Complete Works

by Plato, Cooper, John M. , Hutchinson, D. S.

  CLINIAS: I very much approve of your introduction, sir, and I’m even more impressed by the way you’ve rounded it off so that it leads into the opening of the next theme.

  ATHENIAN: So far, then, these ideas we old men have been tossing about [769] have given us splendid sport.

  CLINIAS: Splendid indeed, but I fancy you really meant they were ‘a splendid challenge for men in their prime of life’.

  ATHENIAN: I dare say. But here’s another point. I wonder if you agree with me?

  CLINIAS: What about? What point?

  ATHENIAN: You know how painting a picture of anything seems to be a never-ending business. It always looks as if the process of touching up [b] by adding color or relief (or whatever it’s called in the trade) will never finally get to the point where the clarity and beauty of the picture are beyond improvement.

  CLINIAS: Yes, I too get much the same sort of impression, though only from hearsay—I’ve never gone in for that sort of skill.

  ATHENIAN: Well, you haven’t missed anything. But we can still use this passing mention of it to illustrate the next point. Suppose that one day somebody were to take it into his head to paint the most beautiful picture [c] in the world, which would never deteriorate but always improve at his hands as the years went by. You realize that as the painter is not immortal, he won’t achieve anything very permanent by lavishing such care and attention on his picture unless he leaves some successor to repair the ravages of time? Won’t his successor also have to be able to supplement deficiencies in his master’s skill and improve the picture by touching it up?6

  CLINIAS: True.

  ATHENIAN: Well then, don’t you think the legislator will want to do [d] something similar? First of all he’ll want to write his laws and make them as accurate as he can; then as time goes on and he tries to put his pet theories into practice—well, do you think there’s any legislator so stupid as not to realize that his code has many inevitable deficiencies which must be put right by a successor, if the state he’s founded is to enjoy a continuous [e] improvement in its administrative arrangements, rather than suffer a decline?

  CLINIAS: Yes, I think—indeed I’m sure—that this is the sort of thing any legislator will want to do.

  ATHENIAN: So if a legislator were able to discover a way of doing this—that is, if by instruction or pointing to concrete examples he could make someone else understand (perfectly or imperfectly) how to keep laws in good repair by amending them—I suppose he’d never give up explaining his method until he’d got it across?

  CLINIAS: Of course. [770]

  ATHENIAN: So isn’t this what you two and I ought to be doing now?

  CLINIAS: What do you mean?

  ATHENIAN: Now that we (in the evening of life) are on the point of framing laws, for which we have guardians already chosen (our juniors), oughtn’t we to combine our law-giving with an attempt to turn them into law-‘givers’ as well as law-‘guardians’, as far as we can?

  [b] CLINIAS: Of course we ought, assuming we’re up to it.

  ATHENIAN: Anyhow, we ought to try, and do our level best.

  CLINIAS: Certainly.

  ATHENIAN: Let’s address them as follows: ‘Colleagues and protectors of our laws, we shall—inevitably—leave a great many gaps in every section of our code. However, we shall certainly take care to outline a sort of sketch of the complete system with its main points, and it will be your [c] job to take this sketch and fill in the details. You ought to hear what your aims should be when you do this. Megillus and Clinias and I have mentioned it to each other more than once, and we are agreed that our formula is a good one. We want you to be sympathetic to our way of thinking and become our pupils, keeping in view this aim which the three of us are unanimous a giver and guardian of laws should have. The central point on which we agree amounted to this. “Our aim in life should be [d] goodness and the spiritual virtue appropriate to mankind. There are various things that can assist us: it may be some pursuit we follow, a particular habit, or something we possess; we may get help from some desire we have or some opinion we hold or some course of study; and all this is true of both male and female members of the community, young or old. Whatever the means, it’s this aim we’ve described that we must all strain every muscle to achieve throughout our lives. No man, whoever he is, [e] should ever be found valuing anything else, if it impedes his progress—not even, in the last resort, the state. Rather than have the state tolerate the yoke of slavery and be ruled by unworthy hands, it may be absolutely necessary to allow it to be destroyed, or abandon it by going into exile. All that sort of hardship we simply have to endure rather than permit a change to the sort of political system which will make men worse.” This, then, is the agreed statement; now it’s up to you to consider this double [771] aim of ours and censure the laws that can do nothing to help us; but you must commend and welcome the effective ones with enthusiasm, and cheerfully live as they dictate. You must have no truck with other pursuits which aim at different “goods” (as people call them).’

  The best way to start the next section of our code will be to deal with matters of religion. First, we should go back to the figure of 5040 and [b] reflect again how many convenient divisors we found both in this total and its subdivision the tribe (which is one-twelfth of the total, as we specified, i.e., exactly the product of twenty-one multiplied by twenty). Our grand total is divisible by twelve, and so is the number of persons in a tribe (420) and in each case this subdivision must be regarded as holy, a gift of God, corresponding to the months of the year and the revolution of the universe. This is exactly why every state is guided by innate intuition to give these fractions the sanction of religion, though in some cases the divisions have been made more correctly than in others and the religious backing has proved more successful. So for our part we claim that we had every justification for preferring 5040, which can be divided by every number from one to twelve, except eleven (a drawback that’s very easily cured: one way to remedy it is simply to omit two hearths). The truth of this could be demonstrated very briefly in any idle moment. So let’s trust [d] to the rule we’ve just explained, and divide our number along those lines. We must allocate a god, or child of a god, to each division and subdivision of the state and provide altars and the associated equipment; we must establish two meetings per month for the purposes of sacrifice, one in each of the twelve tribes into which the state is divided, and another in each of the twelve local communities that form the divisions of each tribe. This arrangement is intended to ensure, first, that we enjoy the favor of the gods and heaven in general, and secondly (as we’d be inclined to stress7) that we should grow familiar and intimate with each other in every kind of social contact.

  You see, when people are going to live together as partners in marriage, it is vital that the fullest possible information should be available about [e] the bride and her background and the family she’ll marry into. One should regard the prevention of mistakes here as a matter of supreme importance—so important and serious, in fact, that even the young people’s recreation must be arranged with this in mind. Boys and girls must dance [772] together at an age when plausible occasions can be found for their doing so, in order that they may have a reasonable look at each other; and they should dance naked, provided sufficient modesty and restraint are displayed by all concerned.

  The controllers and organizers of the choruses should be in charge of all these arrangements and maintain due order; and in conjunction with the Guardians of the Laws they will settle anything we leave out. As we said, it’s inevitable that a legislator will omit the numerous details of such [b] a topic; those who administer his laws from year to year will have to learn from experience and settle the details by annual refinements and amendments, until they think they’ve made the rules and procedures sufficiently precise. In the case of sacrifices and dances, a reasonable and adequate period to allow for experiment, in general and in detail, will be ten years. So long as the original legislator is alive, the var
ious officials [c] should bring him into the consultations, but when he is dead they must use their own initiative in putting up to the Guardians of the Laws proposals for remedying the deficiencies in their respective spheres. This process should continue until every detail is thought to have received its final polish. After that, they must assume that the rules are immutable, and observe them along with the rest of the code which the legislator laid down and imposed on them originally. Not a single detail should be altered, if they can help it; but if they ever believe that the force of circumstances has become irresistible, they must consult all the officials, the entire citizen [d] body and all the oracles of the gods. If the verdict is unanimously in favor, then they may amend, but never in any other conditions whatever; the law will be that the opposition must always win the day.

  To resume, then: when a man of twenty-five has observed others and been observed by them and is confident that he has found a family offering someone to his taste who would make a suitable partner for the procreation [e] of children, he should get married, and in any case before he reaches thirty. First, however, he ought to hear the correct method of trying to find a suitable and congenial partner. As Clinias says, the appropriate preface should stand at the head of every law.

  CLINIAS: Well reminded, sir—and at just the right moment in our conversation, I fancy.

  ATHENIAN: Quite so. ‘My boy,’ let’s say to this son of a good family, [773] ‘you must make a marriage that will be approved by sensible folk. They will advise you not to be over keen to avoid marrying into a poor family or to seek to marry into a rich one; other things being equal, you should always prefer to marry somewhat beneath you. That will be best both for the state and the union of your two hearths and homes, because it is infinitely better for the virtue of a man and wife if they balance and complement each other than if they are both at the same extreme. If a man [b] knows he’s rather headstrong and apt to be too quick off the mark in everything he does, he ought to be anxious to ally himself to a family of quiet habits, and if he has the opposite kind of temperament he should marry into the opposite kind of family. One general rule should apply to marriage: we should seek to contract the alliance that will benefit the state, not the one that we personally find most alluring. Everyone is naturally drawn to the person most like himself, and that puts the whole state off [c] balance, because of discrepancies in wealth and character, and these in turn generally lead, in most states, to results we certainly don’t want to see in ours.’

  If we give explicit instructions in the form of a law—‘no rich man to marry into a rich family, no powerful person to marry into a powerful house, the headstrong must be forced to join in marriage with the phlegmatic and the phlegmatic with the headstrong’—well, it’s ludicrous, of course, [d] but it will also annoy a great many people who find it hard to understand why the state should be like the mixture in a mixing-bowl. When you pour in the wine it seethes furiously, but once dilute it with the god of the teetotalers, and you have a splendid combination which will make you a good and reasonable drink. Very few people have it in them to see that the same principle applies to the alliance that produces children. For these reasons we are forced to omit such topics from our actual laws. However, we must resort to our ‘charms’8 and try to persuade everybody [e] to think it more important to produce well-balanced children than to marry his equal and never stop lusting for wealth. Anyone who is set on enriching himself by his marriage should be headed off by reproaches rather than compelled by a written law.

  So much for marriage: these exhortations should be added to our previous account of how we should become partners in eternity by leaving a line of descendants to serve God forever in our stead.9 Acorrectly composed [774] preface would have all that and more to say about the obligation to marry.

  11. If anyone disobeys (except involuntarily), and unsociably keeps himself to himself so that he is still unmarried at the age of thirty-five,

  he must pay an annual fine: one hundred drachmas if he belongs to the highest property-class, seventy if to the second, sixty if to the third, and thirty if to the fourth; the sum to be consecrated to Hera. [b]

  12. If he refuses to pay his annual fine,

  his debt must be increased ten times.

  (The fine is to be collected by the treasurer of the goddess.

  13. If he fails to collect it,

  he will have to owe the sum himself.

  Every treasurer must give an account of himself in this respect at the scrutiny.) So much for the financial penalty to be paid by anyone refusing to marry, but

  12. (cont.)

  he should also be barred from receiving the respect due to him from his juniors, none of whom should ever readily take the slightest notice of him. If the bachelor tries to chastise a man, everyone should take the victim’s side and protect him.

  14. If a bystander fails to give the victim help, [c]

  the law should see that he gets the reputation of being a rotten, lily-livered citizen.

  We’ve already discussed dowries,10 but we ought to repeat that even if the poor do have to marry and give in marriage on limited resources, it will not affect their prospects of a long life one way or the other, because in this state no one will go without the necessities of life. Nor will wives be so inclined to give themselves airs, and their husbands will be less humiliated by kowtowing to them for financial reasons. If a man obeys [d] this law, so much to his credit.

  15. If he does not, and gives or receives more than fifty drachmas for the trousseau in the case of the lowest property-class (or more than a hundred or a hundred and fifty or two hundred according to class),

  he must owe as much again to the treasury, and the amount given or received must be dedicated to Hera and Zeus.

  [e] 16. The treasurers of these gods are to exact these sums in the same way as we said the treasurers of Hera had to collect the fines in every case of refusal to marry,

  or pay out of their own pockets.

  The right to make a valid betrothal should rest initially with the bride’s father, secondly with her grandfather, thirdly with her brothers by the same father. If none of these is available, the right should belong to the relatives on the mother’s side in the same order. If any exceptional misfortune occurs, the nearest relatives shall be authorized to act in conjunction with the girl’s guardians.

  [775] That leaves us with the pre-marriage sacrifices and any other relevant rites that should be performed before, during or after the wedding. A citizen should ask the Expounders about these matters, and be confident that if he does as they tell him, everything will be in order.

  As for the wedding-feast, neither family should invite more than five friends of both sexes, and the number of relatives and kinsmen from either side should be limited similarly. No one should incur expense beyond his means: that is, no more than a mina in the case of the wealthiest class, [b] half a mina for the next and so on down the scale according to class. Everyone should commend the man who obeys the regulation, but

  17. The Guardians of the Laws must chastise the disobedient as a philistine who has never been trained to appreciate the melodies11 of the Muses of marriage.

  To drink to the point of inebriation is improper whatever the place (except at the feasts of the god who made us the gift of wine), and it’s dangerous too, especially if you want to make your marriage a success. On the day of their wedding particularly, when they are at a turning-point [c] in their lives, bride and groom ought to show restraint, so as to make as sure as they can (it being practically impossible to tell the day or night in which by the favor of God conception will take place) that any child they may have should have parents who were sober when they conceived him. Apart from that, children should not be conceived when the parents’ bodies are in a state of drunken relaxation; the fetus should be compactly formed and firmly planted, and its growth should be orderly and undisturbed. But when he’s drunk a man reels about all over the place and bumps into [d] things, and a ragi
ng passion invades his body and soul; this means that as a sower of his seed a drunkard will be clumsy and inefficient, and he’ll produce unbalanced children who are not to be trusted, with devious characters, and in all probability with misshapen bodies too. That’s why all the year round, throughout his life (but particularly during the age of procreation), a man must take great care to do nothing to injure his health, if he can help it, and nothing with any hint of insolence or injustice, which will inevitably rub off on to the souls and bodies of his children, and produce absolutely degenerate creatures who have been stamped with the [e] likeness of their father. At the very least, he must shun such vices on the day of his wedding and the following night, because if a human institution gets off to a good and careful start, there is a sort of divine guarantee that it will prosper.

  The bridegroom must regard one of the two homes included in the lot [776] as the nest in which he will bring up his brood of young; here he must be married, after leaving his father and mother, and here he must make his home and become the breadwinner for himself and his children. You see, when people feel the need of absent friends, the ties that bind them are strengthened, but when they overdo it and are too much together so that they’re not apart long enough to miss each other, they drift apart. That’s why the newly-weds must leave their father and mother and the wife’s relatives in the old home and live somewhere else, rather as if they had gone off to a colony; and each side should visit, and be visited by, [b] the other. The young couple should produce children and bring them up, handing on the torch of life from generation to generation, and always worshipping the gods in the manner prescribed by law.