Laws

Plato

The ideas

30 ideas. Scroll sideways for the next one.

• Who wrote your laws, a god or a man? Crete says Zeus, Sparta says Apollo. The answer decides whether a law may ever be questioned.

• Crete’s laws are built for war: common meals, light arms, runners, because peace is only a name and every city is secretly at war. That aims at a quarter of virtue; courage ranks fourth, after wisdom, temperance, and justice. A sound lawgiver orders war for the sake of peace.

• Sparta trains against pain and never against pleasure, so half its citizen stays a slave. The usual tests of a man’s self-control cost you a bargain or a daughter. A drinking party under a sober master is the cheap test, and shame gets its training there.

• Whoever will be good at anything must practise it from childhood in play: the future builder builds toy houses. Training for a trade is a narrower thing. Education means training in virtue, which makes a man want to be a good citizen and teaches him to rule and to obey.

• Picture yourself as “a puppet of the Gods, either their plaything only, or created with a purpose”. Cords of pleasure, pain, and fear pull you in opposite directions. One cord is soft and golden: reason, which a city calls law. Grab that one and pull with it against the rest.

• A child feels pleasure and pain long before it can reason. Education is training those first feelings by habit, so the child hates what it should hate and loves what it should love, and later finds reason agreeing. That agreement across the whole soul is virtue.

• Children cannot keep still. Animals leap too, but only humans feel order in movement and sound, which is rhythm and harmony, the gods’ gift. So the uneducated person is the one never trained in a chorus, and the educated can sing and dance well, and sing what is good.

• The justest life is also the pleasantest, because the temperate life has gentle pleasures that outweigh gentle pains, and the wild life has violent ones where pain wins. Poets must sing this. And if it were not true, it would still be the most useful lie a lawgiver could tell.

• Start the world over after a great flood: a few shepherds on hilltops without tools, gold, or any memory of cities. They were poorer in arts and richer in character, because a community with neither poverty nor riches has the noblest principles. Cities, laws, and vice grew back together.

• Three Dorian kingdoms swore oaths and two quickly collapsed, from the worst ignorance: hating what you judge good and loving what you know is wrong. Give anything too big a sail and it capsizes. Sparta survived because its power was split: two kings, 28 elders, then ephors.

• Every constitution descends from two mothers, monarchy and democracy. Persia is the pure case of one and rotted when its princes were raised to be flattered; Athens is the other and rotted when audiences began judging music by shouting. A city needs some of both, in measure.

• Ask a lawgiver what he needs and the honest answer is a tyrant: young, quick to learn, brave, temperate, and lucky enough to meet a real legislator. Nothing changes a city’s habits faster than a ruler who leads by example. The hard part is finding that pair.

• Offices go to whoever obeys the laws best, and rulers are called servants of the law. “For that state in which the law is subject and has no authority, I perceive to be on the highway to ruin”. Where law rules the rulers, the city is saved.

• The first speech to the settlers says God holds the beginning, middle, and end, with justice beside him, and the proud man who wants no guide ends destroyed. Like agrees with like, so the measure of everything is God rather than a man. The temperate man is God’s friend.

• A slave doctor gives orders and runs to the next patient. A free doctor talks with you, explains the illness, and will not prescribe until you are convinced. Most lawgivers use force alone, like the slave doctor. Every law here gets a prelude that persuades before the command threatens.

• Of all the things which a man has, next to the Gods, his soul is the most divine and most truly his own.

• You dishonour your soul when you praise it and let it do as it likes, blame others for your mistakes, value life at any price, or prefer beauty to virtue. Behind all of it is excessive love of self, the source of every offence. Follow a better man instead.

• The best city would have friends holding everything in common; that one is for gods’ children. This one is second best: 5040 households, each on a lot worked by slaves and never sold, with no gold, no dowries, and no lending at interest.

• A very rich man cannot be a very good man, because gains taken justly and unjustly are double the gains taken justly, and honest spending costs twice as much. Nobody may hold more than 4 times the value of his lot; the surplus goes to the state.

• Marry for the city: a headstrong family into a calm one, and a fine for a man still single at 35. Women eat at common tables like men and train in riding and arms like boys, because a lawgiver who leaves the women alone has left half the state alone.

• Nursery habits are too small for law and too important to ignore: they are the unwritten customs, the bonds of the state. Any change except from evil is the most dangerous thing, so children’s games are fixed: a child who invents new games becomes a man who wants new laws.

• About serious things be serious, and about the rest, not. God is the serious object, and a person “is made to be the plaything of God, and this, truly considered, is the best of him”. So spend life in sacrifice, song, and dance. War has no play in it.

• Nobody is unjust on purpose, so punishment is never for revenge. Its job is to make the offender hate injustice and to repay the hurt. The incurable are put to death, which is called the least of evils for them and a lesson for the rest.

• A man who always saw and did the best would need no law. Mind is nobody’s slave. No such man lasts, so law comes second.

• Whoever breaks a law believes one of three things: there are no gods, the gods do not care, or the gods can be bought with sacrifices. The young men who say this ask a fair thing: persuade us before you threaten us. So the longest prelude is an argument.

• Some say fire, water, earth, and air came first by chance, and soul, law, and gods came last, by human art. Turn it around: the only motion that starts itself is soul, so soul is older than every body. The astronomy is gone; the argument is still alive.

• After the argument for the gods comes the law. An honest unbeliever gets at least 5 years in a House of Reformation, visited by the wisest men, then release if cured and death if convicted again. A seller of charms is locked away for life. The persuading stops here.

• The army code holds the line that reads like a barracks: “no one of either sex should be without a commander”, and no mind taught to act alone, even in peace. Set it beside the preludes, the elections, and the men sent abroad to find better laws.

• A council meets before dawn: the 10 oldest guardians of the law, the prize-winners for virtue, the observers back from abroad, each bringing a young man of 30 to 40. Let it down as the anchor of the state, and the city keeps everything worth keeping.

• A ruler who cannot say what the city aims at is no ruler. So the council that guards the laws must know how courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom are one, and hold the proof that there are gods. Give the city that head and the dream becomes a waking reality.

The book in short

In plain words

Think of a rule you hate. Bedtime, maybe, or no phones at the table. Now imagine you had to write every rule for a brand-new town, and people would live by your rules for 100 years. What would you write first? Three old men once spent a whole day on that question, walking up a mountain in the sun.

Three old men on a hot road

It is the island of Crete, on the longest day of summer. Three old men set out from the town of Cnosus on a road that climbs to a cave high on a mountain. Cretans said the god Zeus was raised in that cave, and that their first great king walked up to it every 9 years to get his laws straight from the god. One of the three is Cleinias, a Cretan. One is Megillus, from Sparta. The third is a stranger from Athens, and he never tells anyone his name. The road is long and the sun is fierce. Cleinias promises groves of tall cypress trees and green meadows where they can rest. The stranger says, then let us talk about laws the whole way.

His first question is simple. Who gave you your laws, a god or a man? Cleinias says a god, and he is not joking. Then the stranger asks what the god was trying to do, and Cleinias knows that too. Every Cretan rule is built for war. Men eat at common tables so they eat like soldiers. Boys run over rough ground in light armour. Cleinias explains why. Peace, he says, is only a word. Every city is really at war with every other city all the time, whether anyone announces it or not. And it goes further down than cities. Village fights village, house fights house, and inside each person there is a war too. The best victory of all is the one you win over yourself.

The Athenian takes that last idea and turns it around. If the best victory is the one over yourself, then war is not the point of a city. Being good is. He sorts the good things in life into two piles. Health, good looks, strength, and money are the human goods. Wisdom, self-control, fairness, and courage are the divine goods. A city that gets the divine ones gets the human ones as well. A city that chases only the human ones ends up with neither. And courage is 4th on the divine list, not 1st. So Crete and Sparta built their whole way of life around one quarter of being good. It is worse than that. They train their boys to stand up to pain and never once train them to stand up to pleasure. A boy who can take a beating but cannot say no to a sweet is only half trained, and most of the damage in a life is done on the side he never practised.

The wine test

Megillus is proud that Sparta allows no drinking parties at all. The Athenian defends them, and the way he does it shows what he thinks training is.

You cannot test a soldier’s courage without a battle, or at least a pretend one. Sparta knows this and puts its boys through real fear on purpose. Now imagine a drink that made a man feel bold and careless for an hour, safely, so you could watch what he did with it and he could practise pulling himself back. That drink exists. It is wine. A drinking party with a sober older man in charge is a cheap, safe school for self-control. The drinkers get loud and sure of themselves, and then they have to hold themselves in, with someone watching. It is also the quickest way to find out what a person is really like. Run the party without a sober captain, the way Athens does, and you get exactly what Megillus is afraid of. The Athenian is not recommending Athens.

Behind the wine there is an idea about fear. There are two kinds. One is fear of getting hurt. The other is fear of looking bad, of being thought a coward or a cheat. People call that second fear shame. A city wants the first fear small and the second fear big, and it trains the second one the way it trains courage, by putting people through it. Wine is the test.

The puppet and the golden string

Then the Athenian gives the picture the rest of the day will keep coming back to.

Imagine each of us is a puppet made by the gods. Maybe we are their toys. Maybe we were made for some purpose. Nobody can tell. What we can tell is that there are strings inside us, and they pull. Pleasure pulls one way and pain pulls another, and fear and hope pull ahead of time, before anything has happened. Those strings are hard, like iron. There is one more string, and it is soft and golden. It is thinking. Because it is soft, it cannot win by force. You have to take hold of it and pull with it against the others, and that is what people mean when they say someone is master of himself.

Now look at what a city does. When a city writes down what good thinking says, it calls that law. So a good law is not somebody else’s string tied onto you. It is your own golden string, written out where you can reach it. Obeying a good law and being free are the same move, seen from two sides.

Why the old men have to sing

Babies like and dislike things long before they can think. By the time thinking arrives, it finds a person already trained to enjoy some things and hate others. Education is the work done in that gap. It teaches a child to love the right things and hate the right things before the child can understand why, so that when reason shows up, it finds the feelings already on its side.

Feelings are trained with songs and dances. Every young animal jumps and shouts. Humans are the only ones who can jump and shout in order, in rhythm, and the Athenian says the gods gave us that. Grown-ups drift away from their training as they get tired and old, so the gods gave festivals, days of rest where people dance and sing and get their feelings back in line. The uneducated person is the one who never danced in a chorus.

So the city has 3 choirs. Children sing in one, men under 30 in another, and men from 30 to 60 in the third, and here is the problem: old men are stiff, and they are embarrassed to sing. That is what the wine was for all along. Boys get no wine before 18. Young men get a little until 30. At 40 a man at the public dinner may call on the wine god and sing. The city has found a way to keep its wisest people singing the songs the children learn from.

They all sing one thing: that the good life is the happy life. The songs should not be the ones the crowd likes most. Picture a contest judged by pleasure alone, with no rules about what kind of show is allowed. The little children would vote for the puppet show, the older kids for comedy, the women and young men for tragedy, and the old men for Homer. Pleasure is a real test, but only the pleasure of the best judge, and a city that lets the crowd choose the songs its children grow up on has handed the training of its children to the untrained. Egypt saw this long ago and froze its songs and its pictures by law. Their art was the same 10,000 years ago as it is today, the Athenian says. He does not say it is beautiful. He says it is steady, and steady is what children need. And he is pleased by an old fact about his language: the Greek word for law was also a word for a tune.

Cities that died of too much

Cities, the Athenian says, began after a great flood wiped out the old world. A few shepherds survived on the hilltops, with no tools, no writing, and no gold. They were simple, and simple kept them good. Nobody was rich and nobody was poor, so nobody had anything to fight about. Families grew into villages. Villages came down to the plains and became cities. After the Trojan war, three kingdoms in the south of Greece swore to protect each other: Argos, Messene, and Sparta. Two of the three fell apart within a generation.

Not because their kings were cowards. Because each king held all the power, and nobody could stop him, and unchecked power does something to a person. He begins to hate what he knows is good and love what he knows is bad, and the Athenian says that is the biggest stupidity there is, no matter how clever the man. Sparta survived because its power was split. Some god, he says, gave it 2 kings instead of 1. Then a council of old men was added. Then officials called ephors, who could check the kings. Nobody in Sparta ever held power alone.

Then the two big examples. In Persia, one man ruled. Under King Cyrus that worked, because Cyrus let his generals speak freely and shared out the honour, and Persia grew strong. But his sons were raised inside the palace by women and servants who never told them no. They grew up wanting everything and fearing nothing, and Persia rotted from the top. In Athens, everyone ruled. In the old days the people obeyed the laws with a kind of reverence. Then the poets began to mix up kinds of music that had always been kept apart, and the crowd in the theatre learned to judge by shouting. Once people decided they could judge music by noise, they judged everything by noise, and reverence went out of them. A city needs 3 things: to be free, to be friends with itself, and to be wise. Push freedom on its own and you lose the other two.

Cleinias has been listening harder than he has let on. Crete is founding a new town, he says. He is one of the 10 men chosen to write its laws, and he can write anything he likes. Would the stranger help? He would.

Noon under the cypresses

The new town will sit about 80 stadia from the sea, about 9 miles, with fine harbours. The Athenian groans at the harbours, because the sea brings traders and money and teaches people to cheat, and it tempts a city into a navy, which wins battles by rowing away. A town that has to buy its food is not free.

The Athenian then asks what the fastest road to good laws would be, and his answer is a shock. A tyrant, a man who rules alone, as long as he is young, quick to learn, brave, self-controlled, and has a wise lawgiver standing beside him. One man’s example changes everyone’s habits faster than any vote. The Athenian admits nobody gets that lucky. Then he says the real ruler of everything is God, with luck as his helper and human skill a distant third.

It is noon now. They have reached a resting place under the trees, and the Athenian says that everything so far has been a warm-up. Long ago, in the age of the god Cronos, he says, the god knew that no human can hold unchecked power without going bad, so he set spirits over people the way we set shepherds over sheep. Our city can copy that. The godlike thing in each of us is reason, and reason’s name in a city is law. So the men who rule are not rulers at all. They are the law’s servants. A city where the law is the master and the rulers obey it is on the road to being saved. A city where the rulers are the masters is on the road to ruin. And a person is not the measure of everything, whatever clever men say. God is.

The doctor who explains

Every song has an opening that gets your ear ready. Laws never do. They just threaten.

Athens has two kinds of doctors. Slave doctors run from patient to patient, never ask a question, never explain anything, and give orders like a tyrant before rushing off. Free doctors sit down with a free patient, ask what is wrong, explain what they think is happening inside him, and only then tell him what to take, once he agrees. The Athenian wants every law to open like the second kind of doctor. First explain why the law is right, so the citizen wants to obey. Then, behind that, the penalty.

He shows it with the marriage law. The bare law says: a man shall marry between 30 and 35 or pay a fine and lose privileges. The law with its opening says: marry then, because having children is the only share of living forever that human beings get, and to throw that away on purpose is an insult to the gods. Then the fine. Persuade first, force behind. It is the city’s hand helping you hold the golden string.

Then comes the biggest opening of all, spoken to every citizen. Honour your soul first, next to the gods, because it is the most yours of anything you have. Honour your body second, and the healthiest body is not the strongest or the prettiest but the one in the middle. Money comes third, and only for the sake of the other two. You dishonour your soul when you blame other people for your own mistakes, and when you give in to every pull. Under every wrong a person does there is one root. He loves himself too much. Someone who loves himself too much cannot judge his own case, so he is wrong about right and wrong every single time. Love what is fair instead, whoever happens to be doing it.

The number that splits every way

Now the city gets its shape, and the Athenian starts by naming the best city and refusing to build it. In the best city, friends share everything. Wives, children, property, even eyes and ears and hands if that were possible. It is a city for gods or the children of gods. Human beings cannot live like that. So they will build the second-best city, with private homes and private families, and pull it as hard as they can toward sharing.

The pulling is done with numbers. There will be 5,040 households. That number is chosen because it can be split evenly by every number from 1 to 10, and 59 ways in all, so the land, the tribes, the army, and the offices divide up neatly however the city needs. Each family gets one piece of land, half of it near the town and half of it far, so nobody gets all the good soil. The land can never be sold. It belongs to the family, and behind the family, to the city. A father passes it to one son and finds places for the others. There is no gold and no silver; the city’s own coins are worthless outside its borders. You may grow richer than your land, but only up to 4 times its worth, and everything above that goes to the city. The reason is stated flat. A very rich person cannot also be very good. Whoever takes money from every source, fair and unfair, will always get ahead of the person who takes it only fairly. And a city where the gap between rich and poor is huge is not friends with itself.

Then the jobs. 37 Guardians of the Laws, aged 50 to 70, elected in stages by every citizen who has served as a soldier. A council of 360, with 90 from each wealth class, chosen in a way the Athenian calls halfway between one-man rule and everyone-rules: the rich are forced to vote and the poor may stay home, and then the last step is drawn by lot, so the god gets a say. Young men of 25 to 30 patrol the countryside for 2 years, living rough, building roads and drains, and learning their own land by walking it. The most important job in the whole city is the minister of education. Women eat at common tables just like the men, which no Greek city had dared. And the city keeps slaves. The Athenian says slaves are the hardest kind of property to get right, and the one people argue about most, and he does not solve that problem either.

Rocking the baby, keeping the games

Now the Athenian goes inside the house, where no law can reach. A baby will not sleep. What does a mother do? She does not hold it still. She rocks it and sings to it, and the movement from outside calms the fear inside. Babies should be carried about as if they were always at sea. A small child should be neither spoiled nor crushed, because both make him impossible to live with. From 6, boys and girls learn to ride and shoot, and both hands get trained, because nurses make children lopsided.

None of that is law, and the Athenian knows it. It is custom, the kind everyone follows and nobody writes down. Customs are the beams the written laws rest on. When they slip, the whole building goes. So he names them and attaches no penalty.

Then comes the rule that sounds like the strangest thing an old man ever said. Children’s games must never change. A child who keeps inventing new games grows into a citizen who wants new laws, and the Athenian says that any change, except a change from bad to good, is the most dangerous thing there is. So the city fixes its songs and its dances, and no poet may teach a new one unless the judges approve it.

School is short. Letters from age 10, the lyre from 13, and enough arithmetic and geometry that the citizens do not stay as ignorant as pigs, which is the Athenian’s own word for how he found the Greeks. Girls learn the same. The women who live by the Black Sea ride and shoot alongside their men, he says, and a city that trains only half its people is half a city. The schoolbook, he adds, half embarrassed, could be this very conversation.

And then, in the middle of the school rules, comes the strangest and most beautiful idea of the day. Human affairs, the Athenian says, are not worth much seriousness, and as soon as he says it he is uneasy. He tries again. Only God is fully serious. We are the gods’ toys, and being their toy is the best thing about us. So spend your life in the finest games there are: sacrificing, singing, and dancing for the gods. Everyone has it backwards. They think play is for the sake of war. It is the other way round. The puppet from the morning has turned into a dancer. Megillus objects that this makes people sound small. The Athenian answers that he was looking at God, and beside God people do look small. Be worth something, then, and you will fit the story.

When the law has to be a doctor

The Athenian is embarrassed to write laws about theft and murder for a city planned this well. But people are people, so he writes them. His rule for all of them comes first. Nobody is bad on purpose. Nobody chooses to have a sick soul. So the lawgiver is a doctor, and punishment is not revenge. It is a cure. If a person can be cured, cure him with whatever works: pain, teaching, or honour. If he cannot be cured, then death, which the Athenian calls a mercy for the man and a warning for everyone else.

That gives him a distinction he is proud of. Damage is what you broke. Injustice is what is wrong inside you. The law makes you fix the damage every time, and it treats the injustice by its cause, and there are 3 causes. One is anger, another is wanting things, and the third is not knowing, and that one is the worst, because the person who thinks he knows does the most harm.

Then the gods. There are 3 wrong ideas about them: that they do not exist, that they exist but do not care about us, and that they exist and care but can be bought with gifts. The Athenian is not angry at the young people who believe these things. Clever teachers told them that everything is just stuff and chance, and that laws are whatever the strongest people made up. His answer is patient. Everything that moves was moved by something, unless it moves itself. Follow any chain of movement back far enough and something has to have moved itself first. Moving yourself is what soul means. So soul comes before stuff, not after it, and the teachers had it backwards. The stars move in perfect order, so the soul that moves them is the best soul, and that is what a god is. Do the gods care about small things? A ship’s captain who looked after the big things and ignored the small ones would be a bad captain, and the gods are better than any captain. Can they be bribed? A guard dog that takes meat from a thief is a bad dog, and the gods are better than any dog.

For the people who still will not believe, the Athenian is harsh. Honest doubters, the ones who do not believe but live decently, go to a house of correction for 5 years, with visits from the city’s wisest men, and are let out if they change their minds. Nobody in the city may keep a private altar at home, because frightened and guilty people fill their houses with them and the city loses hold of its gods.

The council before sunrise

The road is nearly done. The last rules come fast. In the army, nobody, man or woman, is ever without a commander, and nobody is allowed to get used to acting on his own. There are examiners, whose job is to check every other official when his term ends; they are the best people in the city, and they are honoured above everyone, because the people who check the checkers must be better than all of them. Nobody travels abroad before 40 except on the city’s business. Older men are sent out to see how other cities live and to report back. Funerals are kept small, because the body is only a shadow and the soul was the person.

Then the last invention. A council made of the 10 oldest Guardians of the Laws, the prize-winners for goodness, and the travellers home from abroad, each bringing one young man aged 30 to 40 whom he has chosen. They meet every day before the sun is up. Their job is the one thing no other office does: to know what all the laws are for. Everyone in the city knows the 4 divine goods, courage, self-control, fairness, and wisdom. But how are the 4 really 1 thing? A guardian who cannot say does not know what he is guarding. This council is the city’s head and its eyes, and the Athenian calls it the anchor. He never says what power it has. It cannot be made by law, he says, only by finding the right people and educating them slowly, and then the road runs out.

Megillus turns to Cleinias. Either we keep the stranger, he says, and beg him if we have to, or we give up the whole thing. Cleinias agrees, and asks him to help hold the stranger. Megillus says, I will. Those are the last words anyone says. The city is not built. The old men never reach the cave.

The long read

Three old men are walking in Crete on the longest day of the year. Two of them are locals to the island’s way of life, Cleinias of Cnosus and Megillus of Sparta; the third is a stranger from Athens who never gives his name. The road runs from Cnosus up to the cave where Zeus was said to have been raised, the same road Minos was said to have walked every ninth year to fetch his laws from the god. The sun is scorching. Cleinias promises groves of cypresses of rare height and green meadows where they can rest. They will talk about laws the whole way, stop at noon under the trees, and by the time the road runs out they will have built a city out of nothing but conversation. It is Plato’s last work, the longest thing he wrote, left on wax tablets when he died and put into 12 books by a student. There is no Socrates in it. The Athenian is an old man with an old man’s patience, and the dialogue has the rhythm of a long walk: it circles and doubles back, stops to rest, and arrives.

A god or a man. The first words are a question. Tell me, Strangers, is a God or some man supposed to be the author of your laws? Cleinias answers without hesitation: Zeus gave Crete its laws, Apollo gave Sparta its laws. The Athenian takes the answer seriously and then asks what the god was trying to do. Cleinias knows this too. Every Cretan institution, the common meals, the gymnasia, the light armour for running over rough ground, was designed for war, because the lawgiver understood the truth about cities: in reality every city is in a natural state of war with every other, not indeed proclaimed by heralds, but everlasting. Village is at war with village, house with house, man with man, and each man is at war with himself. Cleinias offers that last idea as if it settled the matter. There is a victory each man wins or loses at his own hands, the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats, and so the lawgiver who trains for war trains for everything.

The Athenian turns the argument around by accepting it. If victory over yourself is the highest kind, then the lawgiver’s real aim is not war but the whole of what makes a person good. He sorts goods into two piles. Health, beauty, strength, and wealth are human goods. Wisdom, self-command, justice, and courage are divine goods. Now goods are of two kinds: there are human and there are divine goods, and the human hang upon the divine: a city that secures the divine ones gets the human ones as well, and a city that chases the human ones alone ends with neither. Courage sits fourth on the divine list, not first. So a code built to produce brave soldiers has aimed at the smallest part of virtue, and even there it has done half the job, because Sparta and Crete train their young to stand up to pain and never once train them to stand up to pleasure. A man who has been hardened against fear and never tested against desire is defenceless where most of the damage in a life is done.

The word Plato uses for what the lawgiver should aim at is aretē, which English renders as virtue. It means excellence at being a human being, the way a knife has excellence at cutting, and it is closer to being good at living than to being morally spotless. Keep that sense in mind whenever the word comes up.

Wine as a testing ground. Megillus is proud that Sparta forbids drinking parties altogether. The Athenian defends them, and the defence is a way of showing what education is for. You cannot test a soldier’s courage without a battle, or at least a sham battle; the Cretans and Spartans know this and put their boys through fear on purpose. What would you give for a drug that made a man feel terror safely, so you could watch how he handled it? Wine is that drug for the other side of the soul. It loosens self-command, makes a man bold and talkative and sure of himself, and in a room run by a sober elder, Must we not appoint a sober man and a wise to be our master of the revels?, you can see who he is when his self-command loosens, and he can practise tightening it again. A drinking party run right is a cheap, harmless school of self-command, and a way for a lawgiver to read the characters of his citizens. Run wrong, like Athens runs them, it is a proof of Megillus’s point. The Athenian is not recommending Athens.

Behind the argument about wine is a distinction that carries the rest of the dialogue. There are two fears. One is fear of harm coming, which is the ordinary kind. The other is fear of being thought bad: there is the fear of an evil reputation; we are afraid of being thought evil, because we do or say some dishonourable thing, which fear we and all men term shame. Plato’s word is aidōs, closer to reverence or a sense of one’s own dignity than to embarrassment, and he thinks a city stands or falls on it. Lawgivers honour this fear and call it modesty. They train it the way they train courage, by exposure. Wine is the exposure.

The puppet and the golden cord. Then comes the image the Athenian will keep returning to. May we not conceive each of us living beings to be a puppet of the Gods, either their plaything only, or created with a purpose: which of the two, the Athenian says, we cannot know. What we do know is that inside each of us there are cords that pull. Pleasure pulls one way, pain another, expectation of each pulls in advance, and these cords are hard and iron. There is one more cord, and this is the sacred and golden cord of reason, called by us the common law of the State; there are others which are hard and of iron, but this one is soft because golden. Because it is soft it cannot win by force. It needs help. The puppet has to take hold of the golden cord and pull with it against the others, and that taking hold is what the phrase superior to oneself has meant all along. Law is not an outside constraint on a free agent; law is the citizen’s own reason, written down by the city so that the soft cord has something to hold on to.

Two things follow that a modern reader can miss. First, the image makes the citizen’s freedom and the city’s law the same thing seen from two sides, which is why the Athenian never feels the tension between them that a liberal reader feels at every page. Second, the puppet is not a prisoner. It is a toy, and the Athenian says so without flinching. He will come back to that.

Learning to like the right things. Book II turns the wine argument into a theory of childhood. Children feel pleasure and pain long before they can reason, and by the time reason arrives it finds a person already trained to enjoy some things and hate others. Education is the work done in that gap: when pleasure, and friendship, and pain, and hatred, are rightly implanted in souls not yet capable of understanding the nature of them, so that when reason comes it finds its feelings already in agreement with it. This harmony of the soul, taken as a whole, is virtue. Everyone slides off this training as they age, and the gods, pitying the toils which our race is born to undergo, have appointed holy festivals, wherein men alternate rest with labour, and sent the Muses, Apollo, and Dionysus to lead them. The festivals retrain the feelings. This is why the Athenian spends the whole of Book II on singing and dancing, and it is the only reason. The young of every creature cannot keep still or keep quiet; they leap and cry out. Other animals have no sense of order in the leaping. Humans do, and that sense is the gift of the gods who lead the dance. So the uneducated is he who has not been trained in the chorus, and the educated is he who has been well trained, where chorus means song and dance together and being well trained means enjoying the right ones.

The right ones are not the ones that please the most people. The Athenian imagines a contest judged purely by pleasure, with no rule about what kind of show is allowed, and predicts the winner: a puppet show for the small children, comedy for the older boys, tragedy for the educated women and young men, and Homer for the old men. Pleasure is a valid test, but only the pleasure of the best and best-educated judge, and a city that lets the crowd decide the art the crowd will be raised on has put the training of its children in the hands of the untrained. Egypt saw this, and fixed its music and its painting by sacred law; ten thousand years ago, the Athenian says, their art was neither better nor worse than today. He does not claim the Egyptian fixed forms are beautiful, only that they are stable, and stability in what children are taught to enjoy is worth more than novelty.

The three choruses come out of this. Children sing in the choir of the Muses, men under 30 in the choir of Apollo, and the men from 30 to 60 belong to Dionysus, and it is the old men who need wine to loosen them enough to sing at all, because age makes a man stiff and ashamed to perform. So wine is banned for boys under 18 (fire must not be poured upon fire), allowed in moderation to 30, and at 40 a man at the public mess may call on Dionysus. The drinking party turns out to have been a device for getting the wisest people in the city to keep singing the songs the children learn from.

All three choirs sing the same thing, that the good life is the happy one. The Athenian says the Spartans and Cretans already compel your poets to say that the just man is fortunate whether rich or poor, and he goes further. Is the most just life also the pleasantest? If it is not, then the gods who gave the laws were asking men to choose a life the gods themselves called worse, which is absurd. And if some lawgiver could not prove the just life pleasantest, the Athenian says he would still tell the young it was, because no lie was ever more useful. That sentence has been argued over ever since: some readers hear Plato endorsing a lawgiver’s lie, others hear him promising the proof that Book V then delivers.

Where cities come from. Book III starts over from the beginning of the world. Cities have been wiped out many times by floods and plagues, and each time a few survivors, herdsmen on the hilltops, started again with no tools, no metals, no writing, and no memory of the cities that were gone. They were simple, and simplicity kept them good: the community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles. Families lived under a father’s rule, then families joined and had to agree on shared customs, then cities came down to the plain, and Troy fell and the Dorians came back to the Peloponnese and founded three kingdoms sworn to defend one another, Argos, Messene, and Sparta. Two of the three failed within a generation. The Athenian tells it as history; it is tradition shaped to make a point, and the point is why they failed.

Not for lack of courage, and not from bad luck. They failed from ignorance of the most important human things, and the Athenian names the ignorance: the greatest ignorance is when a man hates that which he nevertheless thinks to be good and noble, and loves and embraces that which he knows to be unrighteous and evil. A city where the feelings and the reasoning point different ways is stupid in the only sense that matters, however clever its citizens. Kings given unmixed power come apart this way. Sparta alone survived, because some god, he says, doubled its kingship, then added a council of elders, then the ephors, so that no single power in the state was unmixed. That is the first statement in Western writing of what later thinkers would call the mixed constitution.

He then generalises: there are two mother forms of states from which the rest may be truly said to be derived; and one of them may be called monarchy and the other democracy. Persia is the pure form of the first and Athens of the second, and each destroyed itself by pushing its principle to the end. Cyrus’s Persia was free and friendly and wise while its kings shared rule with their subjects; then princes raised by women and eunuchs in the palace took over and freedom went out of it. Athens under the old laws was a city of reverence, where citizens were the willing slaves of law; then the poets began to mix the musical forms and the theatre audience learned to judge by noise, and instead of an aristocracy in music an evil sort of theatrocracy grew up, and the habit of judging for oneself in music spread to judging for oneself in everything, and reverence went out of it. A state exists to be free, to be friends with itself, and to be wise, and freedom pushed alone kills the other two.

Cleinias then reveals why he has been listening so carefully. Crete is founding a colony, he is one of the 10 commissioners, and he can write any laws he likes for it. Would the Stranger help? He would.

Noon, and the city begins. Book IV opens with the site. The colony will be about 80 stadia from the sea, roughly 9 miles, with excellent harbours, and the Athenian groans at the harbours. The sea is a salty and bitter neighbour: it fills a city with traders and money, teaches citizens to be untrustworthy, and tempts them into a navy, which wins battles by rowing away. A city that must import to eat is not free. Then he asks what kind of state gets its laws fastest, and the answer is a shock in a dialogue about law: let the tyrant be young and have a good memory, quick to learn, brave, generous, and self-commanded, with a good lawgiver beside him. A tyranny is the easiest state to transform because one man’s example changes everyone’s habits. Nobody has ever made a state without such luck, the Athenian admits, and then says that the real ruler of everything is not luck but God, with chance and opportunity as his fellow workers, and art coming a distant third.

This is where the walk pauses. They have been talking since morning, it is noon, they are in a resting place, and the Athenian says that everything so far has been a prelude. Before the laws come the story of the age of Cronos, when the god knew that no human being can bear unchecked power and set spirits over men the way we set men over sheep. A city today should imitate that arrangement by putting the immortal thing in us, reason, in charge, and reason’s name in a city is law. So the men chosen to rule are not rulers. For that state in which the law is subject and has no authority, I perceive to be on the highway to ruin; but I see that the state in which the law is above the rulers, and the rulers are the inferiors of the law, has salvation, and every blessing which the Gods can confer. He calls them ministers of the law, servants, and means it.

The first address to the colonists follows, and it is a sermon. God, as the old tradition declares, holding in his hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is, travels according to His nature in a straight line towards the accomplishment of His end. Justice always accompanies Him, and the man who is lifted up with pride or wealth is left behind and ruins himself and his house. Protagoras had said that man is the measure of all things. Now God ought to be to us the measure of all things, and not man, and the way to be dear to God is to be like him, which means to be self-commanded, because like is dear to like. Prayer and sacrifice from a bad man are wasted; the gods take nothing from the unclean.

Then the Athenian notices something about the address he has just given, and it becomes Plato’s method. Every song, every speech has a prelude that prepares the ear for what follows. Law has never had one. Existing lawgivers do not mingle persuasion with coercion, but employ force pure and simple, like the slave doctors of Athens who run from patient to patient, prescribe from habit, never listen and never explain, while the free doctor sits with a free patient, asks questions, teaches him about his own body, and only then prescribes, having persuaded him. Every law in the city should have a prelude of the second kind, a passage that explains why the law is right and makes the citizen want to obey before the penalty is named. He demonstrates on the marriage law. Bare law: a man shall marry between 30 and 35 or pay a fine and lose privileges. Law with prelude: marry then, because the human race has a share of immortality by leaving children behind it, and to deprive yourself of it on purpose is an impiety; and then the fine. The double method, persuasion first and force behind it, is Plato’s answer to the puppet: the golden cord is soft, and the prelude is the city’s hand on it.

Honour your soul. Book V is the great prelude, and it is addressed to every citizen, not to the lawgiver. Of all the things which a man has, next to the Gods, his soul is the most divine and most truly his own, and everyone says he honours it and nobody does. You dishonour your soul when you blame others for your own faults or indulge it against the lawgiver’s advice. You dishonour it again by giving in to pleasure and pain rather than mastering them, and by ranking money, beauty, or long life above it. The body ranks second, and the healthiest body is not the strongest or most beautiful but the one in the mean. Wealth ranks third and is for the sake of the other two. Children are to be left not gold but a sense of shame.

Then the fault under all the faults. Every man is told that he is his own friend, but the excessive love of self is in reality the source to each man of all offences, because the lover is blind about the beloved and judges his own case wrongly every time, and the man who would be great must love not himself but what is just, whoever does it. A crowd of small counsels follows, about anger, about the incurably bad, about the lawgiver’s care that citizens be gentle where gentleness is possible. And then a long, plain, un-sermonlike proof that the good life is pleasanter, done by counting: a life of pleasure has intense pleasures and intense pains; a life of self-command has mild ones; the mild pleasures outweigh the mild pains and the intense pains outweigh the intense pleasures, so the temperate life wins on balance, and the man who chooses otherwise chooses out of ignorance or youth.

Now the city gets its shape. The Athenian names the best city first and then declines to build it. The first and highest form of the state and of the government and of the law is that in which there prevails most widely the ancient saying, that ‘Friends have all things in common.’ Wives, children, property, even eyes and ears and hands as far as possible held in common; a city of gods or the children of gods. That is the Republic, named without the name, and set aside because human beings are what they are. The city they will build is the second-best, and it keeps private property and private families while pulling as hard as it can toward the first. How far it really departs from the Republic, and whether Plato had changed his mind about what ordinary citizens can become, is a live argument among his readers.

The pull is done with numbers. The number of our citizens shall be 5040, because 5040 divides by every number from 1 to 10 and by 59 numbers in all, which lets the land, the tribes, the army, and the offices be split evenly in every direction the city will ever need. Each household holds one lot, split into a near half and a far half so that nobody has only good land or only bad. The lot belongs to the family and behind the family to the city, and it may never be bought, sold, or split; a father leaves it to one son and finds places for the others by adoption, emigration, or marriage. Household numbers are held steady by encouragement, honours, and in the last resort by sending out colonies. No citizen owns gold or silver; the city keeps a common Greek coinage for embassies and war and issues a local token money worthless outside the borders. A citizen may grow richer than his lot up to a ceiling, double it, triple it, up to four times the amount of this, and anything above the ceiling goes to the city, and the four steps make four property classes for offices and taxes. Aristotle would later object that 5040 households need a territory the size of Babylon to feed them. The point of all of it is stated flatly: very rich and very good at the same time he cannot be, not, at least, in the sense in which the many speak of riches, because whoever takes gain from every source, honest and dishonest, will always outrun the man who takes it only from the honest ones, and a city that wants friendship between its citizens must keep the gap between them small. The city itself is laid out in 12 parts radiating from an acropolis with the temples of Hestia, Zeus, and Athena, the poorer soil in larger portions and the richer in smaller, so that the 12 tribes hold equal wealth.

Who runs the place. Book VI fills the offices, and the design is the mixed constitution of Book III made concrete. At the top, 37 Guardians of the Laws, 19 from the colonists and 18 from the Cnosians at the founding, later chosen by a three-stage election open to every citizen who has borne arms, serving from age 50 to 70 at most. Generals are nominated by the guardians and elected by the soldiers. A council of 360, 90 from each property class, is chosen by a method the Athenian calls a mean between monarchy and democracy: the rich are compelled to vote and the poor may abstain, so wealth counts more than heads, and then the final choice is made by lot among the elected, so that God has a share. The countryside is watched by young men of 25 to 30, 12 to a tribe, who rotate through every district over 2 years, building roads and cisterns and drains and learning their own land by living rough in it. There are wardens for the city and the market, and priests, and a treasurer, and a judge of music and of athletics.

The most important office in the city is the minister of education, elected by every magistrate from among the guardians for 5 years, and the Athenian says so in plain words: the first shoot of any plant, well directed, decides its growth, and a human being well brought up becomes the most divine and gentlest of animals, badly brought up the most savage. Courts sit in three tiers, a neighbourhood court of arbitrators, a tribal court, and a select court of the best judges chosen yearly, and in cases that touch the whole city the whole city hears them, because a citizen who has no share in judging thinks he has no share in the state.

Marriage law follows. Marry to benefit the city, not to please yourself: a hot-tempered man should seek a gentle wife, a rich one a poor, so that the city’s characters blend like wine and water. Women are to eat at common tables like the men, a rule no city has dared, and the Athenian argues it is half the city left unlegislated; his own word for the arrangement, later, is a middle course. Married couples are to be watched for 10 years by women magistrates whose whole task is procreation, and a couple that has not produced children in that time is separated. On slaves the Athenian is honest, unsparing, and finally unmoved: a slave is a difficult possession, revolts are everywhere, no city knows what to do about them, and his own advice is to hold slaves who do not share a language, to treat them justly and never humiliate them, and to punish them rather than reprove them, because a slave is not a friend.

Rocking the cradle, fixing the games. Book VII goes into the house, where law cannot reach and where the city is made. Pregnant women should walk. Infants should be carried about for their first years as if they were always at sea, because when mothers want their restless children to go to sleep they do not employ rest, but, on the contrary, motion, rocking and singing, and the motion from outside overpowers the fear and frenzy inside. A child of 3 to 6 should be neither spoiled nor crushed; both make him unbearable. From 6 the boys and girls separate and both begin to learn to ride and shoot and throw, and the Athenian insists that the left hand be trained like the right, because nurses make children lopsided.

He knows none of this is law. It is what everyone calls unwritten custom, and they are the bonds of the whole state, and come in between the written laws which are or are hereafter to be laid down: written law rests on them the way a building rests on its beams, and when they slip the building goes. So the lawgiver names them without penalties. Then he says something that sounds like the crankiest thing in the whole dialogue. Children’s games must never change. A child who keeps inventing new games grows into a citizen who wants new laws, and any change whatever except from evil is the most dangerous of all things, in seasons, in bodies, in habits, and most of all in what children are taught to love. The paradox comes with it: strains of music are our laws (nomoi), and the Athenian is pleased that the old Greek word for law was also a word for a tune. A city should fix its songs and dances the way Egypt did, dedicate them to gods, and let no poet teach a new one without the judges’ approval.

The curriculum is short. Letters from 10 to 13, the lyre for 3 years after, and arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy for everyone, not to make experts but to lift the citizens above the state the Athenian confesses he found the Greeks in, so ignorant of what can and cannot be measured against what that he was ashamed for himself and all of them and they seemed more like pigs than men. Girls learn the same. I assert without fear of contradiction that gymnastic and horsemanship are as suitable to women as to men; the women by the Black Sea ride and shoot, and a lawgiver who leaves half the citizens untrained has made a city half the size it could be. What text should the schoolmaster use? The Athenian looks back over the day’s talk and says, half apologising, that it seems to him a kind of poetry and a fit model, and orders the minister of education to make the children learn these very discussions and anything like them. He also corrects a lie the Greeks tell about the sky: they call the planets wanderers because they seem to change course, when in truth each runs one fixed circular path, and to slander the gods of the sky with disorder is an impiety.

In the middle of all this comes the passage that gives the whole dialogue its heart. Human affairs, the Athenian says, are not worth great seriousness, yet we must be serious about them, and he is uneasy at his own words. He tries again. A man should be serious about serious things and not about unserious ones, and God is the only fully serious thing, for man, as I said before, is made to be the plaything of God, and this, truly considered, is the best of him; wherefore also every man and woman should walk seriously, and pass life in the noblest of pastimes. The noblest pastimes are sacrificing, singing, dancing, so as to win the gods’ favour and repel enemies. People now think their play is for the sake of war; it is the other way round. War never contains real play or real education, and those are the things worth living for. The puppet of Book I, in the golden cord’s hands, has become a dancer, and the Athenian says a man should make his whole life a game played well for the gods. Megillus objects that this belittles humanity. The Athenian answers that he had God in view and it made men look small; let a man be worth something, then, and he will fit the story.

Contests, farms, and the law that shames. Book VIII sets the festival calendar, one a day at least, 12 great festivals for the 12 tribes, and turns the athletic contests into military training, races in armour, mock battles fought with real risk, and regular days on which the whole city goes out under arms, with the women training and competing too. Then the Athenian faces the appetite he has been circling since Book I. Feeding and drinking can be regulated by custom; sex is stronger and madder, and the cities that gave their young men the most freedom in it, Crete and Sparta, are the ones whose common meals and gymnasia made it worst. He wants a law that makes intercourse between men, and between women, as unthinkable as intercourse between brother and sister, and he thinks he knows how, because the incest rule is obeyed by everyone with no penalty at all: a single sentence, everyone repeats it from childhood, and it works. If the whole city said one thing about the matter it would work here too. He is not sure the city will say it. So he offers a fallback, that such acts at least be done in secret and disgrace attach to being seen. The law is the most dated thing the Athenian proposes, and modern readers push back on it hardest; the mechanism under it is Plato’s whole theory of unwritten custom applied to its hardest case.

The economic laws are simpler. Citizens farm and are forbidden retail trade for gain, which is left to resident foreigners, who may stay 20 years. The harvest is split into thirds, for citizens, slaves, and foreigners, and distributed by the tribes. Craftsmen are foreigners too; a citizen has one craft, citizenship, and it takes all his time. Nobody moves a boundary stone.

When the law must punish. Book IX begins with the Athenian’s embarrassment. It is a disgrace to write laws about theft and murder for a city founded as well as this one, and he writes them because human beings are not what the founding assumed. He states the principle behind all his penalties before he states any penalty: That all bad men are always involuntarily bad, because nobody chooses to have a sick soul, so the lawgiver is a doctor, and punishment is not revenge but cure, and whoever can be cured is cured by whatever pain or teaching or honour will do it, while the incurable man is killed, which is a benefit to him and a warning to everyone else. This forces a distinction the Athenian is proud of. Injury is damage; injustice is a state of soul. A man can injure you unjustly or justly, and he can even benefit you unjustly. The law makes the injurer repair the damage in either case and treats the injustice separately, according to its cause, and there are three causes: anger and fear, pleasure and desire, and ignorance, and the last is the hardest because the one who thinks he knows does the most harm. Homicide is sorted by these causes, involuntary killings by purification and exile, killings in anger by heavier exile, deliberate killings by death. Wounds are compensated at twice the damage if curable and 4 times if not. Cases of temple robbery and treason are tried by the select court, and the Athenian gives the theft law a prelude of its own.

Three ways to get the gods wrong. Book X is the theology, and it is a criminal law. Impiety comes from three beliefs: that the gods do not exist; that they exist but took no care of man; or that they exist and care but were easily appeased by sacrifices and prayers. The Athenian begins by refusing to be angry with the atheists, since they are young and clever and have been taught by philosophers that fire and water and earth exist by nature and chance and that soul and gods and laws came later, by art, so that justice is whatever the strongest make it. The answer takes all of Book X and it turns on motion. Everything that moves is moved by something, unless it moves itself. Trace any chain of motions back and it must begin in something self-moving, because a thing moved by another cannot be a beginning. The self-mover is the tenth kind of motion, the mightiest, and self-motion is the definition of soul. So the soul is the first origin and moving power of all that is, or has become, or will be, and soul is older than the body, and the things of soul, opinion and thought and care, are older than the things of body, length and weight and heat. The materialists had it backwards. Soul drives the heavens, and since the heavens run in perfect order, the soul driving them is the best soul, and the best soul is what we mean by a god. The proof leans its whole weight on the astronomy of its day, and a reader today should weigh it as an argument shape rather than a result.

The second heresy gets the doctor and the pilot. A steersman who took care of the great things and neglected the small would be a bad steersman; a god who did the same would be worse than a man, and the Gods hear and see and know all things, and that nothing can escape them. Every part of the whole is arranged for the good of the whole, and the smallest part is watched. The third heresy gets contempt. A god who could be bought by sacrifice would be worse than a dog who takes meat from a thief, and the men who preach it are the most dangerous of the three.

Then the penalties. The honest atheist, who disbelieves and lives justly, goes for not less than five years to a House of Reformation near the Nocturnal Council, sees no one but its members, and is released if reformed; a second conviction is death. The dishonest impious, the ones who trade on religion, run private rites, and prey on the fearful, are imprisoned for life in a remote prison and thrown out unburied. And no citizen may keep a private shrine, because the fearful and the guilty fill their houses with altars and the city loses control of its gods. Popper read these penalties as the founding document of the closed society; Plato’s defenders read the reformatory as persuasion honestly tried before force. What is not in dispute is that the Athenian wrote the penalties.

Wills, orphans, and the beggar. Book XI is property law, and it is the one that most resembles a real code. Do not pick up what you did not put down, even buried treasure. Sales are in the market for cash, no credit and no complaints later. Adulteration and false weights are punished by the market wardens. Retail trade, the Athenian says in a small surprising prelude, is not shameful in itself; it exists to make the unequal equal and to spread goods where they are needed, and it is despised only because it is done by people who cannot resist gain. He would have it done by resident foreigners under rules the city fixes for prices and profit. A man may not simply write a will, because his property is not his; it belongs to his family and to the city, so he names one son as heir to the lot and provides for the rest within limits set by the guardians. Orphans get guardians appointed by the city and the Athenian tells the guardians to remember that the dead are watching. Parents are to be honoured above all shrines, and a son who strikes a father is banished. Poisoning and sorcery are treated together, and a sorcerer who is a professional diviner is put to death. Let there be no beggars in our state: a good man cannot fall to begging in a city that has arranged its lots, and a beggar is turned out of the market and the city. Men who sell their skill at pleading are dealt with as men who make the worse cause appear the better, and if a citizen does it he is killed.

The anchor. The last book starts with the army and the sentence Popper made famous: the great principle of all is that no one of either sex should be without a commander; nor should the mind of any one be accustomed to do anything, either in jest or earnest, of his own motion, in war or in peace, standing and moving and washing and eating at the word of command. In its place it is a rule of military discipline for a citizen militia, and the Athenian ties it to Book I: anarchy is what a city must expel from the whole of life. Read alone it is the most frightening sentence in Plato, and both readings have serious defenders.

Ambassadors who lie are tried. The examiners, who audit every magistrate at the end of his term, are the finest men in the city, chosen by the whole people, honoured above every other citizen while they live and given a funeral no one else gets, because the correctors of the correctors must be better than everyone they correct. Citizens may not travel abroad before 40, and then only on public business, except for a class of older observers sent to see how other cities live and report to a council that meets before sunrise. Funerals are capped by class and a burial mound may rise no higher than 5 men can raise in 5 days; the body is a shadow, the soul is the man, and elaborate grief is spent on the wrong thing.

That council is the Athenian’s last invention, and his most argued over. It is made of the ten oldest guardians of the law, the prize-winners in virtue, the observers who have come home, and the current and former ministers of education, each bringing one young man aged 30 to 40 of his own choosing. It meets each day between first light and sunrise. Its business is the thing no other office does: to know what the laws are for. The whole city aims at virtue, the Athenian says, but courage, self-command, justice, and wisdom are four things and one thing, and a ruler who cannot say how the four are one, or give the account of the gods that Book X gave, or define the beautiful and the good, is a guardian who does not know what he is guarding. The council is the city’s head, its eyes and reason, and if we let it down to be the anchor of the state, our city, having everything which is suitable to her, will preserve all that we wish to preserve. What powers it has, beyond knowing, the Athenian never says. He says instead that it cannot be legislated for, only educated, and that its members must be found by long testing, and then the road runs out. Megillus turns to Cleinias: either we must detain the Stranger, and by supplications and in all manner of ways make him share in the foundation of the city, or we must give up the undertaking. Cleinias agrees, and Megillus says, I will. Those are the last words. The city is unbuilt and the old men have not reached the cave.

One real line. “For that state in which the law is subject and has no authority, I perceive to be on the highway to ruin; but I see that the state in which the law is above the rulers, and the rulers are the inferiors of the law, has salvation, and every blessing which the Gods can confer.” — Plato, Laws.

What didn’t hold. Book III’s history (the flood, the shepherds on the hills, the Dorian league and its broken oaths, Persia’s rise under Cyrus and fall under palace-raised princes) is stylized tradition and legend, not history; what survives is the analysis it was built to carry, that unmixed power ruins the holder, which Polybius, Cicero, and the framers of mixed constitutions took straight from the Laws. Book X’s proof of the gods rests on soul as the only self-mover and on the perfect circular order of the heavens; modern physics needs neither, and the argument survives only in its shape, as the cosmological argument, which Hume and Kant put under pressure it has not shaken off. Slavery is accepted and regulated in Book VI; Plato saw the problem and kept the institution, and nothing in the text reframes that. Book VIII’s law against intercourse between men and between women calls it contrary to nature and aims to make it shameful by custom; the position is dated, it sits oddly beside the Symposium and Phaedrus, and it is where modern readers push back hardest. Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) took the impiety laws of Book X, with 5 years’ reformatory imprisonment for honest atheists and death for the relapsed, together with the military maxim of XII.942 that no one should act of his own motion, and named Plato the first totalitarian; Morrow, Stalley, and Klosko read 942 as camp discipline for a militia and the reformatory as a real attempt at persuasion before force, and the dispute is live, not settled. Some readers take the Nocturnal Council’s undefined powers as quietly reintroducing the Republic’s philosopher-rulers over a city that was supposed to be ruled by law; others see a study group. Bobonich’s Plato’s Utopia Recast (2002) argues the Laws abandons the Republic’s view that only philosophers can be virtuous and gives every citizen a real chance at the good life; Kahn, Brisson, and others say less changed than that, and the question stays open. The useful lie of Book II, that the just life is pleasantest whether or not it is, is defended in Book V by an argument that claims to make the lie unnecessary; commentators disagree about whether Plato is endorsing lawgivers’ falsehoods or showing that he need not. The text itself was unfinished at Plato’s death; Diogenes Laertius says Philip of Opus copied it from wax tablets and divided it into 12 books, so the division into 12 books, some repetitions, and the loose ends around the Nocturnal Council may be the editor’s, not Plato’s. Aristotle’s Politics (II.6) pushed back first: he thought the Laws drifts back toward the Republic, that 5040 households would need a territory the size of Babylon to feed them, and that the council election tilts the mixed constitution toward oligarchy. Women in Magnesia get common meals, the same schooling, and military training, and still marry at 16 to 20 under supervision and hold office 10 years later than men; it is more than Athens gave and less than equality, and Plato says so himself when he calls it a middle course.

For the little ones

This book as stories to read aloud, each with a note for the grown-up.