Complete Works (335 page)

The Scrutineers are to divide all the officials into twelve groups and look into their conduct by making all such inquiries as are consistent with the dignity of a gentleman. During their period of office as Scrutineers they are to live in the precinct of Apollo and the Sun where they were [d] elected. When they have sat in judgment, either privately and individually, or in association with colleagues, on those at the end of their term of office in the service of the state, they must make known, by posting written notice in the market-place, what penalty or fine in their opinion each official ought to pay. Any official who refuses to admit that he has been judged impartially should haul the Scrutineers before the Select Judges, and if he is deemed innocent of the accusations he should accuse the [e] Scrutineers themselves, if he so wishes. But

102. If he is convicted, and
(a) the Scrutineers had decided on death as his penalty,
he must
die (a penalty which in the nature of the case cannot be increased); but
(b) if his penalty is one that it is possible to double,
then double
he must pay.

Now we ought to hear about the scrutiny of the Scrutineers themselves. What will it be, and how will it be organized?

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During their lifetime these men, whom the whole state has thought fit to dignify with the highest honors, should sit in the front seat at all the festivals; moreover, when the Greeks assemble to perform sacrifices or see spectacles together, or congregate for other sacred purposes, the leaders of the delegations sent by the state should be chosen from the Scrutineers; and the Scrutineers are to be the only citizens whose heads may be graced by a crown of laurel. They should all be priests of Apollo and the Sun; the chief priesthood should be an annual office, held by the Scrutineer [b] who has come top of the list of those appointed that year—which must be recorded under his name, so as to provide a framework for the calendar for as long as the state endures.

After the death of a Scrutineer, his laying-out, his last journey and his tomb must be on a grander scale than for ordinary citizens. All cloth used must be white, dirges and laments must be banned, and a chorus of fifteen girls and another of fifteen youths must stand one on each side of the bier [c] and sing alternately a kind of hymn of praise to the dead priest, celebrating his glory in song throughout the day. As dawn comes up the following day the bier shall be taken to the tomb escorted by a hundred of the youths who attend the gymnasia, chosen by the relatives of the dead man. In front must go the young men who are as yet unmarried, each rigged out in his own military equipment; the cavalry should bring their horses, the infantry their weapons, and so on. Around the bier itself, towards the front, will be [d] boys chanting the traditional strains, followed by girls, and women who have finished bearing children. The Priests and Priestesses will bring up the rear; they are of course banned from other funerals, but provided the oracle at Delphi also approves, they shall attend this one, as it will not defile them. The Scrutineer’s tomb shall be an oblong crypt built of choice
³
stone of the most indestructible kind obtainable; in this, on benches of stone set side by side, they will lay him who has gone to his reward. On top of the tomb they [e] will pile a circular mound, and plant a sacred grove of trees around it—except on one side, to allow for the indefinite extension of the tomb, where more earth will have to be piled up to cover subsequent burials. Every year the citizens will hold competitions in the Scrutineers’ honor, one athletic, one equestrian, and one of the arts. All these honors will be bestowed on Scrutineers whose conduct has borne scrutiny.

If a Scrutineer relies on his election to protect him and goes to the bad, thus showing he’s only too human after all, the law will order a charge to be brought against him by anyone who feels inclined to prosecute. The trial should be held in court according to the following procedure.
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Guardians of the Laws, and all the Scrutineers, active or retired, must sit in conjunction with the court of the Select Judges, and the charge brought by the prosecutor against the defendant must be to the effect that ‘so-and-so is a disgrace to his distinctions and his office.’

103. If the defendant is convicted,
he must
be ejected from his office, denied the special tomb, and stripped of the honors he has already received.

104. If the prosecutor fails to win one fifth of the votes,
he must
pay a fine of twelve hundred drachmas if he belongs to the highest property-class, eight hundred if to the second, six hundred if to [b] the third, and two hundred if to the lowest.

Rhadamanthus should be admired for the way in which, according to report, he decided the suits that came before him. He realized that his contemporaries were absolutely convinced of the existence of gods—and not surprisingly, as most people alive then were actually descended from them, and this is traditionally true of Rhadamanthus himself. I suppose it was because he thought that no mere man should be given the task of judging, but only gods, that he managed to make his judgments so swift and straightforward. Whatever the subject of dispute, he made the litigants take an oath, a device which enabled him to get through his list of cases [c] rapidly and without making mistakes. Nowadays, however, some people (as we remarked) don’t believe in gods at all, while others believe they are not concerned about mankind; and there are others—the worst and most numerous category—who hold that in return for a miserable sacrifice here and a little flattery there, the gods will help them to steal enormous sums of money and rescue them from all sorts of heavy penalties. So in the modern world the legal procedure used by Rhadamanthus will hardly do. The climate of opinion about the gods has changed, so the law must [d] change too, and a legislator who knows his business ought to abolish the oaths sworn by each side in a lawsuit. When a man brings a charge against someone, he should put his accusations in writing without taking an oath; the defendant should similarly write out his denial and hand it to the officials unsworn. It would be dreadful, you see, to know quite well, in view of the frequent lawsuits that occur in the state, that although pretty [e] nearly half our citizens
⁴
have perjured themselves, they go on mixing with each other at common meals and other public and private gatherings without the slightest qualms.

There should therefore be a law requiring a juryman to take an oath before setting about his job. The law should also apply to anyone who votes in the election of officials to public positions: he must do so either
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under oath or with a ballot-pebble he has obtained from a temple; so too should the judge of a chorus or any other artistic performance, and also the supervisor or umpire of any athletic or equestrian competition—and indeed the judge in any matter where there is nothing to ‘gain’ (as it seems to human eyes) from perjury. But whenever there is clearly much to be ‘gained’ from denials and oaths to back them up, then the question at issue between the disputants must be judged at a trial in which oaths are
not
taken.

And more generally, the presiding officials at a trial are not to give a [b] man a hearing if he tries to win belief by swearing oaths, or imprecating himself or his family, or by grovelling appeals for clemency, or effeminate wailing, but only if he states his lawful claims, and listens to those of the other side, with decency and decorum. Otherwise, the officials will ignore his remarks as irrelevant and instruct him to return to the issue before the court.

[c] However, aliens should be entitled, as at present, to offer and accept binding oaths from each other, if they so wish—after all, they’re not going to grow old in the state, nor, as a rule, build a nest in it to produce others entitled to live in the country and behave in the same way as themselves. And whenever an alien prosecutes an alien, the trial should be held under the same rules.

Sometimes a free man may defy the state in something not serious enough to deserve a whipping or imprisonment or death—by refusing to take part in a chorus or procession, for instance, or some public ceremony, [d] or to pay some contribution for such communal purposes as a sacrifice in time of peace, or a special levy in war. The first thing to be done in all these cases is to assess the damages; then the culprit is to give a pledge to those officials who have the duty of exacting it under the law of the land. If he still refuses to obey even after the seizure of the pledge, it should be sold and the proceeds confiscated by the state. If a more severe punishment is called for, the official concerned shall impose the appropriate [e] fine on this stubborn fellow and haul him through the courts until he’s prepared to do as he’s told.

A state which does not go in for trading and whose only source of wealth is the soil is obliged to have some settled policy regarding the foreign travel of its own citizens and the admission of aliens from abroad. The legislator, who has to give advice on these problems, must start by being as persuasive as he can.

In the nature of the case, contact between state and state produces a medley of all sorts of characters, because the unfamiliar customs of the
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visitors rub off on to their hosts—and this, in a healthy society living under sound laws, is an absolute disaster. Most states, however, are not well run at all, so it makes no difference to them if their citizens fraternize with foreigners by welcoming them into the state and by going for trips abroad themselves whenever they feel like it and wherever their wanderlust takes them, whatever their age. On the other hand a policy of complete exclusion and complete refusal to go abroad is just not feasible, and in any case the rest of the world would think us churlish and uncivilized: we’d get the [b] reputation of being a truculent and surly people who have ‘Deportations of Aliens’, as the term is—and a brutal one it is, too. Whether the figure you cut in the eyes of others is good or bad, you should never underestimate its importance. You see, people in general don’t fall so far short of real goodness that they can’t recognize virtue and vice when they see it in others; even wicked people have an uncanny instinct that usually enables even an absolute villain to understand and describe accurately enough [c] what distinguishes a good man from a bad. That is why most states find it an excellent precept to value their good standing with the rest of the world. But the soundest and most important rule is this: if you mean to be perfect, you should seek to live in good repute only if you are really good in the first place, but not otherwise. And so it will be entirely right and proper if the state we are now founding in Crete wins among men a brilliant and glorious reputation for virtue, and if things go according to plan there is every reason to expect that, out of all the states and countries [d] which look upon the Sun and the other gods, Magnesia will be one of the few that are well administered.

So what should we do about the admission of aliens and our own journeys to places in foreign countries? First of all, no young person under forty is ever to be allowed to travel abroad under any circumstances; nor is anyone to be allowed to go for private reasons, but only on some public business, as a herald or ambassador or as an observer of one sort or another. (Of course, absence abroad on miliary service in wartime doesn’t deserve [e] to be mentioned in the same breath: it’s not one of those journeys which are ‘for diplomatic reasons’!) We must send representatives to take part in the sacrifices and games held at Delphi in honor of Apollo and at Olympia in honor of Zeus, and to Nemea and the Isthmus; and we must send as many representatives as we can, the finest and noblest of our citizens, who will do credit to our state in these sacred gatherings of peace,
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and win it renown to match that of her armies on the field of battle. And when they return, they will tell the younger generation that the social and political customs of the rest of the world don’t measure up to their own.

But there are other kinds of observers who should be dispatched, provided the Guardians of the Laws give permission. If any citizen would like to spend rather longer surveying at his leisure the life lived by foreigners, no law should prevent him, because no state will ever be able to live at a properly advanced level of civilization if it keeps itself to itself and never [b] comes into contact with all the vices and virtues of mankind; nor will it be able to preserve its laws intact if it just gets used to them without grasping their raison d’être. In the mass of mankind you’ll invariably find a number—though only a small number—of geniuses with whom it is worth anything to associate, and they crop up just as often in badly-ruled [c] states as in the well-ruled. So the citizen of a well-run state, provided he’s incorruptible, should go out and range over land and sea to track them down, so that he can see to the strengthening of the customs of his country that are soundly based, and the refurbishing of any that are defective. Without this observation and research a state will never stay at the peak of perfection; nor will it if the observers are incompetent.

C
LINIAS
: So how can we ensure that both these requirements are met?

A
THENIAN
: Like this. In the first place, anyone who goes observing for us in this fashion must be over fifty; and since the Guardians of the Laws are going to send him abroad as a specimen Magnesian, he must be one of those citizens who have gained a good reputation generally, and particularly [d] in war; and on passing sixty he must go off observing no longer.

When he has spent as many of his ten years as he pleases making his observations, he should come home and present himself before the council which muses on legislation. (This council,
⁵
which should consist partly of young men and partly of old, must have a strict rule to meet daily from dawn until the sun is well up in the sky. Its membership is to be: (1) those Priests who have won high distinction, (2) the ten Guardians of the Laws [e] who are currently the most senior, (3) the Minister of Education for the time being, together with his predecessors in office. No member should attend alone: each is to bring a young man of his own choice, aged between thirty and forty. The discussion at their meetings must always center round
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their own state, the problems of legislation, and any other important point relevant to such topics that they may discover from external sources. They must be particularly concerned with those studies which promise, if pursued, to further their researches by throwing light on legislative problems that would otherwise remain difficult and obscure. Whichever of these studies are sanctioned by the older members should be pursued with all diligence by the younger. If one of the protégés invited to attend is judged to be inadequate, the whole council is to censure the man who [b] invited him; but any that get a good name should be fostered and watched with particular care by the state at large, and if they do what’s wanted of them, they are to be specially honored, but if they turn out worse than most other young men they should suffer correspondingly worse disgrace.) To this council, then, the observer of foreign customs must proceed as soon as he gets back. If he has come across people who were able to give him some information about any problems of legislation or teaching or education, or if he actually comes back with some discoveries of his own, he should make his report to a full meeting of the council. If he seems to [c] be not a whit better or worse for his journey, he should be congratulated at any rate for his energy; if he is thought to have become appreciably better, even higher recognition should be given him during his lifetime, and after his death he must be paid appropriate honors by authority of the assembled council. But if it seems that he has returned corrupted, this self-styled ‘expert’ must talk to no one, young or old, and provided he obeys the authorities he may live as a private person; but if not, and