Complete Works (287 page)

C
LINIAS
: Splendid! Permission granted.

1
. See 643a ff.

2
. Reading
h
ē
i d
ē
in a3.

3
. A playful etymology:
choros
(chorus) is derived from
chara
(charm, joy, delight).

4
. Deleting
tharrounta
in a7.

5
. ‘Moral standards’ here and ‘high moral standards’ just below translate
aret
ē
,
elsewhere normally translated ‘virtue.’

6
. ‘Discerning taste’ translates
phron
ē
sis,
elsewhere usually translated ‘good judgment’ or ‘wisdom’—it is one of the four basic virtues Plato recognizes, along with justice, courage, and self-control (or moderation or restraint—
s
ō
phrosun
ē
).

7
. See 653b.

8
. Tyrtaeus: see 629a and note. The Athenian makes further brief quotations from the same poem. Midas and Cinyras, kings of Phrygia and Cyprus respectively, were notorious for extreme wealth.

9
. The expression is ambiguous: it may mean ‘miserably’ or ‘wickedly’. In his reply, Clinias is thinking of the first meaning.

10
. Accepting the conjecture of
enanti
ō
i
in c3.

11
. Cadmus. See 641c and note.

12
. The god of healing.

13
. See 653d ff.

14
. See 659e.

15
. 646e ff.

16
. Cf. Euripides,
Cyclops,
3.

Book III

A
THENIAN
: We can take that as settled, then. But what about political
[676]
systems? How are we to suppose they first came into existence? I feel sure that the best and easiest way to see their origins is this.

C
LINIAS
: What?

A
THENIAN
: To use the same method that we always have to adopt when we look into a state’s moral progress or decline.

C
LINIAS
: What method have you in mind?

A
THENIAN
: We take an indefinitely long period of time and study the changes that occur in it. [b]

C
LINIAS
: How do you mean?

A
THENIAN
: Look, do you think you could ever grasp how long it is that states have existed and men have lived under some sort of political organization?

C
LINIAS
: No, not very easily.

A
THENIAN
: But at any rate you realize it must be an enormously long time?

C
LINIAS
: Yes, I see
that
, of course.

A
THENIAN
: So surely, during this period, thousands upon thousands of states have come into being, while at least as many, in equally vast numbers, [c] have been destroyed? Time and again each one of them has adopted every type of political system. And sometimes small states have become bigger, and big ones have grown smaller; superior states have deteriorated and bad ones have improved.

C
LINIAS
: Inevitably.

A
THENIAN
: Let’s try to pin down just why these changes took place, if we can; then perhaps we shall discover how the various systems took root and developed.

C
LINIAS
: Admirable! Let’s get down to it. You must do your best to explain your views, and we must try to follow you.

A
THENIAN
: Do you think there is any truth in tradition?
[677]

C
LINIAS
: What sort of tradition do you mean?

A
THENIAN
: This: that the human race has been repeatedly annihilated by floods and plagues and many other causes, so that only a small fraction of it survived.

C
LINIAS
: Yes, of course, all that sort of thing strikes everyone as entirely credible.

A
THENIAN
: Now then, let’s picture just one of this series of annihilations—I mean the effect of the flood.

C
LINIAS
: What special point are we to notice about it?

A
THENIAN
: That those who escaped the disaster must have been pretty [b] nearly all hill-shepherds—a few embers of mankind preserved, I imagine, on the tops of mountains.

C
LINIAS
: Obviously.

A
THENIAN
: Here’s a further point: such men must have been in general unskilled and unsophisticated. In particular, they must have been quite innocent of the crafty devices that city-dwellers use in the rat-race to do each other down; and all the other dirty tricks that men play against one another must have been unknown.

C
LINIAS
: Quite likely.

[c] A
THENIAN
: And we can take it, can’t we, that the cities that had been built on the plains and near the sea were destroyed root-and-branch?

C
LINIAS
: Yes, we can.

A
THENIAN
: So all their tools were destroyed, and any worthwhile discovery they had made in politics or any other field was entirely lost? You see, my friend, if their discoveries had survived throughout at the same level of development as they have attained today, it is difficult to see what room there can ever have been for any new invention.

[d] C
LINIAS
: The upshot of all this, I suppose, is that for millions of years these techniques remained unknown to primitive man. Then, a thousand or two thousand years ago, Daedalus and Orpheus and Palamedes made their various discoveries, Marsyas and Olympus pioneered the art of music, Amphion invented the lyre, and many other discoveries were made by other people. All this happened only yesterday or the day before, so to speak.

A
THENIAN
: How tactful of you, Clinias, to leave out your friend, who really was born ‘yesterday’!

C
LINIAS
: I suppose you mean Epimenides?

[e] A
THENIAN
: Yes, that’s the man. His discovery, my dear fellows, put him streets ahead of all the other inventors. Hesiod had foreshadowed it in his poetry long before, but it was Epimenides who achieved it in practice, so you Cretans claim.
¹

C
LINIAS
: We certainly do claim that.

A
THENIAN
: Perhaps we can describe the state of mankind after the cataclysm like this: in spite of a vast and terrifying desolation, plenty of fertile land was available, and although animals in general had perished it happened that some cattle still survived, together with perhaps a small stock of goats. They were few enough, but sufficient to maintain the correspondingly
[678]
few herdsmen of this early period.

C
LINIAS
: Agreed.

A
THENIAN
: But at the moment we are talking about the state, and the business of legislation and political organization. Is it conceivable that any trace at all of such things survived—even, so to speak, in the memory?

C
LINIAS
: Of course not.

A
THENIAN
: So out of those conditions all the features of our present-day life developed: states, political systems, technical skills, laws, rampant vice and frequent virtue.

C
LINIAS
: What do you mean?

A
THENIAN
: My dear sir, can we really suppose that the men of that [b] period, who had had no experience of city life in all its splendor and squalor, ever became totally wicked or totally virtuous?

C
LINIAS
: A good point. We see what you mean.

A
THENIAN
: So it was only as time went on, and the numbers of the human race increased, that civilization advanced and reached its present stage of development?

C
LINIAS
: Exactly.

A
THENIAN
: The process was probably not sudden, but gradual, and took a considerable time.

C
LINIAS
: Yes, that’s perfectly plausible. [c]

A
THENIAN
: I imagine men were all numbed with fear at the prospect of descending from the hills to the plains.

C
LINIAS
: Naturally enough.

A
THENIAN
: And what a pleasure it must have been to see each other, there being so few of them at that time! However, pretty well all vehicles they might have used to visit each other by land or sea had been destroyed, and the techniques used to construct them had been lost, so that I suppose they found getting together none too easy. They suffered from a scarcity [d] of timber, because iron, copper and mineral workings in general had been overlaid with sludge and had been lost to sight, so that it was virtually impossible to refine fresh supplies of metal. Even if there was the odd tool left somewhere on the mountains, it was quickly worn down to nothing by use. Replacements could not be made until the technique of mining sprang up again among men.

C
LINIAS
: True.

A
THENIAN
: And how many generations later did that happen, on our calculation?

C
LINIAS
: A good many, obviously. [e]

A
THENIAN
: Well then, during that period, or even longer, all techniques that depend on a supply of copper and iron and so on must have gone out of use?

C
LINIAS
: Of course.

A
THENIAN
: For several reasons, then, war and civil war alike came to an end.

C
LINIAS
: How so?

A
THENIAN
: In the first place, men’s isolation prompted them to cherish and love one another. Second, their food supply was nothing they needed
[679]
to quarrel about. Except perhaps for a few people in the very early stages, there was no shortage of flocks and herds, which is what men mostly lived on in that age. They always had a supply of milk and meat, and could always add to it plenty of good food to be got by hunting. They also had an abundance of clothes, bedding, houses, and equipment for cooking and other purposes. (Molding pottery and weaving, skills that have no need [b] of iron, were a gift from God to men—his way, in fact, of supplying them with all that kind of equipment. His intention was that whenever the human race was reduced to such a desperate condition it could still take root and develop.) Because of all this, they were not intolerably poor, nor driven by poverty to quarrel with each other; but presumably they did not grow rich either, in view of the prevailing lack of gold and silver. Now the community in which neither wealth nor poverty exists will generally [c] produce the finest characters because tendencies to violence and crime, and feelings of jealousy and envy, simply do not arise. So these men were
good
, partly for that very reason, partly because of what we might call their ‘naïveté’. When they heard things labeled ‘good’ or ‘bad’, they were so artless as to think it a statement of the literal truth and believe it. This lack of sophistication precluded the cynicism you find today: they accepted as the truth the doctrine they heard about gods and men, and lived their lives in accordance with it. That is why they were the sort of people we have described.

[d] C
LINIAS
: Megillus and I, at least, agree with your account.

A
THENIAN
: If we compare them with the era before the flood and with the modern world, we shall have to say that the many generations which lived in that way were inevitably unskilled and ignorant of techniques in general, and particularly of the military devices used on land and sea nowadays. They must also have been innocent of the techniques of warfare [e] peculiar to city-life—generally called ‘lawsuits’ and ‘party-strife’—in which men concoct every possible device to damage and hurt each other by word and deed. Weren’t our primitive men simple and manlier and at the same time more restrained and upright in every way? We have already explained why.

C
LINIAS
: Yes, you’re quite right.

A
THENIAN
: Let’s remind ourselves that this reconstruction, and the conclusions
[680]
we shall draw from it, are supposed to make us appreciate how early man came to feel the need of laws, and who their lawgiver was.

C
LINIAS
: Well reminded!

A
THENIAN
: Presumably they felt no need for legislators, and in that era law was not yet a common phenomenon. Men born at that stage of the world cycle
²
did not yet have any written records, but lived in obedience to accepted usage and ‘ancestral’ law, as we call it.

C
LINIAS
: Quite likely.

A
THENIAN
: But this is already a political system, of a sort.

C
LINIAS
: What sort?

A
THENIAN
: Autocracy—the name which everyone, I believe, uses for the [b] political system of that age. You can still find it in many parts of the world today, both among Greeks and non-Greeks. I suppose this is what Homer is describing in his account of the household of the Cyclopes:
³

No laws, no councils for debate have they:

They live on the tips of lofty mountains

In hollow caves; each man lays down the law

To wife and children, with no regard for neighbor.
[c]

C
LINIAS
: That poet of yours sounds as if he was a charming fellow. I have gone through other verses of his, and very polished they were too. Not that I know his work to any great extent—we Cretans don’t go in for foreign poetry very much.

M
EGILLUS
: But we at Sparta do, and we think Homer is the prince of epic poets, even though the way of life he describes is invariably Ionian [d] rather than Spartan. In this instance he certainly seems to bear you out when he points in his stories to the wild life of the Cyclopes as an explanation of their primitive customs.