Plato · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
ATHENIAN: Now then, what should we imagine this city will be like? I don't mean asking what its name is now, or what it will need to be called later on—though that will probably come from wherever it's founded, or some place-name, or the name of a river or spring, or of some local god, lending its own fame to the newly built city. What I really want to ask about it is this: will it be a coastal city, or inland? CLEINIAS: Well, stranger, the city we've been discussing lies about eighty stadia from the sea. ATHENIAN: And are there harbors along that coast, or is it harborless altogether? CLEINIAS: It has as good harbors as one could ask for, stranger. ATHENIAN: My word, that's something. And what about the land around it—does it produce everything, or is it lacking in some things? CLEINIAS: It's lacking in almost nothing. ATHENIAN: Will there be some neighboring city nearby? CLEINIAS: Not really, which is why it's being settled there. There was some old evacuation of the place long ago that left this land empty for an unimaginably long time. ATHENIAN: And what about plains, mountains, and forest? How is each of these apportioned to us? CLEINIAS: It resembles the nature of the rest of Crete as a whole. ATHENIAN: You'd call it more rugged than level, then. CLEINIAS: Yes, certainly.
ATHENIAN: Then it wouldn't be beyond hope of acquiring virtue. If it were going to be coastal, with fine harbors, and not self-sufficient but lacking many things, it would need some great savior and divinely inspired lawgivers, if it weren't to end up with many varied and base habits, given a nature like that. As it is, it has some comfort in those eighty stadia. Still, it lies closer to the sea than it should, exactly to the degree you say its harbors are good—though even that much is something to be grateful for. A sea lying next to a country is a pleasant thing day to day, but in truth it's a bitter, briny neighbor. Filling the land with trade and money-making through retail commerce, it breeds shifting, untrustworthy habits in people's souls, and makes the city itself distrustful and unfriendly both toward its own people and toward other nations as well. Against this the land's being self-sufficient offers some comfort—but being rugged, it clearly can't produce abundantly and produce everything at once. If it had that combination, generating large exports, it would in turn get filled up with silver and gold coin in exchange—and there is, one might almost say, no single thing more ruinous than that for a city's acquiring noble and just habits, as we said earlier, if we remember. CLEINIAS: We do remember, and we agree we were right then, and are right now. ATHENIAN: Well then—what about shipbuilding timber? How is our region provided in that respect? CLEINIAS: There's no fir worth mentioning, nor pine, and not much cypress either. One might find a little stone pine and plane tree, which shipbuilders always need for the fittings inside their vessels. ATHENIAN: And that, too, wouldn't be a bad thing for the land's nature. CLEINIAS: Why so? ATHENIAN: Because it isn't easy for a city to imitate its enemies' bad practices when it can't. CLEINIAS: What in what I've said were you looking at when you said that? ATHENIAN: My good man, keep watching me in light of what was said at the start—that Cretan laws look to one single thing, and you two said that this one thing was warfare. And I, taking that up, said that if such laws are established with an eye to virtue in general, that's fine, but I couldn't fully agree that they aim at only a part of virtue rather than the whole of it. So now I ask you to keep watch over me in turn as I lay down these present laws, in case I make any law that doesn't tend toward virtue, or only toward a part of virtue.
ATHENIAN: For I propose that the only law rightly laid down is the one that, like an archer, always aims at that one thing which alone is constantly accompanied by something good, and leaves aside absolutely everything else—whether it's wealth or anything else of that sort, when it happens to exist apart from what was just mentioned. Now the bad imitation of enemies I spoke of arises like this: when someone lives by the sea and is harassed by enemies—for instance—I'll tell it not wishing to bear any grudge against you—Minos once forced the people living in Attica to pay a harsh tribute, since he possessed great power at sea, while they had not yet acquired warships, as they have now, nor was their land full of shipbuilding timber so that they could easily provide themselves with naval power. So they weren't able, by imitating naval warfare and becoming sailors themselves, to fend off their enemies right away. In fact it would have served them better to lose seven times seven children, before becoming sailors instead of steady foot-soldiers and being trained to leap off ships often, run quickly back to them again, and think it no shame not to dare to die standing their ground when the enemy attacked, but instead to have excuses ready and very handy for throwing away their weapons and fleeing in what people call, not shamefully, a retreat. These are the sort of phrases that tend to follow from naval infantry service—not deserving countless praises, but quite the opposite. Bad habits should never be trained into people, least of all into the best part of the citizens. And one could get this very point from Homer too—that such a practice was not honorable. For his Odysseus rebukes Agamemnon, when the Achaeans were then being pressed hard in battle by the Trojans, for ordering the ships hauled down into the sea; Odysseus grows angry with him and says: 'You who bid us, with war and its clamor still raging, drag our well-benched ships down to the sea, so that the Trojans' wishes may be fulfilled even more, though they already have their desire, and sheer ruin come toppling down on us? Once the ships are hauled toward the water, the Achaeans will not stand fast in the fighting—they'll look back and shrink from the battle. There your plan will prove ruinous, in the very thing you propose.'
ATHENIAN: So Homer, too, recognized this—that it's a bad thing for triremes to stand beside hoplites fighting on land; even lions would learn to flee from deer if trained by such habits. Besides this, the naval power of cities, even while it preserves them, does not award honors to the finest part of their fighting forces. For that power comes about through skill in piloting, and command of fifty-oar crews, and rowing, exercised by all sorts of people, not all of them serious men, and one couldn't rightly assign honors to each in turn. Yet how could a constitution still be sound if it lacks that? CLEINIAS: Nearly impossible. And yet, stranger, we Cretans say that the sea battle at Salamis, fought by the Greeks against the barbarians, saved Greece. ATHENIAN: Indeed, most Greeks and barbarians alike say so. But we—I mean myself and Megillus here—say that the land battle at Marathon, and the one at Plataea, the one began the salvation of the Greeks, the other completed it, and that these made the Greeks better, while the sea-battles did not make them better—if we may speak that way about the battles that saved us together back then; for besides Salamis I'll add to your account the sea-battle at Artemisium as well. But since we're now looking at the virtue of a constitution, and examining the nature of the land and the arrangement of laws, we don't hold merely being kept safe and simply existing as the most valuable thing for human beings, as most people do, but rather becoming and being as good as possible for as long as one exists. This too, I believe, we've said before. CLEINIAS: Quite so. ATHENIAN: Let's consider only this, then: whether we're traveling the same road, the one that is best for founding and legislating for cities. CLEINIAS: Very much so. ATHENIAN: Tell me, then, what comes next: who will the people settling with you be? Will it be anyone who wishes, from the whole of Crete, on the assumption that a surplus population has built up in each of the cities beyond what the land can feed? For surely you're not gathering together anyone who wishes from all of Greece.
ATHENIAN: And yet I do see some among you settled in this land from Argos and Aegina and elsewhere in Greece. But tell me, where do you say the present body of citizens will actually come from now? CLEINIAS: It seems it will come from the whole of Crete, and among the other Greeks it seems they're most inclined to accept settlers from the Peloponnese. And indeed what you just said is true—that some are from Argos, and in fact the clan held in highest esteem here at present, the Gortynian clan, happens to have emigrated from Gortyn in the Peloponnese. ATHENIAN: Then the founding of a city wouldn't be equally easy for all cities, when it doesn't happen in the manner of swarms of bees, one single stock moving from one land, friend among friends, driven by some lack of room in their territory or forced by other such hardships. Sometimes, too, a portion of a city may be forced by factional violence to go into exile elsewhere; and before now an entire city has fled as a body, utterly overwhelmed in war by a stronger power. All these cases make founding and legislating easier in one way, harder in another. Being a single stock, sharing one language and one set of laws, has a certain friendliness to it, sharing in sacred rites and all such things; but it doesn't easily tolerate different laws and other institutions than those it had at home. And sometimes a group that has become factious because of the badness of its own laws, and out of habit still seeks to follow the same customs that ruined it before, becomes difficult and hard to persuade for the one founding and legislating. On the other hand, a population of every sort flowing together into one place might perhaps be more willing to submit to some new laws, but getting it to breathe as one—like a team of horses yoked together, as they say, breathing in unison—that takes a long time and is very difficult indeed. But truly, lawgiving and the founding of cities is the most perfect test there is of human virtue. CLEINIAS: Likely so. But tell me more clearly what you have in mind in saying this. ATHENIAN: My good man, in going back over the subject of lawgivers and examining it, I'm likely to say something rather poor. But if we're speaking to some purpose, nothing will come of holding back. And yet why am I hesitating? Nearly everything human seems to be like this. CLEINIAS: What are you referring to?
ATHENIAN: I was about to say that no human being ever legislates anything; rather, chances and mishaps of every kind, falling out in every sort of way, legislate all things for us. Either some war violently overturns constitutions and changes laws, or the hardship of grinding poverty does; and diseases force many innovations too, when plagues strike, and unfavorable seasons persisting over many years, again and again. Anyone foreseeing all this might rush to say just what I said a moment ago—that no mortal legislates anything, and that nearly all human affairs are matters of chance. And yet one could say the same about seamanship and piloting, medicine, and generalship, and seem to speak well—but one could equally well say something else about these same arts. CLEINIAS: What's that? ATHENIAN: That god governs all things, and along with god, chance and opportunity govern all human affairs. Still, it's gentler to concede that a third thing must go along with these—skill. For whether piloting joins forces with opportunity in a storm or not, makes, I would say, a huge difference. Isn't that so? CLEINIAS: Yes. ATHENIAN: And wouldn't the same hold, by the same reasoning, for the other cases too—and so must be granted for lawgiving as well: that when all the other things that must coincide for a country to live happily fall into place, the lawgiver, holding fast to truth, must apply himself to whichever city happens to come his way. CLEINIAS: Very true. ATHENIAN: So wouldn't the man skilled in each of the things mentioned be able to make the right prayer, as to what he'd need, over and above what chance provides him, if only skill were added? CLEINIAS: Certainly. ATHENIAN: And all the others just mentioned, if asked to state their prayer, would state it, wouldn't they? CLEINIAS: Of course. ATHENIAN: And I think the lawgiver would do the same. CLEINIAS: I think so too. ATHENIAN: Come then, let's say to him: lawgiver, what sort of city, and in what condition, shall we give you, so that, once you have it, you can manage the rest of the city's affairs adequately on your own? CLEINIAS: What would be right to say after that? ATHENIAN: We're stating this on the lawgiver's behalf, aren't we? CLEINIAS: Yes.
ATHENIAN: Here's the case. Suppose someone says to me, 'Give me a city ruled by a single strongman,' and let that strongman be young, with a good memory, quick to learn, brave, and naturally magnificent. Now, whatever quality we said earlier must accompany all the parts of excellence—let that same quality accompany this dominated soul too, if the other traits are going to do any good at all. CLEINIAS: I think he means self-control, Megillus—isn't that what our friend is pointing to? ATHENIAN: Yes, Cleinias, but the popular kind, not the sort someone might dress up grandly and insist must really be wisdom in order to count as self-control. I mean the thing that shows up naturally in children and even animals from birth—some creatures being unable to master their pleasures, others managing to control them. That trait, we said, isn't worth much on its own compared to the many so-called goods, when it stands alone. You follow what I mean, I think. CLEINIAS: Certainly. ATHENIAN: So let our strongman have this nature added to those other natural gifts, if a city is going to acquire, as quickly and as excellently as possible, the constitution that will let it live the happiest life once it has it. For there is no faster or better arrangement for establishing a constitution than this, nor could there ever be. CLEINIAS: How exactly, and by what reasoning, could one claim to be speaking correctly here, stranger? ATHENIAN: It's easy enough to grasp, Cleinias—how this follows naturally from the way things are. CLEINIAS: What do you mean? If a strongman arose who was young, self-controlled, quick to learn, had a good memory, was brave, and magnificent? ATHENIAN: Add 'fortunate'—not lucky in some other respect, but in this: that in his time there arises a lawgiver worthy of praise, and some stroke of fortune brings the two of them together. Once that happens, the god has accomplished nearly everything he does when he wants some city to fare exceptionally well. Second best is when two such rulers arise together; and proportionally harder still the more there are, and easier the fewer there are, in the opposite direction. CLEINIAS: You're saying, it seems, that the best city would come out of a one-man rule, provided it has a supreme lawgiver and an orderly strongman, and that the change to this from such a starting point would happen most easily and quickly—second easiest from an oligarchy, is that right?—and third from a democracy. ATHENIAN: Not at all. First from one-man rule, yes; second from a kingship; third from some form of democracy. But the fourth, oligarchy, would find it hardest of all to allow such a transformation to arise, since in it the most people hold power.
ATHENIAN: We say this happens whenever a true lawgiver arises by nature, and some common strength falls to him alongside those who hold the greatest power in the city. Wherever this power is smallest in number but strongest in force—as in a one-man rule—there the change tends to happen fastest and most easily. CLEINIAS: How so? We don't follow. ATHENIAN: Yet we've said it, not once but many times, I think. Perhaps you've simply never seen a city under one-man rule. CLEINIAS: No, and I have no desire to see such a sight. ATHENIAN: And yet you would see in it exactly what we're now describing. CLEINIAS: What's that? ATHENIAN: No great labor or long stretch of time is needed for a strongman who wants to change a city's habits: he need only lead the way himself, in whatever direction he wishes—toward practices of excellence, urging the citizens on, or toward the opposite—doing everything first by setting the example in his own conduct, praising and honoring some things, steering others toward blame, and dishonoring anyone who won't obey in each of his actions. CLEINIAS: And how do we suppose the rest of the citizens would quickly fall in line with someone who wields such persuasion combined with force? ATHENIAN: Let no one convince us, my friends, that there is any faster or easier way for a city to change its laws than through the leadership of those in power—not now, nor ever in the future. This isn't impossible for us, nor would it be hard to bring about; the hard part is this: that it happens so rarely over so long a stretch of time. But whenever it does happen, it produces countless goods, indeed every good, in whatever city it arises. CLEINIAS: What exactly do you mean? ATHENIAN: Whenever a divine passion for self-controlled and just practices arises in some great power—whether ruling as a monarchy, or excelling through superior wealth or birth—or if someone should point to the nature of Nestor, who, the story goes, outstripped every man alive as a speaker, and outstripped even his own eloquence in self-control. This, they say, happened at Troy, though certainly not in our time. But if such a man has existed, or will exist, or is even now among us, he himself lives a blessed life, and blessed too are those who hear the words that come from his self-controlled mouth.
ATHENIAN: And the same reasoning applies to every kind of power as a whole: whenever the greatest power in a human being coincides with wisdom and self-control, then the birth of the best constitution and of such laws comes about; otherwise it never will. Let this, then, stand as a kind of myth we've spoken like an oracle, and let it show both that it is hard for a city to become well-governed, and also that, if what we're describing should ever happen, it would come about faster and more easily than anything else by far. CLEINIAS: How so? ATHENIAN: Let's try, fitting our words to your city, to mold its laws in speech, like old men playing at being children. CLEINIAS: Let's proceed, then, and delay no further. ATHENIAN: Let us call upon a god for the founding of the city. May he hear us, and hearing, come to us gracious and kind, to join in shaping the city and its laws. CLEINIAS: May he come indeed. ATHENIAN: But what sort of constitution do we actually have in mind to prescribe for the city? CLEINIAS: What exactly do you mean? Speak more clearly still. Do you mean some form of democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, or kingship? Surely you don't mean one-man rule—that's not what we'd suppose you mean. ATHENIAN: Come then, which of you two would like to answer first, by telling me which of these your own homeland's constitution is? MEGILLUS: Wouldn't it be fairer for me, the elder, to speak first? CLEINIAS: Perhaps. MEGILLUS: Well then, stranger, when I really think about the constitution at Sparta, I can't tell you offhand what to call it. It seems to me to resemble one-man rule—the office of the ephors is astonishingly tyrannical in its power there—yet at times it seems to me to resemble a democracy more than any other city. But to deny outright that it's an aristocracy would be absurd; and yet there's also a kingship for life in it, one that both we ourselves and everyone else calls the oldest of all. So, asked suddenly like this, I genuinely can't say, having sorted it out, which of these constitutions it is. CLEINIAS: I seem to be suffering the very same difficulty as you, Megillus—I'm quite at a loss to insist confidently that the constitution at Knossos is any one of these.
ATHENIAN: And that's because, my excellent friends, you really do share in constitutions—but what we've just named are not constitutions at all, but rather cities inhabited under the mastery of some parts of themselves over others enslaved to them, each named after the power of its particular master. But if a city must really be named after something, it ought to be named after the god who truly rules over those who possess reason. CLEINIAS: And who is this god? ATHENIAN: Should we still make some small use of a myth, if we're going to explain what's now being asked in a fitting way? CLEINIAS: Isn't that just what we should do? ATHENIAN: Certainly. Of the cities whose forms of settlement we've already gone through, there is said to have existed, long before any of them, a rule and a way of life under Cronus, most blessed of all, and whichever of our present cities is best governed today holds an imitation of it. CLEINIAS: It seems we should very much like to hear about it. ATHENIAN: So it seems to me too—that's why I've brought it into our discussion. CLEINIAS: You're quite right to do so; and if you go on to complete the story, since it belongs here, you'll be doing exactly right. ATHENIAN: I'll do as you ask. We have received a report of that blessed life back then: that everything was abundant and grew of its own accord. And the reason given for this is something like the following. Cronus, knowing—just as we ourselves have concluded—that no human nature is capable of ruling all human affairs with absolute power without becoming filled with insolence and injustice, appointed over our cities at that time not human beings as kings and rulers, but beings of a more divine and better stock: spirits—just as we ourselves now do with our flocks and all the tame herds we keep. We don't set cattle to rule over cattle, or goats over goats; we ourselves rule over them, being a better stock than they are. In just the same way the god, being a friend to humankind, set over us a stock better than ourselves, the race of spirits, who tended us with great ease to themselves and great benefit to us, providing peace, and reverence, and good order, and an unstinting supply of justice, and made the tribes of men free of civil strife and happy.
ATHENIAN: And this account, speaking the truth even now, tells us this: that in whatever cities a mortal rules rather than a god, there is no escape from evils and hardships for the people there. Instead, it holds that we must imitate by every means the life said to have existed under Cronus, and, insofar as immortality dwells within us, obey it in ordering both our households and our cities publicly and privately, calling this apportionment of reason by the name of law. But if a single individual, or an oligarchy, or even a democracy, possesses a soul reaching after pleasures and desires and demanding to be filled with them, holding nothing back, but gripped by an endless and insatiable disease of evil, and such a person rules over a city or some private household, trampling the laws underfoot—as we just said—then there is no way to be saved. We must examine this account, Cleinias, and decide whether we'll be persuaded by it, or how else we'll act. CLEINIAS: We surely must be persuaded. ATHENIAN: Do you understand, then, that some say there are as many kinds of laws as there are constitutions, and we've just gone through as many constitutions as most people speak of? Don't think the dispute now before us is a trivial one—it concerns the greatest matter of all. For the question of where justice and injustice should look has come around to being disputed among us once again. Some say laws shouldn't look toward war, or toward excellence as a whole, but toward whatever benefits the constitution currently established, so that it will rule forever and never be overthrown—and that this is the finest way to state the natural definition of justice. CLEINIAS: How so? ATHENIAN: That justice is the advantage of the stronger. CLEINIAS: Say it more clearly still. ATHENIAN: Like this. They say that whoever holds power in a city always makes the laws. Isn't that so? CLEINIAS: True. ATHENIAN: Do you suppose, they ask, that a victorious populace, or any other kind of constitution, or even a strongman, would ever willingly make laws aimed at anything else first besides their own advantage in keeping their power? CLEINIAS: How could they? ATHENIAN: And won't whoever made these laws punish anyone who transgresses them as a wrongdoer, calling this 'justice'? CLEINIAS: So it seems. ATHENIAN: This, then, is how and in what way justice would always stand. CLEINIAS: That's what this account says, anyway. ATHENIAN: For this is one of those claims made about the nature of rule. CLEINIAS: Which claims do you mean?
ATHENIAN: Of the things we were examining just now — which people ought to rule over which. And it turned out that parents should rule children, the older the younger, the well-born the low-born, and there were quite a few other pairings, if we remember, some conflicting with others. And indeed one of them was this: we said, I believe, that Pindar leads the way with nature, justifying "the most violent" as he put it. CLEINIAS: Yes, that's what was said then. ATHENIAN: Then consider to which of these sorts our city should be handed over. This sort of thing has happened countless times already in various cities. CLEINIAS: What sort of thing? ATHENIAN: When offices have been fought over, the winners have seized control of the city's affairs so completely that they give no share of office whatsoever to the losers, neither to them nor to their descendants, and they live watching one another closely, in case someone who reaches office should rise up in revolt, remembering the wrongs done before. Such regimes, we now say, are not true constitutions at all, nor are their laws correct, whichever ones are not laid down for the sake of the whole city's common good. Laws made for the sake of some faction we call the laws of partisans, not of citizens, and we say the claims of justice such people make are said in vain. And the reason we say this is that we ourselves will not grant offices in your city to someone because he is rich, nor because he possesses any of the other things of that sort — strength, or stature, or birth. Rather, whoever is most obedient to the established laws and wins that victory in the city — to him, we say, must be given the greatest service to the gods, the first prize; and the second prize to whoever masters the second rank; and so on down the line, each subsequent rank should be assigned in proportion. Those now called rulers I have called servants of the laws, not for the sake of some novelty in terminology, but because I hold that on this above all else hangs a city's survival — or its opposite. Wherever the law is ruled over and has no authority, I see destruction imminent for that city; but wherever the law is master over the rulers, and the rulers are slaves of the law, there I see safety, and all the good things the gods give to cities. CLEINIAS: Yes, by Zeus, stranger — for one your age, you see sharply. ATHENIAN: A young man sees such things most dimly of himself; an old man sees them most sharply. CLEINIAS: Very true. ATHENIAN: Well then, what comes next? Shall we suppose the settlers have arrived and are present, and go on to complete our speech addressed to them? CLEINIAS: Of course.
ATHENIAN: Let us then say to them: Men — as the old saying goes, God, holding the beginning and end and middle of all things that are, travels a straight path, completing his circuit according to nature. And justice keeps ever in his train, exacting punishment from all who desert the divine law. Whoever means to be happy clings to justice and follows it humbly and in good order; but whoever is puffed up with pride, or exalted by wealth or honors, or whose soul is set ablaze — inflamed by bodily beauty joined with youth and folly — with arrogance, as though needing no ruler or guide, but capable even of leading others, such a person is left destitute of god. And having been so left, and having taken on still others like himself, he runs riot, throwing everything into confusion; and to many he seems to be someone important — but before long, paying a penalty that justice does not stint, he brings himself, his household, and his city to utter ruin. Given that things are arranged this way, what must a sensible man do or think, and what must he not do? CLEINIAS: That much is clear: every man must think of himself as one who is going to follow along with god. ATHENIAN: What action, then, is dear to god and follows him? One, and it has a single ancient saying: that like is dear to like, when it is measured, but the unmeasured is dear neither to each other nor to the measured. God, for us, would be the measure of all things, far more than any man could be, as they say. So the one who is to become dear to such a being must, so far as possible, himself become of that same character; and by this reasoning, the self-controlled man among us is dear to god, since he is like him, while the man without self-control is unlike and different — and so is the unjust man, and all the rest follows the same reasoning. Let us take it, then, that this follows from what we have said — a saying I think the finest and truest of all: that for the good man, to sacrifice and to hold constant company with the gods through prayers, offerings, and every kind of service to them, is the finest and best thing, and the most effective toward a happy life, and indeed especially fitting; but for the bad man, the opposite of these things is natural.
ATHENIAN: For the bad man is unclean in soul, while his opposite is clean, and it is never right for either a good man or a god to accept gifts from one who is polluted. So all the great effort spent on the gods by the unholy is in vain, while for the holy it is most timely and fitting for all. This, then, is the mark we must aim at. But what would be the arrows, so to speak, and the shooting of those arrows toward it, spoken most correctly? First, we say, one would hit the mark of piety most correctly by assigning honors second to the Olympian gods and to the gods who hold the city, and honors that are even and reserved as the second and left-hand portion to the gods of the underworld, while assigning the higher and superior honors — the opposite of these — to the gods spoken of just before. After these gods, a sensible man would perform rites also to the daimones, and after them to the heroes. Following these come private shrines of ancestral gods, honored according to law; and after these, honors to living parents. For it is right and proper that one who owes debts should pay the first and greatest of debts, the oldest of all debts owed — believing that everything he possesses and has belongs to those who begot and raised him, and is to be placed at their service to the utmost of his power, beginning with his property, second his body, and third his soul — repaying the loans of their care and of their labors on his behalf, borne long ago and lent out for the sake of the young, paying it back now to the old, who are in the greatest need of it in their old age. Throughout his whole life a man must maintain, and must have maintained, especially reverent speech toward his own parents, because light and winged words carry the heaviest penalty — for over all such things Nemesis, messenger of Justice, has been appointed as overseer. One must therefore give way to parents when they are angry, and let them vent their anger, whether they do so in words or in deeds, forgiving them, on the ground that a father is most likely to be especially angry when he believes he has been wronged by his son. When parents die, the most modest funeral is the finest — neither exceeding the customary scale, nor falling short of what the ancestors established for their own parents — and likewise one should render, year by year, the customary honors that bring order to those who have already reached their end.
ATHENIAN: And by never neglecting to keep constant remembrance of them, one should above all honor them continually in this way, allotting to the dead a fitting portion of whatever expense fortune provides. If we do these things and live by them, each of us in turn would receive our due from the gods and from those who are greater than we are, and would pass the greater part of life in good hope. As for what one owes toward children, relatives, friends, and fellow citizens, and toward strangers, in the services owed to the gods and in dealings with all these people — in fulfilling one's own life and adorning it according to law — the working-out of the laws themselves will accomplish this, partly by persuading, partly, where characters do not yield to persuasion, by compelling and punishing with force and justice, and so, with the gods' cooperation, will render our city blessed and happy. But there are things which a lawgiver who thinks as I do must and ought to say, yet which, spoken in the form of a law, would strike a discordant note. About these matters it seems to me that he should, for his own sake and for those to whom he will give laws, first set forth a sample, and then, having gone through everything else as far as he is able, only after that begin the actual enactment of the laws. In what form, then, are such things best set out? It is not at all easy to capture them in a single formula, as though in one mold — but let us take them up in some such way as this, if we can establish anything firm about them. CLEINIAS: Say what you mean. ATHENIAN: I would want them to be as obedient as possible to virtue, and clearly the lawgiver will try to bring this about in the whole of his legislation. CLEINIAS: Of course. ATHENIAN: Well, it seemed to me that what has been said might do some good toward what the lawgiver would urge — that if it does not take hold of a soul utterly harsh and unyielding, it will make the listener hear it more gently and more favorably; so that even if it accomplishes something small rather than great, by making the hearer more receptive and thus readier to learn what is being said, that alone is worth having. For there is no great ease or abundance of people eager to become as good as possible, and as quickly as possible. Most people declare Hesiod wise for saying that the way down to badness is level going, travelable without a drop of sweat, the road being so short, whereas in front of virtue, he says, the immortal gods have set sweat, and the path to it is long and steep, and rough at first — but when you reach the summit, then it is easy to travel, hard though it was.
CLEINIAS: Yes, and he does seem to speak well. ATHENIAN: Quite so. Now I want to set before you, in plain view, the argument I have been building toward. CLEINIAS: Set it out, then. ATHENIAN: Let us say, addressing the lawgiver: Tell us, lawgiver — if you knew what we ought to do and say, surely you would tell us? CLEINIAS: Necessarily. ATHENIAN: Now, did we not hear you, just a little while ago, say that the lawgiver should not allow poets to compose whatever pleases them? For they would not know which of their words, running counter to the laws, might harm the city. CLEINIAS: What you say is true. ATHENIAN: If, then, we said the following to him on behalf of the poets, would what was said be reasonable? CLEINIAS: What sort of thing? ATHENIAN: This: there is an old story, lawgiver, told repeatedly by us ourselves and agreed to by everyone else, that whenever a poet sits on the tripod of the Muse, he is not then in his right mind, but, like a spring letting whatever flows into it flow freely out again, and since his art is one of imitation, he is compelled, when portraying men disposed in ways opposite to one another, often to contradict himself, and he does not know whether what he says here or what he says there is true. But it is not possible for the lawgiver, in the law, to give two accounts about one matter; he must always declare a single account about a single matter. Consider this from what you yourself just said. Given that there is a funeral that is excessive, one that is deficient, and one that is moderate, you chose the one, the moderate one, and prescribed it, praising it without qualification. But I — if I had an exceptionally wealthy wife who in a poem instructed that she herself be buried — would praise the lavish funeral; while a stingy, poor man would praise the meager one; and a man who possesses a moderate estate and is himself moderate would praise that same moderate funeral. But you should not speak the way you just did, simply saying "the moderate one" — you must say what the moderate amount is, and how much, or else do not yet suppose that such a statement of yours has become a law. CLEINIAS: What you say is very true.
ATHENIAN: Should the one who sets our laws in order simply say nothing of that kind at the start of his laws, but state right away what must be done, and once he has stated it and threatened the penalty, move on to the next law, never adding a single word of comfort or persuasion for those under his legislation? Or is a doctor of a certain sort in the habit of treating us one way, and one of another sort another way each time? Let's recall each manner, so that we may ask the lawgiver for the gentler one, the way children would ask a doctor to treat them in the mildest way possible. What do I mean by this? There are, we say, doctors, and there are also assistants of doctors, and we call these assistants doctors too, don't we? CLEINIAS: Certainly. ATHENIAN: And whether they are free men or slaves, they acquire their skill by their masters' instructions and by observation and practice, not by nature the way the free doctors themselves have learned it and teach it in turn to their own children. Would you set these down as two classes of what are called doctors? CLEINIAS: Of course. ATHENIAN: And do you also notice that, since the sick in our cities are partly slaves and partly free, the slave doctors treat the slaves for the most part—running about and waiting in their surgeries—and none of these doctors gives or accepts any account of each servant's individual illness, but having prescribed what seems right from experience, as though he knew exactly, arrogantly, like a tyrant, he dashes off to the next sick servant, and so gives his master relief from the trouble of caring for his sick. The free doctor, on the other hand, treats and studies for the most part the illnesses of free men, and does so by examining them from the beginning and according to nature, taking the patient himself and his friends into his confidence; and in this way he both learns something from the sick himself and, so far as he is able, teaches the patient in turn; nor does he prescribe anything until he has somehow persuaded him, and only then, taming the patient with persuasion, does he try to bring him steadily forward toward health. Which of the two is the better doctor when he heals, and the better trainer when he trains—the one who works his single skill in a double way, or the one who works it in only one way, and the more brutal of the two? CLEINIAS: The double way, stranger, is far superior. ATHENIAN: Do you want us, then, to observe this double and this single approach as it occurs within lawgiving itself? CLEINIAS: Of course I do.
ATHENIAN: Come then, by the gods, what would be the first law our lawgiver would lay down? Won't he, following nature, first put in order for the cities the beginning that concerns birth? CLEINIAS: Naturally. ATHENIAN: And isn't the beginning of birth, for every city, the union and partnership of marriage? CLEINIAS: Of course. ATHENIAN: It seems, then, that laws about marriage would be the first that, if rightly laid down, would be laid down toward the correctness of the whole city. CLEINIAS: Absolutely. ATHENIAN: Let us state first the simple version—it might go something like this: a man is to marry once he is thirty years old, up to the age of thirty-five; if he does not, he is to be fined in money and stripped of certain honors—so much money, and such-and-such loss of standing. Let that be, more or less, the simple law about marriage. The double version is this: a man is to marry once he is thirty years old, up to thirty-five, bearing in mind that in a certain way the human race has by its very nature a share in immortality, and every one of us has by nature a longing for it in every form; for the desire to become famous, and not to lie nameless once one has died, belongs to just this longing. The human race, then, is something bound by nature to all time, which follows and will follow it to the end, and in this way is immortal—by leaving behind children's children, remaining one and the same forever, it partakes of immortality through generation. For a man willingly to deprive himself of this is never a holy thing to do, and whoever neglects wife and children deprives himself of it by deliberate choice. The man who obeys this law, then, may go free of penalty; but the man who disobeys, who has reached thirty-five without marrying, is to be fined so much every year, so that he will not think that his solitary life brings him profit and ease, and he is to have no share in whatever honors the younger men in the city pay to their elders on each occasion. Having heard this law set beside the other, anyone may consider, for each case, whether laws ought to become double in this way, at the very least in length, through both persuading and threatening at once, or whether, using only the threat, they should remain simple in length.
MEGILLUS: As for the Laconian way, stranger, of always preferring the shorter—yet if someone told me to be a judge of these two texts, as to which I would want written down and set up as law in my city, I would choose the longer one, and indeed I would make the same choice about every law on this pattern, whichever of the two versions existed. Still, presumably what is now being legislated must also please our friend Cleinias here, since it is his city that now intends to make use of such laws. CLEINIAS: Well said, Megillus. ATHENIAN: Now, to argue over whether a text has many words or few is really quite foolish—for it is the best laws, I think, not the shortest, that ought to be honored, nor should length as such be prized or blamed—but of the two versions just stated, the one is not simply twice the other only in usefulness as a piece of legislation; rather, as was just said, the comparison to the two kinds of doctors was exactly right. Yet on this point no lawgiver, it seems, has ever given thought to the fact that, though it is possible to use two things in framing laws—persuasion and force, so far as that is possible with an uneducated crowd—they use only the one of the two; for they do not temper the battle by mixing in persuasion when they legislate, but use force alone, undiluted. And I, my good friends, see that there is still a third thing that ought to happen concerning laws, which nowhere happens now. CLEINIAS: What is this you mean? ATHENIAN: A thing that has arisen, by some god's doing, out of the very discussion we have just been having. For ever since we began speaking about laws, early this morning, it has become midday, and we have come to rest in this altogether beautiful spot, talking of nothing but laws, though we seem to me only now to be beginning to state actual laws—everything before this has been for us preludes to laws. Why do I say this? I want to make this point: of all speeches, and of all things in which the voice has a share, there are preludes, a kind of warming-up, so to speak, which carry within them a skillful preparation useful for what is to follow and be completed. Indeed, for songs sung to the lyre—what we call 'nomes'—and for every kind of music, wonderfully elaborate preludes are set out beforehand; but for the laws that are truly laws, the ones we call political laws, no one has ever yet spoken a prelude, or, in composing one, brought it out into the light, as though there were no such thing by nature. Yet our present discussion, it seems to me, shows that there is such a thing; and those double laws we were just now speaking of seemed to me not simply double in that plain sense, but rather two distinct things—law, and prelude to the law.
ATHENIAN: That thing we compared to the tyrant's command, likening it to the commands of the doctors we called unfree—that is the law in its unmixed form; while what was said before it, the persuasive part spoken by our man here, was truly persuasive, yet had the force of a prelude to a speech. For it seemed clear to me that this whole speech, which the speaker delivered by way of persuading, was spoken for this purpose: so that the one to whom the lawgiver addresses the law might receive the command—which is what the law actually is—with goodwill, and, because of that goodwill, more readily learn it. So, for my part, I would say this very thing is rightly called, not the substance of the law, but a prelude to the law. Having said this, what would I want to say next? This: that the lawgiver ought never to leave his laws without preludes, whether taken as a whole or one by one, to the same degree that the two versions we just spoke of differed from each other. CLEINIAS: For my part, I would tell anyone skilled in these matters not to legislate any other way than this. ATHENIAN: Well, Cleinias, I think you're right to say at least this much—that all laws have preludes, and that at the start of every piece of legislation one ought to set, before each and every provision, the prelude that naturally belongs to it—for what is to be said next is no small matter, and it makes no small difference whether it is remembered clearly or not. Yet if we were to require that great matters and small ones alike, when embodied in law, be given preludes in the same way, we would not be speaking rightly. For neither with song nor with any speech should this be done indiscriminately—though it is natural for it to exist in all of them, it should not be used in all of them—rather, this must be left to the orator, the composer of songs, and the lawgiver, to decide case by case. CLEINIAS: What you say seems entirely true to me. But let us not spend any more time in delay, stranger; let us return to our argument, and begin again, if you're willing, from the point where you spoke without treating it as a prelude at all. So then, as those who are playing a game say, let us take up the thread again from the beginning, this time as a better second attempt, treating it as a prelude and not as some random speech reaching its end, as we did just now; let us take as its beginning the point at which we agree the prelude starts. What was said about honoring the gods and caring for one's ancestors is enough, and what has just now been said also suffices; let us try to speak what comes next, until the whole prelude seems to you to have been adequately stated. After that, he will go on to set out the laws themselves.
ATHENIAN: Well then, concerning the gods and those who come after the gods, and concerning parents both living and dead, we have, as I now put it, given an adequate prelude; and what remains of this same subject you seem to me to be urging me now to bring, as it were, into the light. CLEINIAS: Exactly so. ATHENIAN: Well, after such matters, it is fitting—and indeed most fitting of all—that speaker and listeners alike, in reckoning up how one ought to hold oneself, in earnestness and in relaxation, regarding one's own soul, one's body, and one's property, should become, so far as they are able, possessed of an education in these things; these very matters, then, are what we must next state and hear. CLEINIAS: Quite right.