Laws

Ath. And, as our argument asserts, the cause of this does not lie in luck, but in the evil life which is usually lived by the sons of excessively rich monarchs; for such an upbringing can never produce either boy or man or greybeard of surpassing goodness. To this, we say, the lawgiver must give heed,—as must we ourselves on the present occasion. It is proper, however, my Lacedaemonian friends, to give your State credit for this at least,—that you assign no different honor or training whatsoever to poverty or wealth, to the commoner or the king, beyond what your original oracle[*](The laws of Lycurgus.) declared at the bidding of some god. Nor indeed is it right that pre-eminent honors in a State should be conferred on a man because he is specially wealthy, any more than it is right to confer them because he is swift or comely or strong without any virtue, or with a virtue devoid of temperance.

Meg. What do you mean by that, Stranger?

Ath. Courage is, presumably, one part of virtue.

Meg. Certainly.

Ath. Now that you have heard the argument, judge for yourself whether you would welcome as housemate or neighbor a man who is extremely courageous, but licentious rather than temperate.

Meg. Don’t suggest such a thing!

Ath. Well then,—a man wise in arts and crafts, but unjust.

Meg. Certainly not.

Ath. But justice, surely, is not bred apart from temperance.

Meg. Impossible.

Ath. Nor is he whom we recently proposed[*](Cp. Plat. Laws 689d.) as our type of wisdom,—the man who has his feelings of pleasure and pain in accord with the dictates of right reason and obedient thereto.

Meg. No, indeed.

Ath. Here is a further point we must consider, in order to judge about the conferment of honors in States, when they are right and when wrong.

Meg. What point?

Ath. If temperance existed alone in a man’s soul, divorced from all the rest of virtue, would it justly be held in honor or the reverse?

Meg. I cannot tell what reply to make.

Ath. Yet, in truth, you have made a reply, and a reasonable one. For if you had declared for either of the alternatives in my question, you would have said what is, to my mind, quite out of tune.

Meg. So it has turned out to be all right.

Ath. Very good. Accordingly, the additional element in objects deserving of honor or dishonor will be one that demands not speech so much as a kind of speechless silence.[*](i.e., temperance, regarded as merely an adjunct to civic merit, requires no further discussion at this point.)

Meg. I suppose you mean temperance.

Ath. Yes. And of the rest, that which, with the addition of temperance, benefits us most would best deserve to be held in the highest honor, and the second in degree of benefit put second in order of honor; and so with each of the others in succession—to each it will be proper to assign the honor due to its rank.

Meg. Just so.

Ath. Well then, shall we not declare that the distribution of these things is the lawgiver’s task?

Meg. Certainly.

Ath. Is it your wish that we should hand over the whole distribution to him, to deal with every case and all the details, while we—as legal enthusiasts ourselves also—confine ourselves to making a threefold division, and endeavor to distinguish what comes first in importance, and what second and third?[*](Cp. Plat. Laws 631b, c; Plat. Laws 661a ff.; Plat. Laws 726a ff.; Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1098b 12 ff.)

Meg. By all means.

Ath. We declare, then, that a State which is to endure, and to be as happy as it is possible for man to be, must of necessity dispense honors rightly. And the right way is this: it shall be laid down that the goods of the soul are highest in honor and come first, provided that the soul possesses temperance; second come the good and fair things of the body; and third the so-called goods of substance and property. And if any law-giver or State transgresses these rules, either by promoting wealth to honors, or by raising one of the lower goods to a higher rank by means of honors, he will be guilty of a breach both of religion and of statesmanship. Shall this be our declaration, or what?

Meg. By all means let us declare this plainly.

Ath. It was our investigation of the polity of the Persians that caused us to discuss these matters at greater length. We find that they grew still worse, the reason being, as we say, that by robbing the commons unduly of their liberty and introducing despotism in excess, they destroyed in the State the bonds of friendliness and fellowship. And when these are destroyed, the policy of the rulers no longer consults for the good of the subjects and the commons, but solely for the maintenance of their own power; if they think that it will profit them in the least degree, they are ready at any time to overturn States and to overturn and burn up friendly nations; and thus they both hate and are hated with a fierce and ruthless hatred. And when they come to need the commons, to fight in their support, they find in them no patriotism or readiness to endanger their lives in battle; so that, although they possess countless myriads of men, they are all useless for war, and they hire soldiers from abroad as though they were short of men, and imagine that their safety will be secured by hirelings and aliens.

Ath. And besides all this, they inevitably display their ignorance, inasmuch as by their acts they declare that the things reputed to be honorable and noble in a State are never anything but dross compared to silver and gold.

Meg. Very true.

Ath. So let this be the conclusion of our account of the Persian empire, and how its present evil administration is due to excess of slavery and of despotism.

Meg. By all means.

Ath. We ought to examine next, in like manner, the Attic polity, and show how complete liberty, unfettered by any authority, is vastly inferior to a moderate form of government under elected magistrates. At the time when the Persians made their onslaught upon the Greeks—and indeed one might say on nearly all the nations of Europe—we Athenians had an ancient constitution,[*](That of Solon.) and magistrates based on a fourfold grading; and we had Reverence, which acted as a kind of queen, causing us to live as the willing slaves of the existing laws. Moreover, the vastness of the Persian armament that threatened us both by sea and land, by the desperate fear it inspired, bound us still more closely in the bonds of slavery to our rulers and our laws; and because of all this, our mutual friendliness and patriotism was greatly intensified. It was just about ten years before the seafight at Salamis that the Persian force arrived under Datis, whom Darius had despatched expressly against the Athenians and Eretrians, with orders to bring them back in chains, and with the warning that death would be the penalty of failure. So within a very short time Datis, with his many myriads, captured by force the whole of the Eretrians; and to Athens he sent on an alarming account of how not a man of the Eretrians had escaped him: the soldiers of Datis had joined hands and swept the whole of Eretria clean as with a draw-net. This account—whether true, or whatever its origin—struck terror into the Greeks generally, and especially the Athenians; but when they sent out embassies in every direction to seek aid, all refused, except the Lacedaemonians; and they were hindered by the war they were then waging against Messene, and possibly by other obstacles, about which we have no information, with the result that they arrived too late by one single day for the battle which took place at Marathon. After this, endless threats and stories of huge preparations kept arriving from the Persian king.

Ath. Then, as time went on, news came that Darius was dead, and that his son, who had succeeded to the throne, was a young hothead, and still keen on the projected expedition. The Athenians imagined that all these preparations were aimed against them because of the affair at Marathon; and when they heard of how the canal had been made through Athos, and the bridge thrown over the Hellespont, and were told of the vast number of vessels in the Persian flotilla, then they felt that there was no salvation for them by land, nor yet by sea. By land they had no hopes that anyone would come to their aid; for they remembered how, on the first arrival of the Persians and their subjugation of Eretria, nobody helped them or ventured to join in the fight with them; and so they expected that the same thing would happen again on this occasion. By sea, too, they saw no hope of safety, with more than a thousand war-ships bearing down against them. One solitary hope of safety did they perceive—a slight one, it is true, and a desperate, yet the only hope—and it they derived from the events of the past, when victory in battle appeared to spring out of a desperate situation; and buoyed up by this hope, they discovered that they must rely for refuge on themselves only and on the gods. So all this created in them a state of friendliness one towards another—both the fear which then possessed them, and that begotten of the past, which they had acquired by their subjection to the former laws—the fear to which, in our previous discussions,[*](Cp. Plat. Laws 646e, 647c, 671d.) we have often given the name of reverence, saying that a man must be subject to this if he is to be good (though the coward is unfettered and unaffrighted by it). Unless this fear had then seized upon our people, they would never have united in self-defence, nor would they have defended their temples and tombs and fatherland, and their relatives and friends as well, in the way in which they then came to the rescue; but we would all have been broken up at that time and dispersed one by one in all directions.

Meg. What you say, Stranger, is perfectly true, and worthy of your country as well as of yourself.

Ath. That is so, Megillus: it is proper to mention the events of that period to you, since you share in the native character of your ancestors. But both you and Clinias must now consider whether what we are saying is at all pertinent to our law-making; for my narrative is not related for its own sake, but for the sake of the law-making I speak of. Just reflect: seeing that we Athenians suffered practically the same fate as the Persians—they through reducing their people to the extreme of slavery, we, on the contrary, by urging on our populace to the extreme of liberty—what are we to say was the sequel, if our earlier statements have been at all nearly correct?

Meg. Well said! Try, however, to make your meaning still more clear to us.

Ath. I will. Under the old laws, my friends, our commons had no control over anything, but were, so to say, voluntary slaves to the laws.

Meg. What laws do you mean?

Ath. Those dealing with the music of that age, in the first place,—to describe from its commencement how the life of excessive liberty grew up. Among us, at that time, music was divided into various classes and styles: one class of song was that of prayers to the gods, which bore the name of hymns; contrasted with this was another class, best called dirges; paeans formed another; and yet another was the dithyramb, named, I fancy, after Dionysus. Nomes also were so called as being a distinct class of song; and these were further described as citharoedic nomes.[*](i.e., solemn chants sung to the cithara or lyre. Dithyrambs were choral odes to Dionysus; paeans were mostly hymns of praise to Apollo.) So these and other kinds being classified and fixed, it was forbidden to set one kind of words to a different class of tune.[*](Cp. Plat. Laws 657c ff., 699c ff.) The authority whose duty it was to know these regulations, and, when known, to apply them in its judgments and to penalize the disobedient, was not a pipe nor, as now, the mob’s unmusical shoutings, nor yet the clappings which mark applause: in place of this, it was a rule made by those in control of education that they themselves should listen throughout in silence, while the children and their ushers and the general crowd were kept in order by the discipline of the rod. In the matter of music the populace willingly submitted to orderly control and abstained from outrageously judging by clamor; but later on, with the progress of time, there arose as leaders of unmusical illegality poets who, though by nature poetical, were ignorant of what was just and lawful in music; and they, being frenzied and unduly possessed by a spirit of pleasure, mixed dirges with hymns and paeans with dithyrambs, and imitated flute-tunes with harp-tunes, and blended every kind of music with every other; and thus, through their folly, they unwittingly bore false witness against music, as a thing without any standard of correctness, of which the best criterion is the pleasure of the auditor, be he a good man or a bad.[*](Cp. Plat. Rep. 3.397a ff.)

Ath.By compositions of such a character, set to similar words, they bred in the populace a spirit of lawlessness in regard to music, and the effrontery of supposing themselves capable of passing judgment on it. Hence the theater-goers became noisy instead of silent, as though they knew the difference between good and bad music, and in place of an aristocracy in music there sprang up a kind of base theatrocracy.[*](i.e., rule of the audience; as we might say, the pit and gallery sat in judgment. Cp. Aristot. Pol. 8.6.) For if in music, and music only, there had arisen a democracy of free men, such a result would not have been so very alarming; but as it was, the universal conceit of universal wisdom and the contempt for law originated in the music, and on the heels of these came liberty. For, thinking themselves knowing, men became fearless; and audacity begat effrontery. For to be fearless of the opinion of a better man, owing to self-confidence, is nothing else than base effrontery; and it is brought about by a liberty that is audacious to excess.

Meg. Most true.

Ath. Next after this form of liberty would come that which refuses to be subject to the rulers;[*](Cp. Plat. Rep. 4.424e.) and, following on that, the shirking of submission to one’s parents and elders and their admonitions; then, as the penultimate stage, comes the effort to disregard the laws; while the last stage of all is to lose all respect for oaths or pledges or divinities,—wherein men display and reproduce the character of the Titans of story, who are said to have reverted to their original state, dragging out a painful existence with never any rest from woe. What, again, is our object in saying all this? Evidently, I must, every time, rein in my discourse, like a horse, and not let it run away with me as though it had no bridle[*](Cp. Eur. Ba. 385.) in its mouth, and so get a toss off the donkey[*](A play on ἀπ’ ὄνου=ἀπὸ νοῦ: to show oneself a fool: cr. Artist. Nubes 1274: τί δῆτα ληρεῖς, ὥσπερ ἀπ’ ὄνου καταπεσών.) (as the saying goes): consequently, I must once more repeat my question, and ask—With what object has all this been said?

Meg. Very good.

Ath. What has now been said bears on the objects previously stated.

Meg. What were they?

Ath. We said[*](Cp. Plat. Laws 693b.) that the lawgiver must aim, in his legislation, at three objectives—to make the State he is legislating for free, and at unity with itself, and possessed of sense. That was so, was it not?

Meg. Certainly.

Ath. With these objects in view, we selected the most despotic of polities and the most absolutely free, and are now enquiring which of these is rightly constituted. When we took a moderate example of each—of despotic rule on the one hand, and liberty on the other,—we observed that there they enjoyed prosperity in the highest degree but when they advanced, the one to the extreme of slavery, the other to the extreme of liberty, then there was no gain to either the one or the other.

Meg. Most true.

Ath. With the same objects in view we surveyed,[*](i.e., in Bk. iii. 676-693 (taken in the reverse order).) also, the settling of the Doric host and the homes of Dardanus at the foot of the hills and the colony by the sea and the first men who survived the Flood, together with our previous discourses[*](i.e., in Books i. and ii.) concerning music and revelry, as well as all that preceded these. The object of all these discourses was to discover how best a State might be managed, and how best the individual citizen might pass his life. But as to the value of our conclusions, what test can we apply in conversing among ourselves, O Megillus and Clinias?

Clin. I think, Stranger, that I can perceive one. It is a piece of good luck for me that we have dealt with all these matters in our discourse. For I myself have now come nearly to the point when I shall need them, and my meeting with you and Megillus here was quite opportune. I will make no secret to you of what has befallen me; nay, more, I count it to be a sign from Heaven. The most part of Crete is undertaking to found a colony, and it has given charge of the undertaking to the Cnosians, and the city of Cnosus has entrusted it to me and nine others. We are bidden also to frame laws, choosing such as we please either from our own local laws or from those of other countries, taking no exception to their alien character, provided only that they seem superior. Let us, then, grant this favour to me, and yourselves also; let us select from the statements we have made, and build up by arguments the framework of a State, as though we were erecting it from the foundation. In this way we shall be at once investigating our theme, and possibly I may also make use of our framework for the State that is to be formed.

Ath. Your proclamation, Clinias, is certainly not a proclamation of war! So, if Megillus has no objection, you may count on me to do all I can to gratify your wish.

Clin. It is good to hear that.

Meg. And you can count on me too.

Clin. Splendid of you both! But, in the first place, let us try to found the State by word.