The mention of Minos the great lawgiver, and of Rhadamanthus the righteous administrator of the law (I 624), suggests the two divisions of the laws into enactments and appointments of officers (VI 751). The legislator and the judge stand side by side, and their functions cannot be wholly distinguished. For the judge is in some sort a legislator, at any rate in small matters (compare IX 875 E following); and his decisions growing into precedents, must determine the innumerable details which arise out of the conflict of circumstances. These Plato proposes to leave to a younger generation of legislators. The action of courts of law in making law seems to have escaped him, probably because the Athenian law-courts were popular assemblies; and, except in a mythical form, he can hardly be said to have had before his eyes the ideal of a judge. In reading the Laws of Plato, or any other ancient writing about Laws, we should consider how gradual the process is by which not only a legal system, but the administration of a court of law, becomes perfected.
There are other subjects on which Plato breaks ground, as his manner is, early in the work. First, he gives a sketch of the subject of laws (I 631, 632); they are to comprehend the whole of human life, from infancy to age, and from birth to death, although the proposed plan is far from being regularly executed in the books which follow, partly owing to the necessity of describing the constitution as well as the laws of his new colony. Secondly, he touches on the power of music, which may exercise so great an influence on the character of men for good or evil; he refers especially to the great offence—which he mentions again (VII 812 D, E), and which he had condemned in the Republic (III 397)—of varying the modes and rhythms, as well as to that of separating the words from the music (Laws II 669). Thirdly, he reprobates the prevalence of unnatural loves in Sparta and Crete, which he attributes to the practice of syssitia and gymnastic exercises, and considers to be almost inseparable from them (I 636 B). To this subject he again returns in the eighth book (836 following). Fourthly, the virtues are affirmed to be inseparable from one another (I 630 B), even if not absolutely one; this, too, is a principle which he reasserts at the conclusion of the work (XII 963 following). As in the beginnings of Plato’s other writings, we have here several “notes” struck, which form the preludes of longer discussions, although the hint is less ingeniously given, and the promise more imperfectly fulfilled than in the earlier dialogues.
The distinction between ethics and politics has not yet dawned upon Plato’s mind. To him, law is still floating in a region between the two. He would have desired that all the acts and laws of a state should have regard to all virtue (I 630 E). But he did not see that politics and law are subject to their own conditions, and are distinguished from ethics by natural differences. The actions of which politics take cognisance are necessarily collective or representative; and law is limited to external acts which affect others as well as the agents. Ethics, on the other hand, include the whole duty of man in relation both to himself and others. But Plato has never reflected on these differences. He fancies that the life of the state can be as easily fashioned as that of the individual. He is favourable to a balance of power (III 691), but never seems to have considered that power might be so balanced as to produce an absolute immobility in the state. Nor is he alive to the evils of confounding vice and crime; or to the necessity of governments abstaining from excessive interference with their subjects.
Yet this confusion of ethics and politics has also a better and a truer side. If unable to grasp some important distinctions, Plato is at any rate seeking to elevate the lower to the higher; he does not pull down the principles of men to their practice, or narrow the conception of the state to the immediate necessities of politics. Political ideals of freedom and equality, of a divine government which has been or will be in some other age or country, have greatly tended to educate and ennoble the human race. And if not the first author of such ideals (for they are as old as Hesiod), Plato has done more than any other writer to impress them
