you are both ready to play your part as listeners. But as for my part, though the will is there, to compass the task is hard: still, I must try. In the first place, then, our argument requires that we should define education and describe its effects: that is the path on which our present discourse must proceed until it finally arrives at the god of Wine.

Clin. By all means let us do so, since it is your wish.

Ath. Then while I am stating how education ought to be defined, you must be considering whether you are satisfied with my statement.

Clin. Proceed with your statement.

Ath. I will. What I assert is that every man who is going to be good at any pursuit must practice that special pursuit from infancy, by using all the implements of his pursuit both in his play and in his work. For example, the man who is to make a good builder must play at building toy houses, and to make a good farmer he must play at tilling land; and those who are rearing them must provide each child with toy tools modelled on real ones. Besides this, they ought to have elementary instruction in all the necessary subjects,—the carpenter, for instance, being taught in play the use of rule and measure, the soldier taught riding or some similar accomplishment. So, by means of their games, we should endeavor to turn the tastes and desires of the children in the direction of that object which forms their ultimate goal. First and foremost, education, we say, consists in that right nurture which most strongly draws the soul of the child when at play to a love for that pursuit of which, when he becomes a man, he must possess a perfect mastery. Now consider, as I said before, whether, up to this point, you are satisfied with this statement of mine.

Clin. Certainly we are.

Ath. But we must not allow our description of education to remain indefinite. For at present, when censuring or commending a man’s upbringing, we describe one man as educated and another as uneducated, though the latter may often be uncommonly well educated in the trade of a pedlar or a skipper, or some other similar occupation. But we, naturally, in our present discourse are not taking the view that such things as these make up education: the education we speak of is training from childhood in goodness, which makes a man eagerly desirous of becoming a perfect citizen, understanding how both to rule and be ruled righteously.