Complete Works (304 page)

So much for marriage: these exhortations should be added to our previous account of how we should become partners in eternity by leaving a line of descendants to serve God forever in our stead.
⁹
Acorrectly composed
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preface would have all that and more to say about the obligation to marry.

11. If anyone disobeys (except involuntarily), and unsociably keeps himself to himself so that he is still unmarried at the age of thirty-five,
he must
pay an annual fine: one hundred drachmas if he belongs to the highest property-class, seventy if to the second, sixty if to the third, and thirty if to the fourth; the sum to be consecrated to Hera. [b]

12. If he refuses to pay his annual fine,
his debt
must be increased ten times.

(The fine is to be collected by the treasurer of the goddess.

13. If he fails to collect it,
he will
have to owe the sum himself.

Every treasurer must give an account of himself in this respect at the scrutiny.) So much for the financial penalty to be paid by anyone refusing to marry, but

12. (cont.)
he should
also be barred from receiving the respect due to him from his juniors, none of whom should ever readily take the slightest notice of him. If the bachelor tries to chastise a man, everyone should take the victim’s side and protect him.

14. If a bystander fails to give the victim help, [c]
the law
should see that he gets the reputation of being a rotten, lily-livered citizen.

We’ve already discussed dowries,
¹⁰
but we ought to repeat that even if the poor do have to marry and give in marriage on limited resources, it will not affect their prospects of a long life one way or the other, because in this state no one will go without the necessities of life. Nor will wives be so inclined to give themselves airs, and their husbands will be less humiliated by kowtowing to them for financial reasons. If a man obeys [d] this law, so much to his credit.

15. If he does not, and gives or receives more than fifty drachmas for the trousseau in the case of the lowest property-class (or more than a hundred or a hundred and fifty or two hundred according to class),
he must
owe as much again to the treasury, and the amount given or received must be dedicated to Hera and Zeus.

[e] 16. The treasurers of these gods are to exact these sums in the same way as we said the treasurers of Hera had to collect the fines in every case of refusal to marry,
or pay out
of their own pockets.

The right to make a valid betrothal should rest initially with the bride’s father, secondly with her grandfather, thirdly with her brothers by the same father. If none of these is available, the right should belong to the relatives on the mother’s side in the same order. If any exceptional misfortune occurs, the nearest relatives shall be authorized to act in conjunction with the girl’s guardians.

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That leaves us with the pre-marriage sacrifices and any other relevant rites that should be performed before, during or after the wedding. A citizen should ask the Expounders about these matters, and be confident that if he does as they tell him, everything will be in order.

As for the wedding-feast, neither family should invite more than five friends of both sexes, and the number of relatives and kinsmen from either side should be limited similarly. No one should incur expense beyond his means: that is, no more than a mina in the case of the wealthiest class, [b] half a mina for the next and so on down the scale according to class. Everyone should commend the man who obeys the regulation, but

17. The Guardians of the Laws must chastise the disobedient as a philistine who has never been trained to appreciate the melodies
¹¹
of the Muses of marriage.

To drink to the point of inebriation is improper whatever the place (except at the feasts of the god who made us the gift of wine), and it’s dangerous too, especially if you want to make your marriage a success. On the day of their wedding particularly, when they are at a turning-point [c] in their lives, bride and groom ought to show restraint, so as to make as sure as they can (it being practically impossible to tell the day or night in which by the favor of God conception will take place) that any child they may have should have parents who were sober when they conceived him. Apart from that, children should not be conceived when the parents’ bodies are in a state of drunken relaxation; the fetus should be compactly formed and firmly planted, and its growth should be orderly and undisturbed. But when he’s drunk a man reels about all over the place and bumps into [d] things, and a raging passion invades his body and soul; this means that as a sower of his seed a drunkard will be clumsy and inefficient, and he’ll produce unbalanced children who are not to be trusted, with devious characters, and in all probability with misshapen bodies too. That’s why all the year round, throughout his life (but particularly during the age of procreation), a man must take great care to do nothing to injure his health, if he can help it, and nothing with any hint of insolence or injustice, which will inevitably rub off on to the souls and bodies of his children, and produce absolutely degenerate creatures who have been stamped with the [e] likeness of their father. At the very least, he must shun such vices on the day of his wedding and the following night, because if a human institution gets off to a good and careful start, there is a sort of divine guarantee that it will prosper.

The bridegroom must regard one of the two homes included in the lot
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as the nest in which he will bring up his brood of young; here he must be married, after leaving his father and mother, and here he must make his home and become the breadwinner for himself and his children. You see, when people feel the need of absent friends, the ties that bind them are strengthened, but when they overdo it and are too much together so that they’re not apart long enough to miss each other, they drift apart. That’s why the newly-weds must leave their father and mother and the wife’s relatives in the old home and live somewhere else, rather as if they had gone off to a colony; and each side should visit, and be visited by, [b] the other. The young couple should produce children and bring them up, handing on the torch of life from generation to generation, and always worshipping the gods in the manner prescribed by law.

Now for the question of property: what will it be reasonable for a man to possess? Mostly, it’s not difficult to see what it would be, and acquire it; but slaves offer difficulties at every turn. The reason is this. The terms [c] we employ are partly correct and partly not, in that the actual language we use about slaves is partly a reflection and partly a contradiction of our practical experience of them.

M
EGILLUS
: Oh? What do you mean? We don’t yet see your point, sir.

A
THENIAN
: No wonder, Megillus. The Spartan helot-system is probably just about the most difficult and contentious institution in the entire Greek world;
¹²
some people think it’s a good idea, others are against it (though less feeling is aroused by the slavery to which the Mariandynians have [d] been reduced at Heraclea, and by the race of serfs to be found in Thessaly). Faced with these and similar cases, what should our policy be on the ownership of slaves? The point I happened to bring up in my discussion of the subject, and which naturally made you ask what I meant, was this: we know we’d all agree that a man should own the best and most docile slaves he can get—after all, many a paragon of a slave has done much more for a man than his own brother or son, and they have often been [e] the salvation of their masters’ persons and property and entire homes. We know quite well, don’t we, that some people do tell such stories about slaves?

M
EGILLUS
: Certainly.

A
THENIAN
: And don’t others take the opposite line, and say that a slave’s soul is rotten through and through, and that if we have any sense we won’t trust such a pack at all? The most profound of our poets actually
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says (speaking of Zeus) that

If you make a man a slave, that very day
Far-sounding Zeus takes half his wits away.
¹³

Everyone sees the problem differently, and takes one side or the other. Some people don’t trust slaves as a class in anything: they treat them like animals, and whip and goad them so that they make the souls of their slaves three times—no, a thousand times—more slavish than they were. Others follow precisely the opposite policy.

M
EGILLUS
: True.

[b] C
LINIAS
: Well then, sir, in view of this conflict of opinion, what should we do about our own country? What’s our line on the possession of slaves, and the way to punish them?

A
THENIAN
: Look here, Clinias: the animal ‘man’ quite obviously has a touchy temper, and it looks as if it won’t be easy, now or in the future, to persuade him to fall neatly into the two categories (slave and freeman master) which are necessary for practical purposes. Your slave, therefore, [c] will be a difficult beast to handle. The frequent and repeated revolts in Messenia, and in the states where people possess a lot of slaves who all speak the same language, have shown the evils of the system often enough; and we can also point to the various crimes and adventures of the robbers who plague Italy, the ‘Rangers’, as they’re called. In view of all this you may well be puzzled to know what your general policy ought to be. In fact, there are just two ways of dealing with the problem open to us: first, [d] if the slaves are to submit to the condition without giving trouble, they should not all come from the same country or speak the same tongue, as far as it can be arranged; secondly, we ought to train them properly, not only for their sakes but above all for our own. The best way to train slaves is to refrain from arrogantly ill-treating them, and to harm them even less (assuming that’s possible) than you would your equals. You see, when a man can hurt someone as often as he likes, he’ll soon show whether or not his respect for justice is natural and unfeigned and springs from a [e] genuine hatred of injustice. If his attitude to his slaves and his conduct towards them are free of any taint of impiety and injustice, he’ll be splendidly effective at sowing the seeds of virtue. Just the same can be said of the way in which any master or dictator or person in any position of authority deals with someone weaker than himself. Even so, we should certainly punish slaves if they deserve it, and not spoil them by simply giving them a warning, as we would free men. Virtually everything you say to a slave should be an order, and you should never become at all
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familiar with them—neither the women nor the men. (Though this is how a lot of silly folk do treat their slaves, and usually only succeed in spoiling them and in making life more difficult—more difficult, I mean, for the slaves to take orders and for themselves to maintain their authority.)

C
LINIAS
: You’re quite right.

A
THENIAN
: So now that the citizen has been supplied with a sufficient number of suitable slaves to help him in his various tasks, the next thing will be to outline a housing-plan, won’t it?

C
LINIAS
: Certainly. [b]

A
THENIAN
: Our state is new, and has no buildings already existing, so it rather looks as if it will have to work out the details of its entire architectural scheme for itself, particularly those of the temples and city walls. Ideally, Clinias, this subject would have been dealt with before we discussed marriage, but as the whole picture is theoretical anyway, it’s perfectly possible to turn to it now, as we are doing. Still, when we put the scheme into practice, we’ll see to the buildings, God willing,
before
we regulate marriage, and marriage will then crown our labors in this field. But here and now, [c] let’s just give a swift sketch of the building program.

C
LINIAS
: By all means.

A
THENIAN
: Temples should be built all round the marketplace and on high ground round the perimeter of the city, for purposes of protection and sanitation. Next to them should be administrative offices and courts of law. This is holy ground, and here—partly because the legal cases involve solemn religious issues, partly because of the august divinities [d] whose temples are nearby—judgment will be given and sentence received. Among these buildings will be the courts in which cases of murder, and all other crimes which deserve the death penalty, may properly be heard.

As for city walls, Megillus, I’d agree with the Spartan view that they should be left lying asleep and undisturbed in the ground. My reasons? As the poet neatly puts it, in those words so often cited, ‘a city’s walls should be made of bronze and iron, not stone’.
¹⁴
Besides, what fools people would take us for, and rightly, if we sent our young men out into the [e] countryside every year to excavate trenches and ditches and various structures to ward off the enemy and stop them coming over the boundaries at all
¹⁵
—and then were to build a wall round the city! A wall never contributes anything to a town’s health, and in any case is apt to encourage a certain softness in the souls of the inhabitants. It invites them to take refuge behind
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it instead of tackling the enemy and ensuring their own safety by mounting guard night and day; it tempts them to suppose that a foolproof way of protecting themselves is to barricade themselves in behind their walls and gates, and then drop off to sleep, as if they were brought into this world for a life of luxury. It never occurs to them that comfort is really to be won by the sweat of the brow, whereas the only result of such disgusting luxury and idleness is a fresh round of troubles, in my view. However, if [b] men are to have a city wall at all, the private houses should be constructed right from the foundations so that the whole city forms in effect a single wall: that is, all the houses should be easy to defend because they present to the street a regular and unbroken front. A whole city looking like a single house will be quite a pretty sight, and being easy to guard it will be superior to any other for safety. The job of seeing that the buildings [c] always keep to the original scheme should properly belong to their occupants, but the City-Wardens should keep an eye on them and even impose fines to force any negligent person to do his duty. They should also supervise all the sanitary arrangements of the town and stop any private person encroaching on public land by buildings or excavations. The same officials must take particular care to see that rainwater flows away properly, and in general they must make all the appropriate arrangements inside and outside the city. To deal with all these points, and to supplement any other [d] deficiency in the law (which cannot be exhaustive), the Guardians of the Laws are to make additional rules in the light of experience.