Plato

The genuineness of the Laws is sufficiently proved (1) by more than twenty citations of them in the writings of Aristotle, who was residing at Athens during the last twenty years of the life of Plato, and who, having left it after his death (B.C.

speeches in the assembly) akuroi tugchanousin ontes tois nomois kai tais politeiais tais upo ton sophiston gegrammenais.) —writing 346 B.C., a year after the death of Plato, and probably not more than three or four years after the composition of the Laws—who speaks of the Laws and Republics written by philosophers (upo ton sophiston); (3) by the reference (Athen.) of the comic poet Alexis, a younger contemporary of Plato (fl.

Laert.) That the longest and one of the best writings bearing the name of Plato should be a forgery, even if its genuineness were unsupported by external testimony, would be a singular phenomenon in ancient literature; and although the critical worth of the consensus of late writers is generally not to be compared with the express testimony of contemporaries, yet a somewhat greater value may be attributed to their consent in the present instance, because the admission of the Laws is combined with doubts about the Epinomis, a spurious writing, which is a kind of epilogue to the larger work probably of a much later date.

The suspicion which has attached to the Laws of Plato in the judgment of some modern writers appears to rest partly (1) on differences in the style and form of the work, and (2) on differences of thought and opinion which they observe in them.

The critics seem also to observe in them bad imitations of thoughts which are better expressed in Plato's other writings.

The questions which have been thus indirectly suggested may be considered by us under five or six heads: I, the characters; II, the plan; III, the style; IV, the imitations of other writings of Plato; V; the more general relation of the Laws to the Republic and the other dialogues; and VI, to the existing Athenian and Spartan states.

More and more Plato seems to have felt in his later writings that the character and method of Socrates were no longer suited to be the vehicle of his own philosophy.

Yet so completely in the tradition of antiquity is Socrates identified with Plato, that in the criticism of the Laws which we find in the so-called Politics of Aristotle he is supposed by the writer still to be playing his part of the chief speaker (compare Pol.).

Plato appears to be expressing his own feelings in remarks of this sort.

Such a sadness was the natural effect of declining years and failing powers, which make men ask, 'After all, what profit is there in life?' They feel that their work is beginning to be over, and are ready to say, 'All the world is a stage;' or, in the actual words of Plato, 'Let us play as good plays as we can,' though 'we must be sometimes serious, which is not agreeable, but necessary.' These are feelings which have crossed the minds of reflective persons in all ages, and there is no reason to connect the Laws any more than other parts of Plato's writings with the very uncertain narrative of his life, or to imagine that this melancholy tone is attributable to disappointment at having failed to convert a Sicilian tyrant into a philosopher.

The plan of the Laws is more irregular and has less connexion than any other of the writings of Plato.

To use his own image, 'Some stones are regularly inserted in the building; others are lying on the ground ready for use.' There is probably truth in the tradition that the Laws were not published until after the death of Plato.

There is, however, an interest in possessing one writing of Plato which is in the process of creation.

The first four books are described by Plato himself as the preface or preamble.

After having laid down as the first principle of politics, that peace, and not war, is the true aim of the legislator, and briefly discussed music and festive intercourse, at the commencement of the third book Plato makes a digression, in which he speaks of the origin of society.

In the first part of the sixth book, Plato completes his sketch of the constitution by the appointment of officers.

On such occasions Plato seems to see young men and maidens meeting together, and hence he is led into discussing the relations of the sexes, the evil consequences which arise out of the indulgence of the passions, and the remedies for them.

Proceeding to the greater crime of homicide, Plato distinguishes between mere homicide, manslaughter, which is partly voluntary and partly involuntary, and murder, which arises from avarice, ambition, fear.

The style of the Laws differs in several important respects from that of the other dialogues of Plato: (1) in the want of character, power, and lively illustration; (2) in the frequency of mannerisms (compare Introduction to the Philebus); (3) in the form and rhythm of the sentences; (4) in the use of words.

On the other hand, there are many passages (5) which are characterized by a sort of ethical grandeur; and (6) in which, perhaps, a greater insight into human nature, and a greater reach of practical wisdom is shown, than in any other of Plato's writings.

The subject did not properly take the form of dialogue, and also the literary vigour of Plato had passed away.

Plato has given the Laws that form or want of form which indicates the failure of natural power.

Nor is there anywhere in the Laws that lively enargeia, that vivid mise en scene, which is as characteristic of Plato as of some modern novelists.

The illustrations, such as the two kinds of doctors, 'the three kinds of funerals,' the fear potion, the puppet, the painter leaving a successor to restore his picture, the 'person stopping to consider where three ways meet,' the 'old laws about water of which he will not divert the course,' can hardly be said to do much credit to Plato's invention.

In several passages the Athenian praises himself in the most unblushing manner, very unlike the irony of the earlier dialogues, as when he declares that 'the laws are a divine work given by some inspiration of the Gods,' and that 'youth should commit them to memory instead of the compositions of the poets.' The prosopopoeia which is adopted by Plato in the Protagoras and other dialogues is repeated until we grow weary of it.

More than in any other writing of Plato the tone is hortatory; the laws are sermons as well as laws; they are considered to have a religious sanction, and to rest upon a religious sentiment in the mind of the citizens.

For Plato is incapable of sustained composition; his genius is dramatic rather than oratorical; he can converse, but he cannot make a speech.

There is the same kind of difference between the dialogue and the continuous discourse of Plato as between the narrative and speeches of Thucydides.

The perfection of style is variety in unity, freedom, ease, clearness, the power of saying anything, and of striking any note in the scale of human feelings without impropriety; and such is the divine gift of language possessed by Plato in the Symposium and Phaedrus.

From this there are many fallings-off in the Laws: first, in the structure of the sentences, which are rhythmical and monotonous,—the formal and sophistical manner of the age is superseding the natural genius of Plato: secondly, many of them are of enormous length, and the latter end often forgets the beginning of them,—they seem never to have received the second thoughts of the author; either the emphasis is wrongly placed, or there is a want of point in a clause; or an absolute case occurs which is not properly separated from the rest of the sentence; or words are aggregated in a manner which fails to show their relation to one another; or the connecting particles are omitted at the beginning of sentences; the uses of the relative and antecedent are more indistinct, the changes of person and number more frequent, examples of pleonasm, tautology, and periphrasis, antitheses of positive and negative, false emphasis, and other affectations, are more numerous than in the other writings of Plato; there is also a more common and sometimes unmeaning use of qualifying formulae, os epos eipein, kata dunamin, and of double expressions, pante pantos, oudame oudamos, opos kai ope—these are too numerous to be attributed to errors in the text; again, there is an over-curious adjustment of verb and participle, noun and epithet, and other artificial forms of cadence and expression take the place of natural variety: thirdly, the absence of metaphorical language is remarkable—the style is not devoid of ornament, but the ornament is of a debased rhetorical kind, patched on to instead of growing out of the subject; there is a great command of words, and a laboured use of them; forced attempts at metaphor occur in several passages,—e.g.

There is no real ground for doubting that the work was written by Plato, merely because several words occur in it which are not found in his other writings.

Like several experiments in language of the writers of the Elizabethan age, they were afterwards lost; and though occasionally found in Plutarch and imitators of Plato, they have not been accepted by Aristotle or passed into the common dialect of Greece.

For example, the address to the poets: 'Best of strangers, we also are poets of the best and noblest tragedy; for our whole state is an imitation of the best and noblest life, which we affirm to be indeed the very truth of tragedy.' Or again, the sight of young men and maidens in friendly intercourse with one another, suggesting the dangers to which youth is liable from the violence of passion; or the eloquent denunciation of unnatural lusts in the same passage; or the charming thought that the best legislator 'orders war for the sake of peace and not peace for the sake of war;' or the pleasant allusion, 'O Athenian—inhabitant of Attica, I will not say, for you seem to me worthy to be named after the Goddess Athene because you go back to first principles;' or the pithy saying, 'Many a victory has been and will be suicidal to the victors, but education is never suicidal;' or the fine expression that 'the walls of a city should be allowed to sleep in the earth, and that we should not attempt to disinter them;' or the remark that 'God is the measure of all things in a sense far higher than any man can be;' or that 'a man should be from the first a partaker of the truth, that he may live a true man as long as possible;' or the principle repeatedly laid down, that 'the sins of the fathers are not to be visited on the children;' or the description of the funeral rites of those priestly sages who depart in innocence; or the noble sentiment, that we should do more justice to slaves than to equals; or the curious observation, founded, perhaps, on his own experience, that there are a few 'divine men in every state however corrupt, whose conversation is of inestimable value;' or the acute remark, that public opinion is to be respected, because the judgments of mankind about virtue are better than their practice; or the deep religious and also modern feeling which pervades the tenth book (whatever may be thought of the arguments); the sense of the duty of living as a part of a whole, and in dependence on the will of God, who takes care of the least things as well as the greatest; and the picture of parents praying for their children—not as we may say, slightly altering the words of Plato, as if there were no truth or reality in the Gentile religions, but as if there were the greatest—are very striking to us.

No other writing of Plato shows so profound an insight into the world and into human nature as the Laws.

The Laws of Plato contain numerous passages which closely resemble other passages in his writings.

But the higher flights of Plato about the science of dialectic, or the unity of virtue, or a person who is above the law, would be unintelligible to him.

If the interpolation or double authorship of Greek writings in the time of Plato could be shown to be common, then a question, perhaps insoluble, would arise, not whether the whole, but whether parts of the Platonic dialogues are genuine, and, if parts only, which parts.

Hebrew prophecies and Homeric poems and Laws of Manu may have grown together in early times, but there is no reason to think that any of the dialogues of Plato is the result of a similar process of accumulation.

It is therefore rash to say with Oncken (Die Staatslehre des Aristoteles) that the form in which Aristotle knew the Laws of Plato must have been different from that in which they have come down to us.

The conception of justice as the union of temperance, wisdom, courage (Laws; Republic): the latent idea of dialectic implied in the notion of dividing laws after the kinds of virtue (Laws); the approval of the method of looking at one idea gathered from many things, 'than which a truer was never discovered by any man' (compare Republic): or again the description of the Laws as parents (Laws; Republic): the assumption that religion has been already settled by the oracle of Delphi (Laws; Republic), to which an appeal is also made in special cases (Laws): the notion of the battle with self, a paradox for which Plato in a manner apologizes both in the Laws and the Republic: the remark (Laws) that just men, even when they are deformed in body, may still be perfectly beautiful in respect of the excellent justice of their minds (compare Republic): the argument that ideals are none the worse because they cannot be carried out (Laws; Republic): the near approach to the idea of good in 'the principle which is common to all the four virtues,' a truth which the guardians must be compelled to recognize (Laws; compare Republic): or again the recognition by reason of the right pleasure and pain, which had previously been matter of habit (Laws; Republic): or the blasphemy of saying that the excellency of music is to give pleasure (Laws; Republic): again the story of the Sidonian Cadmus (Laws), which is a variation of the Phoenician tale of the earth-born men (Republic): the comparison of philosophy to a yelping she-dog, both in the Republic and in the Laws: the remark that no man can practise two trades (Laws; Republic): or the advantage of the middle condition (Laws; Republic): the tendency to speak of principles as moulds or forms; compare the ekmageia of song (Laws), and the tupoi of religion (Republic): or the remark (Laws) that 'the relaxation of justice makes many cities out of one,' which may be compared with the Republic: or the description of lawlessness 'creeping in little by little in the fashions of music and overturning all things,'—to us a paradox, but to Plato's mind a fixed idea, which is found in the Laws as well as in the Republic: or the figure of the parts of the human body under which the parts of the state are described (Laws; Republic): the apology for delay and diffuseness, which occurs not unfrequently in the Republic, is carried to an excess in the Laws (compare Theaet.): the remarkable thought (Laws) that the soul of the sun is better than the sun, agrees with the relation in which the idea of good stands to the sun in the Republic, and with the substitution of mind for the idea of good in the Philebus: the passage about the tragic poets (Laws) agrees generally with the treatment of them in the Republic, but is more finely conceived, and worked out in a nobler spirit.

The force of the argument is increased, if we remember that no passage in the Laws is exactly copied,—nowhere do five or six words occur together which are found together elsewhere in Plato's writings.

In other dialogues of Plato, as well as in the Republic, there are to be found parallels with the Laws.

It is remarkable that in the Sophist and Statesman (Soph.), Plato, speaking in the character of the Eleatic Stranger, has already put on the old man.

The madness of the poets, again, is a favourite notion of Plato's, which occurs also in the Laws, as well as in the Phaedrus, Ion, and elsewhere.

Would a forger have had the wit to select the most peculiar and characteristic thoughts of Plato; would he have caught the spirit of his philosophy; would he, instead of openly borrowing, have half concealed his favourite ideas; would he have formed them into a whole such as the Laws; would he have given another the credit which he might have obtained for himself; would he have remembered and made use of other passages of the Platonic writings and have never deviated into the phraseology of them?

Without pressing such arguments as absolutely certain, we must acknowledge that such a comparison affords a new ground of real weight for believing the Laws to be a genuine writing of Plato.

The relation of the Republic to the Laws is clearly set forth by Plato in the Laws.

The scheme of education in the Laws is of a far lower kind than that which Plato had conceived in the Republic.

It must however be remembered that the religion of Plato is co-extensive with morality, and is that purified religion and mythology of which he speaks in the second book of the Republic.

Some confusion occurs in the passage in which Plato speaks of the Republic, occasioned by his reference to a third state, which he proposes (D.V.) hereafter to expound.

But it is not clear that by this the third state of Plato is intended.

It is possible that Plato may have meant by his third state an historical sketch, bearing the same relation to the Laws which the unfinished Critias would have borne to the Republic; or he may, perhaps, have intended to describe a state more nearly approximating than the Laws to existing Greek states.

The Laws are confessedly a Second-best, an inferior Ideal, to which Plato has recourse, when he finds that the city of Philosophers is no longer 'within the horizon of practical politics.' But it is curious to observe that the higher Ideal is always returning (compare Arist.

At length Plato is obliged to institute a Nocturnal Council which is supposed to retain the mind of the legislator, and of which some of the members are even supposed to go abroad and inspect the institutions of foreign countries, as a foundation for changes in their own.

The spirit of such changes, though avoiding the extravagance of a popular assembly, being only so much change as the conservative temper of old members is likely to allow, is nevertheless inconsistent with the fixedness of Egypt which Plato wishes to impress upon Hellenic institutions.

Such reflections may help us to bring home to ourselves by inward sympathy the language of Plato in the Laws, and to combine into something like a whole his various and at first sight inconsistent utterances.

Many enactments are taken from the Athenian; the four classes are borrowed from the constitution of Cleisthenes, which Plato regards as the best form of Athenian government, and the guardians of the law bear a certain resemblance to the archons.

The extravagant dislike which Plato shows both to a naval power and to extreme democracy is the reverse of Athenian.

And the constant reference in the Laws of Plato to the lawgiver is altogether in accordance with Greek modes of thinking and speaking.

Plato is deeply impressed by the antiquity of Egypt, and the unchangeableness of her ancient forms of song and dance.

The first word of the Laws somewhat abruptly introduces the thought which is present to the mind of Plato throughout the work, namely, that Law is of divine origin.

Yet we may observe two inconsistencies in Plato's treatment of the subject: first, a lesser, inasmuch as he does not clearly distinguish the Cretan and Spartan laws, of which the exclusive aim is war, from those other laws of Zeus and Apollo which are said to be divine, and to comprehend all virtue.

These Plato proposes to leave to a younger generation of legislators.

In reading the Laws of Plato, or any other ancient writing about Laws, we should consider how gradual the process is by which not only a legal system, but the administration of a court of law, becomes perfected.

There are other subjects on which Plato breaks ground, as his manner is, early in the work.

As in the beginnings of Plato's other writings, we have here several 'notes' struck, which form the preludes of longer discussions, although the hint is less ingeniously given, and the promise more imperfectly fulfilled than in the earlier dialogues.

The distinction between ethics and politics has not yet dawned upon Plato's mind.

But Plato has never reflected on these differences.

If unable to grasp some important distinctions, Plato is at any rate seeking to elevate the lower to the higher; he does not pull down the principles of men to their practice, or narrow the conception of the state to the immediate necessities of politics.

And if not the first author of such ideals (for they are as old as Hesiod), Plato has done more than any other writer to impress them on the world.

Yet if Plato means to say that society is one of the principal instruments of education in after-life, he has expressed in an obscure fashion a principle which is true, and to his contemporaries was also new.

That at a banquet a degree of moral discipline might be exercised is an original thought, but Plato has not yet learnt to express his meaning in an abstract form.

Plato has arrived at the time when men sit still and look on at life; and he is willing to allow himself and others the few pleasures which remain to them.

Total abstinence for the young, moderate and increasing potations for the old, is Plato's principle.

In his maxims of health and longevity, though aware of the importance of a simple diet, Plato has omitted to dwell on the perfect rule of moderation.

Plato's denial of wine to the young and his approval of it for their elders has some points of view which may be illustrated by the temperance controversy of our own times.

But we may rejoin with Plato that the abuse of a good thing does not take away the use of it.

We entirely agree with Plato in forbidding the use of wine to the young; but when we are of mature age there are occasions on which we derive refreshment and strength from moderate potations.

So by comparing things old and new we may sometimes help to realize to ourselves the meaning of Plato in the altered circumstances of our own life.

The nature of the virtues is to run up into one another, and in many passages Plato makes but a faint effort to distinguish them.

Nor has Plato forgotten his old paradox (Gorgias) that to be punished is better than to be unpunished, when he says, that to the bad man death is the only mitigation of his evil.

In the second book, Plato pursues further his notion of educating by a right use of pleasure.

Plato only recognizes the identity of pleasure and good when the pleasure is of the higher kind.

From this passage may be gathered a more perfect conception of art than from any other of Plato's writings.

We are inclined to suspect that both here and in the Republic Plato exaggerates the influence really exercised by the song and the dance.

At the beginning of the third book, Plato abruptly asks the question, What is the origin of states?

We have already seen—in the Theaetetus, where he supposes that in the course of ages every man has had numberless progenitors, kings and slaves, Greeks and barbarians; and in the Critias, where he says that nine thousand years have elapsed since the island of Atlantis fought with Athens—that Plato is no stranger to the conception of long periods of time.

Modern enquirers, like Plato, have found in infinite ages the explanation not only of states, but of languages, men, animals, the world itself; like him, also, they have detected in later institutions the vestiges of a patriarchal state still surviving.

Thus far Plato speaks as 'the spectator of all time and all existence,' who may be thought by some divine instinct to have guessed at truths which were hereafter to be revealed.

Because there was a Persian empire which was the natural enemy of the Greek, there must also have been an Assyrian empire, which had a similar hostility; and not only the fable of the island of Atlantis, but the Trojan war, in Plato's mind derived some features from the Persian struggle.

In the Republic, Plato is flying in the air regardless of fact and possibility—in the Laws, he is making history by analogy.

The chief object of Plato in tracing the origin of society is to show the point at which regular government superseded the patriarchical authority, and the separate customs of different families were systematized by legislators, and took the form of laws consented to by them all.

According to Plato, the only sound principle on which any government could be based was a mixture or balance of power.

And yet we might fairly ask, a little parodying the language of Plato—O legislator, is unanimity only 'the struggle for existence'; or is the balance of powers in a state better than the harmony of them?

In the fourth book we approach the realities of politics, and Plato begins to ascend to the height of his great argument.

A sermon and a law in one, blending the secular punishment with the religious sanction, appeared to Plato a new idea which might have a great result in reforming the world.

The experiment had never been tried of reasoning with mankind; the laws of others had never had any preambles, and Plato seems to have great pleasure in contemplating his discovery.

The will of God, the authority of the legislator, and the dignity of the soul, have taken their place in the mind of Plato.

The opening of the fifth book, though abrupt and unconnected in style, is one of the most elevated passages in Plato.

In many of his views of politics, Plato seems to us, like some politicians of our own time, to be half socialist, half conservative.

Or as Plato says in the Laws, 'A man will recognize the noblest life as having the greatest pleasure and the least pain, if he have a true taste.' If we admit that pleasures differ in kind, the opposition between these two modes of speaking is rather verbal than real; and in the greater part of the writings of Plato they alternate with each other.

In the Protagoras, speaking in the person of Socrates rather than in his own, Plato admits the calculation of pleasure to be the true basis of ethics, while in the Phaedo he indignantly denies that the exchange of one pleasure for another is the exchange of virtue.

So wide of the mark are they who would attribute to Plato entire consistency in thoughts or words.

Wealth, after all, plays a great part in the Second Republic of Plato.

Plato, writing under Pythagorean influences, seems really to have supposed that the well-being of the city depended almost as much on the number 5040 as on justice and moderation.

Plato is never weary of speaking of the honour of the soul, which can only be honoured truly by being improved.

When Plato says that he must carry out that part of his ideal which is practicable, he does not appear to have reflected that part of an ideal cannot be detached from the whole.

Both in politics and in art Plato seems to have seen no way of bringing order out of disorder, except by taking a step backwards.

Several questions of modern politics, such as the limitation of property, the enforcement of education, the relations of classes, are anticipated by Plato.

Plato, though he admits wealth as a political element, would deny that material prosperity can be the foundation of a really great community.

In the election of the Boule, Plato again attempts to mix aristocracy and democracy.

These political adjustments of Plato's will be criticised by the practical statesman as being for the most part fanciful and ineffectual.

Nor can the voters be expected to retain the continuous political interest required for carrying out such a proposal as Plato's.

Yet the scheme of Plato is not really so extravagant as the actual constitution of Athens, in which all the senators appear to have been elected by lot (apo kuamou bouleutai), at least, after the revolution made by Cleisthenes; for the constitution of the senate which was established by Solon probably had some aristocratic features, though their precise nature is unknown to us.

The ancients knew that election by lot was the most democratic of all modes of appointment, seeming to say in the objectionable sense, that 'one man is as good as another.' Plato, who is desirous of mingling different elements, makes a partial use of the lot, which he applies to candidates already elected by vote.

In Greek history, as well as in Plato's conception of it, this 'progression by antagonism' involves reaction: the aristocracy expands into democracy and returns again to tyranny.

Nothing is less present to the mind of Plato than a House of Commons, carrying on year by year the work of legislation.

If in any state, as Plato says in the Statesman, it is easier to find fifty good draught-players than fifty good rulers, the greater part of the 360 who compose the council must be unfitted to rule.

In the constitution of the Magnesian state Plato has not emancipated himself from the limitations of ancient politics.

In the elections to the priesthood, Plato endeavours to mix or balance in a friendly manner 'demus and not demus.' The commonwealth of the Laws, like the Republic, cannot dispense with a spiritual head, which is the same in both—the oracle of Delphi.

Plato is not disposed to encourage amateur attempts to revive religion in states.

Though the council is framed on the model of the Athenian Boule, the law courts of Plato do not equally conform to the pattern of the Athenian dicasteries.

Plato thinks that the judges should speak and ask questions:—this is not possible if they are numerous; he would, therefore, have a few judges only, but good ones.

The ingenious expedient of dividing the questions of law and fact between a judge and jury, which would have enabled Plato to combine the popular element with the judicial, did not occur to him or to any other ancient political philosopher.

In forming marriage connexions, Plato supposes that the public interest will prevail over private inclination.

To modern feelings there is a degree of coarseness in Plato's treatment of the subject.

In treating of property, Plato takes occasion to speak of property in slaves.

The motive is not so much humanity to the slave, of which there are hardly any traces (although Plato allows that many in the hour of peril have found a slave more attached than members of their own family), but the self-respect which the freeman and citizen owes to himself (compare Republic).

Plato still breathes the spirit of the old Hellenic world, in which slavery was a necessity, because leisure must be provided for the citizen.

Plato seems to have reflected as deeply and earnestly on the importance of infancy as Rousseau, or Jean Paul (compare the saying of the latter—'Not the moment of death, but the moment of birth, is probably the more important').

In the spirit of the statesman who said, 'Let me make the ballads of a country, and I care not who make their laws,' Plato would say, 'Let the amusements of children be unchanged, and they will not want to change the laws.

The 'Goddess Harmonia' plays a great part in Plato's ideas of education.

Plato has no belief in 'liberty of prophesying'; and having guarded against the dangers of lyric poetry, he remembers that there is an equal danger in other writings.

Against three mathematical errors Plato is in profound earnest.

To the early astronomers, who lived at the revival of science, as to Plato, there was nothing absurd in a priori astronomy, and they would probably have made fewer real discoveries of they had followed any other track.

The great fault which Plato finds in the contemporary education is the almost total ignorance of arithmetic and astronomy, in which the Greeks would do well to take a lesson from the Egyptians (compare Republic).

The military spirit which Plato has vainly endeavoured to expel in the first two books returns again in the seventh and eighth.

Plato no longer entertains the idea of any regular training to be pursued under the superintendence of the state from eighteen to thirty, or from thirty to thirty-five; he has taken the first step downwards on 'Constitution Hill' (Republic).

The description which Plato gives in the Republic of the state of adult education among his contemporaries may be applied almost word for word to our own age.

The singular passage in Book vii., in which Plato describes life as a pastime, like many other passages in the Laws is imperfectly expressed.

Like a Christian ascetic, Plato seems to suppose that life should be passed wholly in the enjoyment of divine things.

In one of the noblest passages of Plato, he speaks of the relation of the sexes.

The legislator is to cry aloud, and spare not, 'Let not men fall below the level of the beasts.' Plato does not shrink, like some modern philosophers, from 'carrying on war against the mightiest lusts of mankind;' neither does he expect to extirpate them, but only to confine them to their natural use and purpose, by the enactments of law, and by the influence of public opinion.

He therefore adopts a 'second legal standard of honourable and dishonourable, having a second standard of right.' He would abolish altogether 'the connexion of men with men...As to women, if any man has to do with any but those who come into his house duly married by sacred rites, and he offends publicly in the face of all mankind, we shall be right in enacting that he be deprived of civic honours and privileges.' But feeling also that it is impossible wholly to control the mightiest passions of mankind,' Plato, like other legislators, makes a compromise.

But having regard to the education of youth, to the innocence of children, to the sensibilities of women, to the decencies of society, Plato and the world in general are not wrong in insisting that some of the worst vices, if they must exist, should be kept out of sight; this, though only a second-best rule, is a support to the weakness of human nature.

The subject of religion in Book X is introduced as a prelude to offences against the Gods, and this portion of the work appears to be executed in Plato's best manner.

A weak point in the Laws of Plato is the amount of inquisition into private life which is to be made by the rulers.

Plato does not seem to be aware that espionage can only have a negative effect.

Plato becomes more conservative as he grows older, and he would govern the world entirely by men like himself, who are above fifty years of age; for in them he hopes to find a principle of stability.

Plato has an evident dislike of the Athenian dicasteries; he prefers a few judges who take a leading part in the conduct of trials to a great number who only listen in silence.

On the other hand, Plato is innocent of the barbarity which would visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, and he is quite aware that punishment has an eye to the future, and not to the past.

A defect in Plato's criminal jurisprudence is his remission of the punishment when the homicide has obtained the forgiveness of the murdered person; as if crime were a personal affair between individuals, and not an offence against the State.

The great question of the freedom of the will, which in modern times has been worn threadbare with purely abstract discussion, was approached both by Plato and Aristotle—first, from the judicial; secondly, from the sophistical point of view.

In attempting to distinguish between hurt and injury, Plato says that mere hurt is not injury; but that a benefit when done in a wrong spirit may sometimes injure, e.g.

In some paradoxical sense Plato is disposed to affirm all injustice to be involuntary; because no man would do injustice who knew that it never paid and could calculate the consequences of what he was doing.

Hence the necessity for what in modern language, and according to a distinction which Plato would scarcely have understood, might be termed persecution.

But the spirit of persecution in Plato, unlike that of modern religious bodies, arises out of the desire to enforce a true and simple form of religion, and is directed against the superstitions which tend to degrade mankind.

Plato has not advanced quite so far as this in the path of toleration.

The Laws would have rested on a sounder foundation, if Plato had ever distinctly realized to his mind the difference between crime and sin or vice.

The arguments which Plato uses for the being of a God, have an extremely modern character: first, the consensus gentium; secondly, the argument which has already been adduced in the Phaedrus, of the priority of the self-moved.

Plato did not feel, and has not attempted to consider, the difficulty of reconciling the special with the general providence of God.

was already prevalent in the age of Plato; and that the terrors of another world were freely used in order to gain advantages over other men in this.

Yet this future state of rewards and punishments is in Plato's view not any addition of happiness or suffering imposed from without, but the permanence of good and evil in the soul: here he is in advance of many modern theologians.

The Greek, too, had his difficulty about the existence of evil, which in one solitary passage, remarkable for being inconsistent with his general system, Plato explains, after the Magian fashion, by a good and evil spirit (compare Theaet., Statesman).

Plato is disposed to attribute the incredulity of his own age to several causes.

Plato is very much out of temper at the impiety of some of his contemporaries; yet he is determined to reason with the victims, as he regards them, of these illusions before he punishes them.

The difficulties arising out of ancient sacred writings were far less serious in the age of Plato than in our own.

Nor can we be said to be free from that which Plato justly considers to be the worst unbelief—of those who put superstition in the place of true religion.

To the errors of superstition and unbelief Plato opposes the simple and natural truth of religion; the best and highest, whether conceived in the form of a person or a principle—as the divine mind or as the idea of good—is believed by him to be the basis of human life.

It is remarkable that Plato's account of mind at the end of the Laws goes beyond Anaxagoras, and beyond himself in any of his previous writings.

But Plato makes the further criticism, that the error of Anaxagoras consisted, not in denying the universal agency of mind, but in denying the priority, or, as we should say, the eternity of it.

This appears to be the last form of Plato's religious philosophy, which might almost be summed up in the words of Kant, 'the starry heaven above and the moral law within.' Or rather, perhaps, 'the starry heaven above and mind prior to the world.'

Plato may be claimed as the first free trader, when he prohibits the imposition of customs on imports and exports, though he was clearly not aware of the importance of the principle which he enunciated.

Regarded as the framework of a polity the Laws are deemed by Plato to be a decline from the Republic, which is the dream of his earlier years.

Plato has been arguing throughout the Laws that temperance is higher than courage, peace than war, that the love of both must enter into the character of the good citizen.

The true artist or guardian must be able to reduce the many to the one, than which, as he says with an enthusiasm worthy of the Phaedrus or Philebus, 'no more philosophical method was ever devised by the wit of man.' But the sense of unity in difference can only be acquired by study; and Plato does not explain to us the nature of this study, which we may reasonably infer, though there is a remarkable omission of the word, to be akin to the dialectic of the Republic.

Plato is not altogether disinclined to changes in the law where experience shows them to be necessary; but he is also anxious that the original spirit of the constitution should never be lost sight of.

The Laws of Plato contain the latest phase of his philosophy, showing in many respects an advance, and in others a decline, in his views of life and the world.

Of the speculative side of this theory there are no traces in the Laws, but doubtless Plato found the practical value which he attributed to arithmetic greatly confirmed by the possibility of applying number and measure to the revolution of the heavens, and to the regulation of human life.

Yet there are many traces of advance as well as retrogression in the Laws of Plato.

Education is the last word with which Plato supposes the theory of the Laws to end and the reality to begin.

Plato's increasing appreciation of the difficulties of human affairs, and of the element of chance which so largely influences them, is an indication not of a narrower, but of a maturer mind, which had become more conversant with realities.

Plato would have been the first to acknowledge that the Book of Laws was not the creation of his fancy, but a collection of enactments which had been devised by inspired legislators, like Minos, Lycurgus, and Solon, to meet the actual needs of men, and had been approved by time and experience.

The Laws of Plato are essentially Greek: unlike Xenophon's Cyropaedia, they contain nothing foreign or oriental.

But of Crete so little is known to us, that although, as Montesquieu (Esprit des Lois) remarks, 'the Laws of Crete are the original of those of Sparta and the Laws of Plato the correction of these latter,' there is only one point, viz.

Most of Plato's provisions resemble the laws and customs which prevailed in these three states (especially in the two former), and which the personifying instinct of the Greeks attributed to Minos, Lycurgus, and Solon.

Some enactments are Plato's own, and were suggested by his experience of defects in the Athenian and other Greek states.

And the same lofty aspiration after the good is perpetually recurring, especially in Books X, XI, XII, and whenever Plato's mind is filled with his highest themes.

And Plato's 'Book of Laws,' if described in the language of modern philosophy, may be said to be as much an ethical and educational, as a political or legal treatise.

It is the spirit of this life which Plato would infuse into the Magnesian state and which he seeks to combine with the common meals and gymnastic discipline of Sparta.

The Laws answer to Plato's own description of them, in the comparison which he makes of himself and his two friends to gatherers of stones or the beginners of some composite work, 'who are providing materials and partly putting them together:—having some of their laws, like stones, already fixed in their places, while others lie about.'

Plato's own life coincided with the period at which Athens rose to her greatest heights and sank to her lowest depths.

On the other hand the fame and prestige of Sparta, which had outlived so many crimes and blunders, was not altogether lost at the end of the life of Plato.

Plato, like Aristotle, had in his mind some form of a mean state which should escape the evils and secure the advantages of both aristocracy and democracy.

No system of checks and balances, such as Plato has devised in the Laws, could have given equipoise and stability to an ancient state, any more than the skill of the legislator could have withstood the tide of democracy in England or France during the last hundred years, or have given life to China or India.

The mention of it in the Laws of Plato affords considerable presumption that it was of ancient origin, and not first introduced, as Mr.

Plato was aware of the danger, and has improved on the Spartan custom.

Their way of life may be compared with that of the Spartan secret police or Crypteia, a name which Plato freely applies to them without apparently any consciousness of the odium which has attached to the word in history.

Another great institution which Plato borrowed from Sparta (or Crete) is the Syssitia or common meals.

In the Laws the Cretan custom appears to be adopted (This is not proved, as Hermann supposes ('De Vestigiis,' etc.)): that is to say, if we may interpret Plato by Aristotle, the cost of them was defrayed by the state and not by the individuals (Arist.

Plato goes further than the legislators of Sparta and Crete, and would extend the common meals to women as well as men: he desires to curb the disorders, which existed among the female sex in both states, by the application to women of the same military discipline to which the men were already subject.

It was an extension of the custom of Syssitia from which the ancient legislators shrank, and which Plato himself believed to be very difficult of enforcement.

In the regulation of the Syssitia, in at least one of his enactments respecting property, and in the attempt to correct the licence of women, Plato shows, that while he borrowed from the institutions of Sparta and favoured the Spartan mode of life, he also sought to improve upon them.

The enmity to the sea is another Spartan feature which is transferred by Plato to the Magnesian state.

Plato, like the Spartans, had a prejudice against a navy, because he regarded it as the nursery of democracy.

Like the Spartans, Plato was afraid of the evils which might be introduced into his state by intercourse with foreigners; but he also shrinks from the utter exclusiveness of Sparta, and is not unwilling to allow visitors of a suitable age and rank to come from other states to his own, as he also allows citizens of his own state to go to foreign countries and bring back a report of them.

These are much more numerous than the previous class of resemblances; we are better able to compare the laws of Plato with those of Athens, because a good deal more is known to us of Athens than of Sparta.

(2) Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, as well as later writers, such as Cicero de Legibus, Plutarch, Aelian, Pausanias.

(4) The Scholia on Aristophanes, Plato, Demosthenes.

Nor can we hastily assume that enactments which occur in the Laws of Plato were also a part of Athenian law, however probable this may appear.

There are two classes of similarities between Plato's Laws and those of Athens: (i) of institutions (ii) of minor enactments.

(i) The constitution of the Laws in its general character resembles much more nearly the Athenian constitution of Solon's time than that which succeeded it, or the extreme democracy which prevailed in Plato's own day.

In some particulars Plato appears to have copied exactly the customs and procedure of the Areopagus: both assemblies sat at night (Telfy).

That such a mode of election should have been resorted to in any civilized state, or that it should have been transferred by Plato to an ideal or imaginary one, is very singular to us.

In the election of councillors Plato introduces a further check: they are not to be chosen directly by lot from all the citizens, but from a select body previously elected by vote.

In Plato's state at least, as we may infer from his silence on this point, judges and magistrates performed their duties without pay, which was a guarantee both of their disinterestedness and of their belonging probably to the higher class of citizens (compare Arist.

Hence we are not surprised that the use of the lot prevailed, not only in the election of the Athenian Council, but also in many oligarchies, and even in Plato's colony.

In Plato it was chiefly an elective body, having apparently no judicial and little political power entrusted to it.

Plato was far from allowing such a despotic power to exist in his model community, and therefore he minimizes the importance of the Assembly and narrows its functions.

Plato not unfrequently adopts the details when he rejects the principle.

Plato significantly remarks that a few judges, if they are good, are better than a great number.

Plato does not dwell upon methods of procedure: these are the lesser matters which he leaves to the younger legislators.

Public causes in the Laws, as sometimes at Athens, were voted upon by the whole people: because, as Plato remarks, they are all equally concerned in them.

The department of justice is better organized in Plato than in an ordinary Greek state, proceeding more by regular methods, and being more restricted to distinct duties.

The executive of Plato's Laws, like the Athenian, was different from that of a modern civilized state.

So, too, in Plato's Laws.

(ii) There are numerous minor particulars in which the Laws of Plato resemble those of Athens.

These are less interesting than the preceding, but they show even more strikingly how closely in the composition of his work Plato has followed the laws and customs of his own country.

Plato has a similar law: 'A child shall be allowed to give evidence only in cases of murder.' (b) At Athens an unwilling witness might be summoned; but he was not required to appear if he was ready to declare on oath that he knew nothing about the matter in question (Telfy).

Plato is at once more lenient and more severe: 'If a man be twice convicted of false-witness, he shall not be required, and if thrice, he shall not be allowed to bear witness; and if he dare to witness after he has been convicted three times,...he shall be punished with death.'

Plato, too, has the alternative of death or exile, but he does not confiscate the murderer's property.

(b) The curious provision of Plato, that a stranger who has been banished for involuntary homicide and is subsequently wrecked upon the coast, must 'take up his abode on the sea-shore, wetting his feet in the sea, and watching for an opportunity of sailing,' recalls the procedure of the Judicium Phreatteum at Athens, according to which an involuntary homicide, who, having gone into exile, is accused of a wilful murder, was tried at Phreatto for this offence in a boat by magistrates on the shore.

Plato and Athenian law agree in making homicide justifiable or excusable in the following cases:—(1) at the games (Telfy); (2) in war (Telfy); (3) if the person slain was found doing violence to a free woman (Telfy); (4) if a doctor's patient dies; (5) in the case of a robber (Telfy); (6) in self-defence (Telfy).

Plato only punishes the offence with death when children wound their parents or one another, or a slave wounds his master.

Plato, like Athenian law (Telfy), punishes the theft of public property by death; the theft of private property in both involves a fine of double the value of the stolen goods (Telfy).

He 'who slays him who of all men, as they say, is his own best friend,' is regarded in the same spirit by Plato and by Athenian law.

Plato would have him 'buried ingloriously on the borders of the twelve portions of the land, in such places as are uncultivated and nameless,' and 'no column or inscription is to mark the place of his interment.' Athenian law enacted that the hand which did the deed should be separated from the body and be buried apart (Telfy).

Plato enacts that if a man wounds another in passion, and the wound is curable, he shall pay double the damage, if incurable or disfiguring, fourfold damages.

So Plato bids bystanders assist a father who is assaulted by his son, and allows any one to give information against children who neglect their parents.

Both Plato and Athenian law give to the winner of a suit power to seize the goods of the loser, if he does not pay within the appointed time (Telfy).

At Athens the penalty was also doubled (Telfy); not so in Plato.

Plato however punishes contempt of court by death, which at Athens seems only to have been visited with a further fine (Telfy).

(a) Both at Athens and in the Laws a man who has disputed property in his possession must give the name of the person from whom he received it (Telfy); and any one searching for lost property must enter a house naked (Telfy), or, as Plato says, 'naked, or wearing only a short tunic and without a girdle.

(b) Athenian law, as well as Plato, did not allow a father to disinherit his son without good reason and the consent of impartial persons (Telfy).

(c) Plato and Athenian law enacted that a tree should be planted at a fair distance from a neighbour's property (Telfy), and that when a man could not get water, his neighbour must supply him (Telfy).

Both at Athens and in Plato there is a law about bees, the former providing that a beehive must be set up at not less a distance than 300 feet from a neighbour's (Telfy), and the latter forbidding the decoying of bees.

This provision is common to Plato and to Athenian law (Telfy).

Further, the latter enacted that the nearest male relation should marry or provide a husband for an heiress (Telfy),—a point in which Plato follows it closely.

Plato's law that 'when a man makes an agreement which he does not fulfil, unless the agreement be of a nature which the law or a vote of the assembly does not allow, or which he has made under the influence of some unjust compulsion, or which he is prevented from fulfilling against his will by some unexpected chance,—the other party may go to law with him,' according to Pollux (quoted in Telfy's note) prevailed also at Athens.

(a) Lying was forbidden in the agora both by Plato and at Athens (Telfy).

Plato's enactment is more explicit: he allows only an unskilled person (i.e.

(c) Plato diverges from Athenian practice in the disapproval of credit, and does not even allow the supply of goods on the deposit of a percentage of their value (Telfy).

(d) Athenian law forbad an extortionate rate of interest (Telfy); Plato allows interest in one case only—if a contractor does not receive the price of his work within a year of the time agreed—and at the rate of 200 per cent.

There remains the subject of family life, which in Plato's Laws partakes both of an Athenian and Spartan character.

Divorces are likewise permitted by Plato where there is an incompatibility of temper, as at Athens by mutual consent.

The duty of having children is also enforced by a still higher motive, expressed by Plato in the noble words:—'A man should cling to immortality, and leave behind him children's children to be the servants of God in his place.' Again, as at Athens, the father is allowed to put away his undutiful son, but only with the consent of impartial persons (Telfy), and the only suit which may be brought by a son against a father is for imbecility.

Plato wishes to make the misfortune of orphanhood as little sad to them as possible.

Plato, seeing the disorder into which half the human race had fallen at Athens and Sparta, is minded to frame for them a new rule of life.

In Plato's age the subject of slavery greatly interested the minds of thoughtful men; and how best to manage this 'troublesome piece of goods' exercised his own mind a good deal.

Some privileges were granted to them by Athenian law of which there is no mention in Plato; they were allowed to purchase their freedom from their master, and if they despaired of being liberated by him they could demand to be sold, on the chance of falling into better hands.

Plato is more consistent than either the Athenians or the Spartans; for at Sparta too the Helots were treated in a manner almost unintelligible to us.

A noble and pathetic sentiment of Plato, suggested by the thought of their misery, may be quoted in this place:—'The right treatment of slaves is to behave properly to them, and to do to them, if possible, even more justice than to those who are our equals; for he who naturally and genuinely reverences justice, and hates injustice, is discovered in his dealings with any class of men to whom he can easily be unjust.

Plato never thinks of making the metic, much less the slave, a citizen.

It is Plato's greatest concession to the metic, as the bestowal of freedom is his greatest concession to the slave.

Lastly, there is a more general point of view under which the Laws of Plato may be considered,—the principles of Jurisprudence which are contained in them.

But there are also points which are peculiar, and in which ancient jurisprudence differs considerably from modern; some of them are of great importance...It could not be said at Athens, nor was it ever contemplated by Plato, that all men, including metics and slaves, should be equal 'in the eye of the law.' There was some law for the slave, but not much; no adequate protection was given him against the cruelty of his master...It was a singular privilege granted, both by the Athenian and Magnesian law, to a murdered man, that he might, before he died, pardon his murderer, in which case no legal steps were afterwards to be taken against him.

This law is the remnant of an age in which the punishment of offences against the person was the concern rather of the individual and his kinsmen than of the state...Plato's division of crimes into voluntary and involuntary and those done from passion, only partially agrees with the distinction which modern law has drawn between murder and manslaughter; his attempt to analyze them is confused by the Socratic paradox, that 'All vice is involuntary'...It is singular that both in the Laws and at Athens theft is commonly punished by a twofold restitution of the article stolen.

The distinction between civil and criminal courts or suits was not yet recognized...Possession gives a right of property after a certain time...The religious aspect under which certain offences were regarded greatly interfered with a just and natural estimate of their guilt...As among ourselves, the intent to murder was distinguished by Plato from actual murder...We note that both in Plato and the laws of Athens, libel in the market-place and personality in the theatre were forbidden...Both in Plato and Athenian law, as in modern times, the accomplice of a crime is to be punished as well as the principal...Plato does not allow a witness in a cause to act as a judge of it...Oaths are not to be taken by the parties to a suit...Both at Athens and in Plato's Laws capital punishment for murder was not to be inflicted, if the offender was willing to go into exile...Respect for the dead, duty towards parents, are to be enforced by the law as well as by public opinion...Plato proclaims the noble sentiment that the object of all punishment is the improvement of the offender...

Of all Plato's provisions the object is to bring the practice of the law more into harmony with reason and philosophy; to secure impartiality, and while acknowledging that every citizen has a right to share in the administration of justice, to counteract the tendency of the courts to become mere popular assemblies.

Thus we have arrived at the end of the writings of Plato, and at the last stage of philosophy which was really his.

The doctrine of Ideas passed into one of numbers; instead of advancing from the abstract to the concrete, the theories of Plato were taken out of their context, and either asserted or refuted with a provoking literalism; the Socratic or Platonic element in his teaching was absorbed into the Pythagorean or Megarian.

We have followed him during his forty or fifty years of authorship, from the beginning when he first attempted to depict the teaching of Socrates in a dramatic form, down to the time at which the character of Socrates had disappeared, and we have the latest reflections of Plato's own mind upon Hellas and upon philosophy.

In his return to earth Plato meets with a difficulty which has long ceased to be a difficulty to us.