Laws
forever banished from the city into the country, and let him abstain
from the temples; and if he do not abstain, the wardens of the country
shall punish him with blows, or in any way which they please, and if
he return he shall be put to death. And if any freeman eat or drink, or
have any other sort of intercourse with him, or only meeting him have
voluntarily touched him, he shall not enter into any temple, nor into
the agora, nor into the city, until he is purified; for he should
consider that he has become tainted by a curse. And if he disobeys the
law, and pollutes the city and the temples contrary to law, and one of
the magistrates sees him and does not indict him, when he gives in his
account this omission shall be a most serious charge.
If a slave strike a freeman, whether a stranger or a citizen, let
any one who is present come to the rescue, or pay the penalty already
mentioned; and let the bystanders bind him, and deliver him up to
the injured person, and he receiving him shall put him in chains, and
inflict on him as many stripes as he pleases; but having punished him he
must surrender him to his master according to law, and not deprive him
of his property. Let the law be as follows: The slave who strikes a
freeman, not at the command of the magistrates, his owner shall receive
bound from the man whom he has stricken, and not release him until the
slave has persuaded the man whom he has stricken that he ought to be
released. And let there be the same laws about women in relation to
women, and about men and women in relation to one another.
BOOK X.
And now having spoken of assaults, let us sum up all acts of violence
under a single law, which shall be as follows: No one shall take or
carry away any of his neighbour's goods, neither shall he use anything
which is his neighbour's without the consent of the owner; for these are
the offences which are and have been, and will ever be, the source
of all the aforesaid evils. The greatest of them are excesses and
insolences of youth, and are offences against the greatest when they are
done against religion; and especially great when in violation of public
and holy rites, or of the partly-common rites in which tribes and
phratries share; and in the second degree great when they are committed
against private rites and sepulchres, and in the third degree (not
to repeat the acts formerly mentioned), when insults are offered to
parents; the fourth kind of violence is when any one, regardless of the
authority of the rulers, takes or carries away or makes use of anything
which belongs to them, not having their consent; and the fifth kind
is when the violation of the civil rights of an individual demands
reparation. There should be a common law embracing all these cases. For
we have already said in general terms what shall be the punishment of
sacrilege, whether fraudulent or violent, and now we have to determine
what is to be the punishment of those who speak or act insolently toward
the Gods. But first we must give them an admonition which may be in the
following terms: No one who in obedience to the laws believed that
there were Gods, ever intentionally did any unholy act, or uttered
any unlawful word; but he who did must have supposed one of three
things--either that they did not exist--which is the first possibility,
or secondly, that, if they did, they took no care of man, or thirdly,
that they were easily appeased and turned aside from their purpose by
sacrifices and prayers.
CLEINIAS: What shall we say or do to these persons?
ATHENIAN: My good friend, let us first hear the jests which I suspect
that they in their superiority will utter against us.
CLEINIAS: What jests?
ATHENIAN: They will make some irreverent speech of this sort: 'O
inhabitants of Athens, and Sparta, and Cnosus,' they will reply, 'in
that you speak truly; for some of us deny the very existence of the
Gods, while others, as you say, are of opinion that they do not care
about us; and others that they are turned from their course by gifts.
Now we have a right to claim, as you yourself allowed, in the matter of
laws, that before you are hard upon us and threaten us, you should argue
with us and convince us--you should first attempt to teach and persuade
us that there are Gods by reasonable evidences, and also that they are
too good to be unrighteous, or to be propitiated, or turned from their
course by gifts. For when we hear such things said of them by those who
are esteemed to be the best of poets, and orators, and prophets, and
priests, and by innumerable others, the thoughts of most of us are
not set upon abstaining from unrighteous acts, but upon doing them and
atoning for them. When lawgivers profess that they are gentle and not
stern, we think that they should first of all use persuasion to us, and
show us the existence of Gods, if not in a better manner than other men,
at any rate in a truer; and who knows but that we shall hearken to you?
If then our request is a fair one, please to accept our challenge.
CLEINIAS: But is there any difficulty in proving the existence of the
Gods?
ATHENIAN: How would you prove it?
CLEINIAS: How? In the first place, the earth and the sun, and the stars
and the universe, and the fair order of the seasons, and the division of
them into years and months, furnish proofs of their existence, and also
there is the fact that all Hellenes and barbarians believe in them.
ATHENIAN: I fear, my sweet friend, though I will not say that I much
regard, the contempt with which the profane will be likely to assail us.
For you do not understand the nature of their complaint, and you fancy
that they rush into impiety only from a love of sensual pleasure.
CLEINIAS: Why, Stranger, what other reason is there?
ATHENIAN: One which you who live in a different atmosphere would never
guess.
CLEINIAS: What is it?
ATHENIAN: A very grievous sort of ignorance which is imagined to be the
greatest wisdom.
CLEINIAS: What do you mean?
ATHENIAN: At Athens there are tales preserved in writing which the
virtue of your state, as I am informed, refuses to admit. They speak of
the Gods in prose as well as verse, and the oldest of them tell of the
origin of the heavens and of the world, and not far from the beginning
of their story they proceed to narrate the birth of the Gods, and how
after they were born they behaved to one another. Whether these stories
have in other ways a good or a bad influence, I should not like to be
severe upon them, because they are ancient; but, looking at them with
reference to the duties of children to their parents, I cannot praise
them, or think that they are useful, or at all true. Of the words of the
ancients I have nothing more to say; and I should wish to say of them
only what is pleasing to the Gods. But as to our younger generation and
their wisdom, I cannot let them off when they do mischief. For do but
mark the effect of their words: when you and I argue for the existence
of the Gods, and produce the sun, moon, stars, and earth, claiming for
them a divine being, if we would listen to the aforesaid philosophers we
should say that they are earth and stones only, which can have no care
at all of human affairs, and that all religion is a cooking up of words
and a make-believe.
CLEINIAS: One such teacher, O stranger, would be bad enough, and you
imply that there are many of them, which is worse.
ATHENIAN: Well, then; what shall we say or do? Shall we assume that some
one is accusing us among unholy men, who are trying to escape from the
effect of our legislation; and that they say of us--How dreadful that
you should legislate on the supposition that there are Gods! Shall we
make a defence of ourselves? or shall we leave them and return to
our laws, lest the prelude should become longer than the law? For the
discourse will certainly extend to great length, if we are to treat the
impiously disposed as they desire, partly demonstrating to them at some
length the things of which they demand an explanation, partly making
them afraid or dissatisfied, and then proceed to the requisite
enactments.
CLEINIAS: Yes, Stranger; but then how often have we repeated already
that on the present occasion there is no reason why brevity should be
preferred to length; for who is 'at our heels?' as the saying goes, and
it would be paltry and ridiculous to prefer the shorter to the better.
It is a matter of no small consequence, in some way or other to prove
that there are Gods, and that they are good, and regard justice more
than men do. The demonstration of this would be the best and noblest
prelude of all our laws. And therefore, without impatience, and without
hurry, let us unreservedly consider the whole matter, summoning up all
the power of persuasion which we possess.
ATHENIAN: Seeing you thus in earnest, I would fain offer up a prayer
that I may succeed: but I must proceed at once. Who can be calm when he
is called upon to prove the existence of the Gods? Who can avoid hating
and abhorring the men who are and have been the cause of this argument;
I speak of those who will not believe the tales which they have heard as
babes and sucklings from their mothers and nurses, repeated by them
both in jest and earnest, like charms, who have also heard them in
the sacrificial prayers, and seen sights accompanying them--sights and
sounds delightful to children--and their parents during the sacrifices
showing an intense earnestness on behalf of their children and of
themselves, and with eager interest talking to the Gods, and beseeching
them, as though they were firmly convinced of their existence; who
likewise see and hear the prostrations and invocations which are made by
Hellenes and barbarians at the rising and setting of the sun and moon,
in all the vicissitudes of life, not as if they thought that there were
no Gods, but as if there could be no doubt of their existence, and no
suspicion of their non-existence; when men, knowing all these things,
despise them on no real grounds, as would be admitted by all who have
any particle of intelligence, and when they force us to say what we are
now saying, how can any one in gentle terms remonstrate with the like of
them, when he has to begin by proving to them the very existence of the
Gods? Yet the attempt must be made; for it would be unseemly that one
half of mankind should go mad in their lust of pleasure, and the other
half in their indignation at such persons. Our address to these lost
and perverted natures should not be spoken in passion; let us suppose
ourselves to select some one of them, and gently reason with him,
smothering our anger: O my son, we will say to him, you are young, and
the advance of time will make you reverse many of the opinions which
you now hold. Wait awhile, and do not attempt to judge at present of
the highest things; and that is the highest of which you now think
nothing--to know the Gods rightly and to live accordingly. And in
the first place let me indicate to you one point which is of great
importance, and about which I cannot be deceived: You and your friends
are not the first who have held this opinion about the Gods. There
have always been persons more or less numerous who have had the same
disorder. I have known many of them, and can tell you, that no one who
had taken up in youth this opinion, that the Gods do not exist, ever
continued in the same until he was old; the two other notions certainly
do continue in some cases, but not in many; the notion, I mean, that the
Gods exist, but take no heed of human things, and the other notion that
they do take heed of them, but are easily propitiated with sacrifices
and prayers. As to the opinion about the Gods which may some day become