Complete Works (321 page)

(b) cont.

the penalty
for the murderer of a father or mother is to be death.

N. (a) If a brother kills his own brother in a political brawl or some similar circumstances, in self-defense when his victim had struck first,
he should
be regarded as free of pollution (as though he had killed [d] an enemy).

(b) The same applies if

(i) a citizen kills a citizen, or
(ii) a foreigner kills a foreigner.

(c) If in self-defense

(i) a citizen kills a foreigner, or
(ii) a foreigner kills a citizen,

the culprit
should be in the same position with regard to the freedom from pollution, and likewise if

(iii) a slave kills a slave.

O. If however a slave, in self-defense, kills a free man,
he should
be subject to the same laws as the parricide [47M].

P. The regulations stated about the acquittal from responsibility for [e] murder granted by a father are to apply to every acquittal in such cases (when, that is, one man voluntarily absolves another of responsibility, on the grounds that the murder has been committed involuntarily):

the criminal
must undergo the purifications and spend one year away from the country according to law.

Let this more or less suffice as a description of involuntary murders, which involve violence and anger. Our next task is to speak of voluntary murders, which are premeditated and spring from sheer injustice—the lack of control over the desire for pleasure and over one’s lusts and jealous feelings.

C
LINIAS
: True.

A
THENIAN
: First of all, we ought again to make as complete a list as possible of these sources of crime.

[870]
The chief cause is lust, which tyrannizes a soul that has gone wild with desire. This lust is most usually for money, the object of most men’s strongest and most frequent longing. Because of the innate depravity of men and their misdirected education, money has the power to produce in them a million cravings that are impossible to satisfy—all centering on the endless acquisition of wealth. The cause of this incorrect education is the pernicious praise given to wealth by the public opinion of Greeks and [b] non-Greeks alike. In fact, wealth takes only third place in the scale of goodness;
⁶
but they make it preeminent, to the ruination of posterity and themselves. The best and the noblest policy for all cities to follow is to tell the truth about wealth, namely that it exists to serve the body, just as the body should be the servant of the soul. Although the ends which wealth naturally serves are indeed ‘good’, wealth itself will take third place, coming after the perfection of the soul and the body. Taking, therefore, this argument as our guide, we shall find that the man who means to be [c] happy should not seek simply to be wealthy, but to be wealthy in a way consistent with justice and self-control. Murders needing still more murders in expiation would not occur in cities that had taken this lesson to heart. But as things are, as we said when we embarked on this topic, we have here one cause, and an extremely prominent cause at that, of the most serious charges of deliberate murder.

Second, an ambitious cast of mind: this breeds feelings of jealousy, which are dangerous companions to live with, particularly for the person who actually feels jealous, but potentially harmful to the leading citizens of the state as well.

In the third place, many a murder has been prompted by the cowardly [d] fears of a guilty man. When a man is committing some crime, or has already committed it, he wants no one to know about it, and if he cannot eliminate a possible informer in any other way, he murders him.

These remarks should constitute the preface applying to all these crimes. In addition, we must tell the story which is so strongly believed by so many people when they hear it from those who have made a serious study of such matters in their mystic ceremonies. It is this:

Vengeance is exacted for these crimes in the after-life, and when a man returns to this world again he is ineluctably obliged to pay the penalty [e] prescribed by the law of nature—to undergo the same treatment as he himself meted out to his victim, and to conclude his earthly existence by encountering a similar fate at the hands of someone else.

If a man obeys and heartily dreads such a penalty after merely hearing the overture, there is no need to play over the relevant law. But in case
[871]
of disobedience the following law should be stated in writing:

48 A. (a) If a man by his own hand viciously kills a fellow citizen, with premeditation,
he must
be excluded from the places where people usually gather, and not pollute temples or market or harbors or any other common place of assembly,
whether or not
someone makes a proclamation against the culprit in these terms. (The reason is that the law itself makes the proclamation. It makes a permanent and public proclamation on behalf of the whole state, and always will.)

B. If a man fails in his duty to prosecute the culprit or bar him by [b] proclamation, and is a relative (no more distant than a cousin) of the deceased on either the father’s side or the mother’s,
the pollution
, together with the enmity of the gods, should arrive at his own door. (The curse imposed by the law turns the edict of heaven against him.) He must be subject to prosecution at the hands of any man who wishes to take vengeance for the deceased, and the man who thus wishes to take vengeance must scrupulously perform all the appropriate ablutions and all the other ritual details the god prescribes [c] for such cases; and when he has published the proclamation, he must go and make the criminal submit to the imposition of the penalty, under the law.

It is easy for a legislator to demonstrate that all this should be accompanied by a number of prayers and sacrifices to those gods who make it their business to prevent murders occurring in society. The Guardians of the Laws, in association with expounders, soothsayers, and the god, should [d] rule who these gods are to be, and specify the procedure for bringing such cases that would be most in harmony with the requirements of religion; they should then follow it themselves in bringing these cases to court, which should be the same as the one given final authority over temple-robbers.
⁷

48 A. cont.

(b) If a man is found guilty,
he must
be punished by death and be deprived of burial in the country of his victim. (In this way we can show he has not been forgiven, and avoid impiety.)

C. (a) If the defendant makes off and refuses to submit to trial,
he must
remain in exile permanently.

(b) If such a person sets foot within the country of the murdered man,
⁸
[e]
the first
of the relatives of the deceased who comes across him, or indeed any citizen, should either

(i) kill him with impunity, or
(ii) tie him up, and hand him over to the judges who tried the case for them to carry out the execution.

D. When a man undertakes a prosecution, he should immediately demand sureties from the accused. The latter must duly provide his sureties, who must be deemed, in the eyes of the judges who constitute the court in these cases, to be credit-worthy; and these three credit-worthy sureties must pledge themselves to produce the accused at his trial. If a man refuses, or is unable, to produce sureties,
the authorities
must arrest him and keep him bound and under guard, so that they can produce him at the hearing of the case.

[872]
E. If a man does not actually kill with his own hands, but simply plans the murder, and although responsible for it by virtue of plotting arrangements, continues to live in the state with his soul polluted by homicide, his trial for this crime should proceed along the same lines as before, except as regards the bail. If he is convicted,
he may
be granted burial in his native land, but the other details of the punishment should conform with the regulations previously laid down for this category.
⁹

F. These same regulations about the actual commission and mere plotting of a murder should apply when

(a) (i) foreigners prosecute foreigners,
(ii) citizens prosecute foreigners and foreigners citizens, and
[b](iii) slaves prosecute slaves.

(b) But an exception should be made in the business of the surety. Just as it was said [48D.] that
actual
murderers should provide sureties, the person who proclaims the ban arising from the murder should simultaneously demand sureties in these cases too [48F(a)(i-iii)].

G. If a slave intentionally kills a free man, whether he did the deed himself or planned it, and is convicted,
the public executioner
should haul him off in the direction of the deceased’s grave to a point from which the culprit can see the tomb. He should then scourge him, giving as many strokes as the successful prosecutor instructs. If the homicide survives the scourging, he is to be executed.[c]

H. If a man kills an innocent slave, fearing that he will inform against his own shocking and disgraceful conduct, or prompted by some similar motive,
he should
submit to trial, when a slave has died in these circumstances, precisely as he would have submitted to trial for murder if he had killed a citizen.

Certain crimes, which may occur, make the mere composition of laws for them an unpleasant and distasteful business, but it is impossible to [d] omit them from our code. I mean deliberate and wholly wicked murders of relatives, whether the murderer commits the crime in person or merely plots it. Generally speaking, these killings occur in states that are badly administered or have a defective system of education, but occasionally one of them might crop up even in a country where one would hardly look for it. What we have to do is to repeat our explanation of a moment ago, hoping that anyone who hears it will be more willing and able to avoid committing murders that are absolutely the most detestable in the sight of Heaven. The ‘myth’, or ‘explanation’, or whatever the right word is, has come down to us in unambiguous terms from the lips of priests of long ago. [e]

Justice stands on guard to exact vengeance for the spilling of the blood of relatives; she operates through the law we have just mentioned, and her decree is that a man who has done something of this kind is obliged to suffer precisely what he has inflicted. If ever a man has murdered his father, in the course of time he must suffer the same fate from violent treatment at the hands of his children. A matricide, before being reborn, must adopt the female sex, and after being born a woman and bearing children, be dispatched subsequently by them. No other purification is available when common blood has been polluted; the pollution resists
[873]
cleansing until, murder for murder, the guilty soul has paid the penalty and by this appeasement has soothed the anger of the deceased’s entire line.

Thus the fear of such vengeance, exacted by the gods, should hold a man in check. But this is the law the human legislator will lay down in case some people should be overwhelmed by the terrible misfortune of committing such a crime:

I. (a) If they should dare to tear the soul from the body of their father, mother, brothers or children, deliberately and with premeditation,
the proclamations
of banishment from places of public resort, and the sureties, should be identical to those detailed in previous cases. [b]

(b) If a man is convicted of such a murder, having killed one of the aforementioned persons,
the court-assistants
and the officials shall execute him, and throw him out, naked, at a specified place where three roads meet outside the city. All the officials, on behalf of the entire state, must take a stone and throw it at the head of the corpse, and thus purify the entire state. After this, they must carry the corpse to the borders of the land and eject it, [c] giving it no burial, as the law instructs.

But what about the killer of the person who is, above all, his ‘nearest and dearest’, as the expression is? What penalty ought he to undergo? I am talking about the man who kills
himself
, who (1) uses violence to take his fate out of the hands of destiny, (2) is not acting in obedience to any legal decision of his state, (3) whose hand is not forced by the pressure of some excruciating and unavoidable misfortune, (4) has not fallen into some irremediable disgrace that he cannot live with, and (5) imposes this unjust [d] judgment on himself in a spirit of slothful and abject cowardice. In general, what ritual observances should take place with regard to purification and interment in this case, are matters known to God; the relatives must seek guidance from expounders and the relevant laws, and act in these instances according to their instructions. But

49. (a) People who perish in this way must be buried individually, with no one to share their grave.

(b) They must be buried in disgrace on the boundaries of the twelve territorial divisions, in deserted places that have no name.

(c) The graves must not be identifiable, either by headstone or title.

[e] 50. (a) If a beast of burden or any other animal kills anyone (except when the incident occurs while they are competing in one of the public contests),

(i)
the relatives
must prosecute the killer for murder;
(ii)
the next of kin
must appoint some Country-Wardens (whichever ones he pleases, and as many as he likes), and they must try the case:
(iii) if the animal is found guilty,

they must
kill it and throw it out beyond the frontiers of the country.

(b) If some inanimate object causes loss of human life (but not if it is a stroke of lightning or some similar weapon wielded by God—it must be one of the other things that kill a man by falling on him, or because he falls on it),

[874]
(i)
the next of kin
must appoint the nearest neighbor to sit in judgment on the object, and thus effect the purification of himself and the deceased’s entire line;
(ii)
the condemned
object must be thrown over the frontiers, in the way specified in the case of animals.