14  Property and Impiety in Plato’s Laws: Books 11 and 12

Eric Sanday

At the end of the project traced out in Plato’s Laws, the Athenian Stranger asks what it would take to arrive at an end of the lawgiving.1 In this essay I focus on the way in which the problem of ending relates to the ongoing incompleteness of political community in the so-called “second-best” city that is the subject of the dialogue. I propose in this chapter that the character of the city as second best implies that its very incompleteness is necessarily constitutive of its health, and that the success of the lawgiver will hinge on the city’s ability to live with and allow for the ongoing breakdown of its project. It is my contention that the problem of incompleteness governs the concluding books of the Laws, and that interpreting these books in light of this problem allows us to understand the function of the Assembly (image) introduced in Book 12, which the Athenian refers to as the “perfect and permanent safeguard” of the city they have generated. Key to the reading I will offer is the recognition that impiety extends beyond the limits of personal belief, as identified in the Book 10 reference to the young, and is rooted in the material foundations of life in the city, especially in property, contracts (image), and other institutions first introduced in Book 11.

In Book 10 the Athenian defines impiety as a very serious type of ignorance that is received by many as great wisdom, that body is older than soul. In this essay I interpret this serious ignorance as the forgetfulness of the sources of one’s being, which would include forgetfulness of the gods but also the city as a whole, the families and groups of which it consists, and the weight of tradition in which those groups are rooted. I will focus on the way the institutionalized foundations of daily life in the city, especially those clustered around ownership and the transfer and inheritance of property, are causes of the forgetfulness of the sources of one’s being, ultimately calling for the institution of the above mentioned Assembly. This chapter will show that the problem of impiety extends beyond the narrowly defined scope it is normally granted in interpretations of the Laws, and that in spite of posing real danger to the health of the city and its citizens, impiety is necessary to the city’s flourishing.

Mapping Books 11 and 12

It is hard to deny that Books 11 and 12 of the Laws seem unedited.2 Much of the content appears to be presented without any of the connective tissue that appears throughout the rest of the books, and there is less thematic unity to the points that are in these books than one finds in other parts of the dialogue. Book 11 breaks unceremoniously with the Book 10 discussion of piety, turning to an analysis of business transactions (image), which is itself a loose collection of topics including property (913a–922a), family matters (922a–932d), various bodily harms (932d–934c), and a grab-bag of such things as insanity, slander, beggary, and oratory (934c–941a). However, if there were an organizing principle to the themes addressed in the book, it would seem to be property. The first section of Book 11 deals with property laws pertaining to individual citizens, e.g. the principles of equitable distribution of property, the power of money, laws governing retail trade; the second section of the book deals with property laws pertaining to families, e.g. inheritance, marriage laws, father-son disputes, husband-wife disputes, and parentage.

Book 12 offers even more evidence of being unedited than we find in Book 11. It lacks an introduction, and the ensuing discussion ranges widely from abuse of office (941a–942a), military organization (942a–945b), audits of magistrates (945b–948b), travel abroad (949e–953e), property law (954a–956b), organization of courts (956c–958c), and funerals (958c–961a). The dialogue does not regain its polish until the discussion turns to the Assembly that gives the laws their finishing touch of irreversibility (960b–968b). The discussion of the Assembly does not contradict what precedes it, but neither does this discussion obviously respond to any of those other concerns. Thus the safest conclusion is that Books 11 and 12 consist of material left over from the Laws proper—appendices—and as such they may not deserve to be treated as books at all.

In this chapter it will be maintained that Books 11 and 12 are a vital and necessary part of the development of the Laws, and the topics covered in these books are placed here for important reasons, even if they are incompletely edited. I treat the dialogue to be a response to the problem of impiety within a political context, i.e. inevitable forgetfulness of the source of being within the polis, and these books as responses to important unresolved questions from Book 10. They address the impiety within the civic and economic practices on which the city is founded, material conditions without which the city cannot survive. Treated this way, the discussion of the Assembly at the end of the dialogue offers a partial solution to problems of incompletion related to Magnesia’s status as a second-best city.

According to references in the extant text, the organizing principle tying together disparate elements of Books 11 and 12 is contracts (image), which is introduced at the outset of Book 11 (913a) and not brought to a conclusion until midway through Book 12 (956b). The Athenian explicitly ties the discussion of contracts to the structural level of the project:3

Once the parts of the whole city have been fully discussed, how many and which ones must come to be, and laws have been said concerning all the greatest contracts to the extent of our ability, the remaining thing would have to be the image.4 (956b)

Taken together, these passages suggest that the Athenian Stranger is identifying everything from Book 11 up to the middle of Book 12 as contracts, or agreements. Of course it might be objected that the placement of these passages is contingent.5 But even if we were to exercise healthy doubt as to the placement and, therefore, centrality of the theme of contracts, the Athenian makes it clear that he intends to partner contracts with the discussion of the image, and these paired topics are to be coordinate with the dialogue’s other governing divisions.6 I take the return to the image mentioned here in conjunction with the conclusion of the section on contracts to fulfill the promise made in Book 6 for “a precise division of the image and composition of the laws would most correctly occur at length toward the end of the lawgiving (image)” (768c). Although pursued only briefly in Book 12, I take the discussion of contracts to be coordinate with the image that follows and therefore to be central to the structure of the whole dialogue.7

From the other direction, the discussion of contracts is central to the whole as part of the more complex and far-reaching theme of impiety. Book 10 begins by looking back over what has been accomplished in Book 9 and ahead toward material in Books 11 and 12:

After acts of outrage let some one legal custom of the following kind be stated for all acts of violence: that no one carry off or lead away any of the things that belong to other people, nor to use one of his neighbor’s things, if he does not persuade the owner, for on such a [cause] indeed have depended, do depend, and will depend all the bad things discussed. The greatest of the remaining things are the unrestrained and unprovoked acts of violence of the young, which are greatest of all when [these acts] occur against the sacred things, and especially great whenever they take place against the things belonging to the city and its people as a whole and hallowed things, or the things shared in parts [of the city], either one of the tribes or some other such share-group. Second and secondly is whenever someone commits violence against the private shrines and tombs, and [whenever] someone does violence against parents, third, with the exception of those spoken of earlier. A fourth kind of outrage is whenever someone being heedless of authorities leads or carries away or uses something of theirs without persuading them. And fifth would be the civic [status] of each of the citizens being violated, demanding judicial penalty (image). (Laws 10, 884a–885a, emphasis added)

In Book 10 the Athenian is concerned with impiety explicitly directed toward the gods, and in Book 11 he is concerned with the material and institutional foundations upon which daily life depends and on which foundation all identity rests, including individual, group, family, and city identity. Thus from textual references to the image that are to follow contracts and the preceding discussion of impiety it is prima facie apparent that a discussion of contracts should fall where it does in Books 11 and 12 and that this discussion is intended to have significant structural importance.

In what follows I first show that the subject of contracts is substantively related to the other more obviously philosophical concerns that frame it, and that in particular “contracts” refers to a type of impiety rooted in the material institutions of the city, especially property. The structural impiety rooted in practices of exchange and material conditions arise within the broader context of bringing the lawgiving to an end, so we will be particularly interested in understanding the specific type of closure the Athenian gives to the lawgiving and how the end of the lawgiving relates to the city’s constitutive incompleteness.

Contracts

Overarching themes of incompleteness and reversibility integrate the diverse topics the Athenian discusses in Books 11 and 12 and tie them into the dialogue’s larger structural concern with impiety. Key to these connections is the capacity of reversibility contained in the city’s material foundations, which pointedly contrasts with the power of irreversibility embodied by the Assembly. As we will soon see, the destabilizing and uprooting power of reversibility is essential to the material foundation of the city, e.g., contracts, retail trade, and money, but this selfsame power is simultaneously a valuable resource for the city’s virtue and health.

According to the Athenian, there are two importantly contrasting types of end. On the one hand there is the natural end of a human life (958c–d); on the other there is an end that preserves, specifically an end that will preserve the political entity to which human beings have given rise (960b). After the execution of verdicts, the Athenian turns to discuss the end of a human life:

Next after this, for a man having been born and raised and having borne and raised children, and having engaged with measure in contracts, and paying penalty if he wronged someone and receiving payment from an-other, growing old with the laws, as is the share (image) of people, there would come an end according to nature (image). (958c–d)

This leads into a discussion of funerals: location of the graves, size of the burial mounds, size of the grave-marking stone, procedure for carrying out the funeral, the appropriate beliefs regarding the soul and the body, and the laws governing funerary rites, violations of which are judged by the Guardians of the Laws and punished by all. The Athenian concludes those passages by saying:

But in each instance an end (image) is not quite the doing (image) nor the acquiring (image) nor the founding (image); having discovered the ever-perfect preservation for what has been generated, now then [it is right] to think that all that needs to be accomplished has been accomplished, but before that [it is right] to think the whole is incomplete (image). (960b–c)

The complicated relation between the incompleteness of the city and its perfection is especially important to see here. The Athenian introduces the idea of completeness with reference to “the designations (image) given to the Fates” (960c),8 prefacing his comments by invoking the names of Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos, and announcing that he and his companions have yet to “naturally implant” (image image) the “power of irreversibility” (image image) in the laws. It is in clarifying and drawing out the philosophical implications of the “perfect and permanent safeguard for what has been begotten” that a discussion of property becomes not only instructive, but indispensible.

In light of the attempt to bring the lawgiving to a proper end by implanting within the laws a power of irreversibility, it is telling that property represents a constant threat of reversibility. Let us recall that property first emerges in Book 10 as a root cause of violence in the city. The same theme is repeated in Book 11, which begins:

To the extent possible one should not touch my things, nor in turn move them not even the shortest distance without persuading me at all at any time: according to the same [reasons] I should do (image) the same concerning the things of others, having a sound mind (image image). (913a)

The severity of the problem posed by theft relates directly to the schism between the imagined best city and the city rooted in material foundations. In the best city there is no gap between property and identity, the soul animates everything on which it depends and incorporates it seamlessly into its identity. By contrast, in the second-best city the material foundations in which identity is vested and nourished are detachable appendages.9 The Athenian addresses the specific case in which a treasure (image) is set in store for a people but discovered by someone not related by descent to the one who originally set down the treasure. The Athenian provides manifold support through sayings, myths, and direct praise for divine ordinance he says was originally set down by a sort of founding father: “what you didn’t set down (image), don’t take up (image).”10 The Athenian asks us to let unattended property appear as presided over by gods, even in the absence of the owner to whom the property rightly belongs. The Athenian proposes the following:

If someone leaves behind one of his things somewhere, whether willingly or unwillingly, let the one who happens across let it lie, considering that the image guards these sorts of things [which have been] made sacred to the goddess by the law. (914b)

The sheer emphasis the Athenian places on protecting the bond between groups and their material foundations draws attention to the reversibility of the relationship the city has to its material foundations. In his remarks the Athenian asks us to believe that things are presided over by image, but he makes no attempt to deny that property appears simply as present, uninflected by its past and uncommitted to the future. This is just how property appears: as something to be taken up and disposed of as anyone sees fit. The Athenian insists that we subordinate the appearance of orphan property to the appearance of belonging-to or being-invested-with communal identity, laden with a past, a context, and a meaning that has already in a sense been laid down for it. When we see property, the lawgiver wants us to see the person, the family, the posterity, and ultimately the gods to which it belongs and of which it speaks. But this insistence cannot correct the fact of property—that it presents itself without parentage, without connection to person or community, and it addresses any passerby as a person in general.

The orphan appearance of property points to a more serious problem. Property never really takes us on as the particular persons we are, i.e. with our own particular past and future, and that of our family, community, history, gods. Just as much as I can take over property from someone else in general, as an orphan, so too can property be taken from me. In relation to this kind of property, I never become more than a person in general. In simply appearing fungible, transferable, belonging to anyone in general, property constitutes us as abstract persons. Property is a tacit incitement to forget the sources of being.

A person free to take up any identity, not only the one she has set down or that has been set down for her, has adopted the abstract relation to place and time that is the root of impiety. The Athenian has made every possible effort to combat this abstract identity in the citizens by situating the city in the most appropriate type of terrain, dividing its places, apportioning the times of the year according to specific purposes, and rigidly prescribing individual identities.11 In light of this extraordinary attempt to solidify the relationship of the city to its places and times, the abstract and reversible character of property poses a tacitly corrosive incitement that should be read as an institutionalized form of impiety. Living in the best city would demand one to automatically and unproblematically see property as being sourced in an individual, group, or family, which belongs primarily to the city, to ancestors, and ultimately to the gods. Living in the second-best city demands that we live “as if” this were the case, even though appearances infallibly suggest otherwise. These points regarding the threat of reversibility rooted in the simple presence and therefore transferability of property are borne out in the discussions of money and retail trade.

The Athenian’s instructions to the lawgiver and the Guardians of the Laws regarding money and retail trade (918b–920b) confirm the view that the power of property is both a resource and a threat. The power of money, according to the Athenian, is to render “even and symmetrical property consisting of any sort of thing that is asymmetrical and uneven” (918b). Money is the tool used by the merchant, the hireling, the innkeeper, etc., “fully to provide for all [human beings] resource for needs and evenness in properties” (918c). Unfortunately these practices contain an implicit promise of gain, which solicits a desire for unlimited increase (918d). The best human beings are able to remain unmoved by the solicitations of abstract and reversible wealth. If the best individuals were to become innkeepers and retail traders, the reciprocal gift-giving relationship between guest and host would be maintained. The average person however does not offer the gift of hospitality but holds their guests prisoner and charges them a ransom (919a). Three laws are written to protect the city against the corrosive promise of wealth and threat of poverty implicit within retail trade: (1) no one of the 5,040 hearths is ever to become a retail trader, wholesale trader, or render service to private persons who do not “return an equal service” (except to family members). The point here is that no service is to be exchanged for money (919d–e).12 (2) Those who do engage in retail trade must be resident aliens or strangers (920a), presumably because these people are already uprooted from the land and the past. Most importantly for my purposes, (3) the Guardians of the Laws are to understand themselves to be guards not only of those whom they can easily guard against becoming outlaws, having been well educated and nurtured, but all the more “the ones not of that sort pursuing pursuits that have some strong impulse toward encouraging those who pursue them to turn out bad” (920b). The Athenian explicitly acknowledges that certain practices prompt human beings to become bad. The promptings of the retail trade and similar promptings implicit in the nature of property all point to institutionalized impiety woven into the material foundations of the city, which cannot be eliminated but which also have been given no strong positive reason for being preserved.

The corrosive effect of money is found in its power to detach a thing or a service from the person, the family, the land, and past from which that thing or service emerges. It is on this basis that money allows for the even distribution of goods and services, by providing an abstract basis for exchange and distribution. It is possible to live with abstract exchange and property without becoming corrupt, and as we see the laws against retail trade are only properly directed at the average citizen, for whom this trade is prohibited.13 To be required to uphold the best city through the strength of imagination, or by actively ignoring real possibilities etched in one’s surroundings, is just what it means to live in the second-best city.14 However, and this is the important qualification that allows us to understand the Athenian’s political philosophy, the destructive possibilities continuously enjoined by property, money, and retail trade, are also resources for virtue and the transformation from habit to understanding, as the institution of the Assembly will soon show.

Before turning to the Assembly, however, it should be clarified what relation the material foundations of the city have to the other sources of impiety explicitly identified in the text, which include human nature, the terrain, custom, poor birth, and bad upbringing. Each of these is given as a reason to explain the human tendency to take up property, money, and retail trade in a way that is destructive to the community. I want to turn our attention to places in the Laws in which the other sources of impiety are identified in order to argue that, far from superseding the sources of institutional impiety, these contending explanatory principles all presuppose and confirm the problem of material foundations. Once we see how central this problem is to the constitution of the city, we will be in a position to appreciate fully the implications of the point that the dangers posed are simultaneously a resource for virtue.

The impious view that body is older than soul hinges on the assumption that particular experiences, pleasures, meanings, and possessions are the most basic stuff of which happiness consists. In Book 10, impiety is described as the view that the material foundations of things are the origin and ongoing source for the life of the soul. In the text of the Laws more broadly there are at least three other causes cited as explanations for the perversion of the relationship between soul and body: (1) the nature of human beings, (2) human history, and (3) human education/culture (including the terrain in which the polis is situated and the tacit educational effects this terrain has on the virtue of citizens).15 Book 9 is especially helpful for identifying the various causes of impiety; it names history, culture, and nature in particular. However, these texts do not all carry the same explanatory power, and some specifically seem intended to cure a problem rather than explain it.

According to 854a–b of Book 9, human history is cited as the cause of impiety. In this passage the Athenian suggests that the image (sacrilegious person) be told by the laws that there is an “evil that moves you, urging you to go toward sacrilege,” and that this evil has neither a human nor divine origin but is “some goad engendered in human beings from ancient and unpurified injustices (image)” (854b). Given that this passage occurs within a prelude meant to invoke the proper orientation in the citizen, and given that it is offered as something to tell the sacrilegious person, it seems that the gadfly of natural injustice stemming from ancient unpurified injustices is meant as a curative directed at a soul with a very specific illness. It is unclear that the Athenian wishes or needs to inform the citizens of the cause of their impiety except for the sake of correcting certain damaging views.

Later, roughly halfway through Book 9, in the midst of describing the penalties for murder and considering the conditions of the soul that mitigate or exacerbate the severity of a crime, the Athenian says, “money has the power to engender tens of thousands of erotic desires for its insatiable and limitless acquisition” (870a). This claim points to money itself as an institutional cause of a certain kind of impiety, but the hold money has on the soul is attributed to impiety stemming from “nature” (image) and a “lack of education” (image). The “lack of education” is in turn attributed to the rumor (image) spread around by Greeks and Barbarians that celebrates wealth as if it were an independent value (870b). Thus the governing causes seem to be in a general sense nature and culture rather than the institutions of money and property.16 This reading is reinforced when we consider the remedy proposed for this impiety: the noblest and best thing the Athenian says is to tell the truth about wealth. The truth told is that “[wealth] is for the sake of the body,” and “the body is for the sake of the soul,” and the happy desire is to be wealthy justly and moderately (870c). Thus it seems it is not wealth that corrupts the soul but the cultural understanding of wealth more broadly that gives wealth its power to corrupt.

Expanding on this theme, the perversion of the relationship between soul and body is attributed at the end of Book 9 not to human cultural attitudes toward wealth but to mortal nature itself. There the Athenian is describing someone who is good in soul but who rules autocratically, i.e. without being audited.17 The point made there is that even someone with virtuous attitudes and convictions can be corrupted because, it seems, there is an aspect of mortal nature that remains uneducated by virtue. The Athenian says the cause of the virtuous person’s corruption is mortal nature, which (1) always strives to get more than its fair share, and (2) naturally prefers the private before the common (875b). This discussion feeds into the consideration of the acts of outrage against elders with which Book 10 begins.

All of these claims strongly suggest that property may serve as the occasion for impiety, but that culture, and mortal nature itself, are the more fundamental causes of ruin in the soul. In what follows, I argue that it is not human nature per se that the Athenian has in mind but a certain unavoidable and healthy stage of human education, brought to the fore in Book 10, in which one must presuppose an indeterminate relationship to place and time and open oneself to the rudderless abstraction implicit in life’s material foundations. This posture of the soul has the potential to be crippling to virtue, but it equally has the potential to be taken up as a resource.

The impiety of the young in Book 10 is attributed more than anything to a refusal of inherited or received authority. Specifically, the cause of impiety is tied to the young who, for reasons relating to youth, take special interest in challenging the existence of gods. The Athenian tells Cleinias that the source of the problem is “some very serious ignorance (image), appearing to be great wisdom” (886b). This very serious ignorance is in part attributed to ancient written accounts that describe the genesis of heaven, the gods, and their mingling (886c); the Athenian claims these accounts are destructive of the “services and honors” (image) toward parents (886d). It is also attributed to the impiety of the new and wise men who claim that the heavenly bodies are earth and stones, unthinking, and that in spite of being raised properly, these people still say “that [of] all matters that are becoming, having become, and being about to become, some [are] by nature, some by artifice, and some through chance” (888e), and that “the right thing is whatever someone wins using force” (890a). The Athenian boils down this latter source of impiety to a certain mistaken use of logos: “the one saying these things is likely to consider fire and water and earth and air to be first of all things” and believe they are oldest (891c). These four are named “nature,” and soul emerges or is generated from them. The Athenian responds to these two types of serious ignorance with arguments (1) for the existence of the gods, (2) that the gods care about human affairs, and (3) that the gods are impassive; these arguments span the text from 891e to 907b.18 The problem with these young people and their insolence is, in a word, that they do not understand that soul is prior to body.

Looking over the various ways in which the sources of impiety have been articulated in Books 9 and 10, from the introduction of the image in Book 9 to the arguments for the impassivity of the gods in Book 10, the Athenian’s frustration with impiety exposes an absurd parallel, almost identity, between nature and virtue. The Athenian becomes exasperated by being forced to address the problem of injustice at all. In Book 9 the Athenian says it is in a certain way shameful to assume that in a city such as theirs, best equipped for the practice of virtue, someone will grow up who shares in the evils of other places. He says it shameful even to anticipate and protect against wickedness, as if it were inevitably part of the polis. The Athenian is forced to acknowledge that he and his fellow citizens are not gods legislating for gods, as much as he might wish this were the case, and he thinks he knows what that would mean. We are, he says, the children of men legislating for the seeds men, and there is no blame in anticipating the “seed that cannot be cooked” (853b–d). But there is an absurd assumption at play here: that the process of becoming virtuous is analogous to boiling seeds, and that a person would naturally become virtuous once exposed for sufficient time to the appropriate influences. Even in the best possible human world it will always be necessary to make room for freedom, i.e. to make room for the young to break with the principles in which the city is rooted in order that the city may be renewed as a place for the divine in nature. From this point of view it is absolutely inevitable that there will be problems with impiety and impious attitudes in the city, for impiety is a necessary aspect of the city’s process of regenerating itself. The city re-emerges with each generation affirming the possibility that things could be radically otherwise.

At a certain inevitable stage of educational development one adopts the stance of a person in general, breaking with the familiar, in order to begin to see for oneself and to establish oneself as one’s own. This is the wellspring from which philosophy flows. The impious view that soul is younger than body is implied by this period of adolescence, which has its constant and abiding institutional correlative in money and property. Money and property should not be thought of only as the unfortunate occasions for impiety but as the supporting and necessary constituent parts of the environment in which the person in general, i.e. the citizen, can emerge and hold herself in tension with the given context of her emergence.

With property we are dealing with aspects of the city that remain steadfastly “outside the law,” constantly undermining and challenging the efficacy the law, and yet it is an aspect of the city that is inexorably part of everyday life. Books 11 and 12 offer sustained reflections on structural and institutional insolence that are irreducible and necessary to the birth of virtue in the city. Customary, daily, and necessary practices contain a degree of institutional impiety that is simply necessary not just for the bodily functioning of the polis but for its health as a distinctively human city. It seems that the Laws directs the lawgiver neither to expel nor to purify the practices that stand outside the law but to accommodate them and manage them, so that they may be used as resources to the extent possible. This is the nature of the ending that will serve as “the perfect and permanent safeguard of what has been begotten,” that the laws be able to accommodate and even draw on their own undoing. This work of accommodation is the explicit purpose of the Assembly, and the discussion of the Assembly occurs at the end of the Laws after the Athenian has been able to clarify the ambiguous power of the city’s material foundations.

The Assembly [958d–968b]

Turning now to the end of the Laws in Book 12, we will examine the way in which the Assembly (image) instituted there responds to the problem of completion. The value of this final section will be to demonstrate that the Assembly has the primary function of transforming an unavoidable weakness of the city into a resource for education in virtue.

The various types of ending that introduce the Assembly in Book 12 constructively recall discussions of reaching completion from earlier in the Laws, specifically the analogies to works of art, e.g. the Book 6, 769–772d discussion of the Guardians. There the Athenian refers to painters who keep touching things up and never reach an end (image). He draws analogy to someone who gets it in his mind to paint something as beautiful as possible and requires of his work “that this never get worse but always better” (image image) (769c). This painter, being mortal, would leave someone behind to constantly touch up and improve the painting, guarding the figure against time.19 Similarly, the lawgiver will want to write the laws with complete precision (image image), but like the painter will discover “very many necessarily left incomplete” (image) (769d). The work of law-giving is thus never finished. The noticeable point is that a proper ending will entail coming to terms with a constitutive incapacity to reach an end. The work of establishing the laws will therefore be ongoing, and this work will be done by the Assembly outlined precisely in its composition and purpose in the final ten pages of the dialogue.20

Our study of the Assembly begins with the three different modes of engaging the laws. The first mode of engagement with the laws comes up in the ordinances governing Travel Abroad [949e–953e], where travel is regulated in service of receiving and defending the laws through understanding rather than habit. The second mode of engagement is discussed under ordinances governing the process of becoming a judge [956b–958d]. And the third is the description of the Assembly itself [958d–968b]. This comparison will help us to see more precisely what is at stake in the work of the Assembly.

The laws governing “Travel Abroad” (949e–953e) are partially for the sake of confirming the correctness of the laws as established and partially for testing and strengthening the truth of these laws. The first type of observation mission will be sent abroad because Magnesia must mix with other cities in order to have a good reputation and to be looked upon by “the Sun and the other gods” as having good laws (950d); these missions are called “political trips.” The observers must not be younger than forty, and they must not travel in private capacity. Upon return, they are tasked with teaching the young that the legal customs pertaining to other regimes are inferior. The higher level observation mission consists of members no less than fifty years old, no more than sixty, who spend as many as ten years (as they choose) abroad under the aegis of the Guardians of the Laws (image), and they must report to the Guardians when they return. These missions (1) observe the legal customs among the rest of humanity, and (2) seek out divine human beings with whom it is altogether worthwhile to keep company (image), and who will (3) explain “some utterance” concerning the laying down of laws (image), or education (image), or upbringing (image) (952b).

On the surface of things, it is not clear at first why Magnesia engages the outside world at all. These two modes of engagement only expose the city to the corruption and sickness of innovation (949e), where innovation is the very thing the Nocturnal Council (6.758a) protects against. As we look a little further, however, it becomes clear that Magnesia does stand under compulsion to own itself and its customs, which means to possess itself in some way superior to mere momentum of habit. At 951b the Athenian says that laws governing the sending and receiving of strangers do honor to Zeus (953e) by bringing the city into contact with others and preventing the city from becoming isolated. An isolated city could not be “tame” (image) and “perfect” (image), he says, because it would be “unsociable” (image). A city would not be able to defend laws if it had accepted these laws merely out of habit (951b) and not knowledge (image). The ability to defend its laws well is the condition for entering into friendship and doing honor to Zeus, the god of friendship.

The value of observation missions, then, is to help the city transform its laws from habit into knowledge. The mechanism by which this happens is that the members of the observation missions must take on and endure the reversibility of their inherited practices by exposing themselves (and their souls) to the danger and sickness of detachment from inherited customs. The observers become uprooted, like ships at sea, and to an extent they allow themselves to become detached from the city’s inherited ways. The law students play host to the powers of reversibility, corruption, and innovation, but do not become sick, or at least not crippled in the process. To the contrary, they become more intelligent and more virtuous. From this point of view, the concrete work of the ambassadors who travel abroad might not involve changing much, just details of the laws, but they would do so having plumbed the depths of the laws and exposed them to the light of critical scrutiny.

The openness to the contingency and reversibility of inherited practices that one sees in the observation missions sent abroad is also an important resource in the process of becoming a judge (956b–958d). The Athenian says that of all the studies, the study of established laws is the most powerful way to make oneself “better” (image) (if the laws are “correctly established”), which the Athenian says confirms the truth of the etymological connection between the name for intelligence (image) and the name for “our divine and wondrous law” (image image). The education of a judge consists in the study of the “written things” (image) broadly construed concerning what is just, noble, and good. The juror (image)21 in training must use the writings of the law-giver as an internalized (image) “antidote” (image)

… to guide himself and the city: providing for the good rooting and growth of the just, and for the bad a change as great as possible from ignorance and unrestraint and cowardice and altogether from every injustice, for all the wicked whose opinions are curable. (957d957e)

Unlike the observation mission, the judge’s “antidote” seems to ward off anything that disagrees with the writings of the lawgiver. The practice of executing those with fixed opinion—as a method of “curing” them—suggests that the judge perpetuates the law by enforcing its commands. This would also imply that “intelligence” (image) is not a matter of interpreting or understanding the law but enforcing it correctly.22

As stipulated in Book 6 (766d), however, judges are required to go beyond what is said on either side of a dispute. In order to render judgment it is necessary to go further than the testimony of contending parties. In order to be a judge, one would have to be able to go beyond the writings of the written law to interpret what more it says, and precisely this is meant by “intelligence.” The discussion of “Travel Abroad” (949e) and the process of becoming a judge demonstrate that the city needs citizens who are able to go beyond the law, so as to address the possibility of corruption and perversion that animate the laws at their core. A judge must take on, even internalize, the possibility not that one thing or another will be different in its particular interpretation, but that everything will be turned upside down and seen in a wholly different light. The work of internalizing the powers of corruption, detachment, and innovation, in the city will be performed at the highest level by the Assembly (image), which is described by the Athenian as an anchor that will “preserve” (image) all things we wish for (image)” (961c).

The Assembly is the appropriate savior in each of the city’s activities, just as in an animal it is the soul and the head, or sight and intelligence, that preserve the animal, and on a ship it is the pilot and the sailors that “nous-about-what mixed with senses would be preservation for ships in storms and in fair weather? On board, don’t the pilot and sailors together save themselves and the other things on ship by mixing the senses with piloting-nous?” (961e).23 According to the text, the Assembly (1) knows the city’s goal, (2) knows in what way to attain the goal, and (3) gives advice. Furthermore, it performs these tasks in the face of the natural and necessary innovation. The Athenian says that legal customs wander (image) because different parts of the legislated code address different aims (962d), and the Assembly must be able to re-found the laws in order to preserve the city. The role of intelligence is to guide, and the city is guided by the Assembly.

The final law, according to the Athenian, is whether the Nocturnal Assembly (image) is to become guard of the city, for the sake of safekeeping (image) (968a–b). Cleinias cannot see this law passed quickly enough, but as eager as the Athenian is to follow suit, there is something standing in the way. Before this law can be established the Assembly must first be enacted in deed. At present, the Athenian can only go so far as to identify the necessary preparations for establishing this body, which include “teaching through prolonged companionship” (image).24 Even going this far poses problems: it is not easy to discover the proper subjects of education, or to find the person who can make this discovery, or indeed to become a student of that person. And then there is the difficulty of determining at what times and for how long a subject should be taken up (968d). The Athenian finally declares the core issue here:

it is vain to say these matters in writings, for it wouldn’t be clear to the learners themselves whether the subject were being learned at the right time, until knowledge of the subject had, doubtless, come into being within the soul of each. (968d–e)

The Athenian clarifies that things are not indescribable secrets, but neither are they capable of being described beforehand. Thus at the end of the laws the subject returns to “education and upbringing,” and the Athenian refers for the first time to the “Divine Assembly” (image image … image) that is now their hope, and the risk they must undertake to bring their project to completion. The last thing the Athenian says is to extol the “Divine Assembly” to be for its unprecedented “virtue of safekeeping” (image) (969c).

Conclusion

The purpose of this essay has been to show that in spite of signs that Books 11 and 12 of the Laws are not edited, they are nonetheless unified as an important concluding study of institutional impiety that is an ineradicable material basis of life in the polis and a resource for its flourishing. Human beings are not gods, and they are not quite at home among things, property, money, etc. As such they are to a degree incapable of belonging to the gods or occupying their place and time completely. Placelessness has been in this essay attributed to an inexhaustible power of reversibility in things, but also in customs and the symbols of power, even in language itself, all of which tacitly support the impious view that body is “older than” the soul. Rather than doing away with this outlaw power of reversibility, I have suggested that these are the moments at which the soul gains distance from the received ways of doing things enough to embark on a philosophical project. This distance does not come without its risks, and the subsequent ambiguity entailed is what most of all marks this city as “second best.”

The Athenian is only able to take the project at hand as far as the moment of its actual inception, at which point the Assembly would be founded. The end of the Laws is therefore not quite the beginning of Magnesia, insofar as the law governing that Assembly must wait for the establishment of that Assembly, which falls outside of their project. The finishing touch of “irreversibility” (Atropos) will be the establishment of an organ that will host the power of reversibility inherent to the material basis of existence, both internally in contracts, retail trade, etc., and externally in its relation to other cultures and norms. It is fitting then that the Assembly must consist of elders and young people rather than philosopher-kings, for a human city must draw on the power of dialogue, especially the dialogue between the old and the young, to preserve its soul.

Notes

1. Interestingly, this is simultaneously a process of arriving at a beginning, for in the process of the investigation the Athenian says that they are not yet lawgivers, but becoming lawgivers, so they are not only arriving at a conclusion but getting closer to the beginning of lawgiving.

2. Mitchell Miller suggests in this volume that Laws 11–12 seem unedited up to the introduction of the Nocturnal Council at 960c. I will be maintaining that the incompleteness Miller notices in the Laws should not be interpreted to imply that the final books do not serve a particular function of their own within the overall structure of the dialogue.

3. The translations in this chapter are mine, but I have received substantial assistance from Patricia Fagan.

4. Pangle translates image here as “procedures.” There are at least two translations necessary to capture the meaning image carries in the Laws. On the one hand image can be translated as “penalties” or “a suit,” which is the sense of the term adopted in Laws 9 when the speakers turn from the laws proper to the penalties enforcing them. But image can also refer to the “system of courts,” which as we shall see is the sense of the term appropriate to the Laws 12 turn from contracts to the organization of the judiciary.

5. The sheer diversity of the topics intervening between the beginning of Laws 11 and the turn to the image in Laws 12 tends to undermine any single organizing principle. Laws governing abusive speech, slander, oratory (i.e., improper use of language) in Book 11 seem unrelated to laws governing military organization or those governing the city auditors in Laws 12. It is not clear what any of these topics would have to do with laws governing poisoning and violent injury.

6. What I call “contracts” Miller limits to the first of four divisions of Books 11 and 12. In his essay in the present volume, Miller divides these books into the following parts: (1) movable property and commercial transactions, (2) family law, (3) personal injury, (4) agents of the state acting in official capacities. By contrast, I take everything from the beginning of Laws 11 (913a) to the middle of Laws 12 (956b), almost forty-three Stephanus pages, to be responding to the problem and necessity of contractual relations within the city, followed first by the discussion of the “system of courts” (image) (956b–960b) and the discussion of the Assembly (image) (960b–end).

7. Miller takes the promised return to the image to occur in the Laws 9 discussion of “penalties,” following the completed discussion of the offices and the laws. Although I see a few reasons why someone would interpret the text this way, I disagree with Miller on the grounds that the promise in Laws 6 is to continue the discussion of the courts of justice (image), which the Athenian characterizes as not quite ruling offices (image) and not completely different from ruling offices, and most importantly as some provisional outline given from outside (image) that still needs to be filled out. Thus the promised return to the image cannot concern the circumstances of punishment, as it does in Book 9, but must rather concern “the parts of the entire city” (image) (956b), as it does in Laws 12.

8. It seems the Athenian is referring to Hesiod. This reference to the many earlier things that were “sung beautifully” may be a reference (1) back to Laws 7, 799b where the sequence of regulations was interrupted by the “strange argument about laws” according to which anyone who fails to sing the songs ordained for each of the gods will be excluded or exiled, and anyone who refuses to abide exile can be charged with impiety by “anyone who wants to bring the charge.” There the Fates were mentioned as those gods to whom the citizens sacrifice in common to sanctify the ordained songs. However, there is no mention here either of singing to the Fates or of their designations. It may also refer (2) back to Laws 3, 692a when the self-destruction of Argos and Messene is compared to the self-preservation of the Lacedaemonian system. There the Athenian mentions the “three saviors” of the Spartan regime, referring to the splitting of authority that lent that system its measure and cured its fever (692a). But here the Fates are not even mentioned by name. The “many earlier things” that were “sung beautifully” might also refer to (3) the identification of the three Fates in the closing sections of Republic 10—Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos—who sing of what has been, what is, and of what is going to be (Republic, 617c). In Republic 10, each soul once having chosen its life goes forward in order first to Lachesis (dispenser of lots), who sends each away with the daemon he had chosen to act as a guardian of the life and a fulfiller of the choice; the daemon then leads the soul to Clotho (spinner), where the soul turns the spindle and ratifies the life it had chosen; then after touching her (i.e., Clotho) the daemon leads the soul to the spinning of Atropos (inevitable or unturnable), “making the threads irreversible” (620e). Here there is mention of the singing of the Fates and their designation, but there is no mention of anything being sung by the poet or philosopher. The reference might also be back to (4) Hesiod’s Theogony, which is explicitly marked out as a song, and a song in which the three Fates are designated; although the only mention made at Theogony 905–906 is that Zeus of the Counsels gave the Fates the greatest honor: “Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos, who release / to moral human beings good and bad (things) to have.”

9. As Sara Brill remarks in her essay on Laws 10, the unity of the city will in some sense be founded on the institution of property and not, as in at least the case of the Guardians of the Republic, on the abolition of this institution. As Brill notes, the preservation of this institution is accompanied by an acknowledgement of the limitations of mortal nature and its distance from the divine, as mentioned in Laws 5 (739c–e).

10. Pangle comments that the lawgiver in question seems to be Solon.

11. In terms of the “image of our education and lack of it” in Republic 7, it is not possible to be in the cave if it were not for the impious act of Prometheus in which fire was stolen from Zeus and given to human beings. The abstract relationship to place and time is made possible by fire, by technology, and it is the condition for life in the cave.

12. John Sallis has pointed out that the gift exchange, referenced here in passing, seems to become untenable in Magnesia. It seems that the consequence of the laws governing property would be either to mandate gift-giving relationships in which services are traded for services, or to attenuate or even undermine the possibility of gift-giving in Magnesia. The status of the city as “second best” implies that it must withdraw its support for the very practices that would promote virtue and friendship in order to make room for a city that is unable to achieve virtue as a whole.

13. As Patricia Fagan makes clear in her chapter in this volume, the dangers of terrain, especially the sea, are reducible to the dangers posed by contact with other people and the “reversibility” that contact would introduce into the customs and character of Magnesia. Notably, it is not simply the encounter with different customs that would cause the problem but the introduction of money-making. Fagan expands this point with reference to the habits of cowardice and changeability that take root in people who are too dependent upon the sea, as evidenced in the very style in which marines wage war. This problem of instability in customs and character is at a rudimentary level solved by placing Magnesia away from the sea and protecting its citizens from the evils of retail and mercantilism. The lasting solution will involve the sending out of special observers who will be able to internalize and thereby master the forces of corruption, to which we will turn below.

14. As Mitchell Miller points out, the city under discussion in the Laws is “second-best” insofar as it can only imitate, but not achieve, the paradigm example of political life under the rule of Cronus. The cause of this falling short introduced in Laws 4 is the “birth, nurture, and education” (740a) of human being, and the proposals for land ownership and private property I have been examining are meant to approximate the divine to the extent possible for the human.

15. This final point regarding the effect of the terrain on the virtue of citizens is clearly elucidated in Patricia Fagan’s chapter in this volume.

16. The natural imperfection of human beings is also characterized in Laws 5 as an excessive self-love that is a cause of all harms (731e) (also noted by Brill).

17. This echoes a point the Athenian made in Laws 4: “So Cronus was aware, just as we recounted, that no human nature is sufficient to human affairs, when managing all human affairs autocratically, without becoming full of arrogant violence and injustice” (713c). Human beings need something external to themselves in order to moderate their natural tendency toward insolence, injustice, and impiety. Even if they have adequate knowledge as an expert, still they would need the law to prevent them from becoming corrupt. Mitchell Miller in his essay in this volume not only points out the human dependence upon law but also uses this characterization of human nature to clarify the horizons within which the conversation of the Laws takes shape. Miller reads the limitation of human nature to be the inescapable (perhaps because uneducable) claim that our own pleasures and pains make on us. Cf. Aristotle, Politics 3.1287a, for a discussion of the political climate of distrust in which abstract norms are preferred to individual expertise. Aristotle compares this climate to one in which people would rather use a book to heal themselves than trust a doctor.

18. The most impious of the impious persons is the one who maintains the argument that the gods can be “appeased by the unjust,” i.e. turned, reversed willy-nilly. The argument that responds to this impiety is the third, in which the gods are shown to be impassive.

19. This is reminiscent of, but apparently the converse of, the discussion of Egyptian Art in Laws 2, 656d–657b: Egyptian Art is praised for introducing no innovations; literally for 10,000 years the paintings were made “in no way” more beautiful or ugly.

20. When the “perfect and permanent safeguard” is introduced, it is referred to as the “[Assembly (image)] previously discussed” (961a). The Assembly mentioned here is most likely the Assembly mentioned at Laws 12.951d just ten pages earlier in the discussion of the procedures governing travel abroad (949e–954a). That Assembly consists of a mixture of young and elderly men. It meets every day from dawn until the sun has risen (crepuscule). It consists of the priests who have obtained the prizes of excellence, the ten Guardians of the Laws who are eldest at any given time, the new Supervisor of Education and all retired ones, each of whom attends with a young man of thirty or forty, chosen as they please. Its purpose is to re-found the laws of the city, placing the ones nobly laid down on “firmer footing” and correcting others if they are lacking something, for “without this observation and search a city will never remain perfect image” (951c). Its purpose is to deal with innovation, deviation from the established norms. The discussion of “Travel Abroad” is situated in “Harms to the City” (and their redress). Because Magnesia does not engage in commerce, it must be prepared to deal with “innovations,” which are the greatest of all injuries to cities governed by means of correct laws (949e–950a). There are other “councils” mentioned. In Laws 6 there is a council (image) with 360 members consisting of four parts of ninety members elected in a way that strikes a mean between Monarchic and Democratic regimes (756b–757a). There are the few members (image) of this council, divided into twelve parts, who will keep watch at night to give or receive information, and to keep guard against innovation (6.758a–d). And the Guardians described at Laws 6.769a–e seem to have a similar function to this council in Laws 12. At Laws 6.764a the same Greek noun is used as in Laws 12, but it is used to describe “the common assembly” (image). At Laws 10.909a, those who are impious because of a lack of intelligence are to be kept in the Moderation Tank for no less than five years and have contact with no citizen except the Nocturnal Assembly (image), who talk to him only for admonishment and salvation of the soul. At Laws 10.908a, the second of the city’s prisons is to be built at the meeting place of “the assembly of the ones holding nightly assemblies” (image image), and that is the Moderation Tank.

21. If this is an Athenian context, the word has the sense of a “juror” more than a “judge.”

22. Continuing the above quote, we can see that the juror’s judgment is not directed at the law as much as it is directed at the souls that are subject to the law: “… but to those whose opinions are truly spun out, prescribing death as a remedy to souls so disposed, which justly would be said, these sorts of jurors and leaders would become worthy of the whole city’s praise” (957e–958a).

23. In armies it is generals who aim at victory and superiority over enemies; in the art of medicine it is doctors that aim at provision of health for the body.

24. Cf. Socrates’ own references to specifically philosophical companionship in Theaetetus (150d–e).