Complete Works (336 page)

105. he is convicted in court of meddling in some educational or legal [d] question,
he must die.

106. If none of the authorities takes him to court when that is what he deserves,
it should
count as a black mark against them when distinctions are awarded.

So much for the way foreign travel should be undertaken and the sort of persons who should venture on it. But what about our duty to welcome foreign visitors? There are four categories of them worth discussing. Those in the first turn up every year without fail, usually in summer, with the [e] regularity of migrating birds. Most of them are on business trips in search of profit, and throughout the summer they ‘wing’ their way like so many birds across the sea to foreign parts. They must be received at trading posts and harbors and in public buildings outside but not far from the state by officials appointed for the purpose, who should (a) take good care that none of this category of visitor introduces any novel custom, (b)
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handle with proper impartiality the lawsuits that affect them, and (c) keep intercourse with them down to the unavoidable minimum. The second type are ‘observers’ in the most basic sense: they come to see the sights, and to listen, too, at festivals of the arts. All such visitors should be received in hospitable lodgings near temples, by whose priests and custodians they are to be looked after and attended to. Then, when they have stayed for a reasonable length of time, and seen and heard what they came to see and hear, they should take their leave without having inflicted or suffered any harm. If anyone injures them, or they injure anyone else, the Priests [b] are to act as judges, provided no more than fifty drachmas are involved. If the claim is for a greater sum, the trial must be held before the Market-Wardens.

The third type of visitor, who arrives from another country on some matter of state, should be received at public expense, and by no one except Generals, Cavalry-Commanders and Company-Commanders. Together with the executive for the time being, the official by whom he is put up and entertained should have the sole responsibility for him. [c]

Sometimes, though rarely, a fourth kind of visitor arrives. If ever a counterpart to our own observers comes from a foreign country, we shall first of all require that he should be not less than fifty years old, and in addition he should profess to be coming to view something whose excellence surpasses that of anything in the rest of the world, or to report on some such feature to another state. Such a man may dispense with invitations, [d] and present himself at the doors of the wise and rich, because that is the class of man he is himself. In the full confidence that he is the right sort of guest for such a distinguished host, he should go to the home of (say) the Minister of Education, or of someone who has won an award for virtue. He should spend his time in the company of one or other of these, and after an exchange of information take his leave, duly honored as a friend by friends with fitting presents and tokens of esteem.

These are the laws that should govern the reception of all our visitors [e] from abroad, of either sex, and the dispatch of our own people to other countries. We must show respect for Zeus the God of Strangers, and not keep aliens at arm’s length by uncongenial food and offensive sacrifices (like the sons of Old Father Nile do nowadays), or by uncivilized proclamations.

Anyone who stands surety should do so in precise terms, by specifying all the details of the agreement in a written contract, before not less than three witnesses if the sum involved is less than one thousand drachmas,
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and not less than five in the case of greater sums. (Also, a warrantor
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is surety for a vendor who is insolvent or cannot be sued, and is to have the same liability in law.)

When a man wants to search someone else’s premises, he should do so clad in only his tunic,
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without a belt, and after swearing to the gods specified by law that he really does expect to find what he’s looking for. The other party is to open up his home, including all its sealed and unsealed property, to be searched; if he refuses permission to search to anyone [b] requesting it, the party thus hindered must go to law, giving his estimate of the value of the object he is looking for.

107. If the defendant is convicted,
he must
pay double the estimated value as damages.

If the owner of the house happens to be away, the residents must make unsealed property available for search; sealed property should be countersealed by the searcher, who should then post anyone he likes to guard it for a period of five days. If the householder stays away for longer than that, the other party should fetch the City-Wardens and make the search, opening up sealed property as well and sealing it up again afterwards in [c] the same way in the presence of the household and the City-Wardens.

Now for cases when title is in dispute. After a certain period has elapsed, it must be no longer possible to challenge the rights of the person in possession. In Magnesia, of course, dispute about land or houses is out of the question. But as for other possessions, if a man has used something openly in town or market-place or temple, and no one has tried to recover it and claimed to have been looking for it all the time the other man has obviously made no attempt at concealment, then provided the ownership of the one party and the search of the other have continued for a year, [d] after the expiry of that period no claim for recovery is to be permitted. If a man uses an object openly, not indeed in town or market-place, but in the countryside, and no one confronts him with a claim to it for five years, then on the expiry of that period no one is to be allowed to attempt repossession. If the article is used in a man’s town house, the time limit is to be three years; if it is kept in a building in the country, ten years; and if it is used abroad, then there is to be no time limit for recovery at [e] all, however long the claimant may take to find it.

Sometimes a man may forcibly prevent a litigant or witness from appearing at a trial. If he prevents a slave, his own or another’s, the suit should be null and void.

108. If he prevents a free man,
he must
be imprisoned for a year and be liable to a suit for kidnapping
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at the hands of anyone who cares to prosecute, and the suit will be null in any case.

If a man forcibly prevents a rival competitor from participating in an athletic or cultural or any other contest, anyone who wishes should report the fact to the supervisors of the games, who should set the would-be contestant free to enter the competition. If they prove unable to do so, and the man responsible for the competitor’s absence wins, the prize should be awarded to the person prevented from competing, and he should be [b] recorded as the winner in any temple he pleases.

109. The person who has hindered him must not be allowed to make any dedication or record relating to that contest, and he must be liable to a prosecution for damages whether he wins or loses.

110. If a man receives stolen goods, knowing them to be stolen,
he must
suffer the same penalty as the thief.

111. The penalty for harboring an exile should be death.

Everyone is to have the same friends and enemies as the state.

112. (a) If a man makes a private peace or wages private war with [c] anyone without the backing of the state,
he too must
be punished by death.

If any sectional interest in the state makes peace or war with any parties on its own account, the Generals must haul those responsible for the affairs before a court.

(b) If the defendants are convicted,
death should
be the penalty.

Members of the public service should perform their duties without taking bribes. Such a practice must never be extenuated by an approving reference to maxims like ‘One good turn deserves another’. It is not easy for an [d] official to reach his decisions impartially and stick to them, and the safest thing he can do is to listen to the law and obey its command to take no gifts for his services.

113. If a man disobeys and is convicted in court,
the only penalty
permitted is to be death.

Now to deal with payments to the public treasury. For a variety of reasons, an assessment must be made of each man’s property, and the members of the tribes must make a written return of the year’s produce to the Country-Wardens. The treasury will thus be able to use whichever [e] of the two methods of exacting payment it finds convenient—that is, every year the authorities will decide to levy a proportion
either
of the sum total of the individual assessments
or
of the revenues accruing that particular year. (Payment for the common meals should be excluded from the calculations.)

The offerings a reasonable man makes to the gods should be on a correspondingly reasonable scale. As the earth and every household’s hearth are already sacred to all the gods, no one should consecrate them a second time. The gold and silver that you find in temples and private
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houses in other states encourage jealousy; ivory, taken as it is from a lifeless body, is an unclean offering; and iron and bronze are instruments of war. A man may offer at the public temples any objects he likes made of wood or stone, provided that in either case it consists of no more than a single piece; if he offers woven material, it should not exceed what one woman can produce in a month. In general, and particularly in the case of woven material, white is the color appropriate to the gods; dyes must not be [b] employed, except for military decorations. The gifts the gods find most acceptable are birds and pictures, provided they do not take a painter more than a single day to complete. All this should serve as a pattern for all our other offerings.

Now that we have described the nature and number of the parts into which the whole state is divided, and done what we can to frame laws for all the most important agreements men make, we’re left with the question of legal procedure. The court of first resort will consist of judges—arbitrators, in fact, but ‘judges’ is really a more appropriate title—chosen [c] by agreement between prosecutor and defendant. If the case is not settled in the first court, the litigants should go and contest it again before the second (composed of villagers and tribesmen, duly divided into twelve groups), but at the risk of an enhanced penalty: if the defendant loses for the second time, he must be mulcted an additional fifth of the penalty previously assessed and recorded. If he is still aggrieved with his judges and wants to fight the case for the third time, he must take it to the Select [d] Judges, and if he is defeated again, he is to pay one and a half times the original penalty. As for the prosecutor, if he is not prepared to lie down under defeat in the first court, and goes before the second, he should be awarded the extra fifth of the penalty if he wins, but be fined that amount if he loses. If the litigants refuse to acquiesce in the earlier decision and go before the third court, and the defendant loses, he must pay one and a half times the penalty as already stated; if the prosecutor loses, he must be fined one half of it. [e]

But what about the balloting for jurors, and the procedure for making up the juries? What about the appointment of attendants for the various officials, the fixing of times at which the various formalities should be completed, voting methods, adjournments, and all the other similar inescapable details of legal procedure, such as putting cases early or late in the calendar, the enforcement of attendance and of replies to interrogation, and suchlike? Well, we’ve made the point before, but the truth is all the better for being stated two or even three times. All these minor rules are
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perfectly easy to invent, and the senior legislator may skip them and leave it to his young successor to fill in the gaps. But although that will be reasonable enough in the case of the courts that are appointed privately, the common public courts, and those that the various officials need to use in the performance of their duties, need a rather different approach. Sensible people in several states have framed a good many decent regulations which our Guardians of the Laws should adapt for the state that we are now [b] founding. The Guardians should examine them and touch them up after trying them out in practice, until they think they have licked each single one into shape; then they should finalize them, ratify them as immutable, and render them lifelong obedience. Then there is the question of the silence of the judges, and the restraint or otherwise of their language, as well as all the other details in which our standards of justice and goodness and decorum differ from those you find in such variety in other states. We’ve already had something to say on this topic, and we shall have more to say towards the end. The judge who wants to act with proper judicial [c] impartiality should bear all these points in mind and get hold of books in which to study the subject. The study of laws, provided they are good laws, is unsurpassed for its power to improve the student. (It can’t be an accident that the name of this god-given and wonderful institution, law, is so suggestive of reason.)
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And other compositions, such as eulogies or censures in verse or prose, in the latter case either taking written form or being simply spoken during our day-to-day contacts when we indulge in [d] contentious argument or (sometimes thoughtlessly) express our agreement—all these will be measured against a clear criterion: the writings of the legislator, which the good judge will treasure as a kind of antidote against the others, so as to ensure his own moral health and that of the state. He will confirm and strengthen the virtuous in the paths of righteousness, [e] and do his best to banish ignorance and incontinence and cowardice and indeed every sort of injustice from the hearts of those criminals whose outlook can be cured. However—and this is a point that deserves constant
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repetition—when a man’s soul is unalterably fixed in that condition by decree of fate, our erudite judges and their advisers will deserve the commendation of the whole state if they cure him by imposing the penalty of death.