Laws · Plato
INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.
The fictions of the Laws have no longer the verisimilitude which is characteristic of the Phaedrus and the Timaeus, or even of the Statesman. We can hardly suppose that an educated Athenian would have placed the visit of Epimenides to Athens ten years before the Persian war, or have imagined that a war with Messene prevented the Lacedaemonians from coming to the rescue of Hellas. The narrative of the origin of the Dorian institutions, which are said to have been due to a fear of the growing power of the Assyrians, is a plausible invention, which may be compared with the tale of the island of Atlantis and the poem of Solon, but is not accredited by similar arts of deception. The other statement that the Dorians were Achaean exiles assembled by Dorieus, and the assertion that Troy was included in the Assyrian Empire, have some foundation (compare for the latter point, Diod. Sicul.). Nor is there anywhere in the Laws that lively enargeia, that vivid mise en scene, which is as characteristic of Plato as of some modern novelists.
The old men are afraid of the ridicule which 'will fall on their heads more than enough,' and they do not often indulge in a joke. In one of the few which occur, the book of the Laws, if left incomplete, is compared to a monster wandering about without a head. But we no longer breathe the atmosphere of humour which pervades the Symposium and the Euthydemus, in which we pass within a few sentences from the broadest Aristophanic joke to the subtlest refinement of wit and fancy; instead of this, in the Laws an impression of baldness and feebleness is often left upon our minds. Some of the most amusing descriptions, as, for example, of children roaring for the first three years of life; or of the Athenians walking into the country with fighting-cocks under their arms; or of the slave doctor who knocks about his patients finely; and the gentleman doctor who courteously persuades them; or of the way of keeping order in the theatre, 'by a hint from a stick,' are narrated with a commonplace gravity; but where we find this sort of dry humour we shall not be far wrong in thinking that the writer intended to make us laugh. The seriousness of age takes the place of the jollity of youth. Life should have holidays and festivals; yet we rebuke ourselves when we laugh, and take our pleasures sadly. The irony of the earlier dialogues, of which some traces occur in the tenth book, is replaced by a severity which hardly condescends to regard human things. 'Let us say, if you please, that man is of some account, but I was speaking of him in comparison with God.'
The imagery and illustrations are poor in themselves, and are not assisted by the surrounding phraseology. We have seen how in the Republic, and in the earlier dialogues, figures of speech such as 'the wave,' 'the drone,' 'the chase,' 'the bride,' appear and reappear at intervals. Notes are struck which are repeated from time to time, as in a strain of music. There is none of this subtle art in the Laws. The illustrations, such as the two kinds of doctors, 'the three kinds of funerals,' the fear potion, the puppet, the painter leaving a successor to restore his picture, the 'person stopping to consider where three ways meet,' the 'old laws about water of which he will not divert the course,' can hardly be said to do much credit to Plato's invention. The citations from the poets have lost that fanciful character which gave them their charm in the earlier dialogues. We are tired of images taken from the arts of navigation, or archery, or weaving, or painting, or medicine, or music. Yet the comparisons of life to a tragedy, or of the working of mind to the revolution of the self-moved, or of the aged parent to the image of a God dwelling in the house, or the reflection that 'man is made to be the plaything of God, and that this rightly considered is the best of him,' have great beauty.
2. The clumsiness of the style is exhibited in frequent mannerisms and repetitions. The perfection of the Platonic dialogue consists in the accuracy with which the question and answer are fitted into one another, and the regularity with which the steps of the argument succeed one another. This finish of style is no longer discernible in the Laws. There is a want of variety in the answers; nothing can be drawn out of the respondents but 'Yes' or 'No,' 'True,' 'To be sure,' etc.; the insipid forms, 'What do you mean?' 'To what are you referring?' are constantly returning. Again and again the speaker is charged, or charges himself, with obscurity; and he repeats again and again that he will explain his views more clearly. The process of thought which should be latent in the mind of the writer appears on the surface. In several passages the Athenian praises himself in the most unblushing manner, very unlike the irony of the earlier dialogues, as when he declares that 'the laws are a divine work given by some inspiration of the Gods,' and that 'youth should commit them to memory instead of the compositions of the poets.' The prosopopoeia which is adopted by Plato in the Protagoras and other dialogues is repeated until we grow weary of it.
The legislator is always addressing the speakers or the youth of the state, and the speakers are constantly making addresses to the legislator. A tendency to a paradoxical manner of statement is also observable. 'We must have drinking,' 'we must have a virtuous tyrant'--this is too much for the duller wits of the Lacedaemonian and Cretan, who at first start back in surprise. More than in any other writing of Plato the tone is hortatory; the laws are sermons as well as laws; they are considered to have a religious sanction, and to rest upon a religious sentiment in the mind of the citizens. The words of the Athenian are attributed to the Lacedaemonian and Cretan, who are supposed to have made them their own, after the manner of the earlier dialogues. Resumptions of subjects which have been half disposed of in a previous passage constantly occur: the arrangement has neither the clearness of art nor the freedom of nature. Irrelevant remarks are made here and there, or illustrations used which are not properly fitted in. The dialogue is generally weak and laboured, and is in the later books fairly given up, apparently, because unsuited to the subject of the work. The long speeches or sermons of the Athenian, often extending over several pages, have never the grace and harmony which are exhibited in the earlier dialogues. For Plato is incapable of sustained composition; his genius is dramatic rather than oratorical; he can converse, but he cannot make a speech. Even the Timaeus, which is one of his most finished works, is full of abrupt transitions. There is the same kind of difference between the dialogue and the continuous discourse of Plato as between the narrative and speeches of Thucydides.
4. The peculiarities in the use of words which occur in the Laws have been collected by Zeller (Platonische Studien) and Stallbaum (Legg.): first, in the use of nouns, such as allodemia, apeniautesis, glukuthumia, diatheter, thrasuxenia, koros, megalonoia, paidourgia: secondly, in the use of adjectives, such as aistor, biodotes, echthodopos, eitheos, chronios, and of adverbs, such as aniditi, anatei, nepoivei: thirdly, in the use of verbs, such as athurein, aissein (aixeien eipein), euthemoneisthai, parapodizesthai, sebein, temelein, tetan. These words however, as Stallbaum remarks, are formed according to analogy, and nearly all of them have the support of some poetical or other authority. Zeller and Stallbaum have also collected forms of words in the Laws, differing from the forms of the same words which occur in other places: e.g. blabos for blabe, abios for abiotos, acharistos for acharis, douleios for doulikos, paidelos for paidikos, exagrio for exagriaino, ileoumai for ilaskomai, and the Ionic word sophronistus, meaning 'correction.' Zeller has noted a fondness for substantives ending in -ma and -sis, such as georgema, diapauma, epithumema, zemioma, komodema, omilema; blapsis, loidoresis, paraggelsis, and others; also a use of substantives in the plural, which are commonly found only in the singular, maniai, atheotetes, phthonoi, phoboi, phuseis; also, a peculiar use of prepositions in composition, as in eneirgo, apoblapto, dianomotheteo, dieiretai, dieulabeisthai, and other words; also, a frequent occurrence of the Ionic datives plural in -aisi and -oisi, perhaps used for the sake of giving an ancient or archaic effect.
To these peculiarities of words he has added a list of peculiar expressions and constructions. Among the most characteristic are the following: athuta pallakon spermata; amorphoi edrai; osa axiomata pros archontas; oi kata polin kairoi; muthos, used in several places of 'the discourse about laws;' and connected with this the frequent use of paramuthion and paramutheisthai in the general sense of 'address,' 'addressing'; aimulos eros; ataphoi praxeis; muthos akephalos; ethos euthuporon. He remarks also on the frequent employment of the abstract for the concrete; e.g. uperesia for uperetai, phugai for phugades, mechanai in the sense of 'contrivers,' douleia for douloi, basileiai for basileis, mainomena kedeumata for ganaika mainomenen; e chreia ton paidon in the sense of 'indigent children,' and paidon ikanotes; to ethos tes apeirias for e eiothuia apeiria; kuparitton upse te kai kalle thaumasia for kuparittoi mala upselai kai kalai. He further notes some curious uses of the genitive case, e.g. philias omologiai, maniai orges, laimargiai edones, cheimonon anupodesiai, anosioi plegon tolmai; and of the dative, omiliai echthrois, nomothesiai, anosioi plegon tolmai; and of the dative omiliai echthrois, nomothesiai epitropois; and also some rather uncommon periphrases, thremmata Neilou, xuggennetor teknon for alochos, Mouses lexis for poiesis, zographon paides, anthropon spermata and the like; the fondness for particles of limitation, especially tis and ge, sun tisi charisi, tois ge dunamenois and the like; the pleonastic use of tanun, of os, of os eros eipein, of ekastote; and the periphrastic use of the preposition peri. Lastly, he observes the tendency to hyperbata or transpositions of words, and to rhythmical uniformity as well as grammatical irregularity in the structure of the sentences.
For nearly all the expressions which are adduced by Zeller as arguments against the genuineness of the Laws, Stallbaum finds some sort of authority. There is no real ground for doubting that the work was written by Plato, merely because several words occur in it which are not found in his other writings. An imitator may preserve the usual phraseology of a writer better than he would himself. But, on the other hand, the fact that authorities may be quoted in support of most of these uses of words, does not show that the diction is not peculiar. Several of them seem to be poetical or dialectical, and exhibit an attempt to enlarge the limits of Greek prose by the introduction of Homeric and tragic expressions. Most of them do not appear to have retained any hold on the later language of Greece. Like several experiments in language of the writers of the Elizabethan age, they were afterwards lost; and though occasionally found in Plutarch and imitators of Plato, they have not been accepted by Aristotle or passed into the common dialect of Greece. 5. Unequal as the Laws are in style, they contain a few passages which are very grand and noble. For example, the address to the poets: 'Best of strangers, we also are poets of the best and noblest tragedy; for our whole state is an imitation of the best and noblest life, which we affirm to be indeed the very truth of tragedy.'
Or again, the sight of young men and maidens in friendly intercourse with one another, suggesting the dangers to which youth is liable from the violence of passion; or the eloquent denunciation of unnatural lusts in the same passage; or the charming thought that the best legislator 'orders war for the sake of peace and not peace for the sake of war;' or the pleasant allusion, 'O Athenian--inhabitant of Attica, I will not say, for you seem to me worthy to be named after the Goddess Athene because you go back to first principles;' or the pithy saying, 'Many a victory has been and will be suicidal to the victors, but education is never suicidal;' or the fine expression that 'the walls of a city should be allowed to sleep in the earth, and that we should not attempt to disinter them;' or the remark that 'God is the measure of all things in a sense far higher than any man can be;' or that 'a man should be from the first a partaker of the truth, that he may live a true man as long as possible;' or the principle repeatedly laid down, that 'the sins of the fathers are not to be visited on the children;' or the description of the funeral rites of those priestly sages who depart in innocence; or the noble sentiment, that we should do more justice to slaves than to equals; or the curious observation, founded, perhaps, on his own experience, that there are a few 'divine men in every state however corrupt, whose conversation is of inestimable value;' or the acute remark, that public opinion is to be respected, because the judgments of mankind about virtue are better than their practice; or the deep religious and also modern feeling which pervades the tenth book (whatever may be thought of the arguments); the sense of the duty of living as a part of a whole, and in dependence on the will of God, who takes care of the least things as well as the greatest; and the picture of parents praying for their children--not as we may say, slightly altering the words of Plato, as if there were no truth or reality in the Gentile religions, but as if there were the greatest--are very striking to us.
We must remember that the Laws, unlike the Republic, do not exhibit an ideal state, but are supposed to be on the level of human motives and feelings; they are also on the level of the popular religion, though elevated and purified: hence there is an attempt made to show that the pleasant is also just. But, on the other hand, the priority of the soul to the body, and of God to the soul, is always insisted upon as the true incentive to virtue; especially with great force and eloquence at the commencement of Book v. And the work of legislation is carried back to the first principles of morals. 6. No other writing of Plato shows so profound an insight into the world and into human nature as the Laws. That 'cities will never cease from ill until they are better governed,' is the text of the Laws as well as of the Statesman and Republic. The principle that the balance of power preserves states; the reflection that no one ever passed his whole life in disbelief of the Gods; the remark that the characters of men are best seen in convivial intercourse; the observation that the people must be allowed to share not only in the government, but in the administration of justice; the desire to make laws, not with a view to courage only, but to all virtue; the clear perception that education begins with birth, or even, as he would say, before birth; the attempt to purify religion; the modern reflections, that punishment is not vindictive, and that limits must be set to the power of bequest; the impossibility of undeceiving the victims of quacks and jugglers; the provision for water, and for other requirements of health, and for concealing the bodies of the dead with as little hurt as possible to the living; above all, perhaps, the distinct consciousness that under the actual circumstances of mankind the ideal cannot be carried out, and yet may be a guiding principle--will appear to us, if we remember that we are still in the dawn of politics, to show a great depth of political wisdom.
It must be admitted that these principles are difficult of application. Yet a criticism may be worth making which rests only on probabilities or impressions. Great disputes will arise about the merits of different passages, about what is truly characteristic and original or trivial and borrowed. Many have thought the Laws to be one of the greatest of Platonic writings, while in the judgment of Mr. Grote they hardly rise above the level of the forged epistles. The manner in which a writer would or would not have written at a particular time of life must be acknowledged to be a matter of conjecture. But enough has been said to show that similarities of a certain kind, whether criticism is able to detect them or not, may be such as must be attributed to an original writer, and not to a mere imitator. (d) Applying these principles to the case of the Laws, we have now to point out that they contain the class of refined or unconscious similarities which are indicative of genuineness. The parallelisms are like the repetitions of favourite thoughts into which every one is apt to fall unawares in conversation or in writing. They are found in a work which contains many beautiful and remarkable passages. We may therefore begin by claiming this presumption in their favour. Such undesigned coincidences, as we may venture to call them, are the following.
Some lesser similarities of thought and manner should not be omitted, such as the mention of the thirty years' old students in the Republic, and the fifty years' old choristers in the Laws; or the making of the citizens out of wax (Laws) compared with the other image (Republic); or the number of the tyrant (729), which is NEARLY equal with the number of days and nights in the year (730), compared with the 'slight correction' of the sacred number 5040, which is divisible by all the numbers from 1 to 12 except 11, and divisible by 11, if two families be deducted; or once more, we may compare the ignorance of solid geometry of which he complains in the Republic and the puzzle about fractions with the difficulty in the Laws about commensurable and incommensurable quantities--and the malicious emphasis on the word gunaikeios (Laws) with the use of the same word (Republic). These and similar passages tend to show that the author of the Republic is also the author of the Laws. They are echoes of the same voice, expressions of the same mind, coincidences too subtle to have been invented by the ingenuity of any imitator. The force of the argument is increased, if we remember that no passage in the Laws is exactly copied,--nowhere do five or six words occur together which are found together elsewhere in Plato's writings.
In other dialogues of Plato, as well as in the Republic, there are to be found parallels with the Laws. Such resemblances, as we might expect, occur chiefly (but not exclusively) in the dialogues which, on other grounds, we may suppose to be of later date. The punishment of evil is to be like evil men (Laws), as he says also in the Theaetetus. Compare again the dependence of tragedy and comedy on one another, of which he gives the reason in the Laws--'For serious things cannot be understood without laughable, nor opposites at all without opposites, if a man is really to have intelligence of either'; here he puts forward the principle which is the groundwork of the thesis of Socrates in the Symposium, 'that the genius of tragedy is the same as that of comedy, and that the writer of comedy ought to be a writer of tragedy also.' There is a truth and right which is above Law (Laws), as we learn also from the Statesman. That men are the possession of the Gods (Laws), is a reflection which likewise occurs in the Phaedo. The remark, whether serious or ironical (Laws), that 'the sons of the Gods naturally believed in the Gods, because they had the means of knowing about them,' is found in the Timaeus.
The reign of Cronos, who is the divine ruler (Laws), is a reminiscence of the Statesman. It is remarkable that in the Sophist and Statesman (Soph.), Plato, speaking in the character of the Eleatic Stranger, has already put on the old man. The madness of the poets, again, is a favourite notion of Plato's, which occurs also in the Laws, as well as in the Phaedrus, Ion, and elsewhere. There are traces in the Laws of the same desire to base speculation upon history which we find in the Critias. Once more, there is a striking parallel with the paradox of the Gorgias, that 'if you do evil, it is better to be punished than to be unpunished,' in the Laws: 'To live having all goods without justice and virtue is the greatest of evils if life be immortal, but not so great if the bad man lives but a short time.' The point to be considered is whether these are the kind of parallels which would be the work of an imitator. Would a forger have had the wit to select the most peculiar and characteristic thoughts of Plato; would he have caught the spirit of his philosophy; would he, instead of openly borrowing, have half concealed his favourite ideas; would he have formed them into a whole such as the Laws; would he have given another the credit which he might have obtained for himself; would he have remembered and made use of other passages of the Platonic writings and have never deviated into the phraseology of them? Without pressing such arguments as absolutely certain, we must acknowledge that such a comparison affords a new ground of real weight for believing the Laws to be a genuine writing of Plato.
V. The relation of the Republic to the Laws is clearly set forth by Plato in the Laws. The Republic is the best state, the Laws is the best possible under the existing conditions of the Greek world. The Republic is the ideal, in which no man calls anything his own, which may or may not have existed in some remote clime, under the rule of some God, or son of a God (who can say?), but is, at any rate, the pattern of all other states and the exemplar of human life. The Laws distinctly acknowledge what the Republic partly admits, that the ideal is inimitable by us, but that we should 'lift up our eyes to the heavens' and try to regulate our lives according to the divine image. The citizens are no longer to have wives and children in common, and are no longer to be under the government of philosophers. But the spirit of communism or communion is to continue among them, though reverence for the sacredness of the family, and respect of children for parents, not promiscuous hymeneals, are now the foundation of the state; the sexes are to be as nearly on an equality as possible; they are to meet at common tables, and to share warlike pursuits (if the women will consent), and to have a common education. The legislator has taken the place of the philosopher, but a council of elders is retained, who are to fulfil the duties of the legislator when he has passed out of life. The addition of younger persons to this council by co-optation is an improvement on the governing body of the Republic. The scheme of education in the Laws is of a far lower kind than that which Plato had conceived in the Republic.
There he would have his rulers trained in all knowledge meeting in the idea of good, of which the different branches of mathematical science are but the hand-maidens or ministers; here he treats chiefly of popular education, stopping short with the preliminary sciences,--these are to be studied partly with a view to their practical usefulness, which in the Republic he holds cheap, and even more with a view to avoiding impiety, of which in the Republic he says nothing; he touches very lightly on dialectic, which is still to be retained for the rulers. Yet in the Laws there remain traces of the old educational ideas. He is still for banishing the poets; and as he finds the works of prose writers equally dangerous, he would substitute for them the study of his own laws. He insists strongly on the importance of mathematics as an educational instrument. He is no more reconciled to the Greek mythology than in the Republic, though he would rather say nothing about it out of a reverence for antiquity; and he is equally willing to have recourse to fictions, if they have a moral tendency.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.