My account of Plato’s life and thought, particularly of the Sicilian episodes, is to some extent based on his ‘autobiographical’ Seventh Letter. Unfortunately, at least one of the thirteen letters that have come down to us under Plato’s name is spurious, and none of the others can be shown to be certainly genuine; the reasons for asserting their genuineness or falsity are speculative, frequently double-edged and never conclusive. I cannot here go into the details of this highly contentious topic: I merely record my view that Letters III, VII and VIII are genuine and may therefore legitimately be used in a reconstruction of Plato’s career. This opinion is in accord with the general consensus among scholars in recent years.1
How relevant are the Letters for our understanding of the Laws? There are, I think, two main issues, the first particular and the second general.
(1) It may well be that Plato wrote most of the first four books of the Laws with Sicilian conditions in mind. This thesis has been most plausibly argued by L. A. Post.2 Near the end of the fourth book of the Laws the Athenian Stranger refers to the whole of the preceding discussion as ‘legislative preamble’ (see 722d). In Letter III, written to Dionysius II in the year 357 BC, Plato mentions (316a) that when in Sicily in Dionysius’ court in 367 he ‘paid some little attention to the preambles to the laws’. Post suggests that this refers in effect to the first four books of the Laws and points out that there are many passages in those books which look as if they refer to Sicilian political problems and read like more or less direct advice to Dionysius. The most celebrated of these passages is 709 ff., where the Stranger asks a legislator what conditions in the state will enable him to run it properly. The legislator replies: ‘Give me a state under the absolute control of a dictator, and let the dictator be young, with a good memory, quick to learn, courageous, and with a character of natural elevation.’ [He should also be lucky in being] ‘the contemporary of a distinguished lawgiver and fortunate enough to come into contact with him… The next best thing would be a pair of such dictators; the third best would be several of them.’ For ‘dictator’ read ‘Dionysius’, and for ‘distinguished lawgiver’ read ‘Plato’.3
I am not bowled over by this seemingly attractive line of argument. Dionysius II was a young man of volatile temper whose taste for philosophy exceeded his ability and whose enthusiasm was greater than his perseverance. Anything more likely than Laws I–IV to bore such a man to extinction is difficult to imagine. I prefer to suppose that Plato merely composed, perhaps with Dionysius at his elbow, a number of ‘preambles’ of the kind he explains in Laws 720 ff., which he proposed to prefix to certain laws he was pressing on Dionysius.4 As for the description of the discussion preceding 722c, as ‘preambles’, this seems to me to be no more than a slender joke, suggested by the context, to the effect that it is about time the discussion advanced beyond its preliminary stages. The other ‘references’ to Sicily seem to me so general as to be worthless. But I must admit that I can no more conclusively refute Post’s thesis than he can demonstrate it: the only possible verdict is ‘not proven’.
(2) On the more general issue I shall be provocative and dogmatic.5 It is commonly supposed that Plato’s disappointments in Sicily marked some sort of turning point in his political thought; that the philosopher-kings of the Republic constituted his ideal, which he attempted to realize in the person of Dionysius II, and that after he had learned the impracticability of this ideal he sadly turned to the construction of a more down-to-earth utopia in the Laws. This seems to me a distortion. There is not a scrap of evidence to suggest that Plato ever tried to convert Dionysius or anyone else into a Republic-style philosopher-king. Doubtless Plato wanted to give Dionysius some philosophical training, so as to demonstrate the reasons for the code of laws and form of constitution Plato hoped to see him adopt, but that is all. If Letter VII is genuine, we have Plato’s own word that even in 388 (which is probably earlier and can hardly be later than the composition of the Republic), Plato insisted and Dion accepted that the Syracusans ought to live under ‘the rule of the best of laws’ (324a-b, cf. 334c).6 This remark, and that of Letter III about the preambles, suggest that whatever the advice was that Plato gave in Sicily, it was something more practical than the scheme of the Republic. I therefore suggest that although the Sicilian episodes may in one way or another have prompted Plato to commit his practical political programme to writing, they were not the occasion of any fundamental change in his views. Nevertheless, for the student of Plato’s political ideas the Letters are required reading: they give us an invaluable insight into his character, his reaction to contemporary events, and the lengths he was prepared to go in order to put his theories into practice.7
NOTES
1. But see L. Edelstein, Plato’s Seventh Letter (Leiden, 1966); G. Ryle, Plato’s Progress (Cambridge, 1966), especially pp. 55–101. For references to other scholarly literature see H. Cherniss, Lustrum, 4 (1959), pp. 103–14. For recent treatments of this question, see P. A. Brunt, Studies in Greek History and Thought (Oxford, 1993) and M. Schofield, ‘Plato and Practical Politics’, in C. Rowe and M. Schofield (eds.), The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 293–302.
2. L. A. Post, ‘The Preludes to Plato’s Laws’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 60 (1929), pp. 5–24.
3. Ryle (Plato’s Progress, pp. 88–9, 99–100, 180–81, 257) takes for granted the identification of the dictator with Dionysius. For Ryle’s views of the composition of the Laws, see pp. 256–9 and my comments in Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 45 (1967), pp. 496–7.
4. Such ‘preamble material’ may of course have been utilized later at various places in the Laws. See G. R. Morrow, Plato’s Epistles (2nd edn; New York, 1962), p. 92, n. 4.
5. Cf. my remarks in the Introduction, pp. xxxii–xxxiii.
6. See Morrow, Plato’s Epistles, pp. 148 ff.
7. For a different view of Plato’s involvement with practical politics see Schofield, ‘Plato and Practical Politics’, in C. Rowe and M. Schofield (eds.), The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 293–302.