Greek Texts & Translations

I certainly am.

And I can assure you they have reached Crete also, shipped over from Lacedaemon.

Come now, let us jointly interrogate this poet somehow on this wise: 629c“O Tyrtaeus, most inspired of poets (for assuredly you seem to us both wise and good in that you have eulogized excellently those who excel in war), concerning this matter we three Megillus, Clinias of Cnosus and myself are already in entire accord with you, as we suppose; but we wish to be assured that both we and you are alluding to the same persons. Tell us then: do you clearly recognize, as we do, two distinct kinds of war?” In reply to this I suppose that even a much less able man than Tyrtaeus would state the truth, 629dthat there are two kinds, the one being that which we all call “civil,” which is of all wars the most bitter, as we said just now, while the other kind, as I suppose we shall all agree, is that which we engage in when we quarrel with foreigners and aliens—a kind much milder than the former.

Certainly.

Come, then, which kind of warriors, fighting in which kind of war, did you praise so highly, while blaming others? Warriors, apparently, who fight in war abroad. 629eAt any rate, in your poems you have said that you cannot abide men who dare not “face the gory fray”Tyrtaeus and smite the foe in close combat.
Tyrtaeus Then we should proceed to say, “It appears, O Tyrtaeus, that you are chiefly praising those who achieve distinction in foreign and external warfare.” To this, I presume, he would agree, and say “Yes”? 630a

Of course.

Yet, brave though these men are, we still maintain that they are far surpassed in bravery by those who are conspicuously brave in the greatest of wars; and we also have a poet for witness,—Theognis (a citizen of Sicilian Megara), who says: In the day of grievous feud, O Cyrnus, the loyal warrior is worth his weight in silver and gold.
Theognis 5.77-8 Bergk ^note Such a man, in a war much more grievous, is, we say, ever so much better than the other—nearly as much better, in fact, as the union of justice, prudence and wisdom 630bwith courage is better than courage by itself alone. For a man would never prove himself a loyal and sound in civil war if devoid of goodness in its entirety; whereas in the war of which Tyrtaeus speaks there are vast numbers of mercenaries ready to die fighting ^note “with well-planted feet apart,” of whom the majority, with but few exceptions, prove themselves reckless, unjust, violent, and pre-eminently foolish. What, then, is the conclusion to which our present discourse is tending, and what point is it trying to make clear by these statements? Plainly it is this: both the Heaven-taught legislator of Crete 630cand every legislator who is worth his salt will most assuredly legislate always with a single eye to the highest goodness and to that alone; and this (to quote Theognis) consists in “loyalty in danger,” and one might term it “complete righteousness.” But that goodness which Tyrtaeus specially praised, 630dfair though it be and fitly glorified by the poet, deserves nevertheless to be placed no higher than fourth in order and estimation. ^note

We are degrading our own lawgiver, Stranger, to a very low level!

Nay, my good Sir, it is ourselves we are degrading, in so far as we imagine that it was with a special view to war that Lycurgus and Minos laid down all the legal usages here and in Lacedaemon.

How, then, ought we to have stated the matter?

In the way that is, as I think, true and proper 630ewhen talking of a divine hero. That is to say, we should state that he enacted laws with an eye not to some one fraction, and that the most paltry, of goodness, but to goodness as a whole, and that he devised the laws themselves according to classes, though not the classes which the present devisers propound. For everyone now brings forward and devises just the class which he needs: one man deals with inheritances and heiresses, another with cases of battery, and so on