Laws

Ath. In the first place, owing to their desolate state, they were kindly disposed and friendly towards one another; and secondly, they had no need to quarrel about food. For they had no lack of flocks and herds (except perhaps some of them at the outset), and in that age these were what men mostly lived on: thus they were well supplied with milk and meat, and they procured further supplies of food, both excellent and plentiful, by hunting. They were also well furnished with clothing and coverlets and houses, and with vessels for cooking and other kinds; for no iron is required for the arts of moulding and weaving, which two arts God gave to men to furnish them with all these necessaries, in order that the human race might have means of sprouting and increase whenever it should fall into such a state of distress. Consequently, they were not excessively poor, nor were they constrained by stress of poverty to quarrel one with another; and, on the other hand, since they were without gold and silver, they could never have become rich. Now a community which has no communion with either poverty or wealth is generally the one in which the noblest characters will be formed; for in it there is no place for the growth of insolence and injustice, of rivalries and jealousies. So these men were good, both for these reasons and because of their simple-mindedness, as it is called; for, being simple-minded, when they heard things called bad or good, they took what was said for gospel-truth and believed it. For none of them had the shrewdness of the modern man to suspect a falsehood; but they accepted as true the statements made about gods and men, and ordered their lives by them. Thus they were entirely of the character we have just described.

Clin. Certainly Megillus and I quite agree with what you say.

Ath. And shall we not say that people living in this fashion for many generations were bound to be unskilled, as compared with either the antediluvians or the men of today, and ignorant of arts in general and especially of the arts of war as now practised by land and sea, including those warlike arts which, disguised under the names of law-suits and factions, are peculiar to cities, contrived as they are with every device of word and deed to inflict mutual hurt and injury; and that they were also more simple and brave and temperate, and in all ways more righteous? And the cause of this state of things we have already explained.

Clin. Quite true.

Ath. We must bear in mind that the whole purpose of what we have said and of what we are going to say next is this,—that we may understand what possible need of laws the men of that time had, and who their lawgiver was.

Clin. Excellent.

Ath. Shall we suppose that those men had no need of lawgivers, and that in those days it was not as yet usual to have such a thing? For those born in that age of the world’s history did not as yet possess the art of writing, but lived by following custom and what is called patriarchal law.

Clin. That is certainly probable.

Ath. But this already amounts to a kind of government.

Clin. What kind?

Ath. Everybody, I believe, gives the name of headship to the government which then existed,—and it still continues to exist to-day among both Greeks and barbarians in many quarters.[*](Cp. Aristot. Pol. 1252b 17ff. This headship, which is the hereditary personal authority of the father of a family or chief of a clan, we should term patriarchy.) And, of course, Homer mentions its existence in connection with the household system of the Cyclopes, where he says—

1. No halls of council and no laws are theirs,
2. But within hollow caves on mountain heights
3. Aloft they dwell, each making his own law.

1. For wife and child; of others reck they naught.

Clin. This poet of yours seems to have been a man of genius. We have also read other verses of his, and they were extremely fine; though in truth we have not read much of him, since we Cretans do not indulge much in foreign poetry.

Meg. But we Spartans do, and we regard Homer as the best of them; all the same, the mode of life he describes is always Ionian rather than Laconian. And now he appears to be confirming your statement admirably, when in his legendary account he ascribes the primitive habits of the Cyclopes to their savagery.

Ath. Yes, his testimony supports us; so let us take him as evidence that polities of this sort do sometimes come into existence.

Clin. Quite right.

Ath. Did they not originate with those people who lived scattered in separate clans or in single households, owing to the distress which followed after the catastrophes; for amongst these the eldest holds rule, owing to the fact that the rule proceeds from the parents, by following whom they form a single flock, like a covey of birds, and live under a patriarchal government and a kingship which is of all kingships the most just?

Clin. Most certainly.

Ath. Next, they congregate together in greater numbers, and form larger droves; and first they turn to farming on the hill-sides, and make ring-fences of rubble and walls to ward off wild beasts, till finally they have constructed a single large common dwelling.

Clin. It is certainly probable that such was the course of events.

Ath. Well, is not this also probable?

Clin. What?

Ath. That, while these larger settlements were growing out of the original small ones, each of the small settlements continued to retain, clan by clan, both the rule of the eldest and also some customs derived from its isolated condition and peculiar to itself. As those who begot and reared them were different, so these customs of theirs, relating to the gods and to themselves, differed, being more orderly where their forefathers had been orderly, and more brave where they had been brave; and as thus the fathers of each clan in due course stamped upon their children and children’s children their own cast of mind, these people came (as we say) into the larger community furnished each with their own peculiar laws.

Clin. Of course.

Ath. And no doubt each clan was well pleased with its own laws, and less well with those of its neighbors.

Clin. True.

Ath. Unwittingly, as it seems, we have now set foot, as it were, on the starting-point of legislation.

Clin. We have indeed.

Ath. The next step necessary is that these people should come together and choose out some members of each clan who, after a survey of the legal usages of all the clans, shall notify publicly to the tribal leaders and chiefs (who may be termed their kings) which of those usages please them best, and shall recommend their adoption. These men will themselves be named legislators, and when they have established the chiefs as magistrates, and have framed an aristocracy, or possibly even a monarchy, from the existing plurality of headships, they will live under the constitution thus transformed.

Clin. The next steps would certainly be such as you describe.

Ath. Let us go on to describe the rise of a third form of constitution, in which are blended all kinds and varieties of constitutions, and of States as well.[*](For this mixed polity of the city of the plain, cp. the description of democracy in Plat. Rep. 557d ff.)

Clin. What form is that?

Ath. The same that Homer himself mentioned next to the second, when he said that the third form arose in this way. His verses run thus—

1. Dardania he founded when as yet
2. The Holy keep of Ilium was not built
3. Upon the plain, a town for mortal folk,
4. But still they dwelt upon the highland slopes
5. Of many-fountained Ida.