Complete Works

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

  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 [956] 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 [957] 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.)8 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 [958] 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.

  When the suits for the year have been finally decided, the following laws must apply to the execution of judgment. First of all, immediately after the voting in each case, and by proclamation of a herald in the hearing of the judges, the official who has pronounced sentence should assign all [b] the property of the convicted party, except the minimum he must retain, to the successful prosecutor. If after the expiry of the month following that in which the case was tried the loser has not settled the business with the victor to the satisfaction of both, the official who gave judgment must at the request of the victorious party hand over the goods of the loser. If the latter lacks the means to pay, and the deficiency amounts to a drachma or more, he must not be allowed to prosecute other people (they however, [c] being entitled to prosecute him), until he has paid his debt in full to his opponent. If someone who has received an adverse verdict obstructs the bench that condemned him, the officials thus obstructed should haul him before the court of the Guardians of the Laws.

  114. If he is convicted on such a charge,

  he must be punished by death,

  on the grounds that his conduct is wrecking the entire state and its laws.

  Now here’s the next point. A man is born and brought up, and begets and rears his own children in turn; he deals fairly in his business transactions, [d] paying the penalty if he has done anyone injury and exacting one if others have wronged him; and finally, as destiny decrees, after an old age spent in obedience to the laws, the course of nature will bring him to the end of his life. So what should we do when a man or woman has died? First, we must bow to the absolute authority of the Expounders’ instructions about the sacred rites to be observed in honor of the nether gods and those of this world. No tomb, whether its mound is large or small, should be constructed anywhere on land that can be farmed; graves [e] must take up space only where nature has made the ground good for nothing except the reception and concealment of the bodies of the dead with minimum detriment to the living, because no one, alive or dead, must ever rob the living of any land which—thanks to the natural fertility of Mother Earth—will grow food for the human race. The soil must not be piled higher than five men can manage by working for five days. Stone slabs must not be made bigger than they need to be to accommodate a eulogy of the deceased’s career of not more than the usual four hexameters. [959] The laying-out at home should not last longer than is necessary to confirm that the person really is dead and not just in a faint; in average cases, it will be reasonable for the body to be taken to the tomb after two days.

  We should, of course, trust whatever the legislator tells us, but especially his doctrine that the soul has an absolute superiority over the body, and that while I am alive I have nothing to thank for my individuality except my soul, whereas my body is just the likeness of myself that I carry round with me. This means we are quite right when we say a corpse ‘looks like’ [b] the deceased. Our real self—our immortal
soul, as it is called—departs, as the ancestral law declares, to the gods below to give an account of itself. To the wicked, this is a terrifying doctrine, but a good man will welcome it. And once he’s dead, there’s not a great deal we can do to help a man: all his relatives should have helped him while he was still in the land of the living, so that he could have passed his life in all possible justice and [c] holiness; and then after death he could have escaped the penalty visited on evil deeds in the life to come. This all goes to show that we should never squander our last penny, on the fanciful assumption that this lump of flesh being buried really is our own son or brother or whoever it is we mournfully think we are burying. We ought to realize that in fact he has departed in final consummation of his destiny, and that it is our duty to make the best of what we have and spend only a moderate sum on the body, which we may now think of as a kind of altar to the gods below, [d] now deserted by its spirit; and as for what is meant by ‘moderate’ in this matter, the most respectable ideas will be those of the legislator. The law, then, should specify a reasonable level of expenditure as follows. In the case of a member of the highest property-class, the whole funeral should not cost more than five hundred drachmas; three hundred may be spent on a member of the second class, two hundred on a member of the third, and one hundred on a member of the fourth.

  The Guardians of the Laws will have to shoulder a great many burdens and responsibilities, but their overriding duty will be to devote their lives [e] to the care of children and adults and indeed persons of all ages. In particular, when a man is nearing his end his household should invite one Guardian to take charge of him, and if the funeral arrangements pass off decorously and without extravagance, this Guardian-in-charge will get the credit, but if not, then the blame will be at his door. The laying-out and other matters should take place according to usage, but usage must be modified by the following directions of our legislator-statesman. ‘Tasteless though it is to forbid or instruct people to weep over the dead, dirges [960] should be forbidden; and cries of mourning should be allowed only inside the house. The mourners must not bring the corpse on to the open street nor make their procession a noisy one, and they must be outside the city by day-break.’ So much for the regulations on the subject. The person who obeys them will never be punished, but

  115. if a man disobeys a single Guardian of the Laws,

  he must be punished by them all with whatever penalty recommends itself to their united judgment.

  [b] The other methods of burying the dead, and the kind of criminals to whom we deny burial, such as parricides, temple-robbers and all similar categories, have already been specified and provided for in the legal code.9 And that means, I suppose, that we have pretty well come to the end of our legislation.

  ATHENIAN: However, even when you have achieved or gained or founded something, you have never quite finished. Only when you have ensured complete and perpetual security for your creation can you reckon to have done everything that ought to have been done. Until then, it’s a case of [c] ‘unfinished business’.

  CLINIAS: Well said, sir—but what’s the particular point you had in mind in saying that? Could you be a little clearer?

  ATHENIAN: Well, you know, Clinias, a lot of old expressions are extraordinarily apt. I’m thinking particularly of the names of the Fates.

  CLINIAS: What names?

  ATHENIAN: Lachesis for the first, Clotho for the second, and Atropos for the third fulfiller of destiny10—the last so called from her likeness to a [d] woman making the threads on her spindle irreversible.11 That is precisely the situation we want to see in our state and its citizens—not merely physical health and soundness, but the rule of law in their souls and (more important than all that) the preservation of the laws themselves. In fact, it seems to me that the service we’ve still not done for the laws is to discover how to build into them a resistance to being reversed.

  CLINIAS: That’s serious, because I don’t suppose there’s a way of giving anything that sort of property.

  [e] ATHENIAN: But there is. I see that quite clearly now.

  CLINIAS: Well then, we mustn’t abandon our task till we’ve achieved this for the legal code we’ve expounded. It would be silly to waste our labor on something by failing to construct it on a firm foundation.

  ATHENIAN: You’re right to encourage me, and you’ll find me as keen as you are.

  CLINIAS: Splendid! So what is this safety device for our political system and legal code going to be, according to you? And how can we construct it?

  [961] ATHENIAN: We said12 that we ought to have in the state a council with the following range of membership. The ten Guardians of the Laws who are currently the eldest were to convene together with all persons who had won awards of distinction and the travelers who had gone abroad to see if they could discover any special method of keeping a legal code intact. When these observers got back safe and sound, they were to be accepted as suitable associates of the council, provided they had first passed the scrutiny of its members. In addition, each member had to bring a young man of at least thirty years of age, but only after selecting him as [b] particularly well qualified by natural abilities and education; on these terms the young man was to be introduced to the other members of the council, and if they approved of him, he was to join them; if not, they were not to breathe a word to anyone about the fact that he was considered, least of all to the rejected candidate himself. The council was to meet before dawn, when people are least beset by other business, public or private. That was more or less the description we gave earlier, wasn’t it? [c]

  CLINIAS: Certainly it was.

  ATHENIAN: So I’m going to resume the subject of this council, and here’s the point I want to make about it. I maintain that if one were to lower it as a sort of ‘anchor’ for the whole state, then provided conditions were suitable, it would keep safe everything we wanted it to.

  CLINIAS: How so?

  ATHENIAN: Now at this crucial moment, we must strain every muscle to get things right.

  CLINIAS: That’s a fine sentiment. Now do what you have in mind.

  ATHENIAN: The question we have to ask about anything, Clinias, is this: [d] what is it that has the special power of keeping it safe in each of its activities? In a living creature, for instance, this is the natural function of the soul and the head, in particular.

  CLINIAS: Again, what’s your point?

  ATHENIAN: Well, when these two are functioning satisfactorily, they ensure the animal’s safety, don’t they?

  CLINIAS: How so?

  ATHENIAN: Because no matter what else is true of either, the soul is the seat of reason and the head enjoys the faculties of sight and hearing. In short, the combination of reason with the highest senses constitutes a single faculty that would have every right to be called the salvation of the animal concerned.

  CLINIAS: That’s likely enough, I suppose.

  ATHENIAN: Of course it is. But how do reason and the senses combine to [e] ensure the safety of a ship, in fair weather or foul? Isn’t it because captain and crew interpret sense-data by reason, as embodied in the expertise captains have, that they keep themselves and the whole ship safe?

  CLINIAS: Naturally.

  ATHENIAN: We’ve no need to multiply examples, but take a general in command of his army, or any doctor tending a human body. What will they each aim at, on the assumption that they intend, as they should, to preserve their charges safe and sound? Won’t the general aim at victory [962] and control over the enemy, and won’t doctors and their attendants aim to keep the body in a healthy condition?

  CLINIAS: Of course.

  ATHENIAN: Now consider a doctor who can’t recognize the state of the body we’ve just called ‘health’, or a general who doesn’t know what’s meant by ‘victory’ and the other terms we reviewed. Could either of them possibly be judged to have a rational knowledge of his field?

  CLINIAS: Of course not.

  ATHENIAN: And if the ruler of a state were obviously
ignorant of the [b] target at which a statesman should aim, would he really deserve his title ‘ruler’? Would he be capable of ensuring the safety of an institution whose purpose he entirely failed to appreciate?

  CLINIAS: Certainly not.

  ATHENIAN: Well then, in the present circumstances, if our settlement of this territory is to be finished off properly, it looks as if we shall have to provide it with some constituent that understands (a) this target we have mentioned—the target, whatever we find it is, of the statesman, (b) how to hit it, and (c) which laws (above all) and which persons have helpful advice to give and which not. If a state lacks some such constituent, no [c] one will be surprised to see it staggering from one irrational and senseless expedient to another in all its affairs.

  CLINIAS: That’s true.

  ATHENIAN: So is there any institution or constituent part of our state qualified and prepared to function as an organ of protection? Can we name one?

  CLINIAS: No, sir, not with much assurance, anyway. But if guess I must, I think your remarks point to the Council you said just now had to convene during the night.

  [d] ATHENIAN: You’ve caught my meaning splendidly, Clinias. As the drift of our present argument shows, that body must possess virtue in all its completeness, which means above all that it will not take erratic aim at one target after another but keep its eye on one single target and shoot all its arrows at that.

  CLINIAS: Certainly.

  ATHENIAN: Now we can see why it is hardly surprising that rules and regulations fluctuate so much from state to state: it is because legislation has a different aim in each. Nor is it surprising that in most cases you find that some people think of justice as nothing but the subjection of the state [e] to the rule of this or that type of person without regard to their vice or virtue, while others think of it as the opportunity to become rich, no matter whether they are thereby enslaved or not; others again are bent hell for leather on a life of ‘freedom’. Some legislators keep both ends in view, and their laws have the dual purpose of securing control over other states and freedom for their own. The cleverest legislators of all (as they like to think of themselves), so far from aiming at one single end, look not only to these but all others like them, simply because they cannot identify any supremely valuable end to which all others ought, in their view, to contribute.