CHAPTER XIV
The System of Social Relations in the Laws
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GEOGRAPHY AND POPULATION
It is by the foundation of an imaginary colony that Plato seeks to sketch the lines of the law-state and its mixed constitution. The greater part of the island of Crete, in which the scene of the dialogue is laid, is about to found a colony; and the Cretan Cleinias, who is one of the persons of the dialogue, is also one of a commission of ten which has been appointed to superintend its foundation (702 C). The commission has power to make the laws of the colony; and Cleinias begs the Athenian stranger to propound for its consideration a draft or sketch of a code and a constitution.1 The case here imagined was one that often occurred in actual Greek life; and it indicates both the impulse which colonization furnished to political speculation, and the part which such speculation might play in the construction of new States. Modern colonists are apt to carry with them the laws and institutions of some one mother-country from which they have come, and to which they remain attached.2 Greek colonies, as a rule, began a new and independent life on their own account: their population was sometimes, if not always, drawn from different sources and stocks which had been accustomed, in their original homes, to different laws and institutions; and it was natural that they should begin their life with an effort to find some new code of law and some new form of constitution in which their differences might be reconciled.1 Plato sees that there may be advantages in colonists of a single stock, who possess from the start community of race, of language, of law, and of religion (708 C).2 On the other hand, united as they are, they are prone to cling blindly to the laws and institutions of their original home; and colonists drawn from different stocks, though they may find it hard to pull together, will be more likely to accept new laws and institutions. Accordingly the colonists of the imaginary colony are to be drawn not only from the whole of Crete, but also from the Peloponnese (708 C); and the commission is to have power to adopt laws not only on the Cretan model, but also on foreign models if it considers that they are better (702 C).3 The colony will thus be like the confluence of springs from many sources into a single lake (736 B), and the legislator will be able to require that the waters shall all be pure, and the colonists shall all be good material.
As the founder of a colony, who starts with a clean slate, the legislator will not be compelled to provide for any preliminary purgation of his State, nor need he begin by putting to death or sending into exile the elements which cannot be woven into the texture of his State (735).1 He is in the happy position of the Dorian States at the beginning of their history: he is free from vested interests and inherited prejudices. He is, indeed, in an even happier position. He can choose the site of his colony, and determine freely the geographical conditions under which his State shall start its life. Plato is well aware of what we should call the effects of climate on national character. Soil and atmosphere influence the mind and temper of a people (747 E); they are things which the legislator must bear in mind when he comes to frame his laws.2 The one geographical condition on which Plato specially insists (and here he is partly followed and partly criticized by Aristotle in the Politics), is that the colony should not be situated close to the sea (704–7). Here he is contradicting, and contradicting deliberately, the general practice of Greece. The Greeks were a sea-faring people whose high-road was the ‘wet ways’ of the sea; and their colonies were almost always founded on its shores. Plato would have his colony set inland, and he would keep it, as far as might be, aloof from the great highroad. He would have it self-supporting, so that it needs no imports: he would have it produce no more than it needs, so that it has nothing to export: he would have it deficient in timber, so that it cannot turn to ship-building. A maritime position, he believes, corrupts a State.
‘The sea is pleasant enough to a country as daily company: but it is in reality, and in a high degree, a salt and sour neighbour. It fills a country with merchandise and money-making and bargaining: it breeds in men’s minds habits of double-dealing and faithlessness: it makes the State faithless and friendless, alike in its own inner life, and in its relations with others’ (705 A).
So far, the condemnation of the maritime State is in essence a condemnation of the commercial State. But the maritime State also tends to become a naval power; and Plato condemns a naval power no less than he condemns the commercial State. The Athenian stranger has criticized the laws of Sparta and Crete for their militarism: he feels himself bound in justice also to criticize the practice of his own State for the same reason.1 Militarism at sea may indeed be regarded as worse than militarism on land. Naval tactics, which involve sudden landings and sudden retreats, sap a soldierly temper; and honours in a naval State, which may owe its preservation to the mechanical skill of its naval forces, are not awarded to the kind of military qualification which best deserves recognition.2
The State of the Laws is thus to be self-contained, and to lie off the beaten track of commerce. It will be an agricultural community, growing sufficient crops for its own needs, and living, if not (like Sparta) in complete, at any rate in comparative isolation: which will permit it to keep unsoiled its original type. In the size, of its population it will be a mean between Athens and Sparta;3 and Plato fkes the number of its citizens at 5040. The number is in no sense arbitrarily chosen. Plato had always believed in the significance of number; and in the last period of his life the Pythagorean element grew even stronger, and Platonic philosophy became still more a philosophy of number. The number 5040 is primarily selected because it is capable of being divided by a number of different divisors into a variety of divisions.1 It will thus be useful in war, as a basis of military divisions: it will be equally useful in peace for the assessment of taxes and the distribution of land or other public property among the citizens. The main divisor which Plato apparently suggests is the number 12; and the system which he advocates is thus a duodecimal system (746 D–E). This system will serve to provide the State with twelve tribes, and the Council of the State with twelve committees, each serving for a month in the year. It will serve, in civil affairs, as a basis alike of the currency and the reckoning of weights and measures, which will thus be symmetrical and consonant both with one another and with the political structure of the State.2 But Plato sees more than practical convenience in a due regard for number. When he requires the legislator to know the number which is most likely to be useful to all States (737 E), and to command the citizens not to lose sight of a uniform numerical system (747 A), he has also in mind the educational value of mathematics. If the State is ordered on a proper numerical basis, it will be, as it were, a living lesson in arithmetic; and there is no subject of education for the young which has such power, whether for domestic economy, or for politics, or for the arts and crafts, as has the study of numbers, which quickens the sluggish and stupid to a vigour and wit beyond the reach of their natural powers. This is an echo, if only an echo, of the doctrine of the Republic, that by mathematics men may transcend sense, and rise into the region of pure thought. The last and the loftiest of Plato’s arguments for a mathematically ordered State touches the region of metaphysics. A State rightly divided on true mathematical principles will accord with the world and its structure, which is a structure based on number. Every part and portion of the State should be regarded as a sacred gift of God, corresponding to the months and the revolution of the universe (771 B). Number is the secret of sounds and music; number controls the motions of the heavens. The true ruler has seen the mind which moves in the stars of heaven, and the connexion of music with its motion; and he brings the habits and laws of our natures into conformity with what he has seen (967 E). The stars in their spheres, revolving by rule and measure, accord with music and its measures; and laws and institutions should accord with both, that there may be a ‘divine concordance’ of all three, and they may all agree in following rule and measure.1
THE TREATMENT OF PROPERTY IN THE LAWS
When Plato turns to sketch the social basis of life in the new colony, he follows as his guiding thread that idea of mixture of different elements which runs through the Laws. The social basis must be such that it will be easy to erect upon it a good constitution and system of law; and since the constitution will be mixed, and the law will be a combination of persuasion and command, the social basis must also be a blend of different elements. Marriage must thus be a union of different characters and classes (773 A): property must be a combination of private ownership and public control (740 A); and the rich, so far as there are any rich, must voluntarily share their wealth with the poor to prevent any civil dissension (736 D–E). Warp and woof – the firm strands and the loose – must be united to form an harmonious texture (734 E–735 A); the design of social arrangements must be the reconciliation of economic interests and the blending of social differences.
The system of property proposed in the Laws marks a definite departure from the communistic ideal of the Republic (739). Plato distinguishes three grades of constitutions – the best or ideal; the second best or sub-ideal; and a third grade, which he does not explain, but by which we are perhaps intended to understand the constitutions of actual States. The best State, the best constitution, and the best laws are those in which the old saying that friends have all things in common is followed to the greatest extent. In such a State women and children and all things (
) are in common: the conception and the language of private property are banished entirely from life; and the State – one body and one mind – rejoices in a single pleasure and is grieved by a single pain. Whether such an ideal is possible or impossible, today or in days to come, one thing is certain: it makes more for goodness, and is therefore truer and better, than any other ideal; it is the pattern of constitution which men should always keep in view, and to which they should seek to make the nearest approach in their power. The perfect energy of life, which lifts men highest above the stalled ox, can perhaps never be attained while things are as they are now, nor so long as women and children and houses are private, and all such things are arranged for every man on that basis (807 B). There is, however, a second best or sub-ideal. ‘The State we have taken it in hand to build, should it ever come into existence, will be in its way next closest to immortal perfection, and it will be a unity in the next best sense’ (739 E). If it can be attained, things will be very tolerably well; and those who live in such a State will have a work to accomplish, in the practising of excellence of body and mind, which is twice and more than twice as arduous as the pursuit of victories in the great games (807 B–C). In this second best State lands and houses will be allotted as private property; nor will there be any farming in common (
), since such a thing is beyond the reach of men born under the present system, and nurtured and educated in the present way (740 A).1 Each citizen is to receive a lot for himself in the original distribution; but each, if he receives it as private property, is to consider that it also belongs in common to all the State. Plato, like Aristotle, afterwards, would combine private possession with common use, as the practice of Sparta, in some ways, actually did. The right to property must be recognized as a socially created right, to be used for the benefit of society: it must not be regarded as an absolute or inherent right of the individual, entitling him to do what he likes with his own. Plato not only lays down the general principle; he proposes a method for its enforcement. The produce of the land must support a system of common tables (806 E), in which women, as well as men, will share; and thus, if ownership is private, consumption at any rate will be public and common.
The 5040 original lots are to be equal, and they are also to be inalienable (741 B). The population must be kept stationary at the number of 5040, in order that there may always be one citizen for each of the lots. If a citizen has no child to succeed him in the inheritance of his lot, he must adopt as his heir the son of another citizen. If there is a general tendency to exceed the prescribed number of the population, births must be restricted or a colony founded: if the tendency is the other way (and this seems to be Plato’s fear – a fear which the decline in Spartan numbers might readily suggest), rewards must be given to the married and penalties attached to the celibate. But the equality which Plato is thus careful to preserve is an equality only of the original lots, or in other words of landed property: it is consistent, and it is combined, with inequality of personal possessions. It might be best that every settler should bring to the colony an equality of possessions; but this is impossible (744 B). Plato accordingly provides that every citizen should be permitted to acquire possessions, or personalty, up to the value of four times that of the lot (744 E). There will thus be a scale of wealth, ranging from the man who possesses a lot, with the minimum of personalty, to the man who possesses a lot with personalty of four times its value. The former is the necessary condition of citizenship: anything in excess of the latter must go to the public exchequer.1 The result is a system of four classes based on a property qualification; and on this, when he comes to construct the constitution, Plato bases the franchise and its exercise. The division of classes here proposed suggests the four classes of Solonian Athens; and another division which Plato proposes seems based on Athenian precedent. Cleisthenes had created ten tribes, and to each he had allotted a territorial district, though that territorial district was divided into three separate units, each situated in a different part of Attica. Plato, adopting a duodecimal system, proposes twelve tribes, each with a territorial district which, unlike the districts of Cleisthenes, is apparently to be a compact block. In one respect, however, Plato imitates the policy of Cleisthenes; and if he does not divide the districts of the tribes into disconnected units, he divides the holding of each citizen into two disconnected halves (745 C–E), one of which is to be near the central city, and the other to be near the frontiers of the country.1 His object, like the object of Cleisthenes, would seem to be the prevention of local feeling and local divisions. If each man has two holdings and two houses, one in the city and one in the country, it will be hard for any division to arise between the town and country interests.2
THE SYSTEM OF ECONOMICS IN THE STATE OF THE LAWS
Though every citizen has his lot, with its two divisions, and though some of the citizens are comparatively rich in personal possessions, Plato leaves little if any scope for economic interests or activity to any of his citizens. No citizen can practise any art or craft (846 D), or use any ignoble method of money-making, like the art of buying and selling, which perverts a free and ‘gentle’ nature to base vulgarity (741 E). No citizen may be in possession of gold or silver; and though there will be a coinage it will have only local currency, and will not circulate abroad (742 A).3 Interest is to be forbidden; lending must be at the lender’s risk; the borrower is to be under no legal obligation to repay the capital he has borrowed (742 C).4 Excluded from industry and from commerce, forbidden to take interest or even to possess the precious metals, the citizen will be free from the temptation to make the accumulation of wealth into the aim of his life, and he will therefore be free for that pursuit of ‘excellence of body and mind’, to which great riches is the worst and bitterest enemy. To Plato, as to St Paul, the love of money is the root of all evil; and when he says that great riches cannot dwell with great goodness (742 E–743 A), he almost echoes the saying of our Lord, that a rich man shall hardly enter the kingdom of heaven.1 If riches is thus the enemy of goodness, and if it is the aim of the State and the laws to produce goodness, it must also be the aim of the State to prevent men from pursuing riches. It will be acting in its own interest, as well as in the interest of its members, if it seeks to achieve that aim: riches is the prolific mother of dissension and litigation, and dissension and litigation destroy that community of feeling which is a necessary basis of the State (743 C). The State which desires goodness for its members and unity for itself will base itself exclusively on agriculture; nor will it pursue even agriculture further than the due needs of body and mind require (743 D). In such a State, thus based on physiocratic principles, and thus following the true and natural economy of a purely agricultural life, the work of the legislator will be less than half of what is elsewhere. Free from any need of dealing with shipping and coinmerce and retail trade – quit of all concern with loans and compound interest and a thousand other such things – he will legislate simply for farmers and shepherds and bee-keepers (842 C). Nor are the citizens of such a State less fortunate than their legislators. They too are quit of more than half the burdens of ordinary men; and they too – like the guardians of the Republic,2 if a little less fortunate – will be free to run the great race that is set before them. Each has his assured lot of land: each has it tilled for him by slaves, who, holding the lot by a sort of metayer tenancy, pay part of the produce as their rent:3 and each, with his women-folk, messes at common tables, in happy company with his fellows. But this is only one side of the picture, and Plato is well aware that there is another. These institutions are, indeed, only second best; but even so they are a dream, and a dream which can never perhaps be realized (745 E–746 D). It is unlikely that men will ever endure to have limits fixed to the amount of their property and the size of their families: it is unlikely that they will ever consent to be deprived of gold and silver, or to have. their lots divided into town and country halves. Plato admits the truth of such objections; but he pleads that an ideal must first be exhibited as a perfect and consistent whole, before it is put to the test of practice and pared down or modified – here a little and there a little – to suit the exigencies of actual life. The plea is perfectly valid; but it proves (and the point is important) that even the secondary ideal of the Laws is still an ideal, and that Plato, when he exhibited that ideal, had as little (or even less) hope of its realization, as he had when he sketched the palmary ideal of the Republic.
Yet Plato seeks, in many respects, to make his peace with actuality, when he comes to discuss the details of the economic life of his State. Industry and commerce, after all, are not banished from the State. They are interdicted to the citizen; but they have their place in the economy of the State, provided that they are conducted by aliens. To the citizen the art of politics and the pursuit of excellence of body and mind; to the slave agriculture; to the alien commerce and industry – this is the Platonic division of labour in the Laws. The old spirit of the Republic still breathes in its pages; and if the three-class system which we may detect in the Laws is fundamentally different from that of the Republic, the basic principle remains the same, that each man should pursue a single and specific function. It is this principle which inspires the rule, that the citizen shall practise no art or craft other than of a perfect citizenship: it is this principle equally which inspires the rule that no alien shall practise more than a single art (846 D–847 A). But subject to this principle, and subject to these rules, Plato admits a large play of economic activity. There are to be thirteen divisions of alien artisans, one in the city and one in each tribal district. In each of these districts the local division of artisans is to be properly distributed among the different villages; and every village is thus to contain every type of art or craft which is necessary for the convenience of all the neighbouring farms (848 E). In spite of his objections to the commercial State, Plato finds room for foreign commerce and even for free trade (847 B). No duties are to be levied either on imports or on exports; but the importation of unnecessary luxuries (such as dyes and spicery), and the exportation of necessary commodities, are both to be prohibited. The State of the Laws is in nothing like the geschlossene Handelstaat of which Fichte wrote: it tolerates alike the free import of necessary commodities, and the free entry of alien artisans.1 Nor is Plato’s view of internal trade a narrow view. It is true that he prohibits retail trade (καπηλεία) for the sake of money-making (847 E); but this must not be interpreted to mean an absolute prohibition. Resident aliens must necessarily buy food from the citizens, and Plato accordingly sets aside a third of the produce of the country for their use (848 A). They must necessarily sell, as the citizens must necessarily buy, the products of their arts. Retail trade is a necessity: and provided that the element of money-making is eliminated, or at any rate limited, it must necessarily be permitted. The problem to be solved is thus the problem, which so often arises in the course of the Laws, of finding a reconciliation between two different and discrepant elements (918 B–920 C). On the one hand, retail trade is necessary; and it is even more than necessary – it is beneficial. The seller of goods, by using money as a common measure of value, reduces all commodities into terms of a single standard. He liberates men from the painful effort of measuring one commodity against another by the process of barter. In this sense he is a benefactor, with a profession which produces a social advantage; and he has his allotted place and function in the community, which is that of providing, and providing abundantly, satisfaction for its needs and commensurability for its goods. On the other hand, buying and selling is the chief root of the love of money, and the love of money is the root of all evil. If it could be undertaken by persons who were immune from this consequence, and if innkeeping and shopkeeping were in the hands of men of the best type, we should see how pleasant and agreeable such things could be.1 But this suggestion, interesting as it is, is not the basis of the solution which Plato proposes. Men of the best type have other and prior cares: the citizen can only be a passive party to all transactions of business; and if he seeks to take an active part, and (as a medieval bishop wrote) ‘degenerating from the condition of his degree turns to the multiplication of money by way of merchandise’, he is to be imprisoned for a year. Buying and selling must be left to aliens; but they must be placed under such control that the appetite for profit will have little chance of finding any satisfaction. Plato advocates a system of open markets, where buyers and sellers are gathered together in public, and regulation is easy (849). Credit is not to be recognized: the seller who sells on credit sells at his own risk (880 A). Profits are to be fixed by the magistrates at a moderate rate (920 C): only one price is to be asked by the seller for a commodity on any one market day (917 B); adulteration of goods is to be punished by a stripe for every drachma of the price of the adulterated goods (917 D).1
On the whole, and on any general view, it is unnecessary, and it is unjust, to accuse Plato of any aristocratic aloofness from the work-a-day life of the business world. Such prejudice as he shows is in no sense a class-prejudice: it is a prejudice of a moral order. He stands aloof from the seamy side of Levantine haggling and the chicaneries of the bazaar; and he stands aloof because he believes in that plain living which is the mother of high thinking and high action. In the strength of that belief he condemns much that he hardly need have condemned, and he accepts some things which would perhaps have been better condemned. He conceives citizenship as a high calling which engrosses the whole of life; and for its sake he condemns any participation of his citizens in industry and commerce, while he accepts the institution of slavery. The conception of Pericles is less strained, but really nobler: the true citizen must live in the economic world as well as in the world of politics. But if there are some things which are ascetically impossible, there is also much in Plato that is tenderly human. The law of poor relief which he suggests may serve as an instance (936 B–C). Sturdy beggars he would have transported; but he has pity on men of good character, whether they be freemen or whether they be slaves, who have fallen into misfortune. ‘It would be strange indeed if such were utterly neglected, whether bond or free, or fell into utter destitution, in any constitution or State which is even tolerably ordered.’ This is the language, not of class-prejudice, but of universal humanity; nor is the treatment which Plato would have meted out to aliens, or the conduct he would have masters pursue towards slaves, or the attitude he adopts both to foreign commerce and to internal trade, in any way unworthy of a generous and liberal spirit. It is perhaps a little thing, and yet it is also significant, that he finds room for something like technical education, suggesting that boys should be taught in advance the knowledge they will afterwards require for their profession, and should practise, in early years and with mimic tools, the arts of carpentry and building and husbandry (643 B).
THE TREATMENT OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY IN THE LAWS
In the domain of social relations proper, and in all that touches the position of women and the institution of marriage, the Plato of the Laws is closely akin to the Plato of the Republic. With all the old liberality, and with something also of the old earnest tyranny, he insists on the right and the duty of women to take their place by the side of men in the general life of the State. One of the two theses of the Republic – that women should have the same education as men, and be free to follow the same pursuits – is maintained almost in its entirety; and if the other – that the State should be one family, and wives and children should both be common – is largely abandoned, Plato still holds that women should be drawn into public life by a system of common tables, and he still believes that marriage should be controlled in the public interest. In an interesting passage (805 D–806 C) he examines the actual position of women in the communities of his day. In Thrace women are household drudges and almost slaves: they till the ground and tend the cattle. In Attica the wife is mistress of the house and its chattels: but her epitaph is at best domi mansit, lanam fecit. In Sparta unmarried girls have their gymnastics; but the married woman, though she spins no web but the stern web of the Spartan stock, is only half housekeeper, half mater dura virum. No community recognizes what in Plato’s view are the basic facts, that women, though with an inferior capacity and in an inferior degree, are capable of sharing the pursuits and the duties of men, and that, unless they do, the State has lost the services of a half of its members (805 A: 781 B). Recognize these facts, and it follows that the management and ordering of all institutions must be on a common principle for men and women alike. Women must share, first of all, in the system of common tables.1 The men may sit apart; but their wives and daughters must sit at neighbouring tables (806 E). They may protest against being forced to leave the seclusion in which they have dwelt, and to which they have grown inured; but whatever their protestations, they must be drawn into the common life of the State, if ever they are to be imbued with its spirit and become partners in its work (781). In the next place, they must share the same training as men; and a single system of universal compulsory education must include both sexes alike. Women, like men, must be trained in gymnastics: girls and young women must share in the contests of boys and young men: grown women, until they are married, must share in the contests of grown men; and if they will, women may even take part in tournaments, and fight in arms on horseback by the side of men (833–4). Trained like men, women, in the hour of need, must fight like men. They are liable to national service: they must take the field along with men for military drill one day in every month (829 B); and if war comes, and the enemy is at the gate, they must not hide or wail, but come into the open and fight for their young, ‘as birds will’ (814 B). But though Plato thus claims the services of women for the State, he has nothing to say in the Laws of their holding office or voting in the assembly. There are women officials, it is true, but they are only connected with the institution of marriage; and there is no suggestion in the Laws like the suggestion of women guardians in the Republic. Plato, it may be, forgot this side of the matter, or only remembered it far enough to write, that ‘praise should be given to women, no less than to men, who have shown distinguished virtue’ (802 A); or he may have thought that the life of the family, which he had banished from the Republic, but which is left intact in the Laws, was inconsistent with any political activity of women.
Marriage in the Laws is monogamous; but it is controlled, from beginning to end, by the State. Plato begins by providing for young men and maidens falling in love. Every month each tribe is to have a religious assembly, for acquaintance’ sake and to promote good fellowship; and these assemblies, among other purposes,1 are to serve the purpose of introducing men to their future wives (771 D).2 He provides, too, that men and women should see one another stripped before they are married; and here he anticipates a proposal, once advocated on eugenic grounds, that bride and bridegroom should exchange certificates of health (772). Following the cardinal idea of the Laws, and the suggestion already made in the Politicus, he advises that marriage should always be a mixture of opposites: the rich should marry the poor, and the impetuous temperament the calm – not indeed under legal compulsion, which can hardly be applied, but under the persuasion that marriage should be contracted for the benefit of the State rather than for private pleasure (773). When they are married, he would have husband and wife remember that it is their duty to breed children for the service of the State; and to this end he places husband and wife under the supervision of women overseers for the first ten years of their marriage (764). In a State in which the population is to be kept at a stationary figure, regulation of some sort (though it could hardly be acceptable in the shape of these women overseers) is an obvious necessity; and such regulation, while with some it must take the form of restriction of offspring,3 must with others take the form of encouragement (740). Plato, whose fear, as we have seen, was a falling rather than a rising birth-rate, proposes to encourage the birth of children partly by the admonitions of the women overseers, partly by the grant of privileges and honours to parents, and partly by the method, which has its advocates at the present time, of imposing a tax on bachelors who have passed the age of thirty-five (721 D: 774 A). But these measures are based not only on physical grounds: they have also their moral reasons. It is the duty of men to marry and beget children, in order that they may partake of immortality: celibacy is really a form of impiety (721 D).1 It is the duty of men to keep sound and pure in body and mind; for they cannot help leaving the impression of themselves on the souls and bodies of their children (775 E).2 Of the virtue of chastity Plato speaks earnestly and at length (835–41 E); and of the state of marriage he speaks almost in the language of the book of Ruth.
‘Husband and wife shall leave father and mother and kinsfolk: they shall make to themselves, as it were, a colony, and dwell there: they shall beget and rear children, and hand on life like a torch from one generation to another; and they shall always worship the gods according to the law’ (776 B–C).3
On the whole, Plato’s view of marriage is very far from being merely physical. It has its moral and even its religious side; and if it errs, it errs in a way in which Plato often errs in the Laws, by an excess of earnest but perhaps impossible supervision. Nor is Plato’s general conception of social and economic conditions on any other than a noble level. There is much practical wisdom, and there is much humanity and moral insight, in many of its features. The emphasis which he lays on number has its practical as well as its mystical side: his suggestions of registration of property, and of regular assessment of capital and income, are both statesmanlike. His belief in free trade may be set against his aversion to all things maritime: his advocacy of poor relief, even for slaves, against his attitude to slavery, which, even in itself, has its finer sides. His view of marriage is a mixture of wisdom, both on the physical and on the moral side, with regulation less wise than the principles on which it is based: his view of the place of women in the community, if on one point perhaps defective, and on another, again, excessive, is on the whole liberal. The Plato of the Laws is not a socialist, but he recognizes the social character of the right of property: he is something of a physiocrat, but he recognizes the need and the value of industry and of exchange. His defects flow from the application of a moral standard with too rigorous a consequence; but their quality is greater than their defect. There is little here that is dead, or, if it is dead, it ‘yet speaketh’.
); but for the present the argument may advance to (proposals of) legislation (to be considered by the commission) for the sake of obtaining a sketch and an outline (
)’. But Plato hardly adheres to this distinction; and much of the Laws is not really in the nature of a rough drawing, but rather in the form of a final plan and specification. This raises difficulties of interpretation, which have exercised German critics: see C. Ritter’s commentary on the Laws, pp. 140–7. It seems the simplest interpretation to hold that Plato (very naturally, if somewhat inconsistently) alternates between the two views.
The phrase is very like the often-quoted passage in which Herodotus describes the unity of Greece (VIII. 144); cf. supra, p. 308.
(740 D). Plato does not explain in the Laws, as he does in the Republic, the methods of such prevention of birth.