Complete Works (339 page)
C
LINIAS
: How so?
A
THENIAN
: No mortal can ever attain a truly religious outlook without risk of relapse unless he grasps the two doctrines we’re now discussing: first, that the soul is far older than any created thing, and that it is immortal and controls the entire world of matter; and second (a doctrine we’ve expounded often enough before) that reason is the supreme power among the heavenly bodies. He also has to master the essential preliminary studies, [e] survey with the eye of a philosopher what they have in common, and use them to frame consistent rules of moral action; and finally, when a reasoned explanation is possible, he must be able to provide it. No one who is unable
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to acquire these insights and rise above the level of the ordinary virtues will ever be good enough to govern an entire state, but only to assist government carried on by others. And that means, Clinias and Megillus, that we now have to consider whether we are going to add yet another law to the code we’ve already expounded, to the effect that the Nocturnal Council of the Authorities, duly primed by the course of studies we’ve described, shall be constituted the legal protector of the safety of the state. Or is there some alternative course for us to take? [b]
C
LINIAS
: Oh, but my dear sir, there’s no question of refusing to add this law, if we can manage it, even if our success is only partial.
A
THENIAN
: Then let’s make every effort to win the struggle. I’ve had a lot of experience of such projects and have studied the field for a long time, so I’ll be more than happy to help you—and perhaps I shall find others to join me.
C
LINIAS
: Well, sir, we must certainly stick to the path on which—it is hardly an exaggeration to say—God himself is guiding us. But the question to which we need an answer at the moment is this: what will be the correct procedure on our part? [c]
A
THENIAN
: Megillus and Clinias, it is impossible to lay down the council’s activities until it has been established. Its curriculum must be decided by those who have already mastered the necessary branches of knowledge—and only previous instruction and plenty of intimate discussion will settle such matters as that.
C
LINIAS
: How so? How are we supposed to understand
that
remark?
[d] A
THENIAN
: First of all, of course, we shall have to compile a list of candidates qualified for the office of guardian by age, intellectual attainments, moral character and way of life. Then there’s the question of what they have to learn. It is difficult to find out this for oneself, and it is not easy either to discover somebody else who has already done so and learn from him. Quite apart from that, it will be a waste of time to produce written regulations about the order in which the various subjects should be tackled and how long should be spent on each, because even the students, [e] until they have thoroughly absorbed a subject, won’t realize why it comes at just that point in the curriculum. So although it would be a mistake to treat all these details as inviolable secrets, it would be fair to say that they ought not to be divulged beforehand, because advance disclosure throws no light at all on the questions we’re discussing.
C
LINIAS
: Well then, sir, if that’s the case, what are we to do?
A
THENIAN
: My friends, we must ‘chance our arm’, as the saying is. If we are prepared to stake the whole constitution on a throw of ‘three sixes’
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or ‘three ones’, then that’s what we’ll have to do, and I’ll shoulder part of the risk by giving a full explanation of my views on training and education, which we’ve now started to discuss all over again. However, the risk is enormous and unique. So I bid you, Clinias, take the business in hand: establish the state of the Magnesians (or whatever other name God adopts for it), and if you’re successful you’ll win enormous fame; at [b] any rate you’ll never lose a reputation for courage that will dwarf all your successors’. And if, my good companions, if this wonderful council of ours can be formed, then the state must be entrusted to it, and practically no modern legislator will want to oppose us. We thought of our combined metaphor of head and intellect, which we mentioned a moment ago, as idealistic dreaming
15
—but it will all come true, provided the council members [c] are rigorously selected, properly educated, and after the completion of their studies lodged in the citadel of the country and made into guardians whose powers of protection we have never seen excelled in our lives before.
M
EGILLUS
: My dear Clinias, judging from what we’ve heard said, either we’ll have to abandon the project of founding the state or refuse to let our visitor leave us, and by entreaties and every ruse we can think of enroll him as a partner in the foundation of the state.
[d] C
LINIAS
: You’re quite right, Megillus. That’s what I’m going to do. May I enlist your help too?
M
EGILLUS
: You may indeed.
1
. See
Iliad
xvi fin., xvii.125 ff., xviii.78 ff. In the Trojan war, Patroclus, son of Menoetius and companion of Achilles, while wearing the armor of Achilles’ father Peleus, was killed by Hector.
2
. In Plato’s text the regulation called here 100(b) comes
after
101.
3
. Reading
protim
ō
n
in d7.
4
. Alternatively, ‘half the litigants’.
5
. Apparently the ‘Nocturnal’ council, which has not yet been announced: see 960b ff.
6
. The vendor from whom the vendor bought the object in question.
7
. Deleting
ē
in a5.
8
.
Nomos
(‘law’) suggests
nous
(’reason’).
9
. 717e–718a, 872e ff., 908e ff., and 947b ff.
10
. Respectively ‘the Distributor of Lots’, ‘the Spinner’, and ‘the Inflexible One’.
11
. Reading
atrakt
ō
i
in c9.
12
. 951d–952d.
13
. See 630d–e.
14
. Presumably Anaxagoras (mid fifth century) in particular. Cf.
Phaedo
97b ff.
15
. See 961d and 964e–965a.
Translated by Richard D. McKirahan, Jr. Text: L. Tarán,
Academica: Plato, Philip of Opus, and the Pseudo-Platonic Epinomis,
American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1975.
As its name indicates,
Epinomis
is an addition or appendix to the
Laws (Nomoi
in Greek). Clinias, Megillus, and the Athenian visitor reconvene at some unspecified time after their conversation in the
Laws.
Their purpose is to discuss the nature of wisdom—the copestone of human fulfillment and happiness—and, more particularly, the studies by which it is to be attained. Instruction in these must be given to the members of the governing Council of their proposed new city of Magnesia, charged as the Council is with knowing in detail the overall aim of law and how to maintain in perpetuity laws and practices that achieve it. At the end of the
Laws,
it was agreed that these matters could not usefully be explained in advance; the thing to do was actually to establish a city having the right laws, educate and select a Council, and leave to them the further legislation about their successors’ education. Now, going back on that, the Athenian agrees to explain what the necessary studies are and to legislate about them. It turns out, surprisingly perhaps, that though certain preliminary studies are also needed, wisdom is constituted solely by the knowledge of astronomy—of the single, mathematically unified system of the constant movements of the heavenly bodies (assumed, of course, to be rotating round the earth). Knowing that, the Council members will know the principle of order needed to organize correctly the whole of human life, both individually and socio-politically.
This discrepancy (and there are others) already suggests that Plato was not the author of this work. This is generally accepted in current scholarship. There is ancient testimony that its author was in fact Philip of Opus, who is also said to have ‘transcribed’ the
Laws,
presumably from wax tablets in which Plato left the work at his death because he was still revising it. If so, it presents one of the first ‘Platonisms’, very close to Plato’s own time, carrying forward the ‘spirit’ of Plato’s work while giving selective and distorting emphases to various elements within it.
J.M.C.
C
LINIAS
: My friend, all three of us—you, I and Megillus here—have
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come to do what we agreed: to consider what account we ought to give in explaining the nature of wisdom, as well as to discuss the course of studies that we say makes a person who engages in thought as wise as a [b] human can be. And rightly so, since although we have set out in detail everything else that has to do with legislation, we have neither stated nor discovered the most important thing: what a mortal must learn in order to be wise. We must not abandon this now, since to do so would be to leave largely unachieved the goal of our labors, which was to make things clear from start to finish.
A
THENIAN VISITOR
: That is a good idea, Clinias, but I fear you are about [c] to hear an account that is strange, though yet in a way not strange: the human race is, as a rule, neither blessed nor happy. Many people, through their experience in life, offer this same account. Pay attention then and consider closely whether you find that I too, following them, am correct on this point. I claim that people cannot become blessed and happy; there are but a few exceptions to this rule. (I limit this claim to the duration of our lives. Those who strive to live as nobly as they can during their life and at their end to die a noble death have a good hope of attaining after [d] they die everything for which they have striven.) I am not saying anything clever, but only what we all know in some way, both Greeks and foreigners: from the start the terms of life are harsh for every living thing. First we have to go through the stage of being embryos. Then we have to be born
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and then be brought up and educated, and we all agree that every one of these stages involves countless pains. In fact, if we don’t count hardships, but only what everyone would consider tolerable, the time involved turns out to be quite brief—a period round about the middle of a person’s life, which is thought to provide a kind of breathing-space. But then old age quickly overtakes us and tends to make anyone who takes his whole life into account unwilling ever to go through life again, unless he is full of childish thoughts.
[b] What proof do I have of this? That what we are now investigating points in this direction. We are investigating how to become wise, as if this capacity were found in everyone. But it takes to its heels whenever anyone achieves any expertise in any of the so-called arts or branches of wisdom or in any of the other fields usually considered to be sciences—which suggests that none of them deserves the title of wisdom about these human concerns. On the other hand, while the soul is strongly convinced and [c] divines that it is somehow its nature to have wisdom, it is wholly unable to find out what this is, and when and how it is attained. In these circumstances, isn’t our difficulty about wisdom entirely appropriate, and our investigation as well? This turns out to be a larger project than any of us expect who are capable of examining themselves and others intelligently and consistently through arguments of all kinds and sorts. Shall we not agree that this is so?
[d] C
LINIAS
: Perhaps we shall, my friend, since over time we have come to share your hope that we may reach the full truth in these matters.
A
THENIAN
: First we must go through all the other subjects that are called sciences but that do not make those who understand and possess them wise. After getting these out of the way, we will try to identify the ones we need, and then learn them.
To begin, let us consider how it is that the sciences that have to do with the first needs of a mortal race are most necessary and truly first, but also [e] how it happens that those who have knowledge of them, though in early times they were considered wise, nowadays are not reputed for wisdom, but rather are reproached for such knowledge. We shall identify them and
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show that virtually everyone with an ambition for a reputation of having developed into as good a person as possible avoids them in order to acquire wisdom and practice it.
First there is the knowledge that has to do with animals’ eating one another. The story goes that this is what has made it customary to eat some kinds of animals while entirely keeping us from eating others. May the men of former times be kindly to us, as indeed they are; but let the first persons we leave aside be the experts at the knowledge just mentioned. [b] Next, the production of barley meal and wheat flour, in combination with the knowledge of how to use them for nourishment, though it is a noble and excellent pursuit, will never succeed in making anyone completely wise, since this very thing—labelling production as wisdom—would lead to disgust at the products themselves. Nor will cultivation of the entire earth make anyone completely wise: it is clearly not by art but by a natural capacity we have from God that we have all put our hands to working the earth. Moreover, neither will the “weaving together” of dwellings, or construction as a whole, or the art of making all kinds of furnishings and implements, which includes bronze-working, building, molding and [c] weaving, as well as the manufacture of all instruments. This knowledge has practical utility for the masses, but it is not because it is thought to confer virtue that it is called knowledge. Nor does the art of hunting in all its various forms make anyone noble and wise, though it has come to have many forms and involves great skill. Nor do prophetic inspiration or the ability to interpret divine messages have this effect in the least. The prophet only knows what he says; he does not understand if it is true.