Laws
CLEINIAS: What more have you to say?
ATHENIAN: I should say that if a city seriously means to adopt the
practice of drinking under due regulation and with a view to the
enforcement of temperance, and in like manner, and on the same
principle, will allow of other pleasures, designing to gain the victory
over them--in this way all of them may be used. But if the State makes
drinking an amusement only, and whoever likes may drink whenever he
likes, and with whom he likes, and add to this any other indulgences,
I shall never agree or allow that this city or this man should practise
drinking. I would go further than the Cretans and Lacedaemonians, and am
disposed rather to the law of the Carthaginians, that no one while he is
on a campaign should be allowed to taste wine at all, but that he should
drink water during all that time, and that in the city no slave, male
or female, should ever drink wine; and that no magistrates should drink
during their year of office, nor should pilots of vessels or judges
while on duty taste wine at all, nor any one who is going to hold a
consultation about any matter of importance; nor in the day-time at all,
unless in consequence of exercise or as medicine; nor again at night,
when any one, either man or woman, is minded to get children. There are
numberless other cases also in which those who have good sense and good
laws ought not to drink wine, so that if what I say is true, no city
will need many vineyards. Their husbandry and their way of life in
general will follow an appointed order, and their cultivation of the
vine will be the most limited and the least common of their employments.
And this, Stranger, shall be the crown of my discourse about wine, if
you agree.
CLEINIAS: Excellent: we agree.
BOOK III.
ATHENIAN: Enough of this. And what, then, is to be regarded as the
origin of government? Will not a man be able to judge of it best from
a point of view in which he may behold the progress of states and their
transitions to good or evil?
CLEINIAS: What do you mean?
ATHENIAN: I mean that he might watch them from the point of view of
time, and observe the changes which take place in them during infinite
ages.
CLEINIAS: How so?
ATHENIAN: Why, do you think that you can reckon the time which has
elapsed since cities first existed and men were citizens of them?
CLEINIAS: Hardly.
ATHENIAN: But are sure that it must be vast and incalculable?
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: And have not thousands and thousands of cities come into being
during this period and as many perished? And has not each of them
had every form of government many times over, now growing larger, now
smaller, and again improving or declining?
CLEINIAS: To be sure.
ATHENIAN: Let us endeavour to ascertain the cause of these changes; for
that will probably explain the first origin and development of forms of
government.
CLEINIAS: Very good. You shall endeavour to impart your thoughts to us,
and we will make an effort to understand you.
ATHENIAN: Do you believe that there is any truth in ancient traditions?
CLEINIAS: What traditions?
ATHENIAN: The traditions about the many destructions of mankind which
have been occasioned by deluges and pestilences, and in many other ways,
and of the survival of a remnant?
CLEINIAS: Every one is disposed to believe them.
ATHENIAN: Let us consider one of them, that which was caused by the
famous deluge.
CLEINIAS: What are we to observe about it?
ATHENIAN: I mean to say that those who then escaped would only be hill
shepherds,--small sparks of the human race preserved on the tops of
mountains.
CLEINIAS: Clearly.
ATHENIAN: Such survivors would necessarily be unacquainted with the arts
and the various devices which are suggested to the dwellers in cities
by interest or ambition, and with all the wrongs which they contrive
against one another.
CLEINIAS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: Let us suppose, then, that the cities in the plain and on the
sea-coast were utterly destroyed at that time.
CLEINIAS: Very good.
ATHENIAN: Would not all implements have then perished and every other
excellent invention of political or any other sort of wisdom have
utterly disappeared?
CLEINIAS: Why, yes, my friend; and if things had always continued as
they are at present ordered, how could any discovery have ever been
made even in the least particular? For it is evident that the arts were
unknown during ten thousand times ten thousand years. And no more than
a thousand or two thousand years have elapsed since the discoveries of
Daedalus, Orpheus and Palamedes,--since Marsyas and Olympus invented
music, and Amphion the lyre--not to speak of numberless other inventions
which are but of yesterday.
ATHENIAN: Have you forgotten, Cleinias, the name of a friend who is
really of yesterday?
CLEINIAS: I suppose that you mean Epimenides.
ATHENIAN: The same, my friend; he does indeed far overleap the heads
of all mankind by his invention; for he carried out in practice, as you
declare, what of old Hesiod (Works and Days) only preached.
CLEINIAS: Yes, according to our tradition.
ATHENIAN: After the great destruction, may we not suppose that the state
of man was something of this sort:--In the beginning of things there was
a fearful illimitable desert and a vast expanse of land; a herd or two
of oxen would be the only survivors of the animal world; and there might
be a few goats, these too hardly enough to maintain the shepherds who
tended them?
CLEINIAS: True.
ATHENIAN: And of cities or governments or legislation, about which we
are now talking, do you suppose that they could have any recollection at
all?
CLEINIAS: None whatever.
ATHENIAN: And out of this state of things has there not sprung all that
we now are and have: cities and governments, and arts and laws, and a
great deal of vice and a great deal of virtue?
CLEINIAS: What do you mean?
ATHENIAN: Why, my good friend, how can we possibly suppose that those
who knew nothing of all the good and evil of cities could have attained
their full development, whether of virtue or of vice?
CLEINIAS: I understand your meaning, and you are quite right.
ATHENIAN: But, as time advanced and the race multiplied, the world came
to be what the world is.
CLEINIAS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: Doubtless the change was not made all in a moment, but little
by little, during a very long period of time.
CLEINIAS: A highly probable supposition.
ATHENIAN: At first, they would have a natural fear ringing in their ears
which would prevent their descending from the heights into the plain.
CLEINIAS: Of course.
ATHENIAN: The fewness of the survivors at that time would have made
them all the more desirous of seeing one another; but then the means of
travelling either by land or sea had been almost entirely lost, as I
may say, with the loss of the arts, and there was great difficulty in
getting at one another; for iron and brass and all metals were jumbled
together and had disappeared in the chaos; nor was there any possibility
of extracting ore from them; and they had scarcely any means of felling
timber. Even if you suppose that some implements might have been
preserved in the mountains, they must quickly have worn out and
vanished, and there would be no more of them until the art of metallurgy
had again revived.
CLEINIAS: There could not have been.
ATHENIAN: In how many generations would this be attained?
CLEINIAS: Clearly, not for many generations.
ATHENIAN: During this period, and for some time afterwards, all the arts
which require iron and brass and the like would disappear.
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: Faction and war would also have died out in those days, and
for many reasons.
CLEINIAS: How would that be?
ATHENIAN: In the first place, the desolation of these primitive men
would create in them a feeling of affection and goodwill towards one
another; and, secondly, they would have no occasion to quarrel about
their subsistence, for they would have pasture in abundance, except just
at first, and in some particular cases; and from their pasture-land they
would obtain the greater part of their food in a primitive age, having
plenty of milk and flesh; moreover they would procure other food by the
chase, not to be despised either in quantity or quality. They would also
have abundance of clothing, and bedding, and dwellings, and utensils
either capable of standing on the fire or not; for the plastic and
weaving arts do not require any use of iron: and God has given these
two arts to man in order to provide him with all such things, that,
when reduced to the last extremity, the human race may still grow
and increase. Hence in those days mankind were not very poor; nor was
poverty a cause of difference among them; and rich they could not have
been, having neither gold nor silver:--such at that time was their
condition. And the community which has neither poverty nor riches will
always have the noblest principles; in it there is no insolence or
injustice, nor, again, are there any contentions or envyings. And
therefore they were good, and also because they were what is called
simple-minded; and when they were told about good and evil, they in
their simplicity believed what they heard to be very truth and practised
it. No one had the wit to suspect another of a falsehood, as men do now;
but what they heard about Gods and men they believed to be true, and
lived accordingly; and therefore they were in all respects such as we
have described them.
CLEINIAS: That quite accords with my views, and with those of my friend
here.
ATHENIAN: Would not many generations living on in a simple manner,
although ruder, perhaps, and more ignorant of the arts generally, and
in particular of those of land or naval warfare, and likewise of
other arts, termed in cities legal practices and party conflicts,
and including all conceivable ways of hurting one another in word and
deed;--although inferior to those who lived before the deluge, or to the
men of our day in these respects, would they not, I say, be simpler and
more manly, and also more temperate and altogether more just? The reason
has been already explained.
CLEINIAS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: I should wish you to understand that what has preceded and
what is about to follow, has been, and will be said, with the intention
of explaining what need the men of that time had of laws, and who was
their lawgiver.
CLEINIAS: And thus far what you have said has been very well said.
ATHENIAN: They could hardly have wanted lawgivers as yet; nothing of
that sort was likely to have existed in their days, for they had no
letters at this early period; they lived by habit and the customs of
their ancestors, as they are called.
CLEINIAS: Probably.
ATHENIAN: But there was already existing a form of government which,
if I am not mistaken, is generally termed a lordship, and this still
remains in many places, both among Hellenes and barbarians (compare
Arist. Pol.), and is the government which is declared by Homer to have
prevailed among the Cyclopes:--
'They have neither councils nor judgments, but they dwell in hollow
caves on the tops of high mountains, and every one gives law to his
wife and children, and they do not busy themselves about one another.'
(Odyss.)
CLEINIAS: That seems to be a charming poet of yours; I have read some
other verses of his, which are very clever; but I do not know much of
him, for foreign poets are very little read among the Cretans.
MEGILLUS: But they are in Lacedaemon, and he appears to be the prince
of them all; the manner of life, however, which he describes is not
Spartan, but rather Ionian, and he seems quite to confirm what you are