CHAPTER XIII

The Laws and its Theory of the State

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THE GENESIS AND CHARACTER OF THE LAWS

According to the tradition of antiquity the Laws is a posthumous work, published, within a year of Plato’s death (347), by a pupil and amanuensis, Philip of Opus. This is apparently the reason for some of the gaps, and some of the inconsistencies, which Plato, dying with the work unfinished, had left behind, and his editor did not seek to remove. The plan of the Laws may have occurred to Plato as early as 361, when we know, from the Seventh Epistle, that he was engaged with Dionysius the younger on the study of the proper ‘preambles’ to be attached to laws: its composition may be ascribed to the last ten years of his life, when he was an old man of over seventy.1 The marks of old age are written large in many features of the Laws. Like Prospero in The Tempest – the last of Shakespeare’s plays – when he breaks his magic staff and drowns his book in the deeps, Plato has come to feel that men, who play their part in ‘this unsubstantial pageant’, are

                      such stuff
As dreams are made on.

‘Man in his fashion is a sort of puppet of God, and this, in truth, is the best of him’ (803 C). He has come to feel that God is everything, and man is a little thing; but along with this deeper sense of religious truth there has also come a certain rigour, and in the last books of the Laws we may hear

Rumores … senum severiorum.

The style, as well as the content, suggests the declining years of the writers.² There is something of garrulity: there is an increasing forgetfulness, which often leads to repetitions and sometimes lo inconsistencies; there is less artistic power. Plato preserves the form, but not the spirit, of the dialogue; and the Laws is really a monologue by an Athenian stranger in the presence of two patient, and generally polite, listeners – a Cretan and a Spartan. It is difficult to detect the plan on which the work is written, or to trace the connexion of its parts; but here we have to remember that Plato, believing that discourse should wander ‘as the argument listeth’, is never concerned to follow any obvious logical scheme.1 The first four books are of the nature of a preface, which falls into two unconnected parts – the first two books dealing with song and dance and wine, and their place in education; the third treating generally of the historical development of States, and the fourth of the prolegomena or general principles of politics. The next four books are occupied with the construction of a constitution (including a system of education and of social relations) which is to be based on law and to come next in order of excellence to the constitution depicted in the Republic. The next main section (Books IX–XI) contains a legal code, and may be said to be, in some respects, the essence of the dialogue. The ninth book contains the criminal, and the eleventh the civil code: between the two comes ‘the book of the law’ of religion, in which Plato discusses the principles of a true religious belief and fixes the penalties for the crime of heresy. The last book may be termed an epilogue: new political institutions are introduced, in a way which seems to suggest an afterthought and a postscript; and the tone of the dialogue, in spite of Plato’s profession that he is concerned with a State which falls short of the ideal, recurs to the idealism of the Republic. On the whole the dialogue gains in power (though not as a dialogue) during its course; and the last four books of the Laws are not only the finest part of the Laws – they are also among the finest of all the writings of Plato. He appears less as a poet and philosopher, and more as a law-giver and prophet. As a law-giver he not only systematizes Greek law in the spirit of a Bentham, but he also attempts, in his ‘preambles’, to explain the first principles on which his code is based. As a prophet, he attains, in the course of Book X, to a height of argument little removed from that of the greatest of the Hebrew prophets. We may say to ourselves, as we begin to read the Laws, ‘quantum mutatus ab illo’: we can only say, as we end, ‘It is Plato still; and what would not Plato have made of this matter thirty years before’.1

The cardinal change which Plato’s views had undergone by the time he wrote the Laws is indicated in the very title of the dialogue. Hitherto he had believed in the free rule of a personal intelligence, duly trained for its work, but exercising an imperium legibus solutum. He had hoped himself to train such an intelligence, along the lines propounded in the Republic and followed in the Academy. At Syracuse he had seemed to find his opportunity. Here he might show the value of philosophy; and here, turning a young tyrant into a philosopher-king, he might point the way for the salvation of Greece. At Syracuse he had failed. Undaunted by failure, he cast about to find another way. If he could not train a philosophic ruler who should rule without and instead of law, might he not make law itself philosophic, and promulgate a philosophic code for all States to follow? He would still be turning philosophy to practical account, which was always the thought dearest to his heart: it might still be, if not the educator of princes, at any rate the legislator of States. It would miss, indeed, its highest vocation (Plato never abandoned the ideal of the Republic, or ceased to believe that the ideal State must be governed directly and personally by the philosophic mind²); but if a State could only be indirectly governed by philosophy, through an impersonal code of philosophic law, the ‘second best’ would have been attained. A State so governed would still require some form of personal rule for the administration of the law; and this, in default of a philosophic monarchy, superseding all other claimants, might be found in a blend or combination of the different elements – monarch and people; rich and poor – which in actual States contend for political power. Thus the law-state, combined with a mixed constitution, comes to be the dominant political idea of Plato’s later years. It is a half-way house, as it were, between the idea and the actual: it is a sub-ideal State, near enough to actual conditions to be incorporated readily into actual life. It is a return, we may also note, to the general Greek idea of the rule of a fundamental law – an idea against which Plato, seeking to substitute mind itself for the laws which it makes, and the principles which lie behind law for its written enactments, had been so long a rebel.

The change is great: it cleaves Plato’s political theory into two distinct halves. On the one side is the guardian (ϕύλαξ) of the Republic, unfettered by law: on the other is the ‘guardian of the law’ (νομοϕύλαξ), who is its ‘servant’ and is even described as its ‘slave’. Yet if there is change, there is also consistency. The two ideals are not opposites: they are complements. The first had always been, and still continued to be, the absolute ideal of Plato: the second is a secondary or relative ideal – secondary, as compared with the ideal of the Republic; relative, as adapted to the exigencies of actual life.1 Nor, again, was the change sudden, or without its cogent causes. The Politicus already shows Plato ready to recognize that in actual States it is better to have law than the absence of law: it shows him prepared to admit the value of a combination of the different elements of a community, in education, in social life, and in government (supra, p. 327). The metaphor from the art of the weaver, who knits together the warp and the woof, is common to the Politicus and the Laws (734). The course of Syracusan history – the most potent of all the influences in actual life on the development of Plato’s political theory – helped to complete a change which, as the Politicus shows, was already imminent. We have seen, in describing the life of Plato, that he followed, with anxious attention, the difficulties and the contentions which arose at Syracuse after the expulsion of Dionysius by Dion in 357. If his experience at the hands of Dionysius had driven the absolute ideal into the background, the troubles encountered by his friends after the fall of Dionysius served to bring the secondary idea into the foreground; and we may learn from the Epistles how Plato’s thoughts began to turn to the value of a mixed constitution and a code of impartial law (supra, P. ‘33)

Nor must we forget, when we seek to trace the genesis of the Laws, that the Academy was a nurse of legislators, and that it must have been, in some measure, a school of law. The detailed regulations of civil and criminal law which appear in the last four books – enactments based on the law of Greece and especially of Athens – presuppose a technical and systematic study of Greek jurisprudence. A current generalization assigns art and philosophy to the Greeks, and government and jurisprudence (hae tibi erunt artes) to the Romans. The generalization hardly does justice to the genius of the Greeks. Greek law has largely perished.1 When Rome became mistress of the Mediterranean basin, Roman law gradually became the law of the Mediterranean world; and Roman law has survived. But Roman law, like Roman art and literature, was largely the gift of the Greeks. It is not merely a matter of the influence of the Stoic idea of a common law of nature on the Roman jus naturcæ (that influence has probably been over-rated by Sir Henry Maine); it is a matter of the debt of Rome, as early as the fifth century, to the actual law of Greece. Law and legislation bulked largely in Greece from the age of the legislators (circ. 600) onwards. Systematic legislation, such as that of the Code Napoleon, was regular, sometimes in old States, but more often in colonies. When a colony was founded, a legislator, or a legislative commission, was appointed by the State which was founding the colony, or by the colonists, for the purpose of giving a constitution and a code. This is exactly the case which Plato envisages in the Laws. The city of Cnossus, he imagines, is about to found a colony; and he sketches the lines on which the legislator of that colony might act.1 In the imaginary case, as in actual life, we may see constitution-making and law-making going hand in hand; and this suggests a reflection. The political speculation of the Greek philosophers about the best constitution is not merely political speculation: it is also legal speculation. They are seeking an ideal law, or Naturrecht, at the same time that they are seeking an ideal State. There is, as yet, no distinction between a science of politics and a science of jurisprudence. And since this is so, it follows that the Greeks, who founded political speculation, also founded, in the process, the theory of law.

SELF-CONTROL AS THE PRINCIPLE OF THE LAWS

Like Plato, we may begin with a preamble; and our preamble may contain, like his, a statement of the principles which underlie the laws and the constitution of the State which we have to describe. These principles may be summarized in a sentence. ‘The legislator, when making his laws, has in view not a part only of virtue, but all virtue’ (630 E). The State, and the laws of the State, are necessary in order to ensure the moral betterment of the citizens, and that not in one respect only, but in all; for ‘it cannot be supposed that those who know nothing of all the good of civic life can ever have attained the full development of virtue’ (678 B). The legislator must thus begin with a clear conception of complete virtue. In the Republic, as we have seen, virtue is almost identified with justice. Justice means differentiation of function; and functions are so rigidly differentiated in the Republic, that the political organ, confined to its political function, loses all social rights, while the social or economic organ, confined to its economic functions, loses all political rights. There are guardians who have no property and no family, but possess a complete monopoly of government; and there are farmers, possessed of property and living in families, who have no vote and no control of any kind over the government. By the side of justice, and as a companion of justice (alone with wisdom and courage), there is mentioned in the Republic a virtue of self-control or temperance. Self-control means the submission of appetite to the rule of reason; and in the Republic it is accordingly conceived as the virtue which results in the willing submission of the producing classes, which represent appetite, to the governing class which is the expression of reason. It is therefore a link between the social and political organs of the State, just as it is a link between the element of appetite and the element of reason in the individual soul; it produces a harmony of different elements and weaves together the warp and the woof of human nature. It is this virtue which, in place of justice, becomes the mainspring of the Laws. Plato’s ideal becomes a union in harmony of different elements (a view already foreshadowed in the Politicus) rather than a differentiation of unity into specific functions. While in the Republic, therefore, self-control and the other virtues are subordinated to justice, in the Laws it is self-control which crowns and completes all other virtues, including the virtue of justice (supra, p. 177, note 2).

In the first place, wisdom depends upon self-control. Wisdom can do its work, whether in our minds or in the State, only where there is harmony (689 D). But harmony is the daughter of self-control; and we may therefore say that wisdom, the companion and sister of harmony, is also the offspring of self-control. With wisdom thus related to harmony, and thus dependent on self-control, we may expect, and we shall find, that there is no insistence in the Laws on the exclusive rule of wisdom, and no attempt to enthrone philosopher-kings. But it is not only the virtue of wisdom that depends on self-control: the same is true of the virtues of courage and justice. No virtue is virtuous, unless the complete virtue of self-control is first present: self-control is the prior condition, or rather it is the necessary completion (προσθήκη), alike of wisdom, of courage and of justice (696). Nor is it only the crown of all virtues: it is also, because it is a free concord of appetite with reason, and because it issues in free self-direction by a rational will, the essence of liberty. Man is a free agent only when rationally choosing, under the influence of self-control, a course which his reason assures him is right; and he is never less free than when, ‘doing as he likes’, and losing control of his appetites, he falls a victim to his own worse self (626 E–628 A: 733 E–734 B).1

It follows on these conclusions that the legislator who adjusts his laws to producing in a State the complete virtue of self-control will attain three ends in one – ‘that the city for which he legislates shall be free; and secondly, at unity with herself; and thirdly, possessed of understanding’ (701 D: 693 B). Such a city will be different from the city of the Republic. Self-control postulates no absolute differentiation of functions. Accordingly, in the Laws the rulers have both political and social rights; and the same is true of the ruled. The ruler has private property and a family; communism is abandoned, though common tables are retained; and the ruled have a voice and a vote in the election of their rulers. Such a State will not have the unity which springs from the co-operation of different elements, each contributing its special function to the life of the whole; but, permeated as it is by self-control, it will have a unity of sympathy none the less. Issuing as it does in sympathy, self-control brings us into a different atmosphere from that of the Republic – an atmosphere less rare, but more human; less clear, but also less cold.

PEACE AND WAR

If self-control is the crown and completion of the virtues, and the State must be based on self-control, it follows that a State which is based on any other virtue, and on that only, is in its nature wrong. A State which is based on the virtue of courage, and makes war its aim, is a perverted State. This is a point which the Athenian Stranger of the dialogue, discoursing as he is with a Spartan and a Cretan, is naturally led to make against the military States of Sparta and Crete. It is also a point which the actual process of history may well have led Plato to wish to make. Sparta, military State as she was, had gone down before Thebes at the battle of Mantinea in 362. The war-state was discredited, and an epoch of criticism of Sparta began, which finds a voice at once in the Laws of Plato and the Politics of Aristotle.1 Nor was the fate of Sparta the only warning against militarism. In Sicily, too, the military tyranny of the Syracusan princes had recently proved fatal to liberty. In Greece, while Plato was writing the Laws, the Sacred War was showing the power and the character of those mercenary troops who are condemned in the Republic (575 B), as they are condemned, if for different reasons, in the Prince of Machiavelli. Meanwhile from the North, the military power of Macedon was advancing slowly but surely southwards: Philip became king in 359: by 357 he was at war with Athens: in 351 Demosthenes delivered his first Philippic. Looking, it may be, at the signs of the times, Plato in the first book of the Laws preaches the sovereignty of peace, and criticizes the type of State which, like Sparta, has made war its aim. His words have a modern ring and a modern application. To the militarist ‘peace is only a name; and every State in reality is in a constant state of war with every other, without any declaration, but also without any cessation’ (626). So peace is subordinated to war, instead of war to peace; and men live in an armed peace in which all their institutions are directed to the gaining of victory, and of ‘all the good things of the vanquished’, in the day when war at last comes. Such a policy may produce the one virtue of courage, but even the virtue of courage is lame without the support of self-control (634 A); and though men disciplined to courage may rise superior to pain, they will succumb (as the Spartans, indeed, had always tended to succumb) to those temptations of pleasure which they have never learned to control. ‘In reality’ (as the militarist says, not knowing the nature of reality), there are wars to be waged within the State, which demand the true courage that is born of self-control, and demand in addition wisdom and justice. Evil is pitted against good in an inward conflict; and true courage, like all true virtue, can be shown only in those internal struggles in which education meets ignorance, and social justice is set against social injustice. Every State should look inward rather than outward:1 every State should seek in the inward war not victory and annihilation, but final peace and lasting reconciliation through the harmony which comes of moderation and self-control. So the military State, if it listens to Plato, will abjure the outward direction of its life, its one-sided virtue, its hopes of conquest and annihilation, and all its philosophy of a ‘natural state of war’; it will turn to the battleground within its borders, and learning the philosophy of peace it will seek, by ordering its inward policy on the principle of self-control, to secure that harmony and reconciliation of different elements which only self-control can give.

War, after all, is a disease of the body politic, and a State which embarks on a policy of war shows by that act that it is halt and imperfect. ‘No man can gain complete security from wrong, unless he has attained perfect goodness; and it is possible for States to have the same attribute, enjoying peace if they are good, and exposed to war, within and without, if they are evil’ (829 A).² And as war springs from imperfection and evil in its beginnings, so, too, in its course, to Plato’s thinking, it is a thing that brings little good. We may talk of the lessons of war, or the ‘great game of war’; but ‘the truth is that in the nature of war there never was, nor is, nor will be, either amusement or instruction (οὔτε παιδιὰ οὔτε παιδεία) to any degree worth considering’ (803 D). Yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this analysis – an analysis, in effect, of the nature of offensive war – that Plato was a political quietist, or a believer in ‘pacificism’. Aristotle, indeed (whose criticism of the Laws is somewhat external and imperfect), accuses Plato of neglecting the foreign relations of his State;1 and he criticizes his provision that the central city should have no fortifications, but should leave ‘walls to sleep in the ground’.² But Plato, as a matter of fact, abundantly provides for the defence of his State and its central city. If his city has no walls, that is only because a walled city induces men to neglect the defence of their frontiers;³ and he provides that the frontiers of his State shall be digged and trenched and fortified (778 E: 760–1 A). Not only so, but he demands national service, and he makes the right to a vote in civic elections depend on the discharge of such service. All the citizens, women as well as men, must take the field for at least one day in every month (829 B). Men train for athletic contests; ‘and shall the warriors of our city be a whit worse prepared for the greatest of all contests, in which life and children and goods and the State are at stake?’ (830 C).⁴ War, provided it be pro patriae tuitione, finds ample recognition in the Laws. In the opening chapters of the very last book, in a passage which a German writer condemns for its militarism,⁵ he lays down stringent rules of military discipline; and, after enacting penalties for malingerers, he enacts also, ‘for valour’, the award of a crown of wild olive, which the winner may offer to the temple of any of the gods of war (942 A–945 B).

THE NATURE OF LAW

Such is Plato’s conception, in the Laws, of what the State should be, and should not be; of the errors it should avoid, and the ideal it should pursue. That ideal it is the aim of law to express. Of the nature of law – of its necessity, its origin, its extent and its sovereignty – Plato has much, and much that is profoundly wise, to say; and indeed a treatise de l’ esprit de lois might be written on the texts which occur in the Laws.

On the necessity of law there is a noble passage in the ninth book (875), which in form is a preface to the law on the infliction of wounds. Law is civilization: it is the slow-bought gain of the ages during which men have striven to lift themselves above savage beasts; it is the differentia of humanity.1 It is necessary to us for two reasons – first, because our individual minds are not adequate in themselves for the recognition of what is best for social life; secondly because, even when such recognition is attained, our individual wills are not always able or willing to pursue the best. We thus need law, first of all, to precipitate, as it were, and to crystallize the good, for which our consciences darkly grope. The good we seek is a common good, and because it is a common good it binds us together in a society for its common pursuit; and in such a society, joined in the pursuit of a common good, but in such a society only, each individual can attain the good of his own life. It is difficult for men to recognize these facts, or to realize that the common good is the prior condition of any individual good; and that is why the true art of legislation, which far more than tools or any crafts makes civilization, is a necessity of human life. Again we need law, and the public enforcement of law, to supply a motive to our lagging wills. Without the organization of a common opinion, backed by a common force, men will always seek, even if they have an intellectual recognition of the common good, to establish a private interest as their canon (ἰδιοπραγία), and they will always drift into selfish competition for the sake of private advantage (πλεονεξία). If, indeed, by the grace of God, a man should arise among his people naturally able to recognize, and also, of his own motion, to pursue the good, such a man would need no laws for his guidance. There is no law or order greater than wisdom; and genuine free mind is in its nature always sovereign and never subject. But this is a dream – the dream of a god among men. There is no such mind anywhere, or at any rate only a little; and so we must take law and order, admitting as we do that they are only a second best, and that though law may envisage rules of a general application, it cannot (as might a free sovereign mind) meet every case and every need.

But if law is not free mind, it is the expression of mind or reason; and if it does not cover every case, it has an almost universal extent. More than once Plato connects the word ‘law’ (νόμος) with the word ‘mind’ (νοῦς), implying that the one is derived from the other, and that since, as he holds, the word and the thing are intimately united, there is a deep significance in the derivationa.1 Men are as puppets pulled in opposite ways by the many strings of desire; but there is also ‘a sacred and golden cord of Reason, which is called the common law of the State, to which we should always cling, and which we should never let go’ (644 E–645 D). Because it is thus one with reason, law extends over the whole of life (631–2). It regulates birth: it arranges marriage: it rules even in death, for the very dead must be buried according to law. It deals with every passion and affection of life: it makes definitions, and by the honour and dishonour it awards it teaches men to follow its definitions, of the right and wrong of every feeling that can arise in human intercourse. And as it covers the whole space of man’s life, as it deals with every spiritual affection of his nature, so too it deals with all material interests: it regulates property and every nexus between man and man that springs from property. There are, indeed, some matters about which written law is necessarily silent (788 A–B). They are little things, not always apparent, concerned with private family life, which, if brought within its sphere, would only destroy the written law, because, in such small things, men readily form the habit of law-breaking. Even here, however, law may still find a place, in the form of unwritten custom and the shape of a mos majorum (793). Custom is a mortar which fills the interstices of the law; or it may be likened, again, to the props of the builder – it supplements and supports the structure of law which without it would crumble and fall. The legislator, if his primary concern is with law, cannot neglect customs and manners and habits. Law is bound up with them, and they with law: nor ‘must we wonder, if many little things generally accounted to be customs and habits come pouring in and lengthening out our laws’. Much, it is true, will depend on the courts by which law is administered (876). When a State has good courts, much may be left to their good sense. Where they are bad – and here Plato apparently refers to popular courts such as those of Athens – ‘the legislator must lay down the law expressly in almost every case’.1

Of the origin of law, and its making, Plato has also much to say. It is the hypothesis of the whole dialogue that the making of law rests with a legislator. In one passage, in which he is dealing with the growth of early societies, he suggests that the conflict of the customs of different families, when they came to settle together, involved the need of a legislator for the purpose of comparing the different customs and selecting the best for adoption (681). This is a true saying; and many historical instances go to show that the making of a code has often sprung from the settlement in the same territory of peoples with different customs.² In another passage, in which he is concerned with the antecedent conditions necessary for the foundation of his colony, Plato falls into doubts about the legislator’s power (709). Perhaps man never legislates, and chance and nature make all our laws. The effects of war, the influence of economic conditions, pestilence, famine – these, it would seem, are our legislators. But there is, he suggests, another and a truer view. God governs all things: in the domain of human affairs chance and opportunity co-operate; and in this domain, too, art is also of the company. But the art of the legislator, like all other arts, needs chance and opportunity. It needs a social system in which it can play freely: it needs some political force which will give its creations ready effect and an assured root. The Code Napoleon was planted in a society which had been trenched and digged by the French Revolution; the force of Napoleon gave it shelter. In something of this sense, and from something of this point of view, Plato desires that the day of the legislator should coincide with the day of the young tyrant, who by his power, and by the example which he sets, may ensure the due conjuncture of art with chance and opportunity.

The sovereignty of law, when once a State has been equipped with a code, is one of the cardinal principles of the Laws (712–15 E). The law-state must be the reverse of the actual States of Greece; it must adjust its government to the law, as the servant of a sovereign law, and not its law to the government, as the tool of a sovereign government. Contemporary States, Plato argues, recalling the doctrine of the ‘two States’ which he had propounded in the Republic,1 are not really States: ‘they are places of habitation in which we may see cities that are the subjects and slaves of a part of themselves, and where each is named according to the nature of the part that is master.’ Democracy, for example, is not a State: it is an aggregate of men, divided into two parts (the well-to-do and the Demos), one of which dominates the other and gives its particular name to the general aggregate. Here there is no constitution (πολιτεία), but rather a clique (στασιωτεία) – no polity, but rather a party: democracy simply means the rule of a faction. Treating itself as the whole, the faction enacts as law everything which it regards as calculated to promote its own interest. ‘They say that the law ought not to look to goodness, but to the interest of the established form of government.’ This is simply the thesis of Thrasymachus, ‘Justice is the interest of the strongest,’ or, in other words, ‘Law is simply the interest of the predominant class in a State’. In the law-state everything must follow the opposite order. Law must come first, as sole and supreme sovereign, and government must be constructed in the interest of law. But law is one and the same for all, and in the interest of all; and it follows that the government which is constructed in its interest must also be constructed in the interest of all. On this basis a State will live and prosper: on the other basis it will wither and die. And if, Plato adds, we wish to call such a State after the name of the force which predominates in its life, we shall call it by the name of God, and name it theocracy; for the force which predominates is the reason which is in the law, and reason is from God.²

It is natural that Plato, believing in the sovereignty of law, should also believe in its rigidity. He thinks of a fundamental law, to which rulers should conform in their actions and subjects should be habituated in their lives. This was a current Greek principle; but it is a principle which Plato carries far in the Laws. He admits, indeed, that his code of laws, like a picture, may need retouching; and he suggests that the guardians of the law may not only be its servants, but, when it is necessary, and provided that they act in its spirit, may also be its reformers. But this power is apparently only to last for the first few years after the foundation of the colony; and after that time ‘there shall be no more change’, unless, indeed, there is necessity, and unless all the magistrates and all the people, with the consent of all the oracles of the gods, agree to make a change (769–73).1 In the sphere of laws relating to education, as we shall see, this tendency to insist on a rigid law is especially marked; and more than once Plato refers to Egyptian immobility as the ideal to be followed (656 D–E: 799 A–B).

There is, however, one aspect of Plato’s treatment of law which goes far to qualify the impression of rigidity which many passages suggest. This aspect appears in his advocacy of prefaces or preambles (718 A–724 B). Before all his laws, as they occur, the legislator should in each case affix a preamble (προοίμιον), enunciating the principles on which they are based, and persuading the citizens to accept their commands by showing that they are the logical result of principles in which they believe. The reasons which underlie this advocacy of preambles are various. In the first place, preambles may be viewed as corollaries of that principle of self-control which inspires the argument of the Laws. It is true that law is the expression of reason, and that, since reason is sovereign, law should take the form of a sovereign command. But law is also the organ through which the perfect virtue of self-control is realized; and self-control is a harmony between reason and appetite. It is the aim of the preamble to achieve such a harmony, and by adding persuasion to command to make appetite accord with reason. Further, the combination of persuasive preamble and imperative law corresponds to, and prepares the way for, the scheme of government which Plato advocates. It finds its political parallel in the mixed constitution, in which the democratic principle of liberty is blended with the monarchical principle of order. In these preambles, explaining and justifying the laws which they precede, we may trace some counterpart of the function which parliament and the platform play today in enabling a ministry to explain and justify the policy of a legislative scheme. But we shall perhaps come nearest to Plato’s own mind if we conceive these preambles as the bridge by which he passes from the rule of the trained philosophic mind to the rule of law. They represent the principles which would have inspired the ideal ruler untrammelled by law; the law, as far as its power can reach, represents the detailed application of these principles which such a ruler would have made. Taken together, the two are the nearest possible approach to philosophic monarchy. It is not the rule of bare law which Plato advocates: it is the rule of a law which trails a cloud of glory, and recalls the philosophic home from which it has come. Through the preamble Plato can reconcile himself to the law-state: without it, we may fancy, the law-state, might have been, in his view, intolerably arid, and it might have seemed to him no better than the old law, without the righteousness of faith, seemed to St Paul.

The idea of preambles does not occur in an isolated passage; it runs through the whole of the Laws, and some of the finest passages in the dialogue take the forms of preambles. The passage in which Plato seeks to prove the necessity of law is a preamble to a branch of his criminal code: the lofty argument of the tenth book, in which he states a religious creed, is a preamble to the law of heresy. The suggestion is seriously and practically made: Plato, as we have seen, had worked with the younger Dionysius at the study of preambles; and he obviously hoped, by this change in the form and style of legislation, to produce a real change in the actual attitude of the ordinary citizen to law. His advocacy of these preambles shows the strong feeling, which must always be present to the philosophic mind, of the value of a knowledge of the raison d’être of any claim to allegiance and any assertion of obligation. ‘If men but knew’, such a mind may argue, ‘the why and the wherefore of these things, obedience would cease to be a matter of grudging conformity, and obligation would be cheerfully accepted, because it was understood.’ It may be that the philosophic mind generalizes too rapidly, and extends to ordinary men a truth which is only true of itself. Plato believes in the value of epitomized philosophy as a persuasive influence; but would epitomized philosophy succeed, where philosophy unabridged is too often ineffective? Ordinary humanity prefers punishment without a precedent sermon; nor is it as much touched by reason and argument, as the philosopher such as Plato (or again Mill, in his Essay on Liberty) is ready to believe. It is a further difficulty, which the lawyer may raise, that the introduction of philosophic preambles may tend to a confusion of moral philosophy with jurisprudence; and Plato himself may sometimes seem to fall into such a confusion. Yet it is interesting to notice that Bentham, who, if any man, had a legal mind, was also an advocate of preambles. When he offered in 1817 to provide the United States of America with a legal code, he offered to add ‘an accompaniment of reasons … derived from the principle of general utility’.1 The United States turned a deaf ear; and a code accompanied by philosophic preambles is still an unrealized dream.

The general conception of law which appears in the Laws is a conception which, in its general lines, is faithful to the ideas of the Greek city-states, and as such it is largely reproduced by Aristotle. It is a conception wider than ours, in that it makes law regulate the whole of moral life. Plato makes little if any distinction between morality and legality: if there are things which law refrains from enacting, they are only the little things about which it would be unwise to legislate, because it would be impossible to secure obedience. Today we draw such a distinction; and the law of the modern world is confined to the duty of enunciating a legal scheme of rights and duties, within which free moral action may proceed of its own accord.² Because it is wider, Plato’s conception is also, in one sense, higher than ours. It demands that law should be enforced, not only by punishment and the secular arm, but also by education and the appeal of mind to mind. Law is not so much, to Plato or to Aristotle, a force acting on the individual from without, as it is a spirit which he must be trained to draw into his inward being. This is the meaning of education. It is the drawing and training of youth towards that right reason which the law affirms (659 D). It is what makes man covet and love a perfect citizenship (643 E). It is that right habituation, through suitable habits, of the affections of the young – pleasure and friendship, hatred and pain – which makes their minds, when reason comes, already so attuned to her music, that by habit, as well as by reason, they love what they should love, and by habit, as well as by reason, they hate what they should hate (653 B–C). This is that theory of habituation which Aristotle taught in the Ethics. It is also the foundation of the system of education which Plato constructs in the Laws. For there were two things which the Laws gave to the world, and two influences which it exercised on future generations. One of these things is a code of law; and the influence which that code exercised sank deep into the law of the Hellenistic world, and, through it, into the law of Rome. The other is a curriculum of education – not, as in the Republic for the University, but rather for the secondary school; and the influence which that curriculum exercised is perhaps no less far-reaching.

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY

Before he proceeds to construct a State on the basis of these principles, Plato turns to the past, and in the third book of the Laws he passes in review the lessons of history. This appeal to history, which stands in contrast with the logical method on which the construction of the Republic is based, indicates the more realistic temper of the Laws. At the same time it must be confessed that Plato’s use of history is Platonic; and it would be impossible to find anything in the actual history of Greece to correspond to much in his account of its past. He uses history as he uses myth, to suit his argument; and where actual history does not provide an argument, he makes a version of history which does, altering and adding to the facts at will.1 The contrast with the Republic is more apparent than real; and the basis of the Laws is Platonic philosophy, even if it is couched in the guise of Platonic history.

The sketch of history begins with the Deluge, and is concerned with the cycle of human affairs in which men are at present living.² The few survivors who escaped destruction lived on the tops of the hills, to which primitive man would naturally cling for safety. They lived on a pastoral State, very like the city of swine of the Republic: they were ignorant of much that is good, but also of much that is bad, in civilized life; and, if imperfect, they were nevertheless blessed, in the absence alike of poverty and of wealth, and in the simplicity of their hearts. The dream of a golden ‘state of nature’, and the facts of civilized and political life, seem in this picture to strive for the mastery; and Plato appears uncertain which to prefer.1 But he admits that men refused to be content in the paradise of the hills. From the hilltops they next descended to the plains at the foot of the hills: from pasture they turned to agriculture. They had been living in patriarchal families on the tops of the hills (680 E): the closer society which agricultural life involved brought these families into contact. The customs of one patriarchal family were seen not to be as those of another; a legislator was appointed to select the best customs, and the heads of the families formed themselves into a government to maintain the selection. In the stress here laid upon the patriarchal family, and in the view of law as a codification of custom, Plato is on firm historical ground. From the tribal society he next turns to the civic. A third era is marked by the building of Troy in the plain, away from the hills. The mention of Troy suggests its siege: its siege suggests heroic Greece; and so the progress is made to the fourth and final stage, which is the period of the three Dorian kingdoms, Sparta, Argos, and Messene. By an historic consideration of these three Plato attempts to decide ‘what is well or ill settled, and what laws are the salvation and what are the destruction of cities, and what changes would make a State happy’ (683 B); and it is thus from a consideration of the early history of the States of the Peloponnese that he seeks to derive a justification for his theory of the rule of law and the mixed constitution.

In each of the three Dorian Kingdoms the king and the people took oaths in accordance with the common laws regulating rulers and subjects alike; the king swore never to make his rule more arbitrary; the people swore that, so long as the king observed his oath, they would never subvert the monarchy.² The king and people in each State were also united to the kings and peoples of the other two in a definite alliance and understanding: each king was to help the other kings and peoples when they suffered injustice; and each people, in like manner, was to help the other peoples and kings in the like event. Each State was thus in a sense mixed: in each there was a combination of monarchical power and popular right; and in each the stability of this system might seem assured by the help of the rest. Each again offered a free field for the action of the legislator: the three peoples and their kings had newly entered the territories they occupied, and there were no vested interests or inherited prejudices to hinder his work (684). But in spite of these oaths, and this alliance, and this free field of action, the legislators of two of the Dorian States failed to achieve success. The alliance proved no alliance; and the cause of its collapse was the unmixed character of the royal power, which, if limited by oaths, was not checked or balanced by any other authority, and which made each sovereign anxious to act on his own behalf, and disinclined to co-operate with the rest. The Kings of Argos and Messene proved unfaithful to their allies, and unfaithful to their peoples and their oaths. They infringed the rights of their peoples: they violated their oaths: they broke the laws. The fault was the fault of the legislators. They may have made laws for the sake of war, with a view to the one virtue of courage: they had not made laws for the sake of peace, with a view to the sovereign virtue of self-control. Destitute of self-control, the kings of Argos and Messene became also destitute of wisdom, which cannot be kept without self-control; and destitute of wisdom, they ruined the States entrusted to their charge. It was a further error of the legislator that he gave all power into the hands of one man. As soon as the mean is abandoned, and anything is given more than it can bear – a ship more sail, a body more meat, a mind more power – it means ultimate shipwreck (691 C). Sparta was saved, where Argos and Messene perished, because she acted on this rule. Her laws, like theirs, had their defects; but her monarchy was never absolute. It was checked from the first by the existence of a dual kingship: it was balanced, as time went on, by the rise of the concurrent authorities of Senate and Ephors. The lesson of history, therefore, so far as history has any lessons to teach, is that a mixed and balanced constitution may succeed where an unmixed constitution fails. This is the moral to be drawn from the different fortunes of the three Dorian States; and Sparta is the model to be followed by the legislator who wishes his State to enjoy stability.

But there are States other than those of the Peloponnesus to be considered; and there is history more recent than that of the Dorian migration and its sequel to be studied. There is Persia, the type of absolute monarchy: there is Athens, the model of popular self-government. These are the two primary types and mother forms of States, of which all others are varieties; but neither of them is perfect unless it is mixed with the other (693–701 C). Pure and unmixed monarchy, already condemned by the history of ancient Greece, is further condemned in Plato’s eyes by the example of contemporary Persia. There was indeed a time in the history of Persia, under Cyrus and again under Darius, when the liberty of the people was combined with the sagacity of the monarch, and the king was wise enough to consult with any of his subjects who could give him wise advice. But wisdom – the title which the monarch pleads – was not long justified of the Persian kings. Born in the purple, and never schooled in self-control, the kings who succeeded to the two great founders of the Persian monarchy were unwise, because they lacked the virtue which is the key of wisdom. Being unwise, they no longer governed in the interest of their subjects, but for the gratification of their own desires; and governing after this manner, they deprived their State at once of liberty and of any bond of unity. Without wisdom in her rulers, or liberty in her subjects, or unity in herself, Persia lacked all the three things which make a true State (p. 345); and her kings, lacking self-control, lacked the one and only thing which in itself can ever be a title to political power. But pure and unmixed democracy stands equally condemned with absolute monarchy, as the history of Athens, in Plato’s interpretation, goes to show. Here again, it is true, there was a time when the predominant element was mixed with others of a different strain, and the liberty of the people was held to be compatible with a spirit of reverent obedience to law and a graded system of social classes based on a property qualification. These were the days of that ancient constitution under which Athens, united as one man in the hour of peril, faced and beat the power of Persia. But here, too, corruption ensued; and Athenian democracy, like Persian monarchy, lost self-control, and the gifts which self-control alone can give. Art became lawless: poets introduced vulgar innovations in defiance of its canons, and pleaded that the true test of art is the pleasure it affords. The people readily learned the lesson which they were thus taught,1 and they affirmed that the true test of art was the pleasure it afforded them.² They began to sit in judgement on music and drama; and rejecting the idea of canons of art, they established a noisy ‘theatrocracy’, under which their favour or disfavour became the only rule.³ It was an easy step to reject political authority and the laws of social life, and to erect an extreme democracy in which the popular will become the only canon of right and wrong, and the sovereignty of the law made way for the sovereignty of the pleasure of the people. With the passing of the sovereignty of the law, there soon vanished all regard for plighted word and solemn obligation, and all belief in God; and men, like the Titans of old, rose in insurrection against the Highest.1

Plato admits, in spite of these grave indictments, that while both monarchy and democracy, taken by themselves, have their defects, either has also the qualities of its defects. Liberty is the blessing of democracy, if ignorance which pretends to be knowledge is also its curse; monarchy may tend to destroy liberty, but it suggests, if it does not always in practice mean, the rule of wisdom. Combine the qualities of both – secure wisdom in the ruler and guarantee liberty to the ruled – and you will find that fraternity too will follow. But liberty, wisdom, fraternity, these are the three things which a State must seek; and if they can be found in a combination of monarchy and democracy, that is the form of State to be sought. And so, instead of turning kings into philosophers, and rejecting or neglecting peoples, Plato attempts, as practical statesmen have often attempted, to reconcile the cause of monarchy with the cause of popular government. In the light of our own experience it is easy to suggest that such a reconciliation may best be found in a constitutional monarchy, limited by a house of representatives. But Plato, though he may anticipate the principles, can hardly be expected to anticipate the practice of the English Constitution. He had neither the modern conception, which is a legacy from feudal days, of a monarch content to receive the allegiance of his subjects without conducting the actual work of government, nor the modern idea that popular rights may best be secured by the indirect means of representation. In the issue, accordingly, his solution proves to be something like a moderate oligarchy, in which monarchy is diluted by being divided among a number of magistrates, and democracy means little, if anything, more than the right of a primary assembly to elect those magistrates.

But it marks a new stage in the development of Plato’s thought that he should have recognized the principle of liberty, even in a limited form, and should have admitted that consent, as well as knowledge, is after all the basis of government. He is no longer the absolutist that he was when he wrote the Republic; and he has changed the view that he held when he wrote the Politicus. In the Republic he had left the principle of consent unconsidered and unmentioned: in the Politicus he had insisted that the need of consent, like the rule of law, was an unnecessary trammel on the freedom of the ‘statesman’.1 In the Laws he is less concerned with the freedom of the ruler’s action, and more concerned with the freedom of the subject’s life. Just as, in adopting the rule of law, he already pays homage to the principle of consent in the form of persuasive preambles, so too, in adapting the mixed constitution, he accepts that principle as the basis of administration. It is the logical outcome of the virtue of self-control, or harmony of reason and appetite, on which the Laws is based, just as absolutism is the logical outcome of the virtue of justice, or separation of faculty and function, on which the Republic is based. Plato may still cling to absolutism, and still believe in the sovereignty of genuine free mind, but he recognizes that ‘there is no such mind anywhere, or at any rate only a little’ (875); and while he may still place some slight hope in a young tyrant, he is clear that the young tyrant must be associated with a legislator, and only belongs to the first inception of a State (709–713). Instead of urging, as he had done in the Politicus, that the presence of wisdom, and not the presence of consent, is the only test of a true State, he can now maintain that the test of a constitution is voluntary rule of voluntary subjects, without which a constitution is only a legalized form of anarchy (832 C). The changed use which he makes of the analogy of the physician shows the change in his thought. In the Politicus, he had argued that the physician did not require the consent of his patient; why should the statesman need the consent of his subjects? In a passage in the Laws, in which the value of preambles is demonstrated (720 B–D), we learn that it is only the slave doctor who gives his orders like a tyrant: the physician who attends a freeman enters into communication with his patient, and after instructing him to the best of his ability only gives a prescription when he has convinced him of its value and its necessity. Plato, if he is still a physician of States, has become a wise family doctor instead of a brusque consulting physician. He has a deeper knowledge of human nature: the lessons which he professes to derive from history in the third book of the Laws are really derived from the history of his own life. He knows from his experience that when the patient is convinced of the value of a treatment, the treatment is more likely to be successful; and, as we shall see, when we come to consider his attitude in the Laws to private property and family life, he can admit (while still believing that the ideal life is one of communism) that property and the private family are the natural regimen for humanity at large.

1 In Book I (638 B) Plato alludes to the Athenian conquest of the island of Ceos, which had revolted in 364 and again in 363. He also mentions the Syracusan treatment of Locri Epizephyrii. This may be a reference to the tyrannical rule of Dionysius at Locri during the period of his exile from Syracuse (356–346). It follows that Book I was written after 363, and possibly after 356.

² The vocabulary, as well as the style, of the Laws is different from that of the earlier dialogues. This has led some writers to pronounce the Laws spurious; but their view has found no acceptance. Others again, while believing that there is a genuine core, have contended that there is a large amount of addition and interpolation by later hands; and they have sought to separate the wheat from the chaff. The attempt is at once unnecessary and unsuccessful. It is only an instance of the constant tendency of German scholars to split ancient writings into Urschrift and Nachschrift.

¹ At the same time, one may trace a difference between the Republic and the Laws. In the former, the argument may wander from the road; but it is close at hand, and can be readily and firmly brought back from its browsing. In the latter the argument wanders farther afield, until Plato suddenly awakens to the fact, and seeks to recall it by devious ways. ‘The argument ought to be pulled up from time to time, and not be allowed to run away, but held with bit and bridle’ (701 C).

¹ The defects of the Laws seem to me to be largely defects of literary form. Plato at fifty would have made a great work out of material which he makes, at the age of eighty, into a work that seems at first sight mediocre. I agree with Constantine Ritter, who writes (in Platos Gesetze, which contains both a summary and a commentary): ‘I do not hesitate to describe the work, along with the Republic, as one of the most magnificent monuments of the culture of ancient Hellas, and as one of the finest and most admirable books that I know’ (preface, p. v). I may add that in wealth of knowledge, alike of human nature and of human institutions, and in detailed application of principles to actual life, the Laws transcends the Republic.

² He did not abandon the ideal, but he abandoned the hope of its realization (cf. 875). But there are many echoes of the Republic in the Laws. His hope of philosopher-kings recurs in the Laws (709 E–712 A): ‘There neither is, nor ever will be, a better or speedier way of establishing a constitution than by tyranny’ (710 B). Again, in a famous passage in Book V (739 B–E; cf. VII, 807 B), he speaks of the communism of the Republic as the true ideal, and of the scheme of the Laws as only a pis aller. Finally, at the end of Book XII, as we shall see, he harks back to the lines of education sketched in Book VII of the Republic as the only true lines, and seems to revert, in spite of all that he has said of the second best, to the old ideal.

¹ Aristotle had equally his two ideals. The ideal State described in the seventh and eighth books of the Politics corresponds in intention (though many of its details find their parallel in the Laws; and this is significant of the sobriety of Aristotle’s ideal) to Plato’s Republic: the ‘polity’, or mixed constitution, of the fourth book corresponds to the mixed State of the Laws. The debt of Aristotle to the Laws is illustrated in the note at the end of Chapter xvii.

¹ The laws of Solon were still known, and still a subject of comment and study, in the time of Tiberius. Archaeological discoveries, and the work of scholars on these discoveries, have in the last fifty years recreated the subject of Greek law. The discovery in 1884 of the laws of Gortyn, a Cretan law of the family going back, in part, to the seventh century (though, in its present form, a redaction of the fifth), has helped to prove the reality of Greek law. Meanwhile papyrology is adding steadily to our knowledge; and French and German scholars (particularly the former) are busy, with these data at their command, in rediscovering Greek jurisprudence.

¹ While in the Republic Plato propounded a radical cure for old States, in the Laws he suggests a moderate and conservative constitution for a new State. He is acting, like many Greeks before him, as legislator for a colony: he is not seeking to revolutionize existing States by converting their governors into philosophers, and their social life into a system of communism. In this sense again the Laws stands on a lower level than the Republic. It is less ambitious: it is not an attempt to mould old and intractable material, but to shape new and malleable conditions. Plato, as he makes clear (736), starts with a clean slate, and without any difficulties of vested interests. Bentham, when he offered himself as a legislator (supra, p. 9, n. 1), was more ambitious, and offered to legislate for old communities.

¹ Freedom in the individual is the free action of the whole man according to the freely accepted will of the best part of his being. Freedom in the State is the free action of the whole State according to the freely accepted decision of its best representatives. ‘La Liberté,’ as Montesquieu said (Esprit des Lois, XI. 3), ‘ne peut consister qu’a pouvoir faire ce que l’on doit vouloir, et à n’être point contraint de faire ce que l’on ne doit pas vouloir.’

¹ In the Republic, written during the days of the Spartan Empire, Plato had, by implication, criticized the Spartan constitution in the course of Book VIII, but he had also, to some extent, followed the model of Sparta in his system of communism and his advocacy of a course of State training of youth. In the Lam the position is reversed: Spartan training is criticized, and the Spartan constitution followed as a model. Sparta is a war-state only (Plato now writes), devoted to the one virtue of courage, and imperfect even in the exercise of that virtue; while her system of military training, which segregates young men from general social intercourse, and herds them together in a sort of camp-life, leads to unnatural vice (cf. Laws, 636 and 836, where Plato condemns such vice with a severity which differs from his attitude in the Republic, 468 C). But the Spartan constitution is moderate and mixed (691 E–692 A), even if the aim of the Spartan State and its ἦθος are wrong. So blended that it is hard to decide whether it is a tyranny, a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy, that constitution (unlike most constitutions, which merely represent the ascendency of a single section) is a real and genuine polity (712 A–B).

¹ One of the points made by M. Eisenmann, in Le Cornpromis, is that Austria–Hungary has always looked outwards, to a foreign policy of expansion, and has subordinated her internal policy (with fatal results) to the exigencies of this outward direction of her effort. This, he urges, is to invert the true order of development, which should proceed from within outwards.

² The principle which Plato here suggests is that enforced by T. H. Green in The Principles of Political Obligation, section K. See especially § 169, ‘It is not the State, as such, but this or that particular State, which by no means fulfils its purpose … that needs to defend its interests by actions injurious to those outside it’; and § 173, ‘The military system of Europe is no necessary incident of the relations between independent States, but arises from the fact that the organization of State-life, even with those peoples that have been brought under its influence at all, is still so incomplete’.

¹ Politics, II. 6, 7 (1265, a 18–28).

² Ibid. VII. II. §§ 8–11 (1330, b 32–1331, a 10).

³ A First Sea Lord once advised Englishmen to trust the Navy, and sleep quietly in their beds. This is exactly what Plato wishes to prevent, and why he would have walls ‘sleep in the ground’. ‘They lead men to imagine that they will find the way of safety, not through the continual keeping of watch and ward in the city by day and by night, but by shutting themselves inside walls and gates and sleeping in bed’ (779 A).

⁴ Plato would banish athletic contests, other than those of a martial quality (832 E), and substitute the drill-ground for the football-field.

⁵ Gomperz (a Viennese professor), in Greek Thinkers, Vol. 111, p. 262, of the English Translation. The condemnation is the more curious as it is based on a hasty and erroneous reading. What Plato says is that, as far as military service is concerned, the strictest discipline must be maintained in peace as well as in war. What Gomperz makes this mean is that ‘military discipline is held up as a model for the whole of civic life’; and on that text he grows eloquent.

¹ Cf. 937 E:

¹ Cf. 714 A, , and 957 C. Cf. also, for Plato’s conception of the relation of the signifying word to the thing signified, the Cratylus, 434 A, , and 435 D, .

¹ Plato is speaking chiefly of the determination of penalties by the courts.

² The Code of Alfred, for instance, is connected with the Danish settlement in England. Cf. Jenks, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages, p. 11.

¹ Cf. Rep., 422 E, 551 D.

² Plato, repeating a passage in the Politicus, speaks of theocracy as the form of government of the golden age of Chronus. It is gone from the earth, but we must imitate it still, obeying what there is in us of immortality, and regulating our cities according to law, which is one with mind or reason, the immortal and divine element of our being (713 E–714 A).

¹ It is not clear whether Plato means this provision to relate to the whole body of law, or only to laws concerning dances and sacrifices (see C. Ritter’s commentary on the Laws ad locum (772 B–C), pp. 170–1). In the twelfth book, which, as has been said, seems to be a postscript, the nocturnal council is said to be composed of those who have supervision of the laws (ἐποπτεύοντες τοὺς νόμους); but it is not clear, though it seems to be implied, that it has a power of revision (951 E–952 A: cf. 962 B).

¹ See Bowring’s edition of Bentham’s Works, IV. 491–4. The argument is contained in the fifth of the letters sent by ‘Jeremy Bentham, an Englishman, to the citizens of the United States’. The letter is entitled, ‘Of Justifiedness as applied to a Body of Law’. The central argument is ‘that no mass of the matter of law is what it might be, and therefore ought to be, otherwise than in so far as, throughout the whole extent of it, it is furnished with a correspondent body of reasons, for its accompaniment and support’. The whole argument is well worth reading by a student of the Laws.

² Bentham had some idea of formulating a moral code, distinct from, but supplementing, the legal code. The study of such a code he called Deontology (cf. Graham, Englirh Political Philosophy, pp. 207 sqq.).

¹ Plato does not stand alone in this free use of history. The Attic orators pay scant respect to historical fact in their appeals to history. We have to remember that history was not a subject of instruction in Greek education, and that the history of Greece before the fifth century was dependent on a variable tradition composed of myth and legend.

² Plato also refers to the Deluge – which was a Greek as well as a Hebrew (or Babylonian) tradition – in the Critias and the Timaeus. In the Politicus he speaks of cycles, though he explains these cycles in a different way. ‘The idea of an infinite past, and of great cycles of time, which took such hold of Plato’s imagination … was common to him with the Pythagoreans … if not derived from them’ (Campbell, introduction to Politicus, xxii).

¹ Cf. supra, p. 192, n. 1.

² Here Plato anticipates the doctrine of the social contract, or rather, to speak more exactly, of the governmental contract. The social contract, properly speaking, is a contract of each with all, instituting a State in the sense of a political society (pacte d’association): the governmental contract is a contract of a king or magistracy with such a society, instituting a State in the sense of a government (pacte de gouvernement). It is the latter of which Plato writes. One may cite, in illustration of what he says, the form of words supposed to have been used by the barons of Aragon at the coronation of their king: ‘We, who are as good as you are, choose you for our king and lord, provided that you observe our rules and privileges: and if not, not.’ Not only in Aragon, but at the coronation of all medieval kings, there was a mutual exchange of oaths – the coronation oath of the king, and the oath of fealty of his vassals; and this mutual exchange of oaths was one of the grounds of the theory of a compact between king and people. It has already been noticed that in the Crito Plato speaks of a contract between each citizen and the laws of his city, and that in the Protagoras he implies, or makes Protagoras imply, something like a social contract in the proper sense of the term. There is a description in the Critias – in one of the most romantic passages of that romantic fragment (119 C–120 D) – of the confederacy of the ten kings of Atlantis, which is not unlike the description in the Laws of the confederacy of the three Dorian kings. But there is no mention in the Critias of any participation of the people: the ten kings are bound by the ‘writings’ of the god Poseidon, and not by any agreement with their peoples, and while they are to help one another, if the power of any one of them is threatened, nothing is said of their peoples helping one another if their liberty is menaced.

¹ Plato is contending, as it were, that not Socrates, but Euripides, ruined Athenian democracy. The stress which he lays on the corruption of art as the cause of political decadence is due to his view of education. Education is habituation in the spirit of the laws, by which citizens are made law-abiding and States are made stable. The great means of education is ‘music’. in the full sense of that word, which includes poetry and art. If music conforms to fixed canons, which themselves conform to the spirit of the laws, education can do its work. If license invades music, the work of education ceases, and the spiritual basis of law collapses.

² “Thus far I too should agree with the many, that music ought to be judged by the pleasure it gives. But the pleasure should not be the pleasure of any and everybody; the fairest muse is the one that delights the best and the most educated’ (659 A).

³ ‘The Athenian audience’, it has been said, ‘was closely attentive, and highly demonstrative.’ But the actual work of judging the competing plays at the great Dionysia, and the awarding of the prizes, rested with ten judges chosen by lot from a list of persons selected by the council and the choregi who furnished the choruses for the plays. Such judges, however, might, as Plato suggests (659 B), be deafened by popular clamour into deciding according to the instructions of the audience.

Plato’s criticism of θετροκρατία is met and traversed by Aristotle in the Politics, III. 11, § 3 (1281, b 7–10) – ‘The many are better judges (than the few) of musical compositions and works of poetry. Some may perceive one aspect, and some another: all perceive all.’ While Plato condemns θετροκρατία and the δημοκρατία in which it issues, Aristotle tries to find the element of truth in both (cf. supra, p. 264, n. 1).

¹ Plato recognizes in the Laws, what he hardly recognized in the Republic, that the principle of liberty, which underlies democracy, is one which must find its place in the constitution of the State. But his picture of extreme democracy in this passage is still as unfavourable as that in the eighth book of the Republic (cf. supra, pp. 296–8).

¹ Cf. supra, p. 322, n. 1, where it is noted that the view of the Politicus about the principle of consent is not absolutely clear.