Complete Works (333 page)

We have already dealt with
fatal
injuries inflicted by the use of drugs, [e] but we have not yet discussed any of the less harmful cases of voluntary and premeditated injury, inflicted by giving food or drink or by applying ointments. Full treatment of the question is hindered by the fact that so far as human beings are concerned, poisoning is of two kinds. First there is the sort we have just explicitly mentioned: the injury a body suffers from some physical substance by natural processes. The other kind is a
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matter of spells and charms and ‘enchantments’: not only are the victims persuaded that they are being seriously injured by people with magic influence, but even the perpetrators themselves are convinced that it really is in their power to inflict injury by these methods. It is not easy to know the truth about these and similar practices, and even if one were to find out, it would be difficult to convince others; and it is just not worth the [b] effort to try to persuade people whose heads are full of mutual suspicion, that even if they do sometimes catch sight of a molded waxen figure in a doorway or at a junction of three roads or on their parents’ grave, they should ignore it every time, because they cannot be sure these things work. All this means that our law about drugs must be a double law, reflecting the two methods by which poisoning may be attempted. But first, by [c] entreaty, exhortation and advice, we’ll explain that no such thing should ever be attempted, that one should not alarm and terrify the common man, like an impressionable child, and that legislators and judges should not be put to the necessity of curing men of such fears. We shall point out for a start that unless the person who tries to use poison happens to be a diviner or soothsayer, he acts in ignorance of how his spells will turn out, and unless he happens to be an expert in medicine, he acts in ignorance of the effect he will have on the body. So the wording of our law about [d] the use of poisons should be as follows:

83. (a) If a doctor poisons a man without doing either him or any member of his household fatal injury, or injures his cattle or bees (fatally or otherwise), and is found guilty on a charge of poisoning,
he must be punished
by death.
(b) If the culprit is a layman,
the court
is to decide the proper penalty or fine to be inflicted in his case.

84. (a) If a diviner or soothsayer is deemed to be in effect injuring [e] someone, by spells or incantations or charms or any other poison of that kind whatever,
¹⁵
he must die.
(b) If someone with no knowledge of divination is found guilty of this kind of poisoning,
¹⁶
the same
procedure is to be followed as with the other laymen [83.(b)]—that is, the court is to decide what it thinks is the appropriate penalty or fine for him to pay.

When one man harms another by theft or violence and the damage is extensive, the indemnity he pays to the injured party should be large, but smaller if the damage is comparatively trivial. The cardinal rule should be that in every case the sum is to vary in proportion to the damage done, so that the loss is made good. And each offender is to pay an additional
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penalty appropriate to his crime, to encourage him to reform. Thus if a man has been led to do wrong by the folly of someone else, being over-persuaded because of his youth or some similar reason, his penalty should tend to be light; but it is to be heavier when his offense is due to his own folly and inability to control his feelings of pleasure and pain—as when he has fallen victim to cowardice and fear, or some deep-rooted jealousy or lust or fury. This additional penalty is to be inflicted not because of the crime (what’s done can’t be undone), but for the sake of the future: we [b] hope that the offender himself and those that observe his punishment will either be brought to loathe injustice unreservedly or at any rate recover appreciably from this disastrous disease. All these reasons and considerations make it necessary for the law to aim, like a good archer, at a penalty that will both reflect the magnitude of the crime and fully indemnify the victim. The judge has the same aim, and when he is faced by his legal duty of assessing what penalty or fine the defendant must pay, he must [c] follow closely in the legislator’s footsteps; and the latter must turn himself into a sort of artist and sketch some specimen measures consistent with his written prescriptions. That, Clinias and Megillus, is the job to which we must now devote our best efforts; we have to describe what type of penalty is called for in all categories of theft and violence—granted, of course, that the gods and children of gods are prepared to see us legislate in this field.

Lunatics must not be allowed to appear in public; their relations must keep them in custody in private houses by whatever means they can improvise. [d]

85. If they fail to do so,
they must
pay a fine: one hundred drachmas for a member of the highest property-class (whether it is a slave or a free man that he fails to keep an eye on), eighty for a member of the second class, sixty for the third, and forty for the lowest.

There are several kinds of madness, brought on by several causes. The cases we have just mentioned are the result of illness, but there are some people with an unfortunate natural irritability, made worse by poor discipline, who in any trivial quarrel will shout their heads off in mutual abuse. Such a thing is highly improper in a well-run state. So this single law [e] should apply to all cases of defamation: no one is to defame anybody. If you are having an argument you should listen to your opponent’s case, and put your own to him and the audience, without making any defamatory remarks at all. When men take to damning and cursing each other and to calling one another rude names in the shrill tones of women, these
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mere words, empty though they are, soon lead to real hatreds and quarrels of the most serious kind. In gratifying his ugly emotion, anger, and in thus disgracefully stoking the fires of his fury, the speaker drives back into primitive savagery a side of his character that was once civilized by education, and such a splenetic life makes him no better than a wild beast; bitter indeed, he finds, are the pleasures of anger. Besides, on such occasions all men are usually quick to resort to ridicule of their opponents, and no one who has indulged that habit has ever acquired the slightest sense of [b] responsibility or remained faithful to many of his principles. That is why no one must ever breathe a word of ridicule in a temple or at a public sacrifice or at the games or in the marketplace or in court or in any public gathering, and the relevant official must always punish such offenses.

86. If he fails to do so,
he must
be disqualified from competing for awards of merit, as being a [c] man who disregards the laws and fails to perform the duties imposed upon him by the legislator.

87. If in other localities someone fails to refrain from abusive language, whether he resorts to it first or by way of reply,
the passer-by,
provided he is older than the offender, should lend his support to the law and eject by force this fellow who has shown such indulgence to anger, that bad companion.

88. If the passer-by fails to do so,
he must
be liable to the appointed penalty.

The view we are putting forward now is that when a man is embroiled in a slanging-match he is incapable of carrying on the dispute without [d] trying to make funny remarks, and when such conduct is motivated by anger we censure it. Well then, what does this imply? That we are prepared to tolerate a comedian’s eagerness to raise a laugh against people, provided that when he sets about ridiculing our citizens in his comedies, he is not inspired by anger? Or shall we divide comedy into two kinds, according to whether it is
good-natured
or not? Then we could allow the playful [e] comedian to joke about something, without anger, but forbid, as we’ve indicated, anyone whatever to do so if he is in deadly earnest and shows animosity. We must certainly insist on this stipulation about anger; but we still have to lay down by law who ought to receive permission for ridicule and who not. No composer of comedies, or of songs or iambic verse, must ever be allowed to ridicule either by description or by impersonation any citizen whatever, with or without rancor. Anyone who disobeys this rule must be ejected from the country that same day by the presidents of the games.

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89. If the latter fail to take this action,
they must
be fined three hundred drachmas, to be dedicated to the god in whose honor the festival is being held.

Those who have earlier
¹⁷
been licensed to compose verse against each other should be allowed to poke fun at people, not in savage earnest, but in a playful spirit and without rancor. The distinction between the two kinds must be left to the minister with overall responsibility for the education of the young; an author may put before the public anything the minister approves of, but if it is censored, the author must not perform it to anyone [b] personally nor be found to have trained someone else to do so, whether a free man or a slave.

90. If he does,
he must
get the reputation of being a scoundrel and an enemy of the laws.

It is not the starving tout court or the similarly afflicted who deserve sympathy, but the man who in spite of his moderation or some other virtue or progress towards it, nevertheless experiences some misfortune. That being so, it will be a matter for surprise if a virtuous person, whether slave or free, even if the state and society he lives in is run with only average skill, is ever so grossly neglected as to be reduced to abject poverty. So the legislator will be quite safe if he lays down a law running more or less like this. No one is to go begging in the state. Anyone who attempts [c] to do so, and scrounges a living by never-ending importunities, must be expelled from the market by the Market-Wardens, from the city by the City-Wardens, and from the surrounding country conducted by the Country-Wardens across the border, so that the land may rid itself completely of such a creature.

If a slave man or woman damages any piece of someone else’s property, then provided the person who suffers the loss was not himself partly to [d] blame because of inexperience or careless conduct, the slave’s owner must either make good the damage in full, or hand over the actual offender. But if the owner counter-claims that the prosecution has been brought as a result of the injured person and the culprit putting their heads together to rob him of his slave, he must sue the allegedly injured party on a charge of collusion. If he wins the day, he is to receive twice the value of the [e] slave as assessed by the court.

91. If he loses,
he must
both make good the damage and hand over the slave.

92. If a beast of burden or a horse or dog or some other animal damages a piece of a neighbor’s property,
its owner
is to pay for the damage on the same basis.

If anyone deliberately refuses to appear as a witness, the person who needs his evidence must serve a summons on him; and on being duly summoned the man is to present himself at the trial. If he knows something and is prepared to testify, he should give evidence accordingly; if he claims he knows nothing, he must swear an oath to three gods, Zeus, Apollo and Themis, to the effect that quite definitely he has no information, and thus
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be dismissed from the proceedings. If a man is summoned to give evidence and fails to answer the summons, he must be liable by law to a suit for damage. No juryman is to vote in a trial in which he has been put up as a witness and given evidence. A free woman is to be allowed to be a witness and to speak in support of a litigant, provided she is over forty years of age, and to bring prosecutions, provided she has no husband; but if she has a husband living, she must be limited to acting as a witness. Slaves (male and female), and children, should be allowed to support a [b] case by giving evidence, but only in a trial for murder and provided a credit-worthy surety is put up to guarantee their appearance at the trial if their evidence is objected to as false. If either disputant claims someone has borne false witness, he should enter an objection to all or part of the testimony before a verdict in the case is decided on. The objections, under the seal of both parties, should be placed in official custody and produced at the trial for perjury. If anyone is convicted twice on this charge, he may [c] not be
compelled
under any law to bear witness again; if he is convicted a third time, he must never be
allowed
to be a witness in the future; and if he does have the face to give testimony on a further occasion after a third conviction, anyone who wishes should report him to the authorities, who should haul him before a court.

93. If he is found guilty,
he must
be punished by death.

When a court decides to throw out evidence on the ground that the winning [d] side has triumphed because certain witnesses have perjured themselves, and more than half the evidence is condemned, the suit lost on the strength of it should come up for retrial, and after due inquiry a ruling should be given that the false evidence was, or was not, the decisive influence on the verdict; and this ruling, whichever way it goes, will automatically settle the original action.

Although human life is graced by many fine institutions, most of them have their own evil genius, so to speak, which pollutes and corrupts them. Take justice, for instance, which has civilized so much of our behavior: [e] how could it fail to be a blessing to human society? And granted justice is a blessing, can advocacy fail to be a blessing too? But valuable though they are, both these institutions have a bad name. There is a certain kind of immoral practice, grandly masquerading as a ‘skill’, which proceeds on the assumption that a technique exists—itself, in fact—of conducting one’s own suits and pleading those of others,
¹⁸
which can win the day regardless of the rights and wrongs of the individual case; and that this skill itself
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and the speeches composed with its help are available free—free, that is, to anyone offering a consideration in return. Now it is absolutely vital that this skill—if it really is a skill, and not just a knack born of casual trial and error—should not be allowed to grow up in our state if we can prevent it. The lawgiver will have nothing to say to those who obey his command that one should either listen to justice and not contradict her, or leave for some other country; but if anyone disobeys him, the law shall pronounce [b] as follows: if anyone seems to be trying to misrepresent to the judges where the course of justice lies, and to enter one plea after another in support of either his own or someone else’s case, when equity would call a halt, then anyone who wishes should indict him on a charge of perverse pleading or criminal advocacy. He should be tried in the court of select judges and if he is found guilty the court should decide whether it thinks his motive is avarice or pugnacity.