Laws (dialogue)

• 1. Introduction

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  Plato's Laws opens not with the grand philosophical question you might expect, but with a deceptively simple one: who deserves credit for creating a civilization's laws? That single question, posed by an unnamed Athenian Stranger somewhere along the road between Knossos and the cave of Zeus on Mount Ida, sets twelve dense books in motion. It is the longest dialogue Plato ever wrote. It is also the only one in which Socrates never appears. For generations of readers accustomed to Socrates dominating Plato's works, that absence alone signals something different is at work. Some scholars read this dialogue as the product of an older Plato, one who had already tried and failed to shape the politics of Syracuse under the tyrant Dionysius II. Those bruised hopes are only hinted at in the Seventh Letter. What emerged from that experience was not a retreat from politics, but a methodical second attempt: three old men, walking toward a shrine, trying to build a city in words.

• 2. Three Men on a Pilgrimage

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  The Athenian Stranger falls into step with Cleinias of Knossos and Megillus of Sparta as they make a religious journey from Knossos to the cave of Zeus on Mount Ida. The walk is deliberately chosen: it mirrors the route said to have been taken by Minos, the legendary Cretan lawgiver, who walked this same path every nine years to receive Zeus's instruction on lawgiving. The dialogue is also set on the longest day of the year, which the text uses to justify the sheer volume of the discussion that follows. The Athenian begins by asking his two companions whether they trace their laws to a divine or a human origin. Both Cleinias and Megillus answer that their laws are divinely sourced; the Cretan laws, they say, descend from Minos and Rhadamanthus, who consulted Zeus directly. By the end of the third book, the philosophical exercise gains a practical urgency: Cleinias reveals that he has actually been tasked with drawing up laws for a new Cretan colony. He asks the Athenian Stranger for help, and the remaining nine books become a working session for the city they name Magnesia.

• 3. What Magnesia Is Not

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  Readers who arrive at the Laws expecting a sequel to the Republic find instead a pointed rebuttal. Both dialogues describe the construction of a hypothetical city, but Magnesia departs from Kallipolis at several fundamental points. Private property is permitted in Magnesia; in Kallipolis it was abolished. Private families exist; the Republic's arrangement of shared wives for the guardian class is nowhere to be found. Written laws govern the city; the Republic operated without them. The Laws also places its conversation in the mouths of three old men rather than Socrates and his younger interlocutors. The text itself explains why: the old men are devising a rhetorical strategy that conceals its true aims from vigorous youth, using piety, rituals, and virtue as a kind of civilizing cover. The city described in the Laws is called "second best" in the text, but not because Kallipolis is the ideal. The ideal, Plato writes, is a city fit for gods and their children.

• 4. Soul Before Matter

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  The tenth book of the Laws contains one of the dialogue's most philosophically ambitious passages: Plato's argument for the ontological priority of soul. His predecessors among the natural philosophers had argued that matter comes first. In their view, things like earth and fire exist before and give rise to psychic phenomena such as intelligence and skill. Plato reverses this entirely. Soul, he argues, is the self-mover that supervises the cosmos; corporeal things should be explained in terms of soul, not the other way around. This position generates a persistent scholarly debate about whether Plato also allows for an evil soul governing the cosmos alongside a virtuous one. Gabriela Carone has argued that Plato does not dismiss the possibility of an evil soul. More recent scholars have pushed back, reading Plato's psychology as one in which soul is by its very nature intelligent, and in which genuine intelligence cannot be vicious. That reading rules out the existence of an evil soul at the cosmological level altogether.

• 5. Aristotle's Critical Eye

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  Aristotle, who read the Laws carefully enough to compile excerpts from its extensive pages, was also one of its sharpest critics. He made an error that later scholars have noted with some curiosity: he listed the Laws among the Platonic dialogues that feature Socrates, a mistake he likely committed through imprecision rather than knowledge of an alternate version. His substantive criticisms were more pointed. He thought the proposed number of five thousand citizens fit to bear arms was too high; the resulting leisure of citizens would demand a large population of women and servants, which would in turn require an impractically large territory. He also identified a structural flaw in the plan to keep the number of households fixed while the number of children inevitably grew. Where he found value, he saw the Laws and the Republic as largely in agreement. His sustained examination of the dialogue shaped large portions of books seven and eight of his Politics.

• 6. Successors and Rivals

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  The Laws did not stand alone for long. Philippus of Opus, generally identified as the author of the dialogue Epinomis, wrote his work as a direct continuation, keeping the same three characters and giving the Athenian the same central role. The Epinomis deviates from the Laws on some points, but its very existence shows how seriously the Laws was taken in Plato's immediate circle. Outside that circle, Plato's contemporary Isocrates may already have engaged with the work. Centuries later, the Byzantine scholar Georgios Gemistos, who took the name Plethon in later life, named his own political treatise directly after the Laws, calling it the Nomoi. Among the parallel works on ancient Greek law that have survived alongside the Laws, Xenophon's Constitution of the Spartans and Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus are notable companions. Plutarch compared the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus to Numa Pompilius, who supposedly introduced his legal system in Rome around 700 BC. Both Plutarch and the author wrongly attributed to Xenophon admired the Spartan system more openly than Plato did.