Complete Works

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

  [e] ATHENIAN: My point is not an easy one to appreciate, but it’s not unduly difficult either, and won’t take up a lot of time, as I’ll prove to you by my ability to keep my explanation brief—even though it wasn’t so very long ago, when I was no youngster, that I heard of these things. If the subject were difficult, I’d never be able to explain it to you, old men that we all are.

  [822] CLINIAS: You’re right. But what is this subject you say is so wonderful, so suitable for young men to learn, yet unknown to us? Try to tell us that much about it, at any rate, as clearly as you can.

  ATHENIAN: Yes, try I must. This belief, my dear fellows, that the moon and sun and other heavenly bodies do in fact ‘wander’, is incorrect: precisely the opposite is true. Actually, each of them perpetually describes just one fixed orbit, although it is true that to all appearances its path is always changing. [b] Further, the quickest body is wrongly supposed to be the slowest, and vice versa. So if the facts are as stated, and we are in error, we’re no better than spectators at Olympia would be, if they said that the fastest horse in the race or the fastest long-distance runner was the slowest, and the slowest the fastest, and composed panegyrics and songs extolling the loser as the winner. I don’t suppose the praises showered on the runners would be at all apt or welcome to them—they’re only men, after all! At Olympia, such [c] a mistake would be merely ludicrous. But what are we to think of the analogous theological errors we’re committing nowadays? In this field such mistakes are not funny at all; and it certainly gives the gods no pleasure to have us spread false rumors about them.

  CLINIAS: Very true—if you’re right about the facts.

  ATHENIAN: So if we can prove I am right, all such topics as these must be studied to the level indicated, but in the absence of proof they must be left alone. May we adopt this as agreed policy?

  CLINIAS: Certainly. [d]

  ATHENIAN: So it’s high time to call a halt to our regulations about the subjects to be studied in the educational curriculum, and turn our attention to hunting and all that sort of thing. Here too we must adopt the same procedure as before, because the legislator’s job is not done if he simply lays down laws and gets quit of the business. In addition to his legislation, he must provide something else, which occupies a sort of no-man’s land between admonition and law. This is a point, of course, that we’ve come across often enough as we talked of this and that, as for instance when [e] we dealt with the training of very young children. We hold that although education at that level is certainly the sort of topic on which suggestions are needed, it would be plain silly to think of these suggestions as formal laws. Even when the actual laws and the complete constitution have been thus formally committed to writing, you don’t exhaust the praises of a supremely virtuous citizen by saying ‘Here’s a good man for you, a devoted and utterly obedient servant of the laws’. Your praise will be more comprehensive if you can say, ‘He’s a good man because he has given a lifetime of unswerving obedience to the written words of the legislator, whether they took the form [823] of a law, or simply expressed approval or disapproval’. There is no truer praise of a citizen than that. The real job of the legislator is not only to write his laws, but to blend into them an explanation of what he regards as respectable and what he does not, and the perfect citizen must be bound by these standards no less than by those backed by legal sanctions.

  We can cite our present subject as a kind of witness to demonstrate the point more clearly. You know how ‘hunting’ takes a great many forms, [b] almost all of which are nowadays covered by this one term. There is a variety of ways of hunting water animals, and the same goes for the birds of the air, and the animals that live on land too—and not only the wild ones, either: we also have to take into account the hunting of men, not merely by their enemies in war (such as the raids carried out by robbers and the pursuit of army by army), but by their lovers, who ‘pursue’ their quarry for many different reasons, some admirable, some execrable. When the legislator comes to lay down his laws about hunting he cannot [c] leave all this unexplained, but neither can he produce a set of menacing regulations by imposing rules and punishments for all cases. So how are we going to tackle this kind of thing? He—the legislator—having asked himself ‘Are these suitable exercises and activities for the young, or not?’, must then approve or condemn the various forms of hunting. The young men, for their part, must listen to the lawgiver and obey him, without being seduced by the prospect of pleasure or deterred by vigorous effort; [d] and they should pay much more attention to carrying out warm recommendations than to the detailed threats and punishment of the formal law.

  With those preliminaries, we may now put in due form our approval or disapproval of the various forms of hunting, commending the kind that is a good influence on the younger generation and censuring the other sort. So let’s now follow up with a talk to the young people, and address them in this idealistic vein:

  [e] ‘Friends, we hope you’ll never be seized by a desire or passion to fish in the sea or to angle or indeed to hunt water animals at all; and don’t resort to creels, which a lazybones will leave to catch his prey whether he’s asleep or awake. We hope you never feel any temptation to capture men on the high seas and take to piracy, which will make you into brutal hunters and outlaws; and we hope it never so much as occurs to you to turn thief in town or country. Nor should any young man ever be seduced by a fancy to trap birds—away with such an uncivilized desire! That leaves [824] only land animals for the athletes of our state to hunt and capture. Now sometimes this is done by what is called “night-hunting,” when the participants, sluggards that they are, take it in turn to sleep. This sort of hunting is not to be recommended, nor is the sort that offers periods of rest from exertion, where the savage strength of the animals is subdued by nets and traps, rather than because a hunter who relishes the fight has got the better of them. All men who wish to cultivate the “divine”22 courage have only one type of hunting left, which is the best: the capture of four-footed animals with the help of dogs and horses and by your own exertions, when you hunt in person and subdue all your prey by chasing and striking them and hurling weapons at them.’

  This address may be taken as an explanation of what we approve and condemn in this entire business. Here’s the actual law:

  (1) No one should restrain these genuinely ‘holy’ hunters from taking their hounds where they like and as they like; but the night-trapper, who relies on nets and snares, must not be allowed by anyone, at any time or place, to hunt his prey.

  (2) The fowler is not to be restrained on fallow-land or on the mountain side, but any passer-by should chase him off cultivated or holy ground.

  (3) The fisherman is to be allowed to fish anywhere except in harbors and sacred rivers, ponds and lakes, provided only that he does not make the water turbid by using noxious juices.

  So here’s where we have to say that our regulations about education are finally complete.

  CLINIAS: That’s good news!

  1. Frenzied pathological states accompanied by a strong desire to dance, popularly supposed to be caused by the Corybantes, spirits in attendance on the goddess Cybele. The condition was cured homoeopathically by the disciplined music and dancing of Corybantic ritual.

  2. Reading bakcheiōn in e3 with acute accent on the second syllable.

  3. Reading autois in b6.

  4. See 777d ff.

  5. E.g. dropping on to the ground in wrestling (Antaeus), and the use of gloves in boxing (Amycus).

  6. Cretan spirits who protected the infant Zeus.

  7. Castor and Pollux.

  8. Athena.

  9. See 673b ff.

  10. In Books I–II.

  11. See 727e ff., 741e ff.

  12. See 644d ff.

  13. Odyssey iii.26–28.

  14. A reference to 796b–c.

  15. Reading nun ei in b3.

  16. See 644b ff. and 669b ff.

  17. The key to the sequence of thought is that
‘in harmony’ (816a) = emmelōs.

  18. Perhaps the poet Simonides (late sixth and early fifth century); see D. A. Campbell, Greek Lyric (Loeb), vol. III, pp. 434–37.

  19. Reading ephamen in b5.

  20. Greek planēta, lit. ‘wanderers’.

  21. Reading tauta in c5.

  22. See 631b–d.

  Book VIII

  ATHENIAN: Now then, the next job is to enlist the aid of the oracles [828] reported from Delphi to draw up a program of festivals to be established by law, and discover what sacrifices the state will find it ‘meet and right’ to offer and which gods should receive them. It will probably be within our own discretion to decide the number and the occasions.

  CLINIAS: Yes, I dare say the number will be up to us.

  ATHENIAN: So let’s deal with that first. There are to be no less than three [b] hundred and sixty-five of them, so as to ensure that there is always at least one official sacrificing to some god or spirit on behalf of the state, its citizens and their property. The Expounders, Priests, Priestesses and Prophets are to hold a meeting with the Guardians of the Laws and fill in the details the legislator has inevitably omitted (in fact, this same combined board will also have to spot where such deficiencies exist in the first place). The law will provide for twelve festivals in honor of the twelve gods who [c] give their names to the individual tribes. Every month the citizens should sacrifice to each of these gods and arrange chorus performances and cultural and gymnastic contests, varied according to the deity concerned and appropriate to the changing seasons of the year; and they must divide festivals for women into those that must be celebrated in the absence of men, and those that need not be. Further, they must not confuse the cult of the gods of the underworld with that of the ‘heavenly’ gods (as we must style them) and their retinue. They are to keep the two kinds of celebration separate, and put the former by law in the twelfth month, which is sacred to Pluto. Men of battle should feel no horror for such a [d] god as this—on the contrary, they should honor him as a great friend of the human race. The union of body and soul, you see, can never be superior to their separation (and I mean that quite seriously).

  There’s a further point they will have to appreciate if they are going to allocate these events satisfactorily. Although on the score of leisure-time and abundance of all necessities our state has no rivals at the present day, it still has to live the good life, just like the individual person; and the first [829] requirement for a happy life is to do yourself no injury nor allow any to be done to you by others. Of course, the first half of the requirement presents no great problem; the difficulty lies in becoming strong enough to be immune to injury—and the one and only thing that brings such immunity is complete virtue. The same applies to a state: if it adopts the ways of virtue, it can live in peace; but if it is wicked, war and civil war will plague it. That’s the situation in a nutshell, and it means that each and every citizen must undertake military training in peace-time, and not [b] leave it till war breaks out. So a state that knows its business should reserve at least one day per month (and more than one, if the authorities think fit) for military maneuvers, to be held without regard for the weather, come rain come shine. Men, women and children should participate, and the authorities will decide from time to time whether to take them out on maneuvers en masse or in sections. They must never fail to mount a program of wholesome recreation, accompanied by sacrifices; and the program ought to include ‘war-games’ which should simulate the conditions of [c] actual fighting as realistically as possible. On each field-day they should distribute prizes and awards of merit, and compose speeches in commendation or reproof of each other according to the conduct of individuals not only in the contests but in daily life too: those who are deemed to have acquitted themselves particularly well should be honored, while the failures should be censured. But not everyone should produce such compositions. For a start, a composer must be at least fifty years old, and he must not be one of those people who for all their poetical and musical competence have not a single noble or outstanding achievement to their credit. The [d] compositions that ought to be sung (even if in terms of art they leave something to be desired) are those of citizens who have achieved a high standard of conduct and whose personal merits have brought them distinction in the state. The official in charge of education, together with the other Guardians of the Laws, are to select them and grant them alone the privilege of giving their Muses free rein; other people are to be entirely forbidden. No one should dare to sing any unauthorized song, not even if it is sweeter [e] than the hymns of Orpheus or of Thamyras.1 Our citizens must confine themselves to such pieces as have been given the stamp of approval and consecrated to the gods, and to compositions which on the strength of their authors’ reputation are judged to be suitable vehicles for commendation or censure. (I intend the same regulations to apply to men and women alike, both as regards military excursions and freedom to compose unsupervised.)

  The legislator should think things over and employ this sort of analogy: ‘Let’s see, now, once I’ve organized the state as a whole, what sort of [830] citizen do I want to produce? Athletes are what I want—competitors against a million rivals in the most vital struggles of all. Right?’ ‘Very much so’, one would reply, correctly. Well then, if we were training boxers or pancratiasts or competitors in some other similar contest should we go straight into the ring unprepared by a daily work-out against an opponent? If we were boxers, surely we’d have spent days on end before the contest in strenuous practice, learning how to fight, and trying out all those maneuvers [b] we intended to use when the time came to fight to win? We’d come as close as we could to the real conditions of the contest by putting on practice-gloves instead of thongs, so as to get as much practice as possible in delivering and dodging punches. And if we ran particularly short of sparring partners then we’d go to the trouble of hanging up a lifeless dummy to practice against; and we certainly wouldn’t be put off by the idiots who might laugh at us. Come to that, if one day we ran out of sparring [c] partners completely, living or otherwise, and had no one to practice with at all, we’d go so far as to box against our own shadows—shadow-boxing with a vengeance! After all, how else can you describe a practice-session in which you just throw punches at the air?

  CLINIAS: No, sir, there’s no other term for it than the one you’ve just used.

  ATHENIAN: Very well. So when the fighting force of our state comes to brace itself to face the most important contest of all—to fight for life and [d] children and property and the entire state—is it really to be after less intensive training than combatants such as these have enjoyed? Is our citizens’ legislator going to be so scared that their practice against each other may look silly to some people that he will neglect his duty? I mean his duty of instructing that maneuvers on a small scale, without arms, should be held every day, if possible (and for this purpose he should arrange teams to compete in every kind of gymnastic exercise), whereas the ‘major’ exercises, in which arms are carried, should be held not less than once per month. The citizens will compete with each other throughout the entire country, to see who is best at occupying positions and laying [e] ambushes, and they must reproduce the conditions of every kind of battle (that will give them real practice, because they will be aiming at the closest possible approximation to the real targets).2And they should use missiles that are moderately dangerous: we don’t want the competitions they hold against each other to be entirely unalarming, but to inspire them with fear and do something to reveal the brave man and the coward; and the legislator should confer honors or inflict disgrace as appropriate, so as to prepare [831] the whole state to be an efficient fighter in the real struggle that lasts a lifetime. In fact, if anyone is killed in such circumstances, the homicide should be regarded as involuntary, and the legislator should decree that the killer’s hands are clean when once he has been purified according to law. After all, the lawgiver will reflect, even if a few people do die, others who are j
ust as good will be produced to replace them, whereas if fear dies (so to speak), he’ll not be able to find in all these activities a yardstick to separate the good performers from the bad—and that would be a bigger disaster for the state than the other. [b]

  CLINIAS: Yes, sir, we’d agree that this is the sort of law that every state should pass and observe.

  ATHENIAN: Now we all know, don’t we, the reason why this kind of teamwork and competition is not to be found in any state at the present time, except on a very modest scale indeed? I suppose we’d say it was because the masses and their legislators suffer from ignorance?

  CLINIAS: Maybe so.

  ATHENIAN: Not a bit of it, my dear Clinias! We ought to say there are [c] causes, and pretty powerful ones at that.

  CLINIAS: What are they?

  ATHENIAN: The first is a passion for wealth which makes men unwilling to devote a minute of their time to anything except their own personal property. This is what every single citizen concentrates on with all his heart and soul; his ruling passion is his daily profit and he’s quite incapable of worrying about anything else. Everyone is out for himself, and is very [d] quick off the mark indeed to learn any skill and apply himself to any technique that fills his pocket; anything that doesn’t do that he treats with complete derision. So we can treat this as one reason why states are not prepared to undertake this3 or any other praiseworthy activity in a serious spirit, whereas their insatiable desire for gold and silver makes them perfectly willing to slave away at any ways and means, fair or foul, that promise to make them rich. It doesn’t matter whether something is sanctioned by heaven, or forbidden and absolutely disgusting—it’s all the same to them, and causes not the slightest scruple, provided it enables them to make beasts of themselves by wallowing in all kinds of food and drink [e] and indulging every kind of sexual pleasure.

  CLINIAS: You’re quite right.