In the last four books, several questions occur for consideration: among them are (I) the detection and punishment of offences; (II) the nature of the voluntary and involuntary; (III) the arguments against atheism, and against the opinion that the Gods have no care of human affairs; (IV) the remarks upon retail trade; (V) the institution of the Nocturnal Council.
I. A weak point in the Laws of Plato is the amount of inquisition into private life which is to be made by the rulers. The magistrate is always watching and waylaying the citizens. He is constantly to receive information against improprieties of life. Plato does not seem to be aware that espionage can only have a negative effect. He has not yet discovered the boundary line which parts the domain of law from that of morality or social life. Men will not tell of one another; nor will he ever be the most honoured citizen, who gives the most frequent information about offenders to the magistrates (V 730 D, E).
As in some writers of fiction, so also in philosophers, we may observe the effect of age. Plato becomes more conservative as he grows older, and he would govern the world entirely by men like himself, who are above fifty years of age (compare VI 755 A); for in them he hopes to find a principle of stability. He does not remark that, in destroying the freedom he is destroying also the life of the State. In reducing all the citizens to rule and measure, he would have been depriving the Magnesian colony of those great men “whose acquaintance is beyond all price” (XII 951 B); and he would have found that in the worst-governed Hellenic State, there was more of a carriere ouverte for extraordinary genius and virtue than in his own.
Plato has an evident dislike of the Athenian dicasteries; he prefers a few judges who take a leading part in the conduct of trials to a great number who only listen in silence (VI 766 D; cf. also IX 855 D). He allows of two appeals—in each case however with an increase of the penalty (XII 956). Modern jurists would disapprove of the redress of injustice being purchased only at an increasing risk; though indirectly the burden of legal expenses, which seems to have been little felt among the Athenians, has a similar effect. The love of litigation, which is a remnant of barbarism quite as much as a corruption of civilization, and was innate in the Athenian people, is diminished in the new state by the imposition of severe penalties (XI 938). If persevered in, it is to be punished with death.
In the Laws murder and homicide besides being crimes, are also pollutions. Regarded from this point of view, the estimate of such offences is apt to depend on accidental circumstances, such as the shedding of blood, and not on the real guilt of the offender or the injury done to society. They are measured by the horror which they arouse in a barbarous age. For there is a superstition in law as well as in religion, and the feelings of a primitive age have a traditional hold on the mass of the people. On the other hand, Plato is innocent of the barbarity which would visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, and he is quite aware that punishment has an eye to the future, and not to the past (IX 854 D and following). Compared with that of most European nations in the last century his penal code, though sometimes capricious, is reasonable and humane.
A defect in Plato’s criminal jurisprudence is his remission of the punishment when the homicide has obtained the forgiveness of the murdered person (IX 869 E); as if crime were a personal affair between individuals, and not an offence against the State. There is a ridiculous disproportion in his punishments. Because a slave may fairly receive a blow for stealing one fig or one bunch of grapes, or a tradesman for selling adulterated goods to the value of one drachma, it is rather hard upon the slave that he should receive as many blows as he has taken grapes or figs (VIII 845 A), or upon the tradesman who has sold adulterated goods to the value of a thousand drachmas that he should receive a thousand blows (XI 917).
II. But before punishment can be inflicted at all, the legislator must determine the nature of the voluntary and involuntary. The great question of the freedom of the will, which in modern times has been worn threadbare with purely abstract discussion, was approached both by Plato and Aristotle—first, from the judicial; secondly, from the sophistical point of view. They were puzzled by the degrees and kinds of crime; they observed also that the law only punished hurts which are inflicted by a voluntary agent on an involuntary patient.
In attempting to distinguish between hurt and injury (IX 859 and following; compare also 870), Plato says that mere hurt is not injury; but that a benefit when done in a wrong spirit may sometimes injure, e.g. when conferred without regard to right and wrong, or to the good or evil consequences which may follow. He means to say that the good or evil disposition of the
