Laws
(Pluto), but one who is keen of sight, if only he has wisdom for his
companion. For wisdom is chief and leader of the divine class of goods,
and next follows temperance; and from the union of these two with
courage springs justice, and fourth in the scale of virtue is courage.
All these naturally take precedence of the other goods, and this is the
order in which the legislator must place them, and after them he will
enjoin the rest of his ordinances on the citizens with a view to these,
the human looking to the divine, and the divine looking to their leader
mind. Some of his ordinances will relate to contracts of marriage which
they make one with another, and then to the procreation and education of
children, both male and female; the duty of the lawgiver will be to take
charge of his citizens, in youth and age, and at every time of life,
and to give them punishments and rewards; and in reference to all their
intercourse with one another, he ought to consider their pains and
pleasures and desires, and the vehemence of all their passions; he
should keep a watch over them, and blame and praise them rightly by the
mouth of the laws themselves. Also with regard to anger and terror, and
the other perturbations of the soul, which arise out of misfortune, and
the deliverances from them which prosperity brings, and the experiences
which come to men in diseases, or in war, or poverty, or the opposite
of these; in all these states he should determine and teach what is
the good and evil of the condition of each. In the next place, the
legislator has to be careful how the citizens make their money and in
what way they spend it, and to have an eye to their mutual contracts and
dissolutions of contracts, whether voluntary or involuntary: he should
see how they order all this, and consider where justice as well as
injustice is found or is wanting in their several dealings with one
another; and honour those who obey the law, and impose fixed penalties
on those who disobey, until the round of civil life is ended, and the
time has come for the consideration of the proper funeral rites and
honours of the dead. And the lawgiver reviewing his work, will appoint
guardians to preside over these things,--some who walk by intelligence,
others by true opinion only, and then mind will bind together all his
ordinances and show them to be in harmony with temperance and justice,
and not with wealth or ambition. This is the spirit, Stranger, in which
I was and am desirous that you should pursue the subject. And I want to
know the nature of all these things, and how they are arranged in the
laws of Zeus, as they are termed, and in those of the Pythian Apollo,
which Minos and Lycurgus gave; and how the order of them is discovered
to his eyes, who has experience in laws gained either by study or habit,
although they are far from being self-evident to the rest of mankind
like ourselves.
CLEINIAS: How shall we proceed, Stranger?
ATHENIAN: I think that we must begin again as before, and first consider
the habit of courage; and then we will go on and discuss another and
then another form of virtue, if you please. In this way we shall have
a model of the whole; and with these and similar discourses we will
beguile the way. And when we have gone through all the virtues, we will
show, by the grace of God, that the institutions of which I was speaking
look to virtue.
MEGILLUS: Very good; and suppose that you first criticize this praiser
of Zeus and the laws of Crete.
ATHENIAN: I will try to criticize you and myself, as well as him, for
the argument is a common concern. Tell me,--were not first the syssitia,
and secondly the gymnasia, invented by your legislator with a view to
war?
MEGILLUS: Yes.
ATHENIAN: And what comes third, and what fourth? For that, I think, is
the sort of enumeration which ought to be made of the remaining parts
of virtue, no matter whether you call them parts or what their name is,
provided the meaning is clear.
MEGILLUS: Then I, or any other Lacedaemonian, would reply that hunting
is third in order.
ATHENIAN: Let us see if we can discover what comes fourth and fifth.
MEGILLUS: I think that I can get as far as the fourth head, which is
the frequent endurance of pain, exhibited among us Spartans in certain
hand-to-hand fights; also in stealing with the prospect of getting a
good beating; there is, too, the so-called Crypteia, or secret service,
in which wonderful endurance is shown,--our people wander over the whole
country by day and by night, and even in winter have not a shoe to
their foot, and are without beds to lie upon, and have to attend upon
themselves. Marvellous, too, is the endurance which our citizens show in
their naked exercises, contending against the violent summer heat; and
there are many similar practices, to speak of which in detail would be
endless.
ATHENIAN: Excellent, O Lacedaemonian Stranger. But how ought we to
define courage? Is it to be regarded only as a combat against fears and
pains, or also against desires and pleasures, and against flatteries;
which exercise such a tremendous power, that they make the hearts even
of respectable citizens to melt like wax?
MEGILLUS: I should say the latter.
ATHENIAN: In what preceded, as you will remember, our Cnosian friend was
speaking of a man or a city being inferior to themselves:--Were you not,
Cleinias?
CLEINIAS: I was.
ATHENIAN: Now, which is in the truest sense inferior, the man who is
overcome by pleasure or by pain?
CLEINIAS: I should say the man who is overcome by pleasure; for all men
deem him to be inferior in a more disgraceful sense, than the other who
is overcome by pain.
ATHENIAN: But surely the lawgivers of Crete and Lacedaemon have not
legislated for a courage which is lame of one leg, able only to meet
attacks which come from the left, but impotent against the insidious
flatteries which come from the right?
CLEINIAS: Able to meet both, I should say.
ATHENIAN: Then let me once more ask, what institutions have you in
either of your states which give a taste of pleasures, and do not avoid
them any more than they avoid pains; but which set a person in the midst
of them, and compel or induce him by the prospect of reward to get the
better of them? Where is an ordinance about pleasure similar to that
about pain to be found in your laws? Tell me what there is of this
nature among you:--What is there which makes your citizen equally brave
against pleasure and pain, conquering what they ought to conquer, and
superior to the enemies who are most dangerous and nearest home?
MEGILLUS: I was able to tell you, Stranger, many laws which were
directed against pain; but I do not know that I can point out any great
or obvious examples of similar institutions which are concerned with
pleasure; there are some lesser provisions, however, which I might
mention.
CLEINIAS: Neither can I show anything of that sort which is at all
equally prominent in the Cretan laws.
ATHENIAN: No wonder, my dear friends; and if, as is very likely, in our
search after the true and good, one of us may have to censure the laws
of the others, we must not be offended, but take kindly what another
says.
CLEINIAS: You are quite right, Athenian Stranger, and we will do as you
say.
ATHENIAN: At our time of life, Cleinias, there should be no feeling of
irritation.
CLEINIAS: Certainly not.
ATHENIAN: I will not at present determine whether he who censures the
Cretan or Lacedaemonian polities is right or wrong. But I believe that
I can tell better than either of you what the many say about them. For
assuming that you have reasonably good laws, one of the best of them
will be the law forbidding any young men to enquire which of them are
right or wrong; but with one mouth and one voice they must all agree
that the laws are all good, for they came from God; and any one who says
the contrary is not to be listened to. But an old man who remarks any
defect in your laws may communicate his observation to a ruler or to an
equal in years when no young man is present.
CLEINIAS: Exactly so, Stranger; and like a diviner, although not
there at the time, you seem to me quite to have hit the meaning of the
legislator, and to say what is most true.
ATHENIAN: As there are no young men present, and the legislator
has given old men free licence, there will be no impropriety in our
discussing these very matters now that we are alone.
CLEINIAS: True. And therefore you may be as free as you like in your
censure of our laws, for there is no discredit in knowing what is wrong;
he who receives what is said in a generous and friendly spirit will be
all the better for it.
ATHENIAN: Very good; however, I am not going to say anything against
your laws until to the best of my ability I have examined them, but I am
going to raise doubts about them. For you are the only people known to
us, whether Greek or barbarian, whom the legislator commanded to eschew
all great pleasures and amusements and never to touch them; whereas
in the matter of pains or fears which we have just been discussing, he
thought that they who from infancy had always avoided pains and fears
and sorrows, when they were compelled to face them would run away from
those who were hardened in them, and would become their subjects. Now
the legislator ought to have considered that this was equally true of
pleasure; he should have said to himself, that if our citizens are from
their youth upward unacquainted with the greatest pleasures, and unused
to endure amid the temptations of pleasure, and are not disciplined
to refrain from all things evil, the sweet feeling of pleasure will
overcome them just as fear would overcome the former class; and in
another, and even a worse manner, they will be the slaves of those
who are able to endure amid pleasures, and have had the opportunity of
enjoying them, they being often the worst of mankind. One half of their
souls will be a slave, the other half free; and they will not be worthy
to be called in the true sense men and freemen. Tell me whether you
assent to my words?
CLEINIAS: On first hearing, what you say appears to be the truth; but to
be hasty in coming to a conclusion about such important matters would be
very childish and simple.
ATHENIAN: Suppose, Cleinias and Megillus, that we consider the virtue
which follows next of those which we intended to discuss (for after
courage comes temperance), what institutions shall we find relating to
temperance, either in Crete or Lacedaemon, which, like your military
institutions, differ from those of any ordinary state.
MEGILLUS: That is not an easy question to answer; still I should say
that the common meals and gymnastic exercises have been excellently
devised for the promotion both of temperance and courage.
ATHENIAN: There seems to be a difficulty, Stranger, with regard to
states, in making words and facts coincide so that there can be no
dispute about them. As in the human body, the regimen which does good in
one way does harm in another; and we can hardly say that any one course
of treatment is adapted to a particular constitution. Now the gymnasia
and common meals do a great deal of good, and yet they are a source of
evil in civil troubles; as is shown in the case of the Milesian, and
Boeotian, and Thurian youth, among whom these institutions seem always
to have had a tendency to degrade the ancient and natural custom of love
below the level, not only of man, but of the beasts. The charge may be
fairly brought against your cities above all others, and is true also
of most other states which especially cultivate gymnastics. Whether
such matters are to be regarded jestingly or seriously, I think that
the pleasure is to be deemed natural which arises out of the intercourse