Complete Works (318 page)

In a state where the size and number of the farms are to be kept permanently unaltered, it would not be appropriate for the state to confiscate the property of any of these criminals. But if a man commits a crime and is thought to deserve a penalty in money, then provided he possesses a surplus over and above the basic equipment of his farm, he must pay his [b] fine. The Guardians of the Laws must scrutinize the registers and discover the precise facts in these cases, and make an exact report to the court on each occasion, so as to prevent any farm becoming unworked because of a shortage of money. If a man appears to deserve a stiffer fine, and if some of his friends are not prepared to bail him out by contributing the money to set him free, his punishment should take the form of a prolonged period of imprisonment (which should be open to public view), and various humiliations. But no one, no matter what his offense, is ever to be deprived [c] of his citizen rights completely, not even if he has gone into exile beyond our frontiers for it. The penalties we impose will be death, imprisonment, whipping, or various degrading postures (either standing or sitting), or being rusticated and made to stand before temples on the boundaries of the state; and payments of money may be made in certain cases which we have just mentioned, where such a punishment is appropriate. In cases involving the death penalty the judges are to be the Guardians of the Laws, sitting in conjunction with the court whose members are selected by merit from the officials of the previous year. The method of bringing [d] these cases to court, the serving of the summonses and similar procedural details must be the concern of the legislators who succeed us; what
we
have to do is legislate about the voting. The vote should be taken openly, but before this our judges should have ranged themselves according to seniority and sat down close together facing the prosecutor and defendant; all citizens who have some spare time should attend and listen carefully to such trials. First, the prosecutor should deliver a single speech, then the [e] defendant; the most senior judge should follow these addresses by cross-questioning, and continue until he has gone into the arguments in sufficient detail. One by one, the other judges should follow the most senior and work through any points on which either litigant has left him dissatisfied by some kind of error or omission. A judge who feels no such dissatisfaction should hand on the interrogation to his colleague. All the judges should
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endorse those arguments that appear pertinent by appending their signatures and then depositing the documents on the altar of Hestia. The next day they must reconvene in the same place, and after similar interrogation and examination again append their signatures to the depositions. Having followed this procedure three times, after giving due consideration to the evidence and witnesses, each judge should cast a sacred vote, swearing in the name of Hestia to give, as far as lies in him, a judgment just and true. In this way they should conclude this category of trial.

[b] We come next, after these matters of religion, to cases of political subversion. We should treat as the biggest enemy of the entire state the man who makes the laws into slaves, and the state into the servant of a particular interest, by subjecting them to the diktat of mere men. This transgressor of the law uses violence in all that he does and stirs up sedition. Second in the scale of wickedness, in our estimation, should come the holder of some high state office, who while not an accessory to any such crimes, nevertheless fails to detect them and exact the vengeance of his fatherland [c] (or, if he does detect them, holds back through cowardice). Every man who is any good at all must denounce the plotter to the authorities and take him to court on a charge of violently and illicitly overthrowing the constitution. The court should consist of the same judges as for robbers from temples, and the procedure of the entire trial should be the same as it was for them, a majority vote being sufficient for the death penalty.

As a rule, penalties and disgrace incurred by a father should not be [d] passed on to any of his children, except where a man’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather have all in turn been sentenced to death. The state should deport such cases to the state and city from which their family originally came; and they should take their property with them, apart from all the basic equipment of their farm. Next, sons of citizens who have more than one son over ten years of age should be nominated by their father or grandfather on either the mother’s or the father’s side. Ten of them should be chosen by lot, and the names of those whom the lot selects [e] should be reported to Delphi. The god’s choice should then be installed as heir to the abandoned property—and he, we hope, will have better luck.

C
LINIAS
: Splendid.

A
THENIAN
: The same regulations about the judges that should try the case, and the procedure to be followed at the trial, will apply in yet a third instance, when a man is brought to court on a charge of treason. In the
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same way, a single law should apply to all three cases and decide whether the children of these criminals (traitor, temple-robber, and the violent wrecker of the laws of the state) should remain in their fatherland or leave it.

Again, a single law and legal penalty should apply to every thief, no matter whether his theft is great or small:

42. (a)
he must
pay twice the value of the stolen article, if he loses the day and has sufficient surplus property over and above his farm with which to make the repayment.

(b) if he has not,
he must
be kept in prison until he pays up or persuades the man who has had him convicted to let him off.

43. If a man is convicted of stealing from
public
sources, [b]
he shall
be freed from prison when he has either persuaded the state to let him off or paid back twice the amount involved.

C
LINIAS
: How on earth can we be serious, sir, in saying that it makes no odds whether his theft is large or small, or whether it comes from sacred or secular sources? And what about all the other different circumstances of a theft? Shouldn’t a legislator vary the penalties he inflicts, so that he can cope with the various
categories
of theft?

A
THENIAN
: That’s a good question, Clinias: I have been walking in my sleep, and you have bumped into me and woken me up. You have reminded [c] me of something that has occurred to me before, that the business of establishing a code of law has never been properly thought out—as we can see from the example that has just cropped up. Now, what am I getting at? It wasn’t a bad parallel we made, you know, when we compared all those for whom legislation is produced today to slaves under treatment from slave doctors.
¹
Make no mistake about what would happen, if one of those doctors who are innocent of theory and practice medicine by rule of thumb were ever to come across a gentleman doctor conversing with [d] a gentleman patient. This doctor would be acting almost like a philosopher, engaging in a discussion that ranged over the source of the disease and pushed the inquiry back into the whole nature of the body. But our other doctor would immediately give a tremendous shout of laughter, and his observations would be precisely those that most ‘doctors’ are always so ready to trot out. ‘You ass,’ he would say, ‘you are not treating the patient, but tutoring him. Anybody would think he wanted to become a doctor rather than get well again.’ [e]

C
LINIAS
: And wouldn’t he be right to say that?

A
THENIAN
: Perhaps he would—if he were to bear in mind this further point, that anyone who handles law in the way we are now,
is
tutoring the citizens, not imposing laws on them. Wouldn’t it be equally right to say that?

C
LINIAS
: Perhaps so.

A
THENIAN
: However, at the moment, we are in a fortunate position.

C
LINIAS
: How do you mean?

A
THENIAN
: I mean the lack of any necessity to legislate. We are simply
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carrying out our own review of every kind of political system and trying to see how we could put into effect the absolutely ideal kind, as well as the least good sort that would still be acceptable. This is particularly true of our legislation, where it looks as if we have a choice: either we can examine ideal laws, if we want to, or again, if we feel like it, we can look at the minimum standard we are prepared to put up with. So we must choose which course we want to take.

C
LINIAS
: This is a ridiculous choice to give ourselves, my friend: it’s not [b] as if we were legislators forced by some irresistible necessity to legislate at a minute’s notice, without being allowed to put the business off till tomorrow. We, God willing, can do as bricklayers do, or workmen starting some other kind of erecting. We can gather our materials in no particular order and then select—and select at leisure—the items which are appropriate for the forthcoming construction. Our assumption should be, therefore, that we are constructing something, but not under any constraint; we work at our convenience and spend part of the time preparing our material, part of the time fitting it together. So it would be quite fair to [c] describe our penal code as already partially laid down, while other material for it lies ready to hand.

A
THENIAN
: At any rate, Clinias, this will be the more realistic way to conduct our review of legislation. Well then, may we please notice this point that concerns legislators?

C
LINIAS
: What point?

A
THENIAN
: I suppose literary compositions and written speeches by many other authors are current in our cities, besides those of the legislator?

C
LINIAS
: Of course they are.

A
THENIAN
: To whose writings ought we to apply ourselves? Are we to [d] read the poets and others who have recorded in prose or verse compositions their advice about how one should live one’s life, to the neglect of the compositions of the legislators? Or isn’t it precisely the latter that deserve our closest attention?

C
LINIAS
: Yes, it certainly is.

A
THENIAN
: And I suppose the legislator, alone among writers, is to be denied permission to give advice about virtue and goodness and justice? Is he alone to be prevented from explaining their nature and how they should be reflected in our conduct, if we aim to be happy?

C
LINIAS
: No, of course not.

[e] A
THENIAN
: Then is it really more scandalous in the case of Homer and Tyrtaeus and the other poets to have composed in writing
²
bad rules for the conduct of life, but less so for Lycurgus and Solon, and all others who have turned legislator and committed their recommendations to writing? The proper view, surely, is this: a city’s writings on legal topics should turn out, on being opened, to be the finest and best of all those it has in
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circulation; the writings of other men should either sound in harmony with them, or provoke ridicule by being out of tune. So what
is
the style in which a state’s laws ought to be written, in our opinion? Should the regulations appear in the light of a loving and prudent father and mother? Or should they act the tyrant and the despot, posting their orders and threats on walls and leaving it at that? Clearly, then, at this stage, we must decide whether we are going to try to talk about laws in the right spirit. Succeed or no, we shall at any rate show our good intentions. If we take [b] this course and have to face some difficulties
en route
, then let’s face them. Good luck to us, and God willing, we shall succeed.

C
LINIAS
: You’ve put it splendidly. Let’s do as you suggest.

A
THENIAN
: In the first place, we must continue the attempt we’ve just made: we must scrutinize our law about robbers of temples, theft in general, and every variety of crime. We should not let it daunt us if in the full spate of our legislation we find that although we have settled some matters, [c] our inquiry into others has still to be completed. We are still aiming at the status of legislators, but we haven’t achieved it yet; perhaps eventually we may succeed. So now let’s look at these topics I’ve mentioned—if, that is, you are prepared to look at them in the way I have explained.

C
LINIAS
: Certainly we are prepared.

A
THENIAN
: Now, on the whole subject of goodness and justice, we ought to try to see quite clearly just where we agree, and where there are differences of opinion between us. Again, how far do ordinary men agree? What differences are there between
them
? (Naturally, we should claim that we wanted there to be at least a small ‘difference between’ us and ordinary men!) [d]

C
LINIAS
: What sort of ‘differences between us’ have you in mind when you say that?

A
THENIAN
: I’ll try to explain. When we talk about justice in general—just men, just actions, just arrangements, we are, after a fashion, unanimous that all these things are ‘good’. One might insist that even if just men happen to be shocking in their physical appearance, they are still preeminently ‘good’ because of their supremely just character. No one would think a man was talking nonsense in saying that. [e]

C
LINIAS
: Wouldn’t that be right?

A
THENIAN
: Perhaps. But if everything that has the quality of justice is ‘good’, we ought to note that we include in that ‘everything’ even the things done
to
us, which are about as frequent, roughly speaking, as the things
we
do to others.

C
LINIAS
: What now, then?

A
THENIAN
: Any just action we do has the quality of being ‘good’ roughly in proportion to the degree to which it has the quality of justice.