Complete Works (275 page)
10
.
Timaeus
25a–b.
11
. “Mountain copper” or yellow copper ore.
12
. A block or slab, of the sort to be inscribed with a record of victories, dedications, treaties, decrees, etc.
Translated by Malcolm Schofield.
Socrates and a friend try to find a definition of ‘law’. While his friend thinks that laws are whatever is decided upon in various cities, Socrates argues that laws reveal a certain reality, the truth of how civilized life should be regulated. This reality is common and unchanging, and has been grasped best of all in the ancient Cretan legal system. It was King Minos, under the tutelage of Zeus, who established these laws for the benefit of the Cretans; he was a hero of legislation, and one must not believe the slanders heaped upon him by Athenian dramatists.
The assumptions and techniques of argument in
Minos
are thoroughly Platonic; indeed, it is a sort of preface to Plato’s
Laws.
It explains why the
Laws
begins with the story that Minos was the divinely inspired law-giver of Crete, which is the starting point of a discussion about legislation between three old men on their way from Cnossus (the capital city of Minos) to the Idaean cave (where Minos was said to have learned about legislation from Zeus). In
Minos,
bodies of laws are conceived as written texts which can be true or false, a conception shared by Plato, who also held that legal texts benefit from literary elaboration (
Laws
718c–723d). Proper laws express the reality of social life, a reality which is as enduring as the ideal city which the three old men sketch in
Laws
—the best possible social, political, and legal system under which people can live in cities in permanent peace and stability. Although
Minos
was probably written after
Laws,
it adopts an earlier conception of politics as the skill of herding human beings, the conception discussed and rejected in Plato’s
Statesman.
The Greek word for law is
nomos,
which is also used for custom or an established usage or practice. Socrates’ friend in
Minos
attempts to define
nomos
as something
nomizomenon
(the present passive participle of the related verb
nomiz
ō
)—that is, ‘accepted’. Indeed,
nomiz
ō
has a wide range of uses, including ‘practice’, ‘have in common or customary use’, ‘enact’, ‘treat, consider as’, ‘accept the idea that’, ‘hold the customary or conventional belief that’, ‘believe, hold’. Most of these uses, and the translation of
nomizomenon
by ‘accepted’, fit rather more easily with
nomos
conceived as custom than as written law.
From the formal point of view,
Minos
is composed of dry Academic dialectic together with a literary-historical excursus. The classic example of such an excursus is the Atlantis myth in Plato’s
Timaeus
and
Critias,
and there are other examples in
Alcibiades, Second Alcibiades, Hipparchus,
and probably in the (now mostly lost) Socratic dialogues of Antisthenes and Aeschines. The Academic dialectic of
Minos
is a good example of the way questions were discussed in the mid-fourth-century Academy, the dialectic studied in Aristotle’s
Topics
and
Sophistical Refutations.
The combination of dialectic and excursus in
Minos
is very similar to that in
Hipparchus,
as is the skepticism toward the values implicit in Athenian popular culture and history; many scholars conclude that they are the work of the same author, probably writing soon after the middle of the fourth century
B.C.
D.S.H.
[313]
S
OCRATES
: Law—in our view, what is it?
F
RIEND
: What sort of laws are you asking about?
S
OCRATES
: Well, now! Is it possible that law differs from law in this very respect of being law? Think about the question I’m actually asking you. If I had asked: “What is gold?,” then if you had asked me in the same way: “What sort of gold am I referring to?,” I reckon that your question would have been incorrect. For surely gold does not differ at all from gold [b] nor stone from stone in respect of being stone or in respect of being gold. And so law too, I suppose, does not differ at all from law—they are all the same thing. Each of them is law alike, not one more, another less. What I am asking, then, is just this—the global question: what is law? If you have an answer to hand, say it.
F
RIEND
: What else would law be, Socrates, but what is accepted?
S
OCRATES
: And so speech, in your view, is what is spoken, or sight what [c] is seen, or hearing what is heard? Or is speech one thing, what is spoken another, sight one thing, what is seen another, hearing one thing, what is heard another—and so law one thing, what is accepted another? Is that so, or what is your view?
F
RIEND
: They are two different things, as it now seems to me.
S
OCRATES
: Law, then, is not what is accepted.
F
RIEND
: I don’t think so.
S
OCRATES
: So what can law be? Let’s investigate the question as follows. Suppose someone had asked us about what we said just now: “Since you
[314]
say it is by sight that what is seen is seen, what is this sight by which such things are seen?” We would have replied to him: “That form of sense perception which reveals such things through the eyes.” And if he had asked us another question: “Well, now: since it is by hearing that what is heard is heard, what is this hearing?,” we would have replied to him: “That form of sense perception which reveals sounds to us through our ears.” So, then, if he were to ask us: “Since it is by law that what is accepted is accepted, what is this law by which such things are accepted? Is it a [b] form of perception or revealing, as what is learned is learned by the revelations of knowledge? Or is it a form of discovery, as what is discovered is discovered—for example, facts about health and sickness by medicine, or the intentions of the gods (as the diviners say) by divination: for a skill is surely in our view a discovery of things, is it not?
F
RIEND
: Certainly.
S
OCRATES
: Which among these alternatives, then, would we be most inclined to suppose law to be?
F
RIEND
: The resolutions and decrees themselves, in my own view. What [c] else could one say that law is? So it looks as though the answer to your global question about law has to be: resolution of a city.
S
OCRATES
: Political judgment, it appears, is what you call law.
F
RIEND
: I do.
S
OCRATES
: And perhaps this is a good answer. But maybe we’ll get a better one in the following way. Do you call certain people wise?
F
RIEND
: I do.
S
OCRATES
: Aren’t the wise wise in virtue of wisdom?
F
RIEND
: Yes.
S
OCRATES
: Well then, aren’t the just just in virtue of justice?
F
RIEND
: Certainly.
S
OCRATES
: And aren’t the law-abiding law-abiding in virtue of law?
F
RIEND
: Yes.
S
OCRATES
: And the lawless lawless by virtue of lawlessness? [d]
F
RIEND
: Yes.
S
OCRATES
: And the law-abiding are just?
F
RIEND
: Yes.
S
OCRATES
: And the lawless unjust?
F
RIEND
: Unjust.
S
OCRATES
: Aren’t justice and law something very fine?
F
RIEND
: That is so.
S
OCRATES
: But injustice and lawlessness are something very shameful?
F
RIEND
: Yes.
S
OCRATES
: And the one preserves cities and everything else, but the other destroys and subverts them?
F
RIEND
: Yes.
S
OCRATES
: Then we must think about law as something that is fine, and seek it as something good.
F
RIEND
: Obviously.
S
OCRATES
: Now we said that law is resolution of a city?
F
RIEND
: We did say so. [e]
S
OCRATES
: Well, now: is it not the case that some resolutions are admirable, others wicked?
F
RIEND
: It is.
S
OCRATES
: Yet law was not wicked?
F
RIEND
: No.
S
OCRATES
: It is not correct, then, to reply in such unqualified terms that law is resolution of a city.
F
RIEND
: Not in my view.
S
OCRATES
: It would not be in order, then, to take it that a wicked resolution is law.
F
RIEND
: No indeed.
S
OCRATES
: But still, it is quite apparent to me for my part that law is a kind of judgment. And since it is not the wicked judgment, is it not quite obvious by now that it is the admirable, given that law is judgment?
F
RIEND
: Yes.
S
OCRATES
: But what is admirable judgment? Is it not true judgment?
[315]
F
RIEND
: Yes.
S
OCRATES
: Now isn’t true judgment discovery of reality?
F
RIEND
: It is.
S
OCRATES
: Then ideally law is discovery of reality.
F
RIEND
: How is it, Socrates, if law is discovery of reality, that we do not always make use of the same laws on the same matters, assuming we have discovered reality?
S
OCRATES
: Ideally, nevertheless, law is discovery of reality. So it must [b] be that any human beings who do not always make use of the same laws, as appears to be the case with us, are not always capable of discovering what ideally the law does discover—reality. Let’s have a look and see whether it actually does become quite clear to us from our inquiry whether we always make use of the same laws, or different ones at different times, and whether all make use of the same laws, or different people different ones.
F
RIEND
: That’s not difficult to determine, Socrates: the same people do not always make use of the same laws, and different people make use of different ones. For example, with us there is no law providing for human sacrifice—indeed it is unholy, whereas the Carthaginians make such sacrifices [c] as something that is holy and lawful for them, and in fact some of them sacrifice even their own sons to Cronus, as perhaps you have heard yourself. And it is not just foreigners who make use of different laws from us, but those people in Lycia and the descendants of Athamas perform the sacrifices they perform even though they are Greeks. You know about ourselves too, I imagine, from what you have heard yourself, the sorts of laws we made use of in the past with regard to those who died, slaughtering [d] sacred victims before the corpse was carried out and sending for urn women. Again, those who lived in still earlier times used to bury their dead right there in the house. We do none of these things. One could give thousands of such examples—there is ample room to prove that we do not always make use of the same laws as we ourselves recognize, nor do people make use of the same laws as one another.
S
OCRATES
: Look, my friend, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if what you say was correct but went over my head. So long as you express your views [e] in lengthy speeches in your own style and I do too in my turn, I don’t think we’ll ever reach any agreement. But if the inquiry is made a common enterprise, maybe we would agree. So join in a common inquiry with me, asking questions of me if you like, or answering them if you would rather.
F
RIEND
: Socrates, I’m willing to answer whatever you like.
S
OCRATES
: Right, then: do you accept that just things are unjust and unjust things just, or that the just are just and the unjust unjust?
F
RIEND
: I accept that the just are just and the unjust unjust.
[316]
S
OCRATES
: Now are they accepted as such among all people as they are here?
F
RIEND
: Yes.
S
OCRATES
: So among the Persians as well?
F
RIEND
: Among the Persians as well.
S
OCRATES
: Always, I suppose.
F
RIEND
: Always.
S
OCRATES
: Are things which pull down the scale more accepted here as heavier, and those which pull it down less as lighter, or the opposite?
F
RIEND
: No, those which pull it down more as heavier, those less as lighter.
S
OCRATES
: And is this the case in Carthage and in Lycia as well?
F
RIEND
: Yes.
S
OCRATES
: Things that are fine are accepted as fine everywhere, it appears, [b] and things that are shameful as shameful, and not the shameful as fine or the fine as shameful.
F
RIEND
: That is so.
S
OCRATES
: Therefore, to generalize to all cases, what is so is accepted as being so, not what is not so, both among us and among all other people.
F
RIEND
: That is my view.
S
OCRATES
: Then anyone who mistakes what is so mistakes what is accepted.
F
RIEND
: When you express things this way, Socrates, these things do seem to be accepted always both by us and by the others. But when I consider that we are constantly turning the laws upside down, I cannot [c] be persuaded.