Greek Texts & Translations

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 631ain endless variety. But what we assert is that the devising of laws, when rightly conducted, follows the procedure which we have now commenced. Indeed, I greatly admire the way you opened your exposition of the laws; for to make a start with goodness and say that that was the aim of the lawgiver is the right way. But in your further statement that he legislated wholly with reference to a fraction of goodness, and that the smallest fraction, you seemed to me to be in error, and all this latter part of my discourse was because of that. What then is the manner of exposition I should have liked to have heard from you? 631bShall I tell you?

Yes, by all means.

“O Stranger” (thus you ought to have said), “it is not for nothing that the laws of the Cretans are held in superlatively high repute among all the Hellenes. For they are true laws inasmuch as they effect the well-being of those who use them by supplying all that are good. Now goods are of two kinds, human and divine; and the human goods are dependent on the divine, and he who receives the greater acquires also the less, or else he is bereft of both. 631cThe lesser goods are those of which health ranks first, beauty second; the third is strength, in running and all other bodily exercises; and the fourth is wealth—no blind god Plutus, but keen of sight, provided that he has wisdom for companion. And wisdom, in turn, has first place among the goods that are divine, and rational temperance of soul comes second; from these two, when united with courage, there issues justice, as the third; 631dand the fourth is courage. Now all these are by nature ranked before the human goods, and verily the law-giver also must so rank them. Next, it must be proclaimed to the citizens that all the other instructions they receive have these in view; and that, of these goods themselves, the human look up to the divine, and the divine to reason as their chief. And in regard to their marriage connections, and to their subsequent breeding and rearing of children, male and female, both during youth and in later life 631eup to old age, the lawgiver must supervise the citizens, duly apportioning honor and dishonor; and in regard to all their forms of intercourse he must observe and watch their pains and pleasures and desires and 632aall intense passions, and distribute praise and blame correctly by the means of the laws themselves. Moreover, in the matter of anger and of fear, and of all the disturbances which befall souls owing to misfortune, and of all the avoidances thereof which occur in good-fortune, and of all the experiences which confront men through disease or war or penury or their opposites,— 632bin regard to all these definite instruction must be given as to what is the right and what the wrong disposition in each case. It is necessary, in the next place, for the law-giver to keep a watch on the methods employed by the citizens in gaining and spending money, and to supervise the associations they form with one another, and the dissolutions thereof, whether they be voluntary or under compulsion; he must observe the manner in which they conduct each of these mutual transactions, and note where justice obtains and where it is lacking. To those that are obedient he must assign honors by law, but on the disobedient he must impose 632cduly appointed penalties. Then finally, when he arrives at the completion of the whole constitution, he has to consider in what manner in each case the burial of the dead should be carried out, and what honors should be assigned to them. This being settled, the framer of the laws will hand over all his statutes to the charge of Wardens—guided some by wisdom, others by true opinion—to the end that Reason, having bound all into one single system, may declare them to be ancillary neither to wealth nor ambition, but to temperance and justice.” 632dIn this manner, Strangers, I could have wished (and I wish it still) that you had fully explained how all these regulations are inherent in the reputed laws of Zeus and in those of the Pythian Apollo which were ordained by Minos and Lycurgus, and how their systematic arrangement is quite evident to him who, whether by art or practice, is an expert in law, although it is by no means obvious to the rest of us.

What then, Stranger, should be the next step in our argument?

We ought, as I think, to do as we did at first—