Complete Works

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

  CLINIAS: True enough.

  ATHENIAN: So where do we suppose this destructive process invariably starts? Among kings or people?

  [691] CLINIAS: Most instances suggest that this is probably a disease of kings whose life of luxury has made them arrogant.

  ATHENIAN: So it is clear that it was the kings of that era who were first infected by the acquisitive spirit in defiance of the law of the land. The precise point to which they had given their seal of approval by their word and oath became the ground of their disagreement, and this lack of harmony (which is, in our view, the ‘crassest’ stupidity, though it looks like wisdom) put the whole arrangement jarringly off key and out of tune hence its destruction.

  CLINIAS: Quite likely.

  [b] ATHENIAN: Very well. Then what precautions ought a contemporary legislator to have taken in his code to nip this disease in the bud? God knows, the answer’s not difficult nowadays, and the point is quite simple to understand—though if anyone had foreseen the problem then, assuming it was possible to do so, he’d have been wiser than we are.

  MEGILLUS: What do you mean?

  ATHENIAN: Hindsight, Megillus! In the perspective of today it’s easy to understand what should have been done then, and once understood it’s equally easy to explain.

  MEGILLUS: You’d better be even clearer than that.

  ATHENIAN: The clearest way of putting it would be this.

  MEGILLUS: What?

  [c] ATHENIAN: If you neglect the rule of proportion and fit excessively large sails to small ships, or give too much food to a small body, or too high authority to a soul that doesn’t measure up to it, the result is always disastrous. Body and soul become puffed up: disease breaks out in the one, and in the other arrogance quickly leads to injustice. Now, what are we getting at? Simply this: the mortal soul simply does not exist, my friends, which by dint of its natural qualities will ever make a success of [d] supreme authority among men while it is still young and responsible to no one. Full of folly, the worst of diseases, it inevitably has its judgment corrupted, and incurs the enmity of its closest friends; and once that happens, its total ruin and the loss of all its power soon follow. A first-class lawgiver’s job is to have a sense of proportion and to guard against this danger. Nowadays it is a reasonable guess that this was in fact done at that time. However, it looks as if there was…

  MEGILLUS: What?

  ATHENIAN: … some god who was concerned on your behalf and saw what was going to happen. He took your single line of kings and split it into two,13 so as to restrict its powers to more reasonable proportions. After that, a man14 who combined human nature with some of the powers of a [e] god observed that your leadership was still in a feverish state, so he blended the obstinacy and vigor of the Spartans with the prudent influence of age [692] by giving the twenty-eight elders the same authority in making important decisions as the kings. Your ‘third savior’15 saw that your government was still fretting and fuming with restless energy, so he put a kind of bridle on it in the shape of the power of the ephors16—a power which came very close to being held by lot. This is the formula that turned your kingship into a mixture of the right elements, so that thanks to its own stability it ensured the stability of the rest of the state. If things had been left to the discretion of Temenus and Cresphontes and the legislators of that time, [b] whoever in fact they were, not even Aristodemus’ part17 would have survived. You see, they were tiros in legislation: otherwise it would never have occurred to them to rely on oaths18 to restrain the soul of a young man who had taken over power from which a tyranny could develop. But the fact is that God has demonstrated the sort of thing a position of authority ought to have been then and should be now, if it is to have any prospects of permanency. As I said before, we don’t need any great wisdom to [c] recognize all this now—after all, it’s not difficult to see the point if you have a historical example to go by. But if anyone had seen all this then, and had been able to control the various offices and produce a single authority out of the three, he would have saved all the splendid projects of that age from destruction, and neither the Persians nor anyone else would ever have sent a fleet to attack Greece, contemptuously supposing that we were people who counted for very little.

  CLINIAS: That’s true.

  ATHENIAN: After all, Clinias, the way the Greeks repulsed them was a [d] disgrace. In saying this, I don’t mean that those who won the battles of that war by land and sea did not do so magnificently. By ‘disgrace’ I mean that, to start with, only one of those three states fought to defend Greece. The other two were rotten to the core. One of them19 even hindered Sparta’s attempts to help the defense, and fought her tooth and nail, while the [e] other, Argos (which used to be paramount when the territory was first divided up), although called upon to repel the barbarian, ignored the request and failed to contribute to the defense. A detailed history of the course of that war would have some pretty ugly charges to make against Greece: indeed, there is no reason why it should report that Greece made any defense at all. If it hadn’t been for the joint determination of the [693] Athenians and the Spartans to resist the slavery that threatened them, we should have by now virtually a complete mixture of the races—Greek with Greek, Greek with barbarian, and barbarian with Greek. We can see a parallel in the nations whom the Persians lord it over today: they have been split up and then horribly jumbled together again into the scattered communities in which they now live. Well now, Clinias and Megillus, why are we making these accusations against the so-called ‘statesmen’ and legislators of that day and this? Because if we find out why they went [b] wrong we shall discover what different course of action they ought to have followed. That is what we were doing just now, when we said that legislation providing for powerful or extreme authority is a mistake. One should always remember that a state ought to be free and wise and enjoy internal harmony, and that this is what the lawgiver should concentrate on in his legislation. (It ought not to surprise us if several times before now we [c] have decided on a number of other aims and said they were what a lawgiver should concentrate on, so that the aims proposed never seem to be the same from minute to minute. When we say that the legislator should keep self-control or good judgment or friendship in view, we must bear in mind that all these aims are the same, not different. Nor should we be disconcerted if we find a lot of other expressions of which the same is true.)

  CLINIAS: Yes, when we think back over the argument we’ll certainly try to remember that. But you wanted to explain what the legislator ought to aim at in the matter of friendship and good judgment and liberty. So tell [d] us now what you were going to say.

  ATHENIAN: Listen to me then. There are two mother-constitutions, so to speak, which you could fairly say have given birth to all the others. Monarchy is the proper name for the first, and democracy for the second. The former has been taken to extreme lengths by the Persians, the latter by my country; virtually all the others, as I said, are varieties of these two. It is absolutely vital for a political system to combine them, if (and this is of course the point of our advice, when we insist that no state formed [e] without these two elements can be constituted properly)—if it is to enjoy freedom and friendship applied with good judgment.

  CLINIAS: Of course.

  ATHENIAN: One state was over-eager in embracing only the principle of monarchy, the other in embracing only the ideal of liberty; neither has achieved a balance between the two. Your Spartan and Cretan states have done better, and time was when you could say much the same of the [694] Athenians and Persians, but things have changed since then. Let’s run through the reasons for this, shall we?

  CLINIAS: Yes, of course—if, that is, we mean to finish what we have set out to do.

  ATHENIAN: Then let’s listen to the story. Under Cyrus, the life of the Persians was a judicious blend of liberty and subjection, and after gaining their own freedom they became the masters of a great number of other people. As rulers, they granted a degree of liberty to their subjects
and put them on the same footing as themselves, with the result that soldiers felt more affection for their commanders and displayed greater zeal in the [b] face of danger. The king felt no jealousy if any of his subjects was intelligent and had some advice to offer; on the contrary, he allowed free speech and valued those who could contribute to the formulation of policy; a sensible man could use his influence to help the common cause. Thanks to freedom, friendship, and the practice of pooling their ideas, during that period the Persians made progress all along the line.

  CLINIAS: It does rather look as if that was the situation in the period you describe.

  ATHENIAN: So how are we to explain the disaster under Cambyses, and [c] the virtually complete recovery under Darius?20 To help our reconstruction of events, shall we have a shot at some inspired guessing?

  CLINIAS: Yes, because this topic we’ve embarked on will certainly help our inquiry.

  ATHENIAN: My guess, then, about Cyrus, is that although he was doubtless a good commander and a loyal patriot, he never considered, even superficially, the problem of correct education; and as for running a household, I’d say he never paid any attention to it at all.

  CLINIAS: And what interpretation are we to put on a remark like that?

  ATHENIAN: I mean that he probably spent his entire life after infancy on [d] campaign, and handed over his children to the women to bring up. These women reared them from their earliest years as though they were already Heaven’s special favorites and darlings, endowed with all the blessings that implies. They wouldn’t allow anyone to thwart ‘their Beatitudes’ in anything, and they forced everybody to rhapsodize about what the children said or did. You can imagine the sort of person they produced.

  CLINIAS: And a fine old education it must have been, to judge from your account.

  ATHENIAN: It was a womanish education, conducted by the royal harem. [e] The teachers of the children had recently come into considerable wealth, but they were left all on their own, without men, because the army was preoccupied by wars and constant dangers.

  CLINIAS: That makes sense.

  ATHENIAN: The children’s father, for his part, went on accumulating herds and flocks for their benefit—and many a herd of human beings too, [695] quite apart from every other sort of animal; but he didn’t know that his intended heirs were not being instructed in the traditional Persian discipline. This discipline (the Persians being shepherds, and sons of a stony soil) was a tough one, capable of producing hardy shepherds who could camp out and keep awake on watch and turn soldier if necessary. He just didn’t notice that women and eunuchs had given his sons the education of a Mede21 and that it had been debased by their so-called ‘blessed’ status. [b] That is why Cyrus’ children turned out as children naturally do when their teachers have never corrected them. So, when they succeeded to their inheritance on the death of Cyrus, they were living in a riot of unrestrained debauchery. First, unwilling to tolerate an equal, one of them killed the other; next, he himself, driven out of his senses by liquor and lack of self-control, was deprived of his dominions by the Medes and ‘the Eunuch’ (as he was then called), to whom the idiot Cambyses was an object of contempt.22

  [c] CLINIAS: So the story goes, and it seems probable enough.

  ATHENIAN: And it goes on, I think, to say that the empire was regained for the Persians by Darius and ‘the Seven’.

  CLINIAS: Certainly.

  ATHENIAN: Now let’s carry on with this story of ours and see what happened. Darius was no royal prince, and his upbringing had not encouraged him to self-indulgence. When he came and seized the empire with the aid of the other six, he split it up into seven divisions, of which some faint outlines still survive today. He thought the best policy was to govern it by new laws of his own which introduced a certain degree of equality [d] for all; and he also included in his code regulations about the tribute promised to the people by Cyrus. His generosity in money and gifts rallied all the Persians to his side, and stimulated a feeling of community and friendship among them; consequently his armies regarded him with such affection that they added to the territory Cyrus had bequeathed at least as much again. But Darius was succeeded by Xerxes, whose education had reverted to the royal pampering of old. (‘Darius’—as perhaps we’d be entitled to say to him—‘you haven’t learned from Cyrus’ mistake, so [e] you’ve brought up Xerxes in the same habits as Cyrus brought up Cambyses.’) So Xerxes, being a product of the same type of education, naturally had a career that closely reproduced the pattern of Cambyses’ misfortunes. Ever since then, hardly any king of the Persians has been genuinely ‘great’, except in style and title. I maintain that the reason for this is not just bad luck, but the shocking life that the children of dictators [696] and fantastically rich parents almost always lead: no man, you see, however old or however young, will ever excel in virtue if he has had this sort of upbringing. We repeat that this is the point the legislator must look out for, and so must we here and now. And in all fairness, my Spartan friends, one must give your state credit for at least this much: rich man, poor man, commoner and king are held in honor to the same degree and are educated in the same way, without privilege, except as determined by the supernatural instructions you received from some god when your state was [b] founded.23 A man’s exceptional wealth is no more reason for a state to confer specially exalted office on him than his ability to run, his good looks, or his physical strength, in the absence of some virtue—or even if he has some virtue, if it excludes self-control.

  MEGILLUS: What do you mean by that, sir?

  ATHENIAN: Courage, I take it, is one part of virtue.

  MEGILLUS: Of course.

  ATHENIAN: So now that you’ve heard the story, use your own judgment would you be glad to have as a resident in your house or as a neighbor a man who in spite of considerable courage was immoderate and licentious?

  MEGILLUS: Heaven forbid! [c]

  ATHENIAN: Well then, what about a skilled workman, knowledgeable in his own field, but unjust?

  MEGILLUS: No, I’d never welcome him.

  ATHENIAN: But surely, in the absence of self-control, justice will never spring up.

  MEGILLUS: Of course not.

  ATHENIAN: Nor indeed will the ‘wise’ man we put forward just now,24 who keeps his feelings of pleasure and pain in tune with right reason and obedient to it.

  MEGILLUS: No, he certainly won’t.

  ATHENIAN: Now here’s another point for us to consider, which will help us to decide whether civic distinctions are, on a given occasion, conferred [d] correctly or incorrectly.

  MEGILLUS: And what is that?

  ATHENIAN: If we found self-control existing in the soul in isolation from all other virtue, should we be justified in admiring it? Or not?

  MEGILLUS: I really couldn’t say.

  ATHENIAN: A very proper reply. If you had opted for either alternative it would have struck an odd note, I think.

  MEGILLUS: So my reply was all right, then.

  ATHENIAN: Yes. But if you have something which in itself deserves to be admired or execrated, a mere additional element isn’t worth talking [e] about: much better pass it over and say nothing.

  MEGILLUS: Self-control is the element you mean, I suppose.

  ATHENIAN: It is. And in general, whatever benefits us most, when this element is added, deserves the highest honor, the second most beneficial thing deserves the second highest honor, and so on: as we go down the list, everything will get in due order the honor it deserves.

  [697] MEGILLUS: True.

  ATHENIAN: Well then, shan’t we insist again25 that the distribution of these honors is the business of the legislator?

  MEGILLUS: Of course.

  ATHENIAN: Would you prefer us to leave the entire distribution to his discretion and let him deal with the details of each individual case? But as we too have something of a taste for legislation, perhaps you’d like us to try our hands at a three-fold division and distinguish the most important class, then the second and the thir
d.

  MEGILLUS: Certainly.

  [b] ATHENIAN: We maintain that if a state is going to survive to enjoy all the happiness that mankind can achieve, it is vitally necessary for it to distribute honors and marks of disgrace on a proper basis. And the proper basis is to put spiritual goods at the top of the list and hold them—provided the soul exercises self-control—in the highest esteem; bodily goods and advantages should come second, and third those said to be provided by property and wealth. If a legislator or a state ever ignores these guidelines [c] by valuing riches above all or by promoting one of the other inferior goods to a more exalted position, it will be an act of political and religious folly. Shall we take this line, or not?

  MEGILLUS: Yes, emphatically and unambiguously.

  ATHENIAN: It was our scrutiny of the political system of the Persians that made us go into this business at such length. Our verdict was that their corruption increased year by year; and the reason we assign for this is that they were too strict in depriving the people of liberty and too energetic [d] in introducing authoritarian government, so that they destroyed all friendship and community of spirit in the state. And with that gone, the policy of rulers is framed not in the interests of their subjects the people, but to support their own authority: let them only think that a situation offers them the prospect of some profit, even a small one, and they wreck cities and ruin friendly nations by fire and sword; they hate, and are hated in return, with savage and pitiless loathing. When they come to need the [e] common people to fight on their behalf, they discover the army has no loyalty, no eagerness to face danger and fight. They have millions and millions of soldiers—all useless for fighting a war, so that just as if manpower were in short supply, they have to hire it, imagining that mercenaries and foreigners will ensure their safety. Not only this, they [698] inevitably become so stupid that they proclaim by their very actions that as compared with gold and silver everything society regards as good and valuable is in their eyes so much trash.