Laws
received the sanction of the Delphic oracle, but there was a still
stronger obligation by which they were enforced,--the necessity of
self-defence: the Spartans were always living in the presence of their
enemies. They belonged to an age when written law had not yet taken
the place of custom and tradition. The old constitution was very rarely
affected by new enactments, and these only related to the duties of the
Kings or Ephors, or the new relations of classes which arose as
time went on. Hence there was as great a difference as could well
be conceived between the Laws of Athens and Sparta: the one was the
creation of a civilized state, and did not differ in principle from our
modern legislation, the other of an age in which the people were held
together and also kept down by force of arms, and which afterwards
retained many traces of its barbaric origin 'surviving in culture.'
Nevertheless the Lacedaemonian was the ideal of a primitive Greek state.
According to Thucydides it was the first which emerged out of confusion
and became a regular government. It was also an army devoted to
military exercises, but organized with a view to self-defence and not
to conquest. It was not quick to move or easily excited; but stolid,
cautious, unambitious, procrastinating. For many centuries it retained
the same character which was impressed upon it by the hand of the
legislator. This singular fabric was partly the result of circumstances,
partly the invention of some unknown individual in prehistoric times,
whose ideal of education was military discipline, and who, by the
ascendency of his genius, made a small tribe into a nation which became
famous in the world's history. The other Hellenes wondered at the
strength and stability of his work. The rest of Hellas, says Thucydides,
undertook the colonisation of Heraclea the more readily, having a
feeling of security now that they saw the Lacedaemonians taking part in
it. The Spartan state appears to us in the dawn of history as a vision
of armed men, irresistible by any other power then existing in the
world. It can hardly be said to have understood at all the rights
or duties of nations to one another, or indeed to have had any moral
principle except patriotism and obedience to commanders. Men were so
trained to act together that they lost the freedom and spontaneity of
human life in cultivating the qualities of the soldier and ruler. The
Spartan state was a composite body in which kings, nobles, citizens,
perioeci, artisans, slaves, had to find a 'modus vivendi' with one
another. All of them were taught some use of arms. The strength of the
family tie was diminished among them by an enforced absence from
home and by common meals. Sparta had no life or growth; no poetry or
tradition of the past; no art, no thought. The Athenians started on
their great career some centuries later, but the Spartans would have
been easily conquered by them, if Athens had not been deficient in the
qualities which constituted the strength (and also the weakness) of her
rival.
The ideal of Athens has been pictured for all time in the speech which
Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles, called the Funeral Oration.
He contrasts the activity and freedom and pleasantness of Athenian
life with the immobility and severe looks and incessant drill of the
Spartans. The citizens of no city were more versatile, or more readily
changed from land to sea or more quickly moved about from place to
place. They 'took their pleasures' merrily, and yet, when the time for
fighting arrived, were not a whit behind the Spartans, who were like men
living in a camp, and, though always keeping guard, were often too late
for the fray. Any foreigner might visit Athens; her ships found a way
to the most distant shores; the riches of the whole earth poured in upon
her. Her citizens had their theatres and festivals; they 'provided their
souls with many relaxations'; yet they were not less manly than the
Spartans or less willing to sacrifice this enjoyable existence for their
country's good. The Athenian was a nobler form of life than that of
their rivals, a life of music as well as of gymnastic, the life of a
citizen as well as of a soldier. Such is the picture which Thucydides
has drawn of the Athenians in their glory. It is the spirit of this life
which Plato would infuse into the Magnesian state and which he seeks to
combine with the common meals and gymnastic discipline of Sparta.
The two great types of Athens and Sparta had deeply entered into his
mind. He had heard of Sparta at a distance and from common Hellenic
fame: he was a citizen of Athens and an Athenian of noble birth. He must
often have sat in the law-courts, and may have had personal experience
of the duties of offices such as he is establishing. There is no need to
ask the question, whence he derived his knowledge of the Laws of
Athens: they were a part of his daily life. Many of his enactments
are recognized to be Athenian laws from the fragments preserved in
the Orators and elsewhere: many more would be found to be so if we had
better information. Probably also still more of them would have been
incorporated in the Magnesian code, if the work had ever been finally
completed. But it seems to have come down to us in a form which is
partly finished and partly unfinished, having a beginning and end,
but wanting arrangement in the middle. The Laws answer to Plato's own
description of them, in the comparison which he makes of himself and his
two friends to gatherers of stones or the beginners of some
composite work, 'who are providing materials and partly putting them
together:--having some of their laws, like stones, already fixed in
their places, while others lie about.'
Plato's own life coincided with the period at which Athens rose to her
greatest heights and sank to her lowest depths. It was impossible that
he should regard the blessings of democracy in the same light as the
men of a former generation, whose view was not intercepted by the evil
shadow of the taking of Athens, and who had only the glories of Marathon
and Salamis and the administration of Pericles to look back upon. On the
other hand the fame and prestige of Sparta, which had outlived so many
crimes and blunders, was not altogether lost at the end of the life
of Plato. Hers was the only great Hellenic government which preserved
something of its ancient form; and although the Spartan citizens were
reduced to almost one-tenth of their original number (Arist. Pol.),
she still retained, until the rise of Thebes and Macedon, a certain
authority and predominance due to her final success in the struggle with
Athens and to the victories which Agesilaus won in Asia Minor.
Plato, like Aristotle, had in his mind some form of a mean state which
should escape the evils and secure the advantages of both aristocracy
and democracy. It may however be doubted whether the creation of such
a state is not beyond the legislator's art, although there have been
examples in history of forms of government, which through some community
of interest or of origin, through a balance of parties in the state
itself, or through the fear of a common enemy, have for a while
preserved such a character of moderation. But in general there arises a
time in the history of a state when the struggle between the few and
the many has to be fought out. No system of checks and balances, such as
Plato has devised in the Laws, could have given equipoise and stability
to an ancient state, any more than the skill of the legislator could
have withstood the tide of democracy in England or France during the
last hundred years, or have given life to China or India.
The basis of the Magnesian constitution is the equal division of land.
In the new state, as in the Republic, there was to be neither poverty
nor riches. Every citizen under all circumstances retained his lot, and
as much money as was necessary for the cultivation of it, and no one was
allowed to accumulate property to the amount of more than five times
the value of the lot, inclusive of it. The equal division of land was a
Spartan institution, not known to have existed elsewhere in Hellas. The
mention of it in the Laws of Plato affords considerable presumption that
it was of ancient origin, and not first introduced, as Mr. Grote and
others have imagined, in the reformation of Cleomenes III. But at
Sparta, if we may judge from the frequent complaints of the accumulation
of property in the hands of a few persons (Arist. Pol.), no provision
could have been made for the maintenance of the lot. Plutarch indeed
speaks of a law introduced by the Ephor Epitadeus soon after the
Peloponnesian War, which first allowed the Spartans to sell their land
(Agis): but from the manner in which Aristotle refers to the subject,
we should imagine this evil in the state to be of a much older standing.
Like some other countries in which small proprietors have been numerous,
the original equality passed into inequality, and, instead of a large
middle class, there was probably at Sparta greater disproportion in the
property of the citizens than in any other state of Hellas. Plato was
aware of the danger, and has improved on the Spartan custom. The land,
as at Sparta, must have been tilled by slaves, since other occupations
were found for the citizens. Bodies of young men between the ages of
twenty-five and thirty were engaged in making biennial peregrinations of
the country. They and their officers are to be the magistrates, police,
engineers, aediles, of the twelve districts into which the colony was
divided. Their way of life may be compared with that of the Spartan
secret police or Crypteia, a name which Plato freely applies to them
without apparently any consciousness of the odium which has attached to
the word in history.
Another great institution which Plato borrowed from Sparta (or Crete) is
the Syssitia or common meals. These were established in both states, and
in some respects were considered by Aristotle to be better managed in
Crete than at Lacedaemon (Pol.). In the Laws the Cretan custom appears
to be adopted (This is not proved, as Hermann supposes ('De Vestigiis,'
etc.)): that is to say, if we may interpret Plato by Aristotle, the cost
of them was defrayed by the state and not by the individuals (Arist.
Pol); so that the members of the mess, who could not pay their quota,
still retained their rights of citizenship. But this explanation is
hardly consistent with the Laws, where contributions to the Syssitia
from private estates are expressly mentioned. Plato goes further than
the legislators of Sparta and Crete, and would extend the common meals
to women as well as men: he desires to curb the disorders, which existed
among the female sex in both states, by the application to women of the
same military discipline to which the men were already subject. It
was an extension of the custom of Syssitia from which the ancient
legislators shrank, and which Plato himself believed to be very
difficult of enforcement.
Like Sparta, the new colony was not to be surrounded by walls,--a state
should learn to depend upon the bravery of its citizens only--a fallacy
or paradox, if it is not to be regarded as a poetical fancy, which is
fairly enough ridiculed by Aristotle (Pol.). Women, too, must be ready
to assist in the defence of their country: they are not to rush to the
temples and altars, but to arm themselves with shield and spear. In the
regulation of the Syssitia, in at least one of his enactments respecting
property, and in the attempt to correct the licence of women, Plato
shows, that while he borrowed from the institutions of Sparta and
favoured the Spartan mode of life, he also sought to improve upon them.
The enmity to the sea is another Spartan feature which is transferred