Laws
in supposing this to be your meaning?
CLEINIAS: Certainly; and our Lacedaemonian friend, if I am not mistaken,
will agree with me.
MEGILLUS: Why, my good friend, how could any Lacedaemonian say anything
else?
ATHENIAN: And is what you say applicable only to states, or also to
villages?
CLEINIAS: To both alike.
ATHENIAN: The case is the same?
CLEINIAS: Yes.
ATHENIAN: And in the village will there be the same war of family
against family, and of individual against individual?
CLEINIAS: The same.
ATHENIAN: And should each man conceive himself to be his own
enemy:--what shall we say?
CLEINIAS: O Athenian Stranger--inhabitant of Attica I will not call you,
for you seem to deserve rather to be named after the goddess herself,
because you go back to first principles,--you have thrown a light upon
the argument, and will now be better able to understand what I was just
saying,--that all men are publicly one another's enemies, and each man
privately his own.
(ATHENIAN: My good sir, what do you mean?)--
CLEINIAS:...Moreover, there is a victory and defeat--the first and best
of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats--which each man gains or
sustains at the hands, not of another, but of himself; this shows that
there is a war against ourselves going on within every one of us.
ATHENIAN: Let us now reverse the order of the argument: Seeing that
every individual is either his own superior or his own inferior, may we
say that there is the same principle in the house, the village, and the
state?
CLEINIAS: You mean that in each of them there is a principle of
superiority or inferiority to self?
ATHENIAN: Yes.
CLEINIAS: You are quite right in asking the question, for there
certainly is such a principle, and above all in states; and the state
in which the better citizens win a victory over the mob and over the
inferior classes may be truly said to be better than itself, and may
be justly praised, where such a victory is gained, or censured in the
opposite case.
ATHENIAN: Whether the better is ever really conquered by the worse, is
a question which requires more discussion, and may be therefore left for
the present. But I now quite understand your meaning when you say
that citizens who are of the same race and live in the same cities may
unjustly conspire, and having the superiority in numbers may overcome
and enslave the few just; and when they prevail, the state may be truly
called its own inferior and therefore bad; and when they are defeated,
its own superior and therefore good.
CLEINIAS: Your remark, Stranger, is a paradox, and yet we cannot
possibly deny it.
ATHENIAN: Here is another case for consideration;--in a family there
may be several brothers, who are the offspring of a single pair; very
possibly the majority of them may be unjust, and the just may be in a
minority.
CLEINIAS: Very possibly.
ATHENIAN: And you and I ought not to raise a question of words as to
whether this family and household are rightly said to be superior when
they conquer, and inferior when they are conquered; for we are not
now considering what may or may not be the proper or customary way of
speaking, but we are considering the natural principles of right and
wrong in laws.
CLEINIAS: What you say, Stranger, is most true.
MEGILLUS: Quite excellent, in my opinion, as far as we have gone.
ATHENIAN: Again; might there not be a judge over these brethren, of whom
we were speaking?
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: Now, which would be the better judge--one who destroyed the
bad and appointed the good to govern themselves; or one who, while
allowing the good to govern, let the bad live, and made them voluntarily
submit? Or third, I suppose, in the scale of excellence might be placed
a judge, who, finding the family distracted, not only did not destroy
any one, but reconciled them to one another for ever after, and gave
them laws which they mutually observed, and was able to keep them
friends.
CLEINIAS: The last would be by far the best sort of judge and
legislator.
ATHENIAN: And yet the aim of all the laws which he gave would be the
reverse of war.
CLEINIAS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: And will he who constitutes the state and orders the life
of man have in view external war, or that kind of intestine war called
civil, which no one, if he could prevent, would like to have occurring
in his own state; and when occurring, every one would wish to be quit of
as soon as possible?
CLEINIAS: He would have the latter chiefly in view.
ATHENIAN: And would he prefer that this civil war should be terminated
by the destruction of one of the parties, and by the victory of the
other, or that peace and friendship should be re-established, and that,
being reconciled, they should give their attention to foreign enemies?
CLEINIAS: Every one would desire the latter in the case of his own
state.
ATHENIAN: And would not that also be the desire of the legislator?
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: And would not every one always make laws for the sake of the
best?
CLEINIAS: To be sure.
ATHENIAN: But war, whether external or civil, is not the best, and the
need of either is to be deprecated; but peace with one another, and
good will, are best. Nor is the victory of the state over itself to be
regarded as a really good thing, but as a necessity; a man might as
well say that the body was in the best state when sick and purged by
medicine, forgetting that there is also a state of the body which needs
no purge. And in like manner no one can be a true statesman, whether
he aims at the happiness of the individual or state, who looks only,
or first of all, to external warfare; nor will he ever be a sound
legislator who orders peace for the sake of war, and not war for the
sake of peace.
CLEINIAS: I suppose that there is truth, Stranger, in that remark of
yours; and yet I am greatly mistaken if war is not the entire aim and
object of our own institutions, and also of the Lacedaemonian.
ATHENIAN: I dare say; but there is no reason why we should rudely
quarrel with one another about your legislators, instead of gently
questioning them, seeing that both we and they are equally in earnest.
Please follow me and the argument closely:--And first I will put forward
Tyrtaeus, an Athenian by birth, but also a Spartan citizen, who of all
men was most eager about war: Well, he says,
'I sing not, I care not, about any man,
even if he were the richest of men, and possessed every good (and
then he gives a whole list of them), if he be not at all times a brave
warrior.' I imagine that you, too, must have heard his poems; our
Lacedaemonian friend has probably heard more than enough of them.
MEGILLUS: Very true.
CLEINIAS: And they have found their way from Lacedaemon to Crete.
ATHENIAN: Come now and let us all join in asking this question of
Tyrtaeus: O most divine poet, we will say to him, the excellent praise
which you have bestowed on those who excel in war sufficiently proves
that you are wise and good, and I and Megillus and Cleinias of Cnosus
do, as I believe, entirely agree with you. But we should like to be
quite sure that we are speaking of the same men; tell us, then, do you
agree with us in thinking that there are two kinds of war; or what would
you say? A far inferior man to Tyrtaeus would have no difficulty
in replying quite truly, that war is of two kinds,--one which is
universally called civil war, and is, as we were just now saying, of all
wars the worst; the other, as we should all admit, in which we fall out
with other nations who are of a different race, is a far milder form of
warfare.
CLEINIAS: Certainly, far milder.
ATHENIAN: Well, now, when you praise and blame war in this high-flown
strain, whom are you praising or blaming, and to which kind of war are
you referring? I suppose that you must mean foreign war, if I am to
judge from expressions of yours in which you say that you abominate
those
'Who refuse to look upon fields of blood, and will not draw near and
strike at their enemies.'
And we shall naturally go on to say to him,--You, Tyrtaeus, as it seems,
praise those who distinguish themselves in external and foreign war; and
he must admit this.
CLEINIAS: Evidently.
ATHENIAN: They are good; but we say that there are still better men
whose virtue is displayed in the greatest of all battles. And we too
have a poet whom we summon as a witness, Theognis, citizen of Megara in
Sicily:
'Cyrnus,' he says, 'he who is faithful in a civil broil is worth his
weight in gold and silver.'
And such an one is far better, as we affirm, than the other in a more
difficult kind of war, much in the same degree as justice and temperance
and wisdom, when united with courage, are better than courage only; for
a man cannot be faithful and good in civil strife without having all
virtue. But in the war of which Tyrtaeus speaks, many a mercenary
soldier will take his stand and be ready to die at his post, and yet
they are generally and almost without exception insolent, unjust,
violent men, and the most senseless of human beings. You will ask what
the conclusion is, and what I am seeking to prove: I maintain that
the divine legislator of Crete, like any other who is worthy of
consideration, will always and above all things in making laws have
regard to the greatest virtue; which, according to Theognis, is loyalty
in the hour of danger, and may be truly called perfect justice. Whereas,
that virtue which Tyrtaeus highly praises is well enough, and was
praised by the poet at the right time, yet in place and dignity may be
said to be only fourth rate (i.e., it ranks after justice, temperance,
and wisdom.).
CLEINIAS: Stranger, we are degrading our inspired lawgiver to a rank
which is far beneath him.
ATHENIAN: Nay, I think that we degrade not him but ourselves, if we
imagine that Lycurgus and Minos laid down laws both in Lacedaemon and
Crete mainly with a view to war.
CLEINIAS: What ought we to say then?
ATHENIAN: What truth and what justice require of us, if I am not
mistaken, when speaking in behalf of divine excellence;--that the
legislator when making his laws had in view not a part only, and this
the lowest part of virtue, but all virtue, and that he devised classes
of laws answering to the kinds of virtue; not in the way in which modern
inventors of laws make the classes, for they only investigate and offer
laws whenever a want is felt, and one man has a class of laws about
allotments and heiresses, another about assaults; others about ten
thousand other such matters. But we maintain that the right way of
examining into laws is to proceed as we have now done, and I admired the
spirit of your exposition; for you were quite right in beginning with
virtue, and saying that this was the aim of the giver of the law, but I
thought that you went wrong when you added that all his legislation had
a view only to a part, and the least part of virtue, and this called
forth my subsequent remarks. Will you allow me then to explain how I
should have liked to have heard you expound the matter?
CLEINIAS: By all means.
ATHENIAN: You ought to have said, Stranger--The Cretan laws are with
reason famous among the Hellenes; for they fulfil the object of laws,
which is to make those who use them happy; and they confer every sort of
good. Now goods are of two kinds: there are human and there are divine
goods, and the human hang upon the divine; and the state which attains
the greater, at the same time acquires the less, or, not having the
greater, has neither. Of the lesser goods the first is health, the
second beauty, the third strength, including swiftness in running and
bodily agility generally, and the fourth is wealth, not the blind god