Plato · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
ATHENIAN: Let everyone who just now heard what I said about the gods and our ancestral friends listen further. Of all the things a person owns, after the gods, the soul is the most divine, since it is most his own. Everything a person owns comes in two kinds. The stronger and better things are the ruling ones, the weaker and worse are the ruled; and among a man's own possessions, the ruling ones must always be honored above the ruled.
So when I say a man should honor his own soul second — after the gods, our masters, and after the beings in their train — I am giving the right instruction. But hardly any of us honors it correctly, though we think we do. Honor is something divine and good, and nothing bad is honorable, and whoever thinks he can increase his soul's worth by words or gifts or by giving way to it, while making it no better but in fact worse, only seems to honor it — he does nothing of the kind. Take a child: the moment he becomes a person he thinks himself capable of judging everything, and believes that praising his own soul is honoring it, and eagerly lets it do whatever it wants. But what I am saying is that acting this way harms the soul rather than honoring it — and it should be honored second, right after the gods, as we said. Nor does a man honor his soul when he refuses to blame himself for his own mistakes and for most of his worst troubles, and instead blames others, always excusing himself as innocent — he thinks he is honoring his soul, but he is very far from doing so, because he is harming it. Nor, again, whenever a man indulges his soul with pleasures against the reasoned judgment and praise of the lawgiver, is he honoring it in any way — he is dishonoring it, filling it with wrongdoing and regret. Nor, on the other hand, whenever a man fails to endure with fortitude the praised hardships, fears, pains, and griefs, but gives way to them — he does not honor his soul by yielding; he makes it dishonorable by doing all such things. Nor does a man honor his soul when he holds that life is good under any and all conditions — he dishonors it then too. For if the soul supposes that everything in Hades is bad, it gives way and does not stand firm against this idea by teaching and refuting it — that is, by showing that it does not know whether, quite the opposite, the greatest of all goods for us may lie in the realm of the gods below. Nor again, whenever someone prizes beauty ahead of virtue, is this anything other than a genuine and total dishonoring of the soul; for this reasoning claims the body is more honorable than the soul, and that is a lie. Nothing born of earth is more honorable than what belongs to the Olympians, and whoever thinks otherwise about the soul fails to realize how he is neglecting this marvelous possession.
Nor, again, whenever someone is eager to acquire wealth by shameful means, or feels no discomfort in acquiring it that way, does he then honor his own soul with gifts — far from it. He gives away its honor and its beauty together for a little gold; for all the gold on earth and under the earth is not worth as much as virtue. To put it briefly: whatever things the lawgiver, in listing them, has set down as shameful and bad, and their opposites as good and beautiful — whoever is unwilling to abstain from the first by every means, and to pursue the second with all his power, does not realize that in every such case he is treating the most divine thing he has, his soul, in the most dishonorable and disgraceful way. For hardly anyone reckons the greatest penalty that follows wrongdoing, though it is called by that name; and the greatest penalty is this: to become like men who are already bad, and in becoming like them, to flee good men and good words and cut oneself off from them, while clinging to bad men, pursuing their company. And once attached to such people, one is bound to do and suffer whatever such people naturally do and say to one another. This condition is not justice — for what is just, and justice itself, are fine things — but it is retribution, the painful consequence that follows wrongdoing, and both the man who receives it and the one who escapes it are wretched: the one because he goes uncured, the other because he is destroyed so that many others may be saved. For us, honor consists, broadly speaking, in following what is better, and in bringing what is worse — insofar as it can be improved — to as good a state as possible. There is no possession more naturally suited to help a person flee evil and track down and seize the best of all things, and having seized it, live with it in company for the rest of his life, than the soul; that is why it was ranked second in honor. Third — as anyone can see — comes the honor that belongs by nature to the body. But we must examine our honors, and figure out which of them are genuine and which counterfeit — that is the lawgiver's task. It seems to me these are roughly what they show themselves to be: the honorable body is not the beautiful one, nor the strong, nor the swift, nor the large, nor even — though many would think so — the healthy one; nor, for that matter, is it the opposite of these. Rather, the condition that lies in the middle of all these states is by far the most temperate and the most secure; for the extremes make souls either puffed-up and reckless, or servile and mean.
In just the same way, the acquisition of money and property, and the honor given to it, follows the same pattern. Excess in any of these things breeds hostility and factions, both in cities and in private life, while deficiency mostly breeds servitude. So let no one love money for his children's sake, in order to leave them as rich as possible; that is better for neither them nor the city. For young people, wealth that attracts no flatterers, yet is sufficient for necessities — that is the finest and most harmonious kind, for it fits and blends with our whole life and makes it free of pain. What we should leave to our children is a great deal of shame, not gold. We think that by scolding the young for their shamelessness we will leave them this — but that does not come about through the kind of exhortation now given to the young, when they are told they must be ashamed of everything. A sensible lawgiver would rather urge the old to feel shame before the young, and above all to take care that no young person ever sees or hears them doing or saying anything shameful; for wherever the old behave shamelessly, the young there are bound to become most shameless of all. The finest education for the young, and for the old themselves, is not admonishing others but plainly living out, throughout one's whole life, the very things one would tell someone else to do when giving advice. And whoever honors and reveres kinship and the whole fellowship of those bound together by common blood and shared household gods will, quite reasonably, find the gods of birth well disposed toward the begetting of his own children. And likewise, one will win the goodwill of friends and companions for the dealings of life by regarding their services to oneself as greater and weightier than they themselves consider them, while thinking one's own kindnesses to friends and companions lesser than they themselves would say. Toward the city and its citizens, by far the best man is the one who would choose, rather than victory at Olympia or in any contest of war or peace, a reputation for having served the laws of his homeland — as one who has served them, of all people, most nobly throughout his life. Toward foreigners, one must consider one's agreements as most sacred of all; for nearly all wrongs done by and to foreigners are bound up with a god as their avenger far more than wrongs among citizens are.
For the foreigner, being without companions and kin, is more pitiable to both gods and men; whoever is able to avenge him is readier to come to his aid, and none has greater power to do so than the guardian spirit and god of hospitality who attends each such person, following Zeus the god of strangers. So a person with even a little foresight should take great care to go through life to its very end without ever wronging a stranger. Among wrongs done both to strangers and to fellow citizens, the greatest wrong of all, in every case, is against suppliants; for the suppliant, having called a god to witness his plea and having received his solemn assurance, finds in that god an especially watchful guardian of what happens to him, so that the one who suffers a wrong will never go unavenged. We have now gone through nearly all our dealings concerning parents, ourselves and our own affairs, the city, friends, and kin, and both foreigners and fellow citizens; what remains, following on from this, is to discuss what sort of person one should be in order to live one's life most nobly — matters that are not law, but the kind of praise and blame that trains each person to be more tractable and well disposed toward the laws about to be laid down. Truth leads the way among all good things, both for gods and for men; whoever means to become blessed and happy should share in it from the very outset, so as to live as long as possible as a truthful person. Such a person can be trusted. But the untrustworthy person is one who loves a willing falsehood, and whoever loves an unwilling one is simply foolish — neither condition is enviable. For every untrustworthy and ignorant person is friendless, and in time, once he becomes known, he brings upon himself, toward the harsh end of old age, a complete isolation, so that his life becomes nearly as orphaned as if he had no companions or children left living. The man who does no wrong is honorable; but the one who does not even allow wrongdoers to do further wrong deserves more than twice his honor. For the first is worth one man, the second is worth many others besides, since he reports the wrongdoing of others to the rulers. And the one who also joins the rulers in punishing wrongdoing to the extent of his power — that man should be proclaimed the great and complete man in the city, victorious in virtue. The same praise must be given regarding self-control and wisdom, and all the other good things a person can not only possess himself but also share with others.
The one who shares must be honored as the very best; the one who cannot share but is willing should be ranked second; but the one who is grudging, and unwilling from ill will to make anyone a partner in any good things through friendship, should himself be blamed, though the good thing itself should be valued no less because of its possessor — rather, it should still be pursued according to one's ability. Let everyone among us compete for virtue without envy. Such a man builds up his city, since he strives himself without cutting others down through slander; but the envious man, thinking he must excel by slandering others, both strains less toward true virtue himself and discourages his rivals by unjustly disparaging them, and by leaving the whole city untrained in the contest for virtue, he makes it, for his part, smaller in its reputation for excellence. Every man should be spirited, yet as gentle as possible. There is no other way to escape the harsh and hard-to-cure — or wholly incurable — wrongs of others except by fighting back, defending oneself, prevailing, and punishing without ever relenting; and no soul is able to do this without noble spirit. As for those who do wrong but can be cured, one must recognize first that every unjust man is unjust unwillingly; for no one, anywhere, would ever willingly possess any of the greatest evils, least of all in what he holds most precious. And the soul, as we have said, is in truth the most precious thing of all to everyone; so no one would willingly take the greatest evil into that most precious part and live with it possessed throughout his life. The unjust man, and the man who holds bad things generally, is altogether pitiable; and it is fitting to pity the one whose faults are curable, restraining and softening one's anger rather than raging on bitterly like a scolding woman — but toward the one who is incorrigibly and hopelessly wicked and bad, one must let anger loose. That is why we say the good man must always be both spirited and gentle as occasion demands. Now the greatest of all evils is one bred into the souls of most people, an evil for which everyone forgives himself and devises no escape whatsoever: this is what people mean when they say that every man is naturally his own friend, and that it is right that he should be so. But in truth, it is this very excessive self-love that becomes, every time, the cause of all of a person's wrongdoings.
ATHENIAN: Love blinds the lover where the beloved is concerned, so that he judges justice and goodness and beauty badly, always thinking he must honor what's his own over what's true. No man who intends to become great should cherish himself or what belongs to himself, but rather justice, whether it happens to be found in his own conduct or in someone else's. From this same fault comes everyone's habit of thinking that his own ignorance is wisdom. That's why, knowing essentially nothing, we imagine we know everything, and by refusing to let others do what we ourselves don't understand, we're forced to make mistakes doing it ourselves. So every human being must flee excessive self-love and always pursue someone better than himself, feeling no shame in doing so. There are smaller points than these, often repeated, but no less useful, and a man should remind himself of them by speaking them aloud. Just as something is always flowing away, its opposite must flow in to replace it, and memory is the inflow that refills the good sense that keeps draining out. That's why one must refrain from excessive laughter and excessive tears, and every man must urge everyone else to conceal his whole joy and his whole grief and try to keep his composure, whether his own guardian spirit stands firm in good fortune, or, as in hard and steep circumstances, spirits oppose certain of his actions. He must always hope that for good people, whatever the god grants, even when troubles fall, will turn out smaller than they might have been, and that changes for the better will come to his present state, and that as for good things, the opposite of all this will befall him, together with good fortune. Everyone should live by these hopes and by memories of all such truths, sparing nothing, but always reminding both others and himself clearly, whether at play or in earnest. Now then, as to ways of life — what sort we ought to practice, and concerning each one, what kind it should be — we have said pretty much all that pertains to the gods, but we haven't yet spoken of human matters, and we must, since we're talking to human beings, not gods. By nature what belongs most to human beings is pleasures and pains and desires, and from these every mortal creature is necessarily, so to speak, suspended and hung, driven by the strongest concerns.
ATHENIAN: We must praise the finest way of living not only because its very shape wins a good reputation, but also because, if someone is willing to taste it and doesn't flee from it while still young, it wins out too in what we all seek — feeling more joy and less pain throughout the whole of life. That this is so, if one tastes it rightly, will show itself readily and clearly. But what is rightness here? This we must now examine, taking it up from the argument itself. Whether it is so by nature for us, or otherwise, against nature, we must examine which life is more pleasant and which more painful, comparing one against another, in this way. We want pleasure for ourselves; pain we neither choose nor want; and the neutral state, we don't want in exchange for pleasure, but we do want it in exchange for pain. We want less pain combined with more pleasure; we don't want less pleasure combined with more pain; but as for equal amounts exchanged for equal amounts, we couldn't say clearly that we want that either way. All these things are ranked by number, magnitude, intensity, and equality, and by their opposites as they bear on choice — some differing, some not differing, with regard to which one picks. Given that these things are necessarily ordered this way, in whatever life contains much of both, and great and intense amounts of both, but pleasures exceed, we want that life; where the opposite holds, we don't want it. And again, where both are few and small and mild, but the painful exceeds, we don't want it; where the opposite holds, we do want it. And in a life where the two balance evenly, we must think of it as in the previous cases — we want the balanced life if it exceeds compared to what we count as hostile to us, and we don't want it if it doesn't. We must think of all our lives as bound up naturally within these categories, and we must consider what kinds we naturally want. If we claim to want something outside these, we speak out of ignorance, having no experience of the lives that actually exist. What, then, and how many are the ways of life among which someone, having chosen what is wanted and willing, not wanted and unwilling, and having set it as a law for himself, choosing what is at once dear and pleasant and best and finest, should live, so far as a human being can, most blessedly? Let's say there is one temperate life, one prudent life, one courageous life, and let's set down one healthy life as well.
ATHENIAN: And opposite these four, four others: the foolish, the cowardly, the licentious, the sickly. Whoever recognizes the temperate life will call it gentle in every respect, offering mild pains and mild pleasures, soft desires, and passions that aren't frenzied; the licentious life he'll call sharp in every respect, offering violent pains and violent pleasures, and desires and passions that are intense, frenzied, and as maddened as possible — and pleasures exceed pains in the temperate life, while in the licentious life pains exceed pleasures, in magnitude, number, and frequency. From this it follows by necessity, according to nature, that one of these lives turns out more pleasant for us, the other more painful, and that a person who wants to live pleasantly can no longer, willingly at least, live licentiously — rather it's clear now, if what's just been said is right, that everyone is licentious against his will by necessity. For either through ignorance, or through lack of self-control, or through both, the whole human crowd lives lacking temperance. The same must be thought regarding the sickly life and the healthy one — both have pleasures and pains, but pleasures exceed pains in health, while pains exceed pleasures in sickness. Now our wish in choosing among lives is not that the painful should predominate; wherever the pleasant predominates, we have judged that life the more pleasant one. So the temperate life compared to the licentious one, the prudent compared to the foolish, and the courageous life compared to the cowardly — each has less, smaller, and sparser amounts of both feelings, and while each surpasses its counterpart in pleasures, it is surpassed by the other in pains; so the courageous man defeats the coward, and the prudent man defeats the fool. Hence these lives — temperate, courageous, prudent, and healthy — are more pleasant than the cowardly, foolish, licentious, and sickly ones. And in short, the life bound up with virtue, whether in body or in soul, is more pleasant than the life bound up with vice, and surpasses it in every other respect as well, exceedingly, in beauty, rightness, virtue, and good reputation, so that a person possessing it lives, altogether and in every part, more happily than one possessing the opposite. And let this be the end of what we've said here as the prelude to the laws. After the prelude, a law must naturally follow — or rather, to speak truly, we must sketch out the laws of the constitution.
ATHENIAN: Just as with any woven fabric or other kind of plaited work, it isn't possible to make the woof and the warp from the same materials — the strand of the warp thread must differ in quality, being strong and possessing a certain firmness in its character, while the woof is softer and employs a certain fair pliancy — for this reason those who are going to hold office in the cities must be distinguished in some such way from those who have been tested, each time, by only a little education, in due proportion. For there are two kinds of constitution: one is the appointment of officers for each community, the other is the laws assigned to those officers. But before all this we must bear the following in mind. Every shepherd, cowherd, horse-breeder, and the like, taking charge of a herd, will never attempt to tend it in any other way than by first performing the purification appropriate to each group for their communal life, sorting out the healthy from the unhealthy, the well-bred from the ill-bred, and sending some off to other herds while keeping others to be cared for — reckoning that the labor would be vain and unending, applied to bodies and souls that nature and bad rearing have corrupted, ruining thereby the stock of healthy and unspoiled characters and bodies within each holding, unless one purges what one already has. Matters concerning the other animals are of lesser concern and worth setting alongside our argument only as an illustration, but matters concerning human beings deserve the greatest concern from the lawgiver, who must investigate and declare what is fitting for each in regard to purification and all other practices as well. As for purification of a city, the matter stands roughly thus. There are many kinds of purge, some easier, some harsher; and the harshest and best ones, a man who is both tyrant and lawgiver at once could carry out, but a lawgiver establishing a new constitution and laws without tyranny would be content even if he managed only the gentlest of purges. The best purge is a painful one, like certain harsh medicines — the one that brings punishment through justice to chastise, imposing death or exile as the final penalty; for it is customary to remove those who have committed the greatest crimes and are incurable, and who constitute the greatest harm to the city.
ATHENIAN: The gentler kind of purge, for us, is this one: whenever, through poverty of sustenance, people show themselves ready and prepared to follow their leaders against the property of those who have possessions, then, treating these people as a disease naturally implanted in the city, one dismisses them under a euphemism, calling it a colony, sending them off as kindly as possible. Every lawgiver must do something of this sort, in some fashion, right at the outset — but for us the circumstances that have now come about are even less burdensome than these, since there's no need to contrive either a colony or some selective purge for the present situation. Rather, just as when streams flow together from many sources — some springs, some winter torrents — into a single reservoir, we must take care to keep the gathered water as pure as possible, drawing some off and diverting and channeling some away. Labor, it seems, and risk attend every founding of a constitution. But since what is now being done is a matter of word rather than deed, let our gathering be complete, and let its purity, as we wish it, be already accomplished — for as to the bad men among those attempting to join this city-to-be as citizens, having tested them thoroughly with every persuasion and over sufficient time, let us prevent them from arriving, while we welcome the good, as far as we're able, with all goodwill and favor. And let this good fortune not escape our notice: just as we said the colony of the Heraclidae was fortunate in escaping the terrible and dangerous strife over the cancellation of debts and redistribution of land — a strife which, for an ancient city compelled to legislate on it, can neither be left unmoved nor safely moved in any way, and for which only a prayer, so to speak, remains, along with a small, cautious shift, gradually changing things a little over a long time — this is how it may be done: those who make the change must themselves possess abundant land, and must possess many debtors, and must be willing, out of fairness, to share somehow with those in want, forgiving some debts and distributing some land, holding, in some way, to moderation, and considering poverty to consist not in having a smaller estate, but in having a greater insatiability.
ATHENIAN: This becomes the greatest foundation for the safety of a city, and on it, as on a stable footing, one can build up whatever political order suits such an arrangement afterward. But if this transition is rotten, the political work that follows will not come easily to any city. This is the danger we say we're escaping—but it's better to state clearly, even if we didn't fully escape it, how we went about escaping it. Let it be said, then: the way out is through not loving money unjustly, and there is no other route, wide or narrow, out of this trap. Let this stand as the ballast of our city for now. People's properties must be arranged so that no one has grounds for complaint against another, or else those with old grievances against each other, and anyone with even a little sense, should not willingly go further into the rest of the arrangement. But when, as with us now, a god grants people the chance to found a new city, with no existing hostilities among them, for them to create hostility among themselves over the distribution of land and houses would be a folly beyond anything human, joined with every kind of wickedness. So what would be the right way to distribute things? First we must fix the total number of citizens—how many there should be. After that we must agree on how many groups the citizens should be divided into, and how large each group should be, and then land and houses must be distributed among these groups as equally as possible. A sufficient total population cannot rightly be determined except in relation to the land and the neighboring cities. The land must be enough to support a given number of moderate people, and no more is needed; and the population must be large enough to defend itself against wrongdoing neighbors and to help neighbors who are wronged, without being utterly helpless. We'll settle these matters, having seen the actual land and the neighbors, in both deed and word. But for now, for the sake of outline and sketch, so the argument may proceed, let it go forward toward the legislation. Let there be five thousand and forty citizens—a number chosen for its usefulness—landholders and defenders of the allotment; and let land and houses be divided into the same number of shares, so that each man and each lot go together. Let the whole number first be divided into two parts, then into three in the same way; for it is naturally divisible also into four and five, straight through to ten.
ATHENIAN: Now every lawgiver must understand at least this much about numbers—which number, and of what kind, would be most useful for all cities. Let's name the one that contains within itself the most divisions, and the most consecutive ones. The number as a whole admits of every kind of division into everything; but the number five thousand and forty can be divided, for war and for all matters of peace—contracts, partnerships, taxes, and distributions—into no fewer than fifty-nine divisions, continuously from one up to ten. These things must be grasped firmly and at leisure by whoever the law directs to grasp them; for that is simply how it is, and it needs to be said for the sake of anyone founding a city—whether building one entirely new or repairing an old one that has fallen into ruin. As for the gods and their shrines—which gods should be established in each part of the city, and under whose names, whether of gods or spirits—no one with sense will try to disturb whatever ancient traditions Delphi or Dodona or the oracle of Ammon have handed down, or whatever old stories persuaded people, through visions or reported divine inspiration, and led them to establish sacrifices mixed with rites, whether native to the place, or Tyrrhenian, or Cyprian, or from anywhere else—stories through which they consecrated oracles, statues, altars, and temples, and marked out sacred precincts for each. None of these things, down to the smallest detail, should the lawgiver disturb. To each division he must assign a god, or a spirit, or even some hero; and in the distribution of the land he must set aside first the choicest precincts and everything appropriate to them, so that when each group holds its assigned gatherings at fixed times, they can meet their various needs conveniently, show friendship to one another through sacrifices, grow familiar, and come to know each other—since there's no greater good for a city than for its people to be known to one another. Where there is no light between people in their characters, but only darkness, no one will ever rightly attain the honor, office, or justice he deserves. Every man in every city must strive, above all else, toward this one thing: never to appear false to anyone, but to be simple and truthful always, and never to be deceived by another who is like that.
ATHENIAN: What comes next in laying out our laws—like a move in checkers made from the sacred line—being unfamiliar, might at first surprise the listener. Yet on reflection and examination, it will appear that a city could be run this second way toward what is best. Perhaps one wouldn't accept it, though, simply because it isn't the custom for a lawgiver who is not also a tyrant. The most correct approach is to describe the best constitution, and the second, and the third, and then, having described them, to leave the choice to whoever will be in charge of the community. Let's do the same now: having named the first constitution in excellence, and the second, and the third, let's leave the choice to Cleinias for the moment, and to anyone else who might ever wish, in his own way, to select from among such things whatever suits his own homeland. The first city, then—the best constitution and the best laws—is the one where the old saying holds as fully as possible throughout the whole city: that friends truly hold everything in common. Whether this actually exists somewhere now, or ever will—where wives are held in common, and children in common, and all property in common, and every device has been used to remove entirely from life anything called 'private'—where even things naturally private have been made common as far as possible, so that eyes and ears and hands seem to see, hear, and act in common, so that everyone praises and blames as one, feeling joy and pain at the same things, and where whatever laws make a city as unified as possible—no one will ever set a truer or better standard of excellence than this. Such a city, if gods or children of gods, more than one, dwell in it, they live there joyfully under such conditions. So one should look to no other model of government, but hold to this one and seek, as far as possible, whatever comes closest to it. The city we've now undertaken to describe would, if it came into being, be nearest to immortality, and hold second place. A third one, after this, we will work out fully, god willing. But for now, what do we mean by this second one, and how would it come about?
ATHENIAN: Let them first divide up the land and houses, and not farm in common—since that arrangement is too great a thing for the birth, upbringing, and education we're describing now. Let the division happen with this sort of thought in mind: that whoever draws this allotted portion should consider it common to the whole city, and since the land is the fatherland, he must tend it even more carefully than children tend a mother—since she, being a goddess, is mistress over mortal beings. He must hold the same thoughts about the local gods and spirits too. So that these things remain so for all time, we must consider further: the number of hearths we've now distributed must always stay the same—never more, never fewer. This is how that could be secured firmly throughout the city: whoever draws the lot should always leave the house to just one heir among his children, whichever one is dearest to him, as successor and caretaker of the gods, the family, and the city, both for the living and for those who have already passed on. As for the other children, if there are more than one, the daughters are to be given in marriage according to whatever law is established, and the sons are to be distributed as adopted sons to citizens who lack male offspring—preferably by mutual liking. But if in some cases there's a shortage of such goodwill, or if some households have too many surviving children, whether daughters or sons, or, on the contrary, too few, due to a lack of offspring—in all these cases, whatever authority we establish as the greatest and most honored must examine what should be done with the surplus or the shortfall, and devise every possible means to keep the number of houses—five thousand and forty—always exactly the same. There are many such means: for those whose fertility runs too high, there are ways to check childbearing; and conversely, there is encouragement and effort to increase the number of births, through honors and dishonors, and through the warnings of elders addressed to the young in cautionary speeches—these can accomplish what we're describing. And finally, if every device fails to equalize the five thousand and forty households, and we find ourselves with an overflow of citizens because of the goodwill people bear each other in living together, and we run out of options, there remains the old device we've mentioned many times—sending out colonies, done as friends parting from friends, choosing whoever seems suitable.
ATHENIAN: But if, on the other hand, a wave comes crashing in bringing a flood of disease, or destruction through war, and the citizens fall far short of the fixed number through loss of family lines, we must not deliberately admit citizens educated in some illegitimate schooling—yet not even a god, they say, is able to overpower necessity. So let us take it that the argument now before us gives this advice: 'Best of all men, honoring likeness and equality and sameness and agreement according to nature, do not relax your hold, in respect of number and of every power belonging to fine and good things. And now, first of all, guard the stated number throughout your whole life; and next, do not dishonor the height and magnitude of property that you first received as your fair share, by buying and selling among yourselves—for neither the lot that assigned it, being divine, nor the lawgiver, will be your ally in such a case. For now, for the first time, the law commands the disobedient, having declared beforehand that whoever wishes may take part in the allotment on these terms, or not take part at all: that the land is sacred to all the gods first of all, and that priests and priestesses will offer prayers over the first, second, and even a third round of sacrifices, that whoever buys or sells any part of the house-plots or land-plots he was allotted should suffer the fitting consequences for it. They will record this and set it up in the sanctuaries, inscribed on cypress-wood tablets, as a permanent record for future times; and besides this, they will appoint as guardians over these matters whichever office seems to have the sharpest eyes, so that any violations that occur along the way will not escape notice, but the disobedient will be punished together by both law and god. For as great a good as this present command turns out to be for all cities that obey it, once joined with the arrangement that follows from it, then, according to the old proverb, no one will ever know evil, but will become experienced and decent in his habits—for there is no room in such an arrangement for excessive money-making, and it follows from this that no one should or may engage in the sordid moneymaking of the illiberal sort, insofar as the shameful thing called vulgar trade turns a free character away from it, and one should not even think it worth gathering wealth from such sources.'
ATHENIAN: In addition to all this, there follows one more law: no private person may own gold or silver. Only coin for everyday exchange is allowed, since craftsmen must more or less trade in it, and everyone who needs to pay wages to hired workers, slaves, and resident foreigners must have some. For these purposes, we say, coin should be owned by our own people, but it must not be accepted as valid currency among other men. As for a common Greek currency, the city will need to keep some on hand for military campaigns and for journeys abroad—embassies, for instance, or any other mission the city must send out—for these purposes the city must always keep a supply of standard Greek coin. But if a private citizen ever needs to travel abroad, let him get permission from the officials before he goes; and if he comes home with any foreign coin left over, let him hand it over to the city, taking in exchange the equivalent in local currency. If anyone is found to have kept some for himself, it shall be confiscated to the public treasury, and anyone who knew about it and did not report it shall be liable to the same curse and reproach as the offender, along with a fine no less than the amount of foreign coin brought in. When a man marries or gives a daughter in marriage, neither party is to give or receive any dowry whatsoever, nor deposit money with anyone he does not trust, nor lend at interest, on the understanding that the borrower is entirely free to repay neither interest nor principal at all. Anyone considering whether these are the best practices for a city to adopt can judge them correctly by always referring back to our starting point and our aim. Now the aim of a politician with real understanding, we maintain, is not what most people would say it should be: that a good lawgiver should want his city, if he legislates wisely, to be as large as possible and as rich as possible, possessing gold and silver mines and ruling as much territory as it can by land and sea. They would add that he should also want the city to be best and happiest, if he legislates rightly. But of these aims, some can actually be achieved, others cannot. The one arranging things should want the achievable ones; he should neither want the unachievable ones—that would be idle wishing—nor attempt them. Now it is more or less necessary that happiness and goodness go together—that, then, he should want. But it is impossible to be both extremely rich and good, at least by the standard of riches most people reckon by.
ATHENIAN: They mean by the rich those few people who own possessions worth the most money—possessions a bad man could just as easily own. If that is really so, then I would never agree with them that the rich man is truly happy unless he is also good; and being outstandingly good and outstandingly rich at the same time is impossible. Why is that? someone might ask. Because, we would answer, wealth gained from both just and unjust sources is more than double what comes from just sources alone, while the spending of a man unwilling to spend either honorably or dishonorably, as opposed to one who is willing to spend on honorable things, is less than half as much. So one who does the opposite could never become richer than a man who gains from double sources but spends only half as much. Now one of these is good, and the other, when he is thrifty, is not exactly bad, but he is sometimes utterly base; he is never, however, as we just said, good. For the man who takes both justly and unjustly, and spends neither justly nor unjustly, is rich—provided he is also thrifty—while the utterly base man, being for the most part a spendthrift, is generally poor. And the man who spends on honorable things and gains only from just sources could hardly ever become outstandingly wealthy, nor again would he ever be very poor. So our argument holds: men of enormous wealth are not good men; and lacking goodness, they lack happiness too. Now the whole purpose behind our laws was aimed at this: that our citizens should be as happy as possible and as friendly to one another as possible. But citizens can never be friends where there is much litigation and much injustice among them—only where these are as slight and as rare as possible. That is why we say there should be neither gold nor silver in the city, nor should there be much money-making through vulgar trades, moneylending, or shameful livestock-breeding, but only what farming yields and provides—and even of that, only so much as will not force a man to neglect the very things money exists for in the first place, namely soul and body. Without gymnastics and the rest of education, these could never amount to anything worth mentioning. That is why we have said more than once that the care of money should be honored last. For there are three things altogether that every human being takes seriously, and rightly ordered concern for money is the last and third of them; concern for the body comes in the middle; and concern for the soul comes first.
ATHENIAN: And indeed, in the constitution we are now working through, if it ranks these honors this way, it has been legislated correctly. But if any of the laws prescribed within it should turn out to honor bodily health above self-control, or wealth above health and self-control, it will clearly have been laid down incorrectly. So the lawgiver must keep asking himself again and again: What do I actually want? And am I achieving this, or am I missing the mark? Only in this way might he perhaps both come through his legislating himself and free everyone else from confusion—in no other way, ever. Let the man who has drawn a lot, then, hold his allotment on the conditions we have stated. It would have been fine if each person had come to the colony with everything else equal too; but since that is not possible—one man will arrive owning more property, another less—we need, for many reasons, including equal treatment in matters concerning the city, to establish unequal property classes, so that offices, financial contributions, and distributions may assign each person's due honor not solely by his own and his ancestors' virtue, nor by bodily strength and good looks, but also by wealth and poverty—so that, receiving honors and offices as equally as possible given the underlying inequality, proportioned fairly, citizens will not quarrel. For these reasons we should establish four property classes—first, second, third, and fourth—or call them by some other names, marking both when people stay in the same class and when they move, becoming richer from poorer or poorer from richer, into whichever class fits them. Next I would lay down the following shape of law to follow on from this. In a city that is not to share in the greatest disease—which would more accurately be called division, or civil strife—there must be, we maintain, neither harsh poverty among any of the citizens nor, again, wealth, since both breed these evils. The lawgiver, then, must now state a limit for each of these. For poverty, let the boundary be set at the worth of the original allotment, which must remain fixed, and which no official will ever allow to become smaller for anyone, nor will any other person who has any regard at all for excellence.
ATHENIAN: Setting this as his measure, the lawgiver will allow a person to acquire twice, three times, up to four times this amount. But if anyone acquires more than this—whether by discovery, by gift, by business dealings, or by some similar stroke of fortune—by handing over to the city, and to the gods who hold the city, whatever exceeds the measure, he will be well regarded and free of penalty. But if anyone disobeys this law, whoever wishes may report him for half the surplus; the guilty party will pay an equal further portion from his own estate, and the other half will go to the gods. All property beyond the original allotment, belonging to anyone at all, must be registered openly before the officials appointed as guardians, whomever the law assigns, so that lawsuits concerning any monetary matters may be straightforward and perfectly clear. After this, first, the city must be situated as much as possible in the middle of the territory, choosing a site that has whatever else is useful for a city—things not hard to think of or state. After that, the territory must be divided into twelve parts, first setting aside a sanctuary of Hestia, Zeus, and Athena, calling it the acropolis, and drawing a circle around it, from which the twelve parts are to be marked out, both the city itself and the whole territory. The twelve parts must be made equal in the sense that where the land is good the portions are small, and where it is poorer, larger. The allotments are to be divided into five thousand and forty, and each of these again cut in two, and two sections joined into one lot, one near and one far combined in each case: the portion near the city paired with the one at the farthest edge, the second nearest paired with the second farthest, and so on for all the rest. In making these two-part divisions, the same adjustment just mentioned for poor and good land must be applied, equalizing by the size of the portion assigned. The men, too, must be divided into twelve groups, arranging the rest of their property into twelve shares as equal as possible, once a full registration has been made. After this, twelve lots are to be assigned to the twelve gods, and the portion that falls to each god is to be named and consecrated, and that same portion is to be called a tribe. The twelve sections of the city, too, are to be divided the same way the rest of the territory was divided, and each person is to receive two dwellings, one near the center and one at the outskirts. Let the founding of the settlement, then, be complete on these terms.
ATHENIAN: We must bear the following firmly in mind: it is entirely possible that everything just described will never actually fall into circumstances allowing it all to come about exactly as reasoned—men who will not object to living together this way but will put up with holding fixed, modest property their whole lives, and having the number of children we specified for each family, and going without gold and the other things the lawgiver will clearly be prohibiting on the basis of what has now been said, and besides all that, accepting the arrangements about the middle position of territory and city and dwellings arranged all around in circles—as though he were telling something like dreams, or molding some city and its citizens out of wax. Still, there is something not badly said in all this, and we must go back over the following point ourselves. Once again our lawgiver tells us this: In these discussions, friends, do not imagine that I myself have failed to notice that what is now being said has a somewhat idealized character. But I think the most just approach, in each case, in things yet to come, is this: the man laying out the model of what the undertaking should ideally be must leave out nothing that is finest and truest; but where it turns out that some part of this cannot possibly be realized, he should avoid and not attempt that particular part, while contriving to bring about instead whatever remains that is closest and most akin to it among the things that are actually fitting to do—and he should let the lawgiver put the finishing touch on his own intention. Once that is done, only then should one consider jointly with him which of these proposals is beneficial and which part of the legislation is difficult to swallow. For a craftsman responsible for even the humblest thing must make it consistent with itself throughout if he is to be worth mentioning at all. Now, then, after settling on the division into twelve parts, we must be eager to see just how these twelve parts, containing within them as many further subdivisions as possible—along with what follows from these and is generated out of them, down to the five thousand and forty—should give rise to brotherhoods, townships, and villages, as well as military formations and marching orders, and further, coinage, and dry and liquid measures, and weights. All of these the law must arrange so that they are measured out consistently and in harmony with one another.
ATHENIAN: Besides this, there's another worry you needn't fear — that we're falling into pettiness if we require that whatever household goods people acquire should never be left unmeasured, and if we take it as a general principle that the divisions and variations of number are useful for everything: the variations numbers undergo in themselves, and the variations that appear in lengths and in solids, and indeed in musical pitches and in motions — both the straight motion of rising and falling and the circular motion that goes around. The lawgiver must keep all of these in view and require every citizen, as far as he's able, not to fall short in mastering this arrangement. For managing a household, for running a city, and for every craft, there's no single subject of childhood learning with as much power as the study of numbers. The greatest thing about it is this: it rouses up whoever is naturally sluggish and slow to learn, and makes him quick to learn, retentive, and sharp-witted, advancing beyond his own nature by a kind of divine skill. Now all this, if by other laws and practices someone strips away meanness of spirit and love of money from the souls of those who are going to acquire this learning adequately and to their benefit, will turn out to be a fine and fitting course of education. But if not, one may unknowingly produce what's called cunning instead of wisdom — just as we can see happening now among the Egyptians and Phoenicians and many other peoples, made what they are by the meanness bred from their other pursuits and possessions, whether some inferior lawgiver was responsible for it, or a harsh stroke of fortune fell upon them, or some other such natural cause. And indeed, Megillus and Cleinias, let's not lose sight of this either — that with respect to places, there are some that differ from others in producing better or worse human beings, and lawgivers must not legislate against these differences. Some places, because of all sorts of winds and because of exposure to the sun's heat, turn out strange and favorable for their inhabitants in different ways; others differ because of their waters; and others because of the very food that grows from the earth, which yields not only bodies better or worse but is equally capable of producing all such effects in souls as well. And of all these, the places that would differ most are those regions where some divine inspiration and the portions allotted to guardian spirits reside, receiving those who come to settle there graciously — or, on the contrary, unfavorably. Any lawgiver with sense, having examined these matters as far as it's possible for a human being to study such things, will try to frame his laws accordingly. This, Cleinias, is exactly what you must do: you must turn your attention to these matters first, since you're about to found a country. CLEINIAS: Well, Athenian stranger, what you say is altogether right, and that's just what I must do.