It now occurs to the Athenian that the presence of alien workmen and traders in the state may lead to serious crime, because foreigners have not enjoyed the benefits of Magnesian education. He therefore passes to a discussion of major crimes such as sacrilege and treason, for which the penalty is death. There are two important points here:
(a) the elaborate and scrupulously fair trials to be held for capital offences: the Athenian criticizes what he considers to be the hit-and-miss methods of Athenian courts;
(b) slaves and foreigners are probably curable, and although their punishment is severe, it falls short of death; but if after education in Magnesia a citizen commits such a crime, he must be hopelessly wicked: he should be reckoned incurable and executed. This prepares us for the discussion, in the next section, of ‘cure for injustice’ as the aim of punishment, and the attempt to define what ‘injustice’ really is.
PRELIMINARY DISCUSSION
[BK IX] ATHENIAN: Next, in accordance with the natural arrangement [853a] of our legal code, will come the legal proceedings that arise out of all the occupations we have mentioned up till now. To some extent, so far as agricultural affairs and related topics are concerned, we have already listed the acts that should be prosecuted, but the most serious have yet to be specified. Our next task is to enumerate these one by one, mentioning what penalty each should attract and to which court it should be [b] assigned.
CLEINIAS: That’s right.
ATHENIAN: The very composition of all these laws we are on the point of framing is, in a way, a disgrace: after all, we’re assuming we have a state which will be run along excellent lines and achieve every condition favourable to the practice of virtue. The mere idea that a state of this kind could give birth to a man affected by the worst forms of wickedness found in other countries, so that the legislator has to anticipate his appearance by threats – this, as I said, is in a way a disgrace. It means we have to lay down laws against these people, to deter them and punish them when they appear, on [c] the assumption that they will certainly do so. However, unlike the ancient legislators, we are not framing laws for heroes and sons of gods. The lawgivers of that age, according to the story told nowadays, were descended from gods and legislated for men of similar stock. But we are human beings, legislating in the world today for the children of humankind, and we shall give no offence by our fear that one of our citizens will [d] turn out to be, so to speak, a ‘tough egg’, whose character will be so ‘hard-boiled’ as to resist softening; powerful as our laws are, they may not be able to tame such people, just as heat has no effect on tough beans. For their dismal sake, the first law I shall produce will deal with robbery from temples, in case anyone dares to commit this crime. Now in view of the correct education our citizens will have received, we should hardly want any of them to catch this disease, nor is there much reason to expect that they will. Their slaves, however, as well as foreigners and the slaves of foreigners, may well make frequent attempts at such crimes. For their sake principally – but still with an eye on the general weakness of human [854a] nature – I’ll spell out the law about robbery from temples, and about all the other similar crimes which are difficult or even impossible to cure.
ROBBERY FROM TEMPLES
Following the practice we agreed earlier, we must first compose preambles, in the briefest possible terms, to stand at the head of all these laws. Take a man who is incited by day and kept awake at night by an evil impulse which drives him to steal some holy object. You might talk to him and exhort him as follows:
[b] ‘My dear fellow, this evil impulse that at present drives you to go robbing temples comes from a source that is neither human nor divine. It is a sort of frenzied goad, innate in mankind as a result of crimes of long ago that remained unexpiated; it travels around working doom and destruction, and you should make every effort to take precautions against it. Now, take note what these precautions are. When any of these thoughts enters your head, seek the rites that free a man from guilt; seek the shrines of the gods who avert evil, and supplicate them; seek the company of men who have a reputation in your community [c] for being virtuous. Listen to them as they say that every man should honour what is fine and just – try to bring yourself to say it too. But run away from the company of the wicked, with never a backward glance. If by doing this you find that your disease abates somewhat, well and good; if not, then you should look upon death as the preferable alternative, and be quit of life.’
These are the overtures we make to those who think of committing all these impious deeds that bring about the ruin of the state. When a man obeys us, we should silently omit the actual law; but in cases of disobedience, we must change our tune after the overture and sing this resounding strain:
[d] 41. If a man is caught thieving from a temple and is
(a) a foreigner or slave,
a brand of his misfortune shall be made on his face and hands, and he shall be whipped, the number of lashes to be decided by his judges. Then he shall be thrown out beyond the boundaries of the land, naked.
(Perhaps paying this penalty will teach him restraint and make him a better man: after all, no penalty imposed by law has an evil purpose, but generally achieves one of two effects: it makes the person who pays the penalty either more virtuous [e] or less wicked.)
(b) If a citizen is ever shown to be responsible for such a crime – to have perpetrated, that is, some great and unspeakable offence against the gods or his parents or the state,
the penalty is death.
The judge should consider him as already beyond cure; he should bear in mind the kind of education and upbringing the man has enjoyed from his earliest years, and how after all this he has still not abstained from acts of the greatest evil. But the very tiniest of evils will be what the offender suffers;1 indeed, he will be of service to others, by being a lesson to them when he is ignominiously banished from sight beyond [855a] the borders of the state.2 And if the children and family escape taking on the character of the father, they should be held in honour and win golden opinions for the spirit and persistence with which they have shunned evil and embraced the good.
In a state where the size and number of the farms are to be kept permanently unaltered, it would not be appropriate for the state to confiscate the property of any of these criminals. But if a man commits a crime and is thought to deserve to pay a penalty in money, then provided he possesses a surplus over and above the basic equipment of his farm, he must pay his b fine. The Guardians of the Laws must scrutinize the registers and discover the precise facts in these cases, and make an exact report to the court on each occasion, so as to prevent any farm becoming unworked because of a shortage of money. If a man appears to deserve a stiffer fine, and if some of his friends are not prepared to bail him out by contributing the money to set him free, his punishment should take the form of a prolonged period of imprisonment (which should be open to public view), and various humiliations. But no one, no matter what his offence, is ever to be deprived of his citizen rights completely, not even if he has gone into exile beyond our frontiers for it. The penalties we impose will be death, imprisonment, whipping, or various degrading postures (either standing or sitting), or being rusticated and made to stand before temples on the boundaries of the state; and payments of money may be made in certain cases which we have just mentioned, where such a punishment is appropriate.
PROCEDURE IN CAPITAL CASES
In cases involving the death penalty the judges are to be the Guardians of the Laws, sitting in conjunction with the court whose members are selected by merit from the officials of the [d] previous year. The method of bringing these cases to court, the serving of the summonses and similar procedural details must be the concern of the legislators who succeed us; what we have to do is legislate about the voting. The vote should be taken openly, but before this our judges should have ranged themselves according to seniority and sat down close together facing the prosecutor and defendant; all citizens who have some spare time should attend and listen carefully to such [e] trials. First, the prosecutor should deliver a single speech, then the defendant; the most senior judge should follow these addresses by cross-questioning, and continue until he has gone into the arguments in sufficient detail. One by one, the other judges should follow the most senior and work through any points on which either litigant has left him dissatisfied by some kind of error or omission. A judge who feels no such dissatisfaction should hand on the interrogation to his colleague. All the judges should endorse those arguments that appear pertinent by appending their signatures and then [856a] depositing the documents on the altar of Hestia. The next day they must reconvene in the same place, and after similar interrogation and examination again append their signatures to the depositions. Having followed this procedure three times, after giving due consideration to the evidence and witnesses, each judge should cast a sacred vote, promising in the name of Hestia to give, as far as lies in him, a judgement just and true. In this way they should conclude this category of trial.
SUBVERSION
We come next, after these matters of religion, to cases of [b] political subversion. We should treat as the biggest enemy of the entire state the man who makes the laws into slaves, and the state into the servant of a particular interest, by subjecting them to the diktat of mere men. This transgressor of the law uses violence in all that he does and stirs up sedition. Second in the scale of wickedness, in our estimation, should come the holder of some high state office who, while not an accessory to any such crimes, nevertheless fails to detect them and exact the vengeance of his fatherland (or, if he does detect [c] them, holds back through cowardice). Every man who is any good at all must denounce the plotter to the authorities and take him to court on a charge of violently and illicitly overthrowing the constitution. The court should consist of the same judges as for robbers from temples, and the procedure of the entire trial should be the same as it was for them, a majority vote being sufficient for the death penalty.
As a rule, penalties and disgrace incurred by a father should not be passed on to any of his children, except where a man’s [d] father, grandfather and great-grandfather have all in turn been sentenced to death. The state should deport such cases to the state and city from which their family originally came; and they should take their property with them, apart from all the basic equipment of their farm. Next, sons of citizens who have more than one son over ten years of age should be nominated by their father or grandfather on either the mother’s or the father’s side. Ten of them should be chosen by lot, and the names of those whom the lot selects should be [e] reported to Delphi. The god’s choice should then be installed as heir to the abandoned property – and he, we hope, will have better luck.
CLEINIAS: Splendid.
TREASON
ATHENIAN: The same regulations about the judges that should try the case, and the procedure to be followed at the trial, will apply in yet a third instance, when a man is brought to court on a charge of treason. In the same way, a single law should [857a] apply to all three cases and decide whether the children of these criminals (traitor, temple-robber, and the violent wrecker of the laws of the state) should remain in their fatherland or leave it.