Complete Works (296 page)

C
LINIAS
: As far as I’m concerned, I’d certainly instruct our lawgiver, master of his art though he is, to legislate in no way but that.

A
THENIAN
: Yes, Clinias, I think you’re right to agree that all laws have [c] their preambles and that the first task must be to preface the text of each part of the legal code with the appropriate introduction, because the announcement it introduces is important, and it matters a great deal whether it is clearly remembered or not. However, we should be wrong to demand that both ‘major’ laws and minor rules should
invariably
be [d] headed by a preface. Not every song and speech, after all, needs this treatment. (They all have introductions in the nature of the case, but it’s not always appropriate to use them.) Still, the decision in all these cases must be left to the discretion of the orator or singer or legislator.

C
LINIAS
: I think all this is very true. But let’s not waste any more time delaying, sir. Let’s get back to our theme and make a fresh start, if you are agreeable, on the subject you dealt with before, when you were not professing to compose in preamble form; let’s go over the topic again (‘second time lucky’, as they say in games), on the understanding that we [e] are not talking at random, as we did just now, but composing a preface; and we should begin by agreeing that this is what we are doing. We’ve heard enough said just now about the worship of the gods and the services to be rendered to our ancestors;
¹⁶
let’s try to deal with the subsequent topics until you think the entire preface has been adequately put together. Then you will go on to work through the actual laws.

A
THENIAN
: So our feeling at the moment is that we have already produced
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an adequate preface about the gods and the powers below them, and about parents living and dead. Your instructions now, I think, are that I should, as it were, take the covers off the remainder of the preface.

C
LINIAS
: Certainly.

A
THENIAN
: Well now, the next thing is this: how far should a man concentrate or relax the efforts he devotes to looking after his soul, his body, and his property? This is a suitable topic, and it will be to the mutual [b] advantage of both speaker and listeners to ponder it and so perfect their education as far as they can. So beyond a shadow of a doubt here’s the next subject for explanation and the next topic to listen to.

C
LINIAS
: You’re quite right.

1
. Nine or ten miles.

2
. Apparently in part a quotation from Alcman, a Spartan poet of the seventh century. See D. A. Campbell,
Greek Lyric
(Loeb), vol. II, pp. 468–69.

3
. The Athenians killed Androgeos, son of Minos, King of Crete, who then exacted a tribute of seven girls and seven boys as victims for the Minotaur, a Cretan monster.

4
.
Iliad
xiv.96–102.

5
. Accepting the conjecture of
aner
ō
t
ē
theis
in e4.

6
. See 691c.

7
. See 690a ff.

8
. See 690b and note.

9
. Protagoras, a philosopher and sophist of the fifth century, maintained that ‘man is the measure of all things’.

10
. A reference to the Pythagorean list of opposites: Odd, Even; Right, Left; Male, Female; Good, Bad; and a number of others.

11
. Reading
toi nund
ē
in d2.

12
.
Works and Days
287–92.

13
. See 656c ff.

14
. The point seems to be that in the case of the doctors, one kind of treatment was ‘
much
better’ (720e) than the other (not simply twice as good). In other words, if you double the length of your laws, you
more
than double their value.

15
. I.e., laws, the Greek word
nomoi
meaning both ‘laws’ and ‘melodies’.

16
. See 715e–718a.

Book V

[726]
A
THENIAN
: Everyone who was listening to the address just now about the gods and our dearly beloved ancestors, should now pay attention.

Of all the things a man can call his own, the holiest (though the gods are holier still) is his soul, his most intimate possession. There are two elements that make up the whole of every man. One is stronger and superior, and acts as master; the other, which is weaker and inferior, is a slave; and so a man must always respect the master in him in preference to the slave. Thus when I say that next after the gods—our masters—and
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their attendant spirits, a man must honor his soul, my recommendation is correct. But hardly a man among us honors it in the right way: he only thinks he does. You see, nothing that is evil can confer honor, because to honor something is to confer marvelous benefits upon it; and anyone who reckons he is magnifying his soul by flattery or gifts or indulgence, so that he fails to make it better than it was before, may
think
he is honoring it, but in fact that is not what he is doing at all. For instance, a person has [b] only to reach adolescence to imagine he is capable of deciding everything; he thinks he is honoring his soul if he praises it, and he is only too keen to tell it to do what it likes. But our present doctrine is that in doing this he is not honoring but harming it; whereas we are arguing that he should honor it next after the gods. Similarly when a man thinks that the responsibility for his every fault lies not in himself but in others, whom he blames for his most frequent and serious misfortunes, while exonerating himself, [c] he doubtless supposes he is honoring his soul. But far from doing that, he is injuring it. Again, when he indulges his pleasures and disobeys the recommendations and advice of the legislator, he is not honoring his soul at all, but dishonoring it, by filling it with misery and repentance. Or, to take the opposite case, he may not brace himself to endure the recommended toils and fears and troubles and pains, and simply give up; but his surrender confers no honor on his soul, because all such conduct brings [d] disgrace upon it. Nor does he do it any honor if he thinks that life is a good thing no matter what the cost. This too dishonors his soul, because he surrenders to its fancy that everything in the next world is an evil, whereas he should resist the thought and enlighten his soul by demonstrating that he does not really know whether our encounter with the gods in the next world may not be in fact the best thing that ever happens to us. And when a man values beauty above virtue, the disrespect he shows his soul is total and fundamental, because he would argue that the body [e] is more to be honored than the soul—falsely, because nothing born on earth is to be honored more than what comes from heaven; and anyone who holds a different view of the soul does not realize how wonderful is this possession which he scorns. Again, a man who is seized by lust to
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obtain money by improper means and feels no disgust in the acquisition, will find that in the event he does his soul no honor by such gifts—far from it: he sells all that gives the soul its beauty and value for a few paltry pieces of gold; but all the gold upon the earth and all the gold beneath it does not compensate for lack of virtue.

To sum up, the legislator will list and classify certain things as disgraceful and wicked, and others as fine and good; everyone who is not prepared to make all efforts to refrain from the one kind of action and practice the other to the limits of his power must be unaware that in all such conduct he is treating his soul, the most holy possession he has, in the most disrespectful [b] and abominable manner. You see, practically no one takes into account the greatest ‘judgment’, as it is called, on wrongdoing. This is to grow to resemble men who are evil, and as the resemblance increases to shun good men and their wholesome conversation and to cut oneself off from them, while seeking to attach oneself to the other kind and keep their company. The inevitable result of consorting with such people is that what you do and have done to you is exactly what
they
naturally do and say [c] to each other. Consequently, this condition is not really a ‘judgment’ at all, because justice and judgment are fine things: it is mere punishment, suffering that follows a wrongdoing. Now whether a man is made to suffer or not, he is equally wretched. In the former case he is not cured, in the latter he will ultimately be killed to ensure the safety of many others.

To put it in a nutshell, ‘honor’ is to cleave to what is superior, and, where practicable, to make as perfect as possible what is deficient. Nothing that nature gives a man is better adapted than his soul to enable him to avoid evil, keep on the track of the highest good, and when he has captured [d] his quarry to live in intimacy with it for the rest of his life.

For those reasons the soul has been allotted the second rank of honor;
¹
third—as everyone will realize—comes the honor naturally due to the body. Here again it is necessary to examine the various reasons for honoring it, and see which are genuine and which are false; this is the job of a legislator, and I imagine he will list them as follows. The body that deserves to be honored is not the handsome one or the strong or the swift—nor yet the healthy (though a good many people would think it was); and it [e] is certainly not the one with the opposite qualities to all these. He will say that the body which achieves a mean between all these extreme conditions is by far the soundest and best-balanced, because the one extreme makes the soul bold and boastful, while the other makes it abject and groveling.

The same is true of the possession of money and goods: its value is measured by the same yardstick. Both, in excess, produce enmity and
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feuds in private and public life, while a deficiency almost invariably leads to slavery.

No one should be keen on making money for the sake of leaving his children as rich as possible, because it will not do them any good, or the state either. A child’s fortune will be most in harmony with his circumstances, and superior to all other fortunes, if it is modest enough not to attract flatterers, but sufficient to supply all his needs; to our ears [b] such a fortune strikes exactly the right note, and it frees our life from anxiety. Extreme modesty, not gold, is the legacy we should leave our children. We imagine that the way to bequeath them modesty is to rebuke them when they are immodest, but that is not the result produced in the young when people admonish them nowadays and tell them that youth must show respect to everyone. The sensible legislator will prefer to instruct the older men to show respect to their juniors, and to take especial care not to let any young man see or hear them doing or saying anything [c] disgraceful: where the old are shameless the young too will inevitably be disrespectful to a degree. The best way to educate the younger generation (as well as yourself) is not to rebuke them but patently to practice all your life what you preach to others.

If a man honors and respects his relatives, who all share the worship of the family gods and have the same blood in their veins, he can reasonably expect to have the gods of birth look with benevolence on the procreation of his own children. And as for friends and companions, you will find [d] them easier to get on with in day-to-day contact if you make more of their services to you and esteem them more highly than they do, and put a smaller value on your own good turns to your friends and companions than they do themselves. In dealings with the state and one’s fellow citizens, the best man by far is the one who, rather than win a prize at Olympia or in any of the other contests in war and peace, would prefer to beat everyone by his reputation for serving the laws of his country—a reputation [e] for having devoted a lifetime of service to them with more distinction than anyone else.

As to foreigners, one should regard agreements made with them as particularly sacrosanct. Practically all offenses committed as between or against foreigners are quicker to attract the vengeance of God than offenses as between fellow citizens. The foreigner is not surrounded by friends and companions, and stirs the compassion of gods and men that much more, so that anyone who has the power to avenge him comes to his aid more readily; and that power is possessed preeminently by the guardian spirit
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or god, companion of Zeus the God of Strangers, who is concerned in each case. Anyone who takes the smallest thought for the future will therefore take great care to reach the end of his days without having committed during his life any crime involving foreigners. The most serious of offenses against foreigners or natives is always that affecting suppliants; the god the victim supplicated and invoked when he won his promise becomes a devoted protector of his suppliant, who can consequently rely on the promise he received never to suffer without vengeance being taken for the wrongs done to him.

[b] We’ve now dealt fairly thoroughly with a man’s treatment of his parents, himself and his own possessions, and his contacts with the state, his friends, his relatives, foreigners and countrymen. The next question for consideration is the sort of person he must be himself, if he is to acquit himself with distinction in his journey through life; it’s not the influence of law that we’re concerned with now, but the educational effect of praise and blame, which makes the individual easier to handle and better disposed towards the laws that are to be established.

Truth heads the list of all things good, for gods and men alike. Let [c] anyone who intends to be happy and blessed be its partner from the start, so that he may live as much of his life as possible a man of truth. You can trust a man like that, but not the man who is fond of telling deliberate lies (and anyone who is happy to go on producing falsehoods in
ignorance
of the truth is an idiot). Neither state is anything to envy: no one has any friends if he is a fool or cannot be trusted. As the years go by he is recognized for what he is, and in the difficulties of old age as life draws to its close he isolates himself completely; he has just about as much contact [d] with his surviving friends and children as with those who are already dead.