Complete Works (299 page)

2. If he is found keeping it for himself,
it must
be confiscated by the state.

3. If anyone who knows of its concealment fails to report it,
he must
be liable to a curse and a reproach (and so must the importer), [c] and in addition be fined in a sum not less than that of the foreign currency brought in.

When a man marries or gives in marriage, no dowry whatsoever must be given or received. Money must not be deposited with anybody whom one does not trust. There must be no lending at interest, because it will be quite in order for the borrower to refuse absolutely to return both interest and principal.

The best way to appreciate that these are the best policies for a state to follow is to examine them in the light of the fundamental aim. Now we [d] maintain that the aim of a statesman who knows what he’s about is not in fact the one which most people say the good legislator should have. They’d say that if he knows what he’s doing his laws should make the state as huge and as rich as possible; he should give the citizens gold mines and silver mines, and enable them to control as many people as possible by land and sea. And they’d add, too, that to be a satisfactory legislator he must want to see the state as good and as happy as possible. [e] But some of these demands are practical politics, and some are not, and the legislator will confine himself to what can be done, without bothering his head with wishful thinking about impossibilities. I mean, it’s pretty well inevitable that happiness and virtue should come hand in hand (and this is the situation the legislator will want to see), but virtue and great wealth are quite incompatible, at any rate great wealth as generally understood (most people would think of the extreme case of a millionaire, who will of course be a rogue into the bargain). In view of all this, I’ll never
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concede to them that the rich man can become really happy without being virtuous as well: to be extremely virtuous and exceptionally rich at the same time is absolutely out of the question. ‘Why?’ it may be asked. ‘Because,’ we shall reply, ‘the profit from using just
and
unjust methods is more than twice as much as that from just methods alone, and a man who refuses to spend his money either worthily or shamefully spends only half the sum laid out by worthwhile people who are prepared to spend on worthy purposes too.
⁸
So anyone who follows the opposite policy [b] will never become richer than the man who gets twice as much profit and makes half the expenditures. The former is a good man; the latter is not actually a rogue so long as he uses his money sparingly, but on some occasions
⁹
he is an absolute villain; thus, as we have said, he is
never
good. Ill-gotten and well-gotten gains plus expenditure that is neither just nor unjust, when a man is also sparing with his money, add up to wealth; the absolute rogue, who is generally a spendthrift, is quite impoverished. The [c] man who spends his money for honest ends and uses only just methods to come by it, will not easily become particularly rich or particularly poor. Our thesis is therefore correct: the very rich are not good; and if they are not good, they are not happy either.’

The whole point of our legislation was to allow the citizens to live supremely happy lives in the greatest possible mutual friendship. However, [d] they will never be friends if injuries and lawsuits arise among them on a grand scale, but only if they are trivial and rare. That is why we maintain that neither gold nor silver should exist in the state, and there should not be much money made out of menial trades and charging interest, nor from prostitutes; the citizens’ wealth should be limited to the products of farming, and even here a man should not be able to make so much that he can’t help forgetting the real reason why money was invented (I mean for the care of the soul and body, which without physical and [e] cultural education respectively will never develop into anything worth mentioning). That’s what has made us say more than once that the pursuit of money should come last in the scale of value. Every man directs his efforts to three things in all, and if his efforts are directed with a correct sense of priorities he will give money the third and lowest place, and his soul the highest, with his body coming somewhere between the two. In particular, if this scale of values prevails in the society we’re now describing, then it has been equipped with a good code of laws. But if any of the
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laws subsequently passed is found giving pride of place to health in the state rather than the virtue of self-control, or to wealth rather than health and habits of restraint, then quite obviously its priorities will be wrong. So the legislator must repeatedly try to get this sort of thing straight in his own mind by asking ‘What do I want to achieve?’ and ‘Am I achieving it, or am I off target?’ If he does that, perhaps he’ll complete his legislation by his own efforts and leave nothing to be done by others. There’s no other way he could possibly succeed.

[b] So when a man has drawn his lot, he must take over his holding on the terms stated.
¹⁰
It would have been an advantage if no one entering the colony had had any more property than anyone else; but that’s out of the question, and some people will arrive with relatively large fortunes, others with relatively little. So for a number of reasons, and especially because the state offers equality of opportunity, there must be graded property-classes, to ensure that offices and taxes and grants may be arranged on the basis of what a man is worth. It’s not only his personal virtues or his ancestors’ that should be considered, or his physical strength or good [c] looks: what he’s made of his wealth or poverty should also be taken into account. In short, the citizens must be esteemed and given office, so far as possible, on exactly equal terms of ‘proportional inequality’, so as to avoid ill-feeling. For these reasons four permanent property-classes must be established, graded according to wealth: the ‘first’, ‘second’, ‘third’, and ‘fourth’ classes, or whatever other names are employed. A man will either keep his original classification, or, when he has grown richer or poorer [d] than he was before, transfer to the appropriate class.

In view of all this, the next law I’d pass would be along the following lines. (We maintain that if a state is to avoid the greatest plague of all—I mean civil war, though civil disintegration would be a better term—extreme poverty and wealth must not be allowed to arise in any section of the citizen-body, because both lead to both these disasters. That is why the legislator must now announce the acceptable limits of wealth and poverty.) The lower limit of poverty must be the value of the holding [e] (which is to be permanent: no official nor anyone else who has ambitions to be thought virtuous will ever overlook the diminution of any man’s holding). The legislator will use the holding as his unit of measure and allow a man to possess twice, thrice, and up to four times its value. If anyone acquires more than this, by finding treasure-trove or by gift or by a good stroke of business or some other similar lucky chance which presents
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him with more than he’s allowed, he should hand over the surplus to the state and its patron deities, thereby escaping punishment and getting a good name for himself.

4. If a man breaks this law,
anyone
who wishes may lay information and be rewarded with half the amount involved, the other half being given to the gods; and besides this the guilty person must pay a fine equivalent to the surplus out of his own pocket.

The total property of each citizen over and above his holding of land should be recorded in a public register kept in the custody of officials legally appointed for that duty, so that lawsuits on all subjects—in so far [b] as they affect property—may go smoothly because the facts are clear.

After this, the legislator’s first job is to locate the city as precisely as possible in the center of the country, provided that the site he chooses is a convenient one for a city in all other respects too (these are details which can be understood and specified easily enough). Next he must divide the country into twelve sections. But first he ought to reserve a sacred area for Hestia, Zeus and Athena (calling it the ‘acropolis’), and enclose its boundaries; he will then divide the city itself and the whole country into [c] twelve sections by lines radiating from this central point. The twelve sections should be made equal in the sense that a section should be smaller if the soil is good, bigger if it is poor. The legislator must then mark out five thousand and forty holdings, and further divide each into two parts; he should then make an individual holding consist of two such parts coupled so that each has a partner near the center or the boundary of the state as the case may be. (A part near the city and a part next to the boundary should form one holding, the second nearest the city with the [d] second from the boundary should form another, and so on.) He must apply to the two parts the rule I’ve just mentioned about the relative quality of the soil, making them equal by varying their size. He should also divide the population into twelve sections, and arrange to distribute among them as equally as possible all wealth over and above the actual holdings (a comprehensive list will be compiled). Finally, they must allocate [e] the sections as twelve ‘holdings’ for the twelve gods, consecrate each section to the particular god which it has drawn by lot, name it after him, and call it a ‘tribe’. Again, they must divide the city into twelve sections in the same way as they divided the rest of the country; and each man should be allotted two houses, one near the center of the state, one near the boundary. That will finish off the job of getting the state founded.

But there’s a lesson here that we must take to heart. This blueprint as a whole is never likely to find such favorable circumstances that every
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single detail will turn out precisely according to plan. It presupposes men who won’t turn up their noses at living in such a community, and who will tolerate a moderate and fixed level of wealth throughout their lives, and the supervision of the size of each individual’s family as we’ve suggested. Will people really put up with being deprived of gold and other things which, for reasons we went into just now, the legislator is obviously going to add to his list of forbidden articles? What about this description of a city and countryside with houses at the center and in all directions round about? He might have been relating a dream, or modeling a state [b] and its citizens out of wax. The ideal impresses well enough, but the legislator must reconsider it as follows (this being, then, a
reprise
of his address to us).
¹¹
‘My friends, in these talks we’re having, don’t think it has escaped me either that the point of view you are urging has some truth in it. But I believe that in every project for future action, when you are displaying the ideal plan that ought to be put into effect, the most satisfactory procedure is to spare no detail of absolute truth and beauty. [c] But if you find that one of these details is impossible in practice, you ought to put it on one side and not attempt it: you should see which of the remaining alternatives comes closest to it and is most nearly akin to your policy, and arrange to have that done instead. But you must let the legislator finish describing what he really wants to do, and only then join him in considering which of his proposals for legislation are feasible, and which [d] are too difficult. You see, even the maker of the most trivial object must make it internally consistent if he is going to get any sort of reputation.’

Now that we’ve decided to divide the citizens into twelve sections, we should try to realize (after all, it’s clear enough) the enormous number of divisors the subdivisions of each section have, and reflect how these in turn can be further subdivided and subdivided again until you get to 5040.
¹²
This is the mathematical framework which will yield you your brotherhoods, local administrative units, villages, your military companies and marching-columns, as well as units of coinage, liquid and dry measures, [e] and weights. The law must regulate all these details so that the proper proportions and correspondences are observed. And not only that: the legislator should not be afraid of appearing to give undue attention to detail. He must be bold enough to give instructions that the citizens are not to be allowed to possess any equipment that is not of standard size. He’ll assume it’s a general rule that numerical division in all its variety
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can be usefully applied to every field of conduct. It may be limited to the complexities of arithmetic itself, or extended to the subtleties of plane and solid geometry; it’s also relevant to sound, and to motion (straight up or down or revolution in a circle). The legislator should take all this into account and instruct all his citizens to do their best never to operate outside that framework. For domestic and public purposes, and all professional [b] skills, no single branch of a child’s education has such an enormous range of applications as mathematics; but its greatest advantage is that it wakes up the sleepy ignoramus and makes him quick to understand, retentive and sharpwitted; and thanks to this miraculous science he does better than his natural abilities would have allowed. These subjects will form a splendidly appropriate curriculum,
if
by further laws and customs you [c] can expel the spirit of pettiness and greed from the souls of those who are to master them and profit from them. But if you fail, you’ll find that without noticing it you’ve produced a ‘twister’ instead of a man of learning—just what can be seen to have happened in the case of the Egyptians and Phoenicians, and many other races whose approach to wealth and life in general shows a narrowminded outlook. (It may have been an incompetent legislator who was to blame for this state of affairs, or some stroke of bad luck, or even some natural influences that had the same effect.) [d]

And that’s another point about the choice of sites, Clinias and Megillus, that we mustn’t forget. Some localities are more likely than others to produce comparatively good (or bad) characters, and we must take care to lay down laws that do not fly in the face of such influences. Some sites are suitable or unsuitable because of varying winds or periods of heat, others because of the quality of the water; in some cases the very food grown in the soil can nourish or poison not only the body but the soul as [e] well. But best of all will be the places where the breeze of heaven blows, where spirits hold possession of the land and greet with favor (or disfavor) the various people who come and settle there. The sensible legislator will ponder these influences as carefully as a man can, and then try to lay down laws that will take account of them. This is what you must do too, Clinias. You’re going to settle a territory, so here’s the first thing you have to attend to.