Responsibility and Penality in the Laws of Plato

Eli Friedland, Political Science, McGill University, Montréal February 2011

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts. © Eli Friedland, February 2011

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À ma femme Natalie, quoniam amor quoque non verbum sed vita est.

1

Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple- space, to the old ineradicable rhythm… – William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

La lettre écrite m’a enseigné à écouter la voix humaine, tout comme les grandes attitudes immobiles des statues m’ont appris à apprecier les gestes. Par contre, et dans la suite, la vie m’a éclairci les livres. – Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d’Hadrien

2

Table of Contents Abstract / Résumé ...... 4 Introduction / Acknowledgements...... 5 Chapter 1: Lawgivers ...... 9 Chapter 2: De l’homme et du citoyen ...... 38 Chapter 3: Penality and Revenge...... 58 Conclusion ...... 74 Appendix 1: Megillos and the gods...... 77 Appendix 2: The Laws and Homer...... 79 Bibliography ...... 82

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Abstract

This thesis examines Plato’s Laws, offering a fresh consideration of the important differences between its three characters. These differences point to a key tension between the singular voice of law proper, and the multiple voices of Plato’s philosophical project within the law. In turn, this tension provides both the opportunity and quandaries for that project, whose principle aim is the development of authentic human responsibility. This emerges especially in the penal law outlined in Book 9, which must provide for the punishment of criminals despite being grounded in the Athenian Stranger’s maxim, that “no one is willingly unjust.”

Résumé

Cette thèse examine Les Lois de Platon, offrant une nouvelle perspective sur l’importance des différences entre les trois personnages. Ces différences pointent à une tension clé entre la voix singulière de la loi à proprement parler, et les voix multiples du projet philosophique de Platon à l’intérieur de la loi. À son tour, cette tension fournit non seulement l’opportunité mais aussi les dilemmes pour ce projet, qui a pour but principal le développement de la responsabilité humaine authentique. Ceci se dégage particulièrement dans le droit pénal délinéé au Livre 9, qui doit prévoir la punition des criminels malgré le fait d’être ancré dans la maxime de l’Athénien, que « personne n’est volontairement injuste ».

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Introduction

Very often, Plato’s Laws are read as his definitive prescription for the best possible (i.e. practical) system of laws – a system which Plato felt could and should remain unaltered for all time (e.g. Klosko 1988, 82-3; Nightingale 1999, 118-122 and

1993, 290-300; Morrow 1960, 570-1). But to read them in this way is to mistake the rhetoric that Plato believed necessary for law to speak with vis-à-vis its citizen body as a whole, for the purposes of laws as a whole. And this is to miss the relevance that the

Laws has had for millennia, and in particular its relevance for politics today. In fact, Plato begins by very carefully sowing the seeds of doubt about any permanence in any law or political order, though it is important that these seeds are designed to be visible only to a very careful and interested reader. Which is to say that Plato wisely thought that laws in general should only be changed and/or revitalized by careful and interested people – an

“elitism” that seems perfectly reasonable.

This thesis is devoted to drawing out what the author takes to be the most important political and philosophical project of the Laws, namely, human responsibility.

Such a seemingly banal topic may seem unworthy of such serious treatment, but I believe

Plato’s consideration of responsibility to be far more profound than is generally realized, and in fact more radically transformative than most modern readers could possibly imagine. I will proceed by three stages, each with a corresponding chapter.

The first chapter, “Lawgivers,” is a commentary on the opening of the Laws, focused particularly on the character of Megillos. Because I read this character from a highly unorthodox point of view, from which I see the Spartan interlocutor as a most acute and insightful human being, perhaps even a philosopher, the first chapter is a very

5 close commentary on the first book of the Laws. In it, I attempt to show that Megillos is not only extremely psychologically astute, but also that his participation in the opening conversation is the most crucial element that allows that conversation to proceed to begin with. Even – and especially – his apparent hostility toward the Stranger is geared toward facilitating the introduction of what would otherwise remain inadmissible topics for discussion, not to speak of serious reflection.

In the second chapter, “De l’homme et du citoyen,” I discuss the implications of the turn away from the responsibility of the gods and lawgiver, in Book 5, toward the responsibility of the individual. This individual responsibility, moreover, comes to light as a more profound and comprehensive sense of responsibility than is ordinarily recognized, or acceptable. I suggest as well that this particular project of developing such responsibility is a fundamental part of our heritage, the tools for which we are no longer in a position to choose to refuse if we wanted to.

In the third chapter, “Penality and Revenge,” I address the penal code as discussed by the Stranger in Book 9 of the Laws. By examining the rhetorical structure of the argument there, I suggest that the educational purpose of the penal laws is to inaugurate a centuries-long project of crafting something that resembles human will – which does not yet exist, but is politically necessary to assume as a legal “image.” The tension between the Socratic insight, that “no one is willingly unjust,” and the criminal law that insists the opposite, is the mechanism by which the Stranger makes the image of “voluntary” mimetically tempting.

Finally, I conclude by reflecting on why the Stranger’s (and Plato’s) project requires a “safeguard.” Why is it so important that Megillos be present, and be who he is?

6 Why is that project doomed without him? The volatilities (particularly the human desire for revenge) that the Stranger is attempting to transfigure must be appealed to as they are now – but this opens on to the danger that those volatilities will appropriate the very means with which that attempt is working. And this appropriation is the rule, not the exception: without the Megillos sort, Kleinias will always have his way.

***

I wish to deeply thank my thesis supervisor, Christina Tarnopolsky, for all of her extremely insightful comments, encouragement, and conversations during the unfolding of this project. I could not have brought my thesis to fruition without her, and I am proud to be her student and her friend. I am very grateful as well to my first Plato teacher, Horst

Hutter, who has been an inspiration and constant source of wisdom for me for many years. I wish also to thank Mark Antaki, the external reader and evaluator of my thesis, whose comments were invaluable, and whose thoughtful reflections on the many quandaries of philosophy and the philosophic life have both engaged and provoked my own reflections thereon. I am immensely grateful as well to, and for, my mother, Joan, who has always shown me that the life based on understanding others with compassion, is fundamental to understanding oneself at all. To my brothers and sisters, nieces and nephew, a heartfelt and joyful thank-you for all that you have given, and continue to give me. Charlotte et Léo, vous êtes des lumières brillantes dans ma vie, et vous me montrez chaque jour qu’il n’ y a rien plus precieux que la merveille. Merci beaucoup mes potes!

Finally, and above all, I thank and am grateful for my wife, Natalie, who is not only my

7 wife, but the best friend I could ever ask for, and who has, moreover, taught me more about life (and therefore about Plato) than I could ever hope to pass on. May what I have written be worthy of our life together, Natalie.

This thesis was completed with the generous funding of the Social Sciences and

Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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Chapter 1: Lawgivers

καλον γαρ και τοις γερουσι µανθανειν σοφα. - ancient Greek proverb

The purpose of this chapter is to carefully examine the character of Megillos in

Plato’s Laws, as he appears from the outset. There is, so far as I know, no such examination currently available, and the overwhelming neglect of this aspect of the work makes access to the complexities of the dialogue as a whole somewhat difficult. The commentary that follows does, hopefully, partially illustrate why this is so.

I would stress at the outset that this chapter is a commentary, which necessarily presupposes that the Laws themselves are also engaged by the reader. This is a traditional and, I think, just presupposition that goes back at least to Aristotle’s Politics, which likewise cannot be truly read without deeply confronting the Laws. As I will try to illustrate, the Laws is so profoundly rich and inexhaustible that to attempt to provide

Beispiel at every turn would require several volumes for each of its twelve Books (and would still be incomplete). When discussing a particular passage, I have, as much as possible, cited references to passages which shed light on it from elsewhere in Plato’s book (or his oeuvre as a whole), whether through affinity, contradiction, or otherwise.

These are very important, and I must beg my reader to refer to them when I do.

My commentary begins with two principles in mind. The first is that the two

Dorian characters, Kleinias and Megillos, should not be homogenized unless the dialogue itself reveals otherwise. The second is that it should not be assumed at the outset that

Megillos is the “slower” of the two. As I will try to show, by attending carefully to the opening of the text, the commonly asserted opposing positions to these principles only have any purchase if they are imported by the reader from the outset. Plato himself has

9 crafted the Dorians as very different indeed, and Megillos reveals himself – subtly – to be remarkably thoughtful and astute. That this is not immediately apparent would seem to be part of the deliberately difficult work which Plato designed his dialogues to be. In both the Republic and the Laws, a “longer road” not taken by the characters within the dialogue is mentioned (Republic 435d, 504b; Laws 683b and cf. 727a). Yet one could say that this longer road is in fact accessible in those dialogues, provided that their readers transform them (and themselves) into arduous paths of reflection and self-reflection.

***

To begin with, we should ask: on what grounds is it so “naturally” assumed that

Megillos and Kleinias have essentially the same aptitudes, or that Megillos is the more traditional, less acute interlocutor among the two Dorians – if not an outright ignoramus

(an exception to this is Whitaker [2004, 15 and 20n18], who briefly notes that Megillos seems to be the more “sophisticated” interlocutor [based on 680c-d, 804b, and 842a]. But he makes nothing of this, and otherwise homogenizes the two Dorians’ views)?

Unfortunately for the sake of the argument, this assumption is most often simply undefended (cf. England 1921, vol. I, 232-3; Morrow 1960, 32; Stalley 1983, 24, 31 &

174; Clark 2003, 6, 81 & 86; Görgemanns 1960, 79 & 100).1 Pangle (1988, 430-3), while not approaching a full analysis, is certainly more expansive and articulate than most, but in relegating Megillos to the position of “pedestrian check” and “typical citizen of the future regime,” he misses the subtleties of his character as shown in Book 1.2 As I will try

1 In the eleven essays, by eleven different authors, in the recent Plato’s Laws: A Critical Guide (Bobonich ed., Cambridge 2010), I find not a single reference to Megillos that is not about “Kleinias and Megillos” as a homogenized pair (other than references to their respective home cities). 2 For example (ibid, 394-5), while he notes that, in Book 1, the Stranger deliberately provokes Megillos’ “attack on Athens” (636a-637b), he neglects to mention that Megillos then turns around and deliberately provokes, in the same manner, the Stranger’s attack on Sparta (see 637b).

10 to show, what Pangle (ibid, 394-5) interprets as weak argumentation that “has a crude rhetorical effectiveness” on Megillos’ part, is in fact much more sophisticated than it appears. And first impressions matter.

The most obvious probable reason for this modern assumption, however, is

Megillos’ quantitatively limited role in the discussion of the Laws (thus Nightingale

1993, 294). He is overshadowed by Kleinias’ more vocal participation, and is seen as incapable of following the unfolding argument. But this is ultimately to confuse quantity of discourse with quality of discourse – to say nothing of the fact that it does nothing to explain what he, as a Spartan, is doing there. If Megillos is simply meant to represent the more ignorant and obstinate aspect of traditionalism (and this common aspect of every

“ism” must not be ignored), why does Plato assign this role to a Spartan, rather than a

Cretan? It would be easy to say that a Spartan statesman would naturally be present, given that Spartan colonists will be welcomed to the new city (707e-708a),3 and that previous Spartan colonies had abandoned Spartan ways (637b; cf. Xenophon, Lac. Pol.

14; Thucydides 1.77.6). But while this is a possible conceit for having a Spartan present,4

3 References to Stephanus pagination without a dialogue will always be to the Laws. All other references will contain the dialogue’s name. 4 Though compare 702b4-c2, which suggests that Kleinias had thought the new colony a secret until that point. It is certainly not impossible that the seemingly amazing coincidence of this meeting of three old men is just that, a complete coincidence. Plato was under no illusion about what a huge amount of pure good fortune would be required for the kairos (critical moment of opportunity) necessary to even allow the possibility of such a political founding as is discussed in the Laws (cf. 710c7-d3 and e7-9; Republic 473c11-e4, especially the word sumpesêi at d2). However, Megillos at least is almost certainly in Crete in an official capacity. Spartans were – unlike Athenians – only allowed to travel abroad on official missions (Plutarch, Lycurgus 27.3; Xenophon, Lac. Pol. 14; Herodotus 1.67-8). It is possible that Kleinias has been led to believe that the new colony is a secret, by the powers that be in Knossos, who nevertheless solicited help from Sparta and/or Athens. It is, however, impossible to conclude anything about this coincidence with certainty – surely a deliberate choice on Plato’s part. It should be noted, however, that what few hints there are concerning prior conversations on the interlocutors’ parts, indicate only that the Stranger and Megillos have some previous knowledge about or experience with each other and Kleinias (though these hints do not exclude such knowledge or experience on Kleinias’ part). The Stranger knows Kleinias’ name, and that he is from Knossos (629c3), Megillos

11 it does not explain why that Spartan must necessarily be closed-minded or slow to learn

(cf. Megillos’ statements regarding his knowledge of poetry at 680d1 with Thucydides

1.84.1-4). If the Spartans, with these concerns in mind, had wished to send a rigid traditionalist, why did they send the one person in Lacedaimonia who was officially recognized as a friend of Athens (642b-d)?

Further to this point, it should be noted that Spartans, as well as others from the

Peloponnese, are only to be welcomed to the colony (708a4-5) – they are not required in order to found it. Kleinias is under no obligation to appease Megillos with the regime or laws of that colony, because he does not require his support. Had Plato wanted to imply a necessity for such appeasement, he could easily have made the third character another

Cretan, or made the new colony a joint Cretan/Spartan venture. It is telling that he pointedly did neither. Should he want to, Kleinias can tell Megillos, as he can the

Athenian, to take a different sort of hike than the one they are taking, at any point in the conversation. But of course, he never does. Kleinias’ motivations are his own, and if he defers to what he sees as Megillos’ traditionalism, it is because he is so inclined. That is, this tells the reader something about Kleinias’ character, not necessarily about Megillos’.

It should be noted as well that Plato’s audience would by no means necessarily have taken Megillos’ “laconic” way of speaking (and especially not speaking) as evidence of a slower intellect. In fact, the careful listening that it implied, together with the thought and attention involved in expressing oneself well with an extreme economy of words, suggested just the opposite to many in that audience – hence the proverbial

“Laconic wit,” or, as Socrates himself elsewhere discusses, Laconic philosophy

knows himself to be the eldest of the three (712c8), and the Stranger knows himself to be the youngest (892d7).

12 (Protagoras 342a-343b;5 cf. also the “laconic” aphorism [attributed to Protagoras] around which the entire Theaetetus is based – 152a2-4). And, aside from the modern (especially academic) valorization of gaining attention at every opportunity (which Plato would have called, and did call, “love of honor” [philotimia]), it is unclear why this should not to this day be a reasonable prima facie expectation. It is still less clear why the absence of desire for attention, coupled with the presence of careful listening, should prima facie indicate ignorance. Socrates himself, as Plato creates him, is often content to say virtually nothing, and to exclusively listen (cf. Timaeus and Cleitophon in their entireties); or to respond only because it is pointedly demanded of him (Hippias Minor 363a); and would have happily been absent from a discussion that clearly fascinated everyone else involved, had he not been specifically implored to participate (consider the inordinate length of this “persuasion” at the outset of the Laches, 178a-181c). Plato does not seem to have had a love of love of honor.6

So quantity of speech, at least within the context of the Platonic dialogues, does not stand as a criterion for judging the worth or impact thereof.7 Nor does eagerness to speak (cf. Crito 49d; Protagoras 357e and context; Hipparchus 225b-c; Alcibiades I

134c), or city of origin (Laws 951b). What is said (and not said – cf. Hippias Minor 369d and Lampert 2002, 244), to whom, how, and when, would seem to be the only criteria that the internal structures of the dialogues allow. It is these aspects of each thing said

5 Anticipating a little, one could well say that this passage contains a perfect description of Megillos in the Laws. The famous Socratic “irony” in the Protagoras is Platonic irony in the Laws. 6 Sic. 7 From the beginning of Greek literature, the potential weight of a single, quantitatively insignificant, statement has been evident. Consider the Iliad 1.184-7, and Odyssey 9.502-5. Without these lines, neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey exists.

13 within them that allow the reader to think about why it is said (or not said). So it is to these aspects that we must attend in the Laws.8

Commentary 624a1-643a7

As has been frequently noted, the first word of the Laws is “god” (theos) (Strauss

1975, 3; Pangle 1976, 1059; Stalley 1983, 166). Given its place, the immediate evocation for an Athenian listener would be Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which also opens with this word

(Ag. 1, though importantly there in the plural - theous), and which also relates the story of what can only be described as a political sea-change. The auspices under which such changes can occur are, Plato suggests, always bound up in piety.

The question for which this is the first word is posed by an unnamed Athenian

Stranger to Kleinias, a Cretan, and Megillos, a Spartan: “[A] god or some human being,

Strangers, has taken the responsibility (in the sense of credit or blame – aitian) for setting down your laws?” (624a12)9

8 This is an approach very much current in modern Canadian law as well. As Chief Justice McLachlin wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court in a recent Income Tax Act case: “The first part of the inquiry under s. 245(4) requires the court to look beyond the mere text of the provisions and undertake a contextual and purposive approach to interpretation in order to find meaning that harmonizes the wording, object, spirit and purpose of the provisions of the Income Tax Act. There is nothing novel in this. Even where the meaning of particular provisions may not appear to be ambiguous at first glance, statutory context and purpose may reveal or resolve latent ambiguities. ‘After all, language can never be interpreted independently of its context, and legislative purpose is part of the context. It would seem to follow that consideration of legislative purpose may not only resolve patent ambiguity, but may, on occasion, reveal ambiguity in apparently plain language.’ See P.W. Hogg and J.E. Magee, Principles of Canadian Income Tax Law (4th ed. 2002), at p. 563. In order to reveal and resolve any latent ambiguities in the meaning of provisions of the Income Tax Act, the courts must undertake a unified textual, contextual and purposive approach to statutory interpretation” (2005 SCC 54, at 47). 9 Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this essay are my own (from Burnet’s edition of Platonis Opera, in 5 vols, Oxford). I do not in any way intend my commentary to supplant reading the Laws itself, and indeed, without such reading my commentary will be worthless. To my knowledge, the best and only acceptable English translation of the Laws is Pangle’s (1988 [first published 1980]), by a very wide margin (pace Stalley 1983, 11-12, who seems to think that his frankly nasty dismissal thereof requires no supporting examples or argumentation).

14 However, the Greek has an ambiguity to it, an ambiguity also exploited by Plato in the first line of the Minos, one of the companion dialogues of (and in many ways the introduction to) the Laws. Because the second person plural dative pronoun humin (in the

Minos, the first person hêmin) can be taken as either possessive or as indicating interest, the sentence might also be translated: “A god or some human, for you (i.e. according to you), strangers, is responsible for setting down the laws?” Taken in this sense, the

Stranger is asking for the personal opinions of Kleinias and Megillos about laws in general, not – or not only – what the Cretans and Lacedaimonians believe in general about their own laws.10 The Cretans and Lacedaimonians seem to believe that a god is ultimately responsible for their laws. But does Kleinias himself believe this? Does

Megillos?

The ambiguity of this sentence is crucial, and sets the tone for the rest of the

Laws. In the very act of establishing his piety as a whole, the Stranger is also questioning piety, and specifically the piety of his interlocutors (not to mention asking the Euthyphro question – what is piety?).11 And the subtle way in which he poses his question conceals its subversive aspect: only if Kleinias or Megillos is already questioning the veracity of his own inculcated religious foundations, will either of them hear the question as a personal one (the same, perhaps, is true of Plato’s readers – there is perhaps a reason that

10 The first line of the Minos (313a1), Socrates’ question for his unnamed comrade, is: ho nomos hêmin ti estin; - “What is law, for us?” but also: “What is our law?” (Cf. Strauss 1968, 65-6.) The author of the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Peri Dikaiou (“On Justice”) demonstrates an understanding of Plato’s deliberate exploitation of this ambiguity, by mimicking it in the first line his Socrates speaks, which questions what “the just” is – and whether it is worth talking about (372a1). 11 Cf. the order of the (pseudo?)-Platonic Definitions (or Boundaries) 411a1-4 – not all spheres of thought begin with “god.”

15 this ambiguity has not been explored in 20th century literature on the Laws).12 Otherwise, the first and main sense will be the only audible one.

Kleinias takes the Stranger’s question in the first and main sense, and responds with the “most just” answer: “[A] god, Stranger, [a] god” (624a3). Of course, “most just” and “most true” are not identical (cf. 630d9, 664c1, and Strauss 1975, 3),13 but Kleinias’ interest at this point is the just. It remains to be seen whether that interest will, or can, advert to the true; or whether for Kleinias the just is and remains identical with, if not higher than, the true. What is more, the very basis upon which Kleinias has built his sense of justice (cf. 680e1-5) is about to become the seriously contended topic of the rest of

Book 1 (and beyond), and his fondness for expressing his opinions in superlatives will meet gentle but firm reproof (cf. for example 627d5, which we will have cause to consider shortly).

Such is our introduction to Kleinias.

“Among us,” he continues, “it is Zeus, among the Lacedaimonians, where this man is from, I believe they say it is Apollo. Isn’t that so?” (624a3-5). This brings the

Spartan, Megillos, into the conversation, who responds in a most Spartan style: “Yes.”

Importantly, Megillos’ response does not necessarily reveal anything about what he believes personally, but affirms only what the Lacedaimonians believe in general – in the Platonic terms of the dialogue, what “the many” (hoi polloi) Lacedaimonians believe

12 England (1921, vol. 1, 197), in his immense and practically authoritative commentary on the Laws, does not even mention this ambiguity. 13 I will frequently cite Strauss’ The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws (1975), as does any serious writer on the Laws since this “commentary’s” publication. It should therefore be noted from the outset that simply reading a quoted page number from this work will often reveal little if anything in the first encounter. Strauss is a very careful writer, and he deliberately mimics Plato in his commentary on Plato (like many great commentators – e.g. Aristotle, Cicero, Al-Farabi, Maimonides). Very, very often, only critical reflection on the Laws itself, coupled with critical reflection on Strauss’ commentary, will allow my citations to make any tolerable sense. But I assure my reader that they do make such sense.

16 (cf. Herodotus 1.65). This is not an accident, as Plato will demonstrate almost immediately (633b1-2 and 5). When Kleinias brings Megillos into the conversation again

– mere moments later – this time asking whether the latter supports him in his belief that any properly governed city must be primarily ordered toward defeating others in war

(626b-c), Megillos once again answers only with what the Lacedaimonians believe, or are supposed to believe, in general: “How else would any Lacedaimonian answer, you divine man?” (626c4). Particularly given that he has just demonstrated a proverbially Spartan economy of words,14 and that this very question draws attention to how (pôs) a Spartan would respond (as distinct from simply what (ti) he would say in response), this is not an unequivocal Yes. That is, “any Lacedaimonian” would say either Yes or No (mostly the former), and not answer with what is, for a Spartan, such a verbose reply. Megillos’ carefully worded response is a riddle whose surface seems to say Yes – if Yes is, as it is for Kleinias, the desired and expected response – but whose solution suggests hesitation at least. And so he can at one and the same time show Kleinias the political support he has demanded, and the Stranger his hesitation to aver that what they are discussing is in fact true. Put another way, Megillos speaks in such a way as to give the more just answer to the former, while at the same time giving a more true answer to the latter.15

Thus with the first two times he speaks, Megillos demonstrates his own capacity and willingness to speak differently to the Stranger than to Kleinias, even as he pays deference to the latter, and indeed with the very words with which he does so. He speaks, in other words, in the same manner that the Stranger did in the opening question of the

14 For the proverbial “Laconic” style of minimal speech, see 641e6-7, 721e4-5; Protagoras 342e; Herodotus 3.46.1-2. 15 The Scholiast calls the style of Megillos’ reply here “Laconic” (England 1921, vol. I, 200). Since it is obviously not the mere brevity of speech he is referring to (cf. 624a6, which required no such comment), it would seem to be the complexity within that brevity to which he gestures.

17 Laws. Did Megillos perhaps hear the second, more subversive, sense of that initial question, the sense that Kleinias missed?

Stepping back a moment, between these two first times that Megillos speaks,

Kleinias had demonstrated both an ignorance of Homer, and a reluctance (for now) to admit it. Why does this matter – and why does the Stranger so abruptly test his knowledge?

It matters because behind the myth of Minos the lawgiver that the Stranger cites to Kleinias as being of Homeric origin (624a7-b3), lies a curiosity that is to the highest degree pertinent to everything that is to follow, and striking to anyone who actually knows the Homeric epics. That it is not striking at all to Kleinias tacitly demonstrates that he does not in fact know these epics. That curiosity is this: Homer in fact does not say, as the Stranger says he does, that Minos received oracles from his father (i.e. Zeus) every eight16 years when they were together (sunousian), and used those oracles to guide the laws he gave to the Cretan cities. This is the traditional Cretan myth, but Homer in fact says almost nothing of the sort. Homer does have his Odysseus say – in the midst, it should be noted, of a long and convoluted lie – that “Minos reigned, [who] at nine years old was great Zeus’ beloved friend (oaristês)” (Od. 19.178-9). As Benardete (2000, 5-7) points out, when in the Minos Socrates tries to defend the same version of the myth that the Stranger presents here, he is forced to counter the prevailing, Ionian (Homer was an

Ionian Greek), understanding of these lines, which was that Minos was Zeus’ cupbearer, fellow drinker, and sexual plaything at a symposium when he was nine years old (Minos

16 Literally, “every ninth year,” but the Greeks counted inclusively, so in modern English this means every eight years.

18 319b-320b, especially 319e5-6).17 If those listening to the Stranger know their Homer and his reception, the themes of symposia and paiderasteia – soon to become major subjects of debate – are already evoked and adumbrated here. Kleinias, as he later makes clear explicitly, knows little about Homer (680c2-5). Megillos, on the other hand, will stress that he himself is quite familiar with his poems (680c6-7).18 As we will see, Megillos is in general strangely eager to assure the Stranger of his deep knowledge of poetry (cf.

Benardete 2000, 99). For him and the Stranger, though not for Kleinias, the context of the

Homeric references employed will be accessible, though unspoken, as will the alterations and absences in the Stranger’s use thereof, and all of these will form part of their tacit communication.

The third time Megillos speaks (627d6-7) is, as Strauss notes (1975, 5) “his first spontaneous utterance.” But Strauss calling this a demonstration of Megillos’ agreement with what the Stranger has said is, while not wrong per se, misleading.19 In order to understand why this is so, we must note two key aspects of that utterance: 1) it is not only unsolicited, but also the first time Megillos speaks explicitly for himself (hôs ge emoi sundokein); and 2) his “agreement” with the Stranger is highly qualified by the fact that it is phrased as a disagreement with Kleinias’ wholehearted agreement therewith. Just before Megillos speaks, Kleinias had agreed with the Stranger that what the latter had said was true – in fact, truest (alêthestata – 627d5). Megillos agrees only that it was

“kalôs men oun” – “fine (or noble, or beautiful) at any rate.” Whatever agreement with

17 It should be noted that nine years of age is by no means young for drinking wine in ancient Greece. Boys and girls were given wine to drink at some religious festivals, such as the Choës, at the age of three (Burkert 1983, 221n27). 18 He will also, at this point, subtly tell the Stranger that the latter’s “Laconizing” of Homer was not lost on him. Homer, he says, wrote not of a Laconic, but of an Ionian way of life (680c7-d3). Which is to say that he caught the Stranger’s evocation of the symposium at the outset of their conversation. 19 Amicus Strauss, sed magis amica veritas.

19 the Stranger is here evinced, it has been pointedly downgraded from agreement that what he said was the truest possible thing.

What Megillos is agreeing is kalôs, but not true, is the following statement by the

Stranger (627d1-4): “we aren’t examining now the speech of the many as regards the gracefulness (euschêmosunês) and ungracefulness (aschêmosunês) of words, but as regards whatever correctness and error in the laws that might be there by nature” (cf. the very important resonances this whole passage has with 654e3-7, noting both the use of the word schêma there, and the virtually opposite sense the passage has to the present one). The reason this is kalôs, but not true, is that euschêmosunês literally means

“carefully formed” and its negative means “unformed” (i.e. without design). Since

Megillos has been, up to this point, using exclusively the “speech of the many,” and since he has quite precisely been very carefully forming these speeches, he does not agree that this is true, much less truest. What the Stranger’s statement amounts to is asking, very subtly, whether his interlocutors were deliberately speaking carefully – whether, that is, the ambiguities are intentional. Kleinias’ answer, because he does not even hear that there is a question, amounts to “No.” Megillos’ answer means “Yes.”

It should be noted as well that this is the first appearance of the root for the word

“true” (alêthês) in the Laws. As earlier with “just” (dikaios – 624a3 and b5) and “good”

(agathos – 625b5, 626e3), Kleinias is the first to use this term – and once again in the superlative. Kleinias seems very comfortable with his knowledge of what these words mean; he is sure of his knowledge. But is sureness of knowledge, knowledge? Is

“political courage,” as Socrates calls it in the Republic (430c2), courage properly so called (Republic 430c4-6; Laws 708d6-7)? What kind of knowledge is a knowledge that

20 stops questioning itself, and comes to rest in certainty and satisfaction (Ion 532b-533c,

542b)? It is on Kleinias’ terms that the reader is introduced to the key themes of justice, truth, and the good, in the Laws. But it seems unwise to grant that he thereby knows what these words mean, beyond their expression of a place of comfortable and unquestioning repose of thought. The words used by most people and those used by fewer are the same.

But they can mean very different things (cf. Hobbes, Leviathan 6.16-17 with R&C 2

[Curley, ed.]; 1994, 28 & 489).20 The continuous struggle within each person, which

Kleinias is sure of (626d) – and his awareness of this is an obvious surprise to the

Stranger (626e) – is not the same struggle that the Stranger knows to be constitutive of what a person is (644c-d).

Returning to Megillos, it is important that he has certainly not overtly distanced himself, so far, from the opinions of the “many” Lacedaimonians which he has related.

But nor has he overtly identified with those opinions. In his next major exchange21 – his

20 Note that in chapter 6, Hobbes writes of what are “Commonly Called the Passions, and the Speeches by Which They are Expressed” (ibid, 27; my emphases), and it is under this rubric that “courage” is defined as “Aversion with opinion of hurt from the object, [i.e.] FEAR,” coupled with “hope of avoiding that hurt by resistance” (ibid, 30). In R&C 2, he writes of courage differently: “courage (by which I mean the contempt of wounds and violent death)” (my underlining; ibid, 489). The difference between what is said by many, and what I say, is still a major one for Hobbes.

21 A very brief but important exchange intervenes before this one, at 629b. The Stranger, after citing the Athenian cum Spartan poet Tyrtaeus (accurately in his direct quotation, slightly modified in his paraphrase thereafter), notes that Kleinias has “perhaps heard of” (akêkoas pou) this poem (cf. 680c2-5), whereas Megillos is, the Stranger believes, “surfeited (diakorês) with them” (629b3-5). Megillos assures him: “Entirely so” (panu men oun). Has Megillos been acquainted with the poetry of Theognis as well (cf. 680c6), who was apparently well received in Sparta shortly before the Persian Wars (Theognis, Elegies 783-8), and, as Pangle (1988, 514-5n24) notes, copied or paraphrased, in some of his own poems, the poetry of Tyrtaeus, including the one just quoted by the Stranger (citing Theognis, Elegies 935-8 and 1003- 6)? Is he perhaps aware that the lines the Stranger immediately quotes from that poet are bracketed in the full poem by lines “emphasiz[ing] how few men are trustworthy and hence how important secrecy and deception are, even with some of one’s own friends” (Pangle 1988, ibid)? It is a significant possibility that he does. Moreover, if both Megillos and the Stranger are “entirely” versed in the poetry of Theognis in general (cf. 810e10-811a1 for what the Stranger means by “surfeited” with poetry), then the later introduction by Megillos of “drinking parties” (637a-b), though it is voiced as criticism, might well be deliberate collusion with the Stranger’s efforts; i.e. an opening of a subject that can only get a foothold in the conversation by being attacked and subsequently defended. Theognis himself (Elegies 467-96) wrote a

21 first as primary interlocutor – with the Stranger (633a-d), he will for the first time explicitly so identify (with the emphatic egôge at 633b1). The subject is the whole of virtue, as seen by the original Spartan lawgiver. We must note that at the outset of this exchange it is not how the laws laid down by Lycurgus actually play out in practice, but what his intention was with these laws (633a5, b2, 636a4-b1). What is significant in

Megillos’ list of institutionalized practices in Sparta is that while he seems to stress only the aspects thereof that involve endurance of suffering, he in fact first mentions hunting outside of this preoccupation (633b1-2 – note that Megillos here emphatically speaks for himself [egôge] as well as his countrymen). And of all the examples he gives, it is the only activity for which he describes no corresponding goal. The conversation proceeds by three stages:

1) The Stranger asks first whether “we said (phamen)22 that the common meals and

gymnastics were invented/discovered (exêurêsthai)23 by the lawgiver for [the

purpose of] war?” (633a4-5; note that he has dropped the “weapons” mentioned at poem both criticizing symposia, and advocating the lessons of moderation available within them – “a man who can drink wine and still control himself is invincible,” he writes (lines 491-2). And Megillos’ extended participation in the conversation as the topic of symposia is introduced is surely remarkable (almost four full Stephanus pages: 636a-639d. He will not speak at such length again until Book 3). Regardless of such a conjecture, though, it is important to note the increasing familiarity and warmth in the language used by the Stranger with Megillos. Both Kleinias and Megillos are Doric Greeks, but whereas with his comment to the former the Stranger had remained within the Attic dialect (akêkoas – see above), with the latter he here – the first time he directly engages Megillos alone – uses a Doric inflection (diakorês, as opposed to diakoros) (Benardete [2000, 40-1] is therefore incorrect that 642c is the first example of a Dorism other than ô theie at 626c6 [cf. England,1921, vol. I, 200 on this word – it is a Doric epithet expressed in Athenian dialect], though he is entirely correct to stress the implications for the Laws of dialectal difference in general, and his commentary thereof should be read with care. However, he is also incorrect that 642c2-3 “seems to be exclusively Laconic” – he is certainly correct that it is not common Attic usage, but its pedigree is Homeric, not Laconic [cf. Iliad 9.249-50; Odyssey 20.314 and 23.56]; and regardless, Megillos is quoting directly what he heard the “many” say to him in Sparta – a “Laconism” is therefore to be expected – and moreover relates it in the Athenian dialect [n.b. errexe, not erreze]). This may seem a slight point, but it is diplomatically significant. Even today, a diplomat speaking in (or at least showing some knowledge of) the language or dialect of her foreign counterpart, with that counterpart, thereby demonstrates a friendliness and interest that can be invaluable to their interactions (cf. Megillos’ remarks at 642c5-6 and 641c8). 22 The verb phêmi does not mean “to agree,” only “to say.” To agree would be sumphêmi. 23 Cf. the Greek of Minos 315a4 and Herodotus 1.94.2-4.

22 625c7-e2). Megillos agrees, though he had not, as we have seen, added his voice

to this assertion (nor had the Stranger). The Stranger then asks what other

“devices” the lawgiver had invented, in rank order (after these two), and with a

view toward the whole of virtue – i.e. not only war.

2) At this point Megillos makes clear that when he had earlier declined to

specifically add his own voice to what the “Lacedaimonians” say, this was

purposeful (this will become even more clear at 636a2-3). He does so by now

specifically adding his own voice to what the Lacedaimonians say. “Thirdly, I

(egôge) and any Lacedaimonian would say that he discovered (êure) hunting”

(633b1-2). While it is tempting to hear this, within the broader conversation, as

Megillos mentioning just another means to war and education in suffering, he has

precisely isolated it from both. The fourth, distinct group of practices that he will

immediately talk about have to do with suffering hardships. The first two were

“said” to have been focused on war, but the Stranger explicitly asked Megillos

what practices other than those focused on war had been instituted by the

lawgiver (thus the fourth group too is, in Megillos’ opinion, not merely looking

toward war). Moreover, Megillos does not himself say what hunting was designed

to promote, nor does he link it only (or at all) with the Spartan initiation hunting

ritual.24 To modern readers, the connection between hunting and erotics may not

be evident, but it is certainly not lost on the Stranger: when he later “legislates”

hunting (822d-24a), he is quite precisely concerned with the “erotic” and

excessive enjoyment that should be expected to attend this activity. What is more,

24 Here he mentions the activity in general, not the ritual. This mirrors his later “condemnation” of symposia, in which he mentions the ritual, not the activity in general.

23 in Greek mythology, “sexual”25 eroticism and hunting were mutually implicated

in a tension built on both prohibition and indulgence (Barringer 2001, 125-8).

Megillos’ silence concerning the purpose of hunting with regard to developing

virtue is, perhaps, pregnant. It would seem that he too (i.e. not only the Stranger)

is concerned with sophrosunê.26

3) The Stranger now asks for another practice legislated by Lycurgus. In response,

Megillos for the first time says what he (and not, or not necessarily, the

Lacedaimonians) would focus on (633b5-6). The sequence of his speech is

therefore temporally: i) what the Lacedaimonians say; ii) what I and the

Lacedaimonians say; iii) what I say.27 What he would focus on for the fourth

practice is the array of experiences common to Spartan youths and adults. Some

of these, such as the krupteia (secret murder of Helots) and thievery, were

shameful for the Spartans (cf. Pangle 1988, 515n31), but Megillos is startlingly

frank about their existence.28 His focus, however, is exclusively on the effects of

these institutions for character, not for larger political ends (the krupteia at least

had such political ends). They educate Spartans in enduring pain, cold, heat, and

extreme physical trials (633b-c). Importantly, Megillos speaks of these also as

25 A clinical term for which there exists no Greek equivalent. Obviously, any consideration of what sophrosunê is, for the Greeks, absolutely must leave such a clinical separation of the “things of Aphrodite” (ta Aphrodisia) behind. 26 All of this is not even to mention the metaphoric connection of hunting and philosophy throughout the Platonic dialogues (perhaps predominantly in the Republic and Sophist). “Hunting” is gestured at earlier in the Laws, by the Stranger, in just this context, but only suggestively (627c8-d1). Cf. also 654e and 728d. 27 One is tempted to infer here an analogous sequence to that of “most just” (624a3), “true and just” (630d9), “most true” (664c1). 28 Pace Benardete (2000, 26), I see no necessary embarrassment on Megillos’ part when he mentions thievery.

24 somehow distinct from a war-focused sense of virtue.29 In fact, as will shortly

become clear (though in a very polite way) it turns out that, according to him,

none of the Spartan practices mentioned (common meals, gymnastics, hunting,

and education through suffering) were devised only with an eye to war (636a).

Megillos, unlike Kleinias, does not confuse current habitual practices and beliefs

with the original intentions of the lawgiver.

All of this may seem like getting Megillos off on a technicality (or a series of technicalities). The point, however, is that Megillos speaks in such a careful way as to give one general impression, while another specific one is available only to a listener who is as careful as he is (such as the Stranger). The same cannot be said for Kleinias. In fact, when Kleinias is pressed for an overt admission of his opinion concerning whether any well-ruled city must be arranged mainly so as to defeat others in war, he gives it clearly and emphatically – “Entirely so” (626c3; cf. 628e2-5) – then solicits Megillos’ support.

As we have already seen, Megillos responds with rhetorical support, but his words leave room for ambiguous interpretation (626c4-5).30 He then distances himself further from

Kleinias’ opinion, until finally he says outright that the common meals and gymnastics of the Dorian regimes were “likely founded to be fine for both” andreia and sophrosunê

(636a2-3) – in terms of the question asked by the Stranger (635e6-636a1), this is different

29 Suffering is by no means connected only with developing endurance for war. The necessity of suffering for wisdom has a pedigree reaching back at least to Homer’s Odyssey (as a whole). Cf. Republic 620c2-d2, 619c6-d5; Aeschylus, Agamemnon 176-83, Eumenides 523-4; Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 5-13; Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed 3. 21-24; John Keats, letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February 1819 (“The Vale of Soul-making”); Nietszsche, Beyond Good and Evil aph. 188. This trope can also be seen in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, and the Hindu Ramayana of Valmiki, among many others. 30 It is important that the Stranger lets this ambiguity stand, and that he is aware of the ambiguity. When Kleinias later responds to him in an almost identical manner (673b-c), the Stranger forces Kleinias to say outright what he means.

25 than regimes organized predominantly or only for war.31 In other words, he seems to

Kleinias to have agreed with him, and then reluctantly to have admitted their mutual error. But Megillos never actually said this error was mutual, and seems to have taken as much care to avoid doing so, as he did to appear to do so.

What Megillos has done (not for the last time) is facilitate the discussion past an impasse that Kleinias could not get past on his own. Regardless of his willingness to discuss the Cretan laws, the latter could not admit that the lawgiver designed his laws without war as their principle or only object in view, nor that this would be an inferior sort of law (628e2-5, 630d2-3, 635e1-2). Megillos facilitates the topic’s pursuit by ostensibly defending Kleinias’ position, but then admitting the point that Kleinias would not (633d4, 634b7-c2, 636a2-3). He acts the conservative elder on whom Kleinias may rely to value tradition above all, but who in fact articulates Kleinias’ reluctance to part with his traditional assumptions in a manner that allows the Stranger to assuage that reluctance.

This is a point to draw out. Megillos does not trick Kleinias into giving up his hostility. Rather, he articulates the roots – emotional and reasonable32 – of that hostility, in a way that obviates its most frequent expression: obdurate silence and refusal to entertain alternative ways of thinking. Megillos’ passionate but articulate traditionalism allows examination where Kleinias’ passionate but obdurate33 traditionalism would not.

This is essentially what Megillos and the Stranger now do by way of introducing symposia as part of an education – or safeguard of education – in moderation.

31 The Greek is considerably subtler than my paraphrase allows, and should be consulted. 32 This distinction is strictly provisional, and is in fact ultimately absurd. As one progresses through the Laws, such a distinction becomes increasingly dubious. 33 I am using this word in its etymological sense, from the Latin obduratus – “hardened.” I do not at all mean the modern English connotation of hardened in wrongdoing.

26 To begin with, the Stranger attacks the Cretans specifically for their pervasive practices of paederasteia, and for manipulating divine myths to provide legitimacy for those practices (636b-e).34 It should be noted that paederasteia was by no means practiced only in Crete (and Sparta), but was a fixture of many if not all Greek cities. But the

Stranger singles out Crete as the originator of this practice, and its most complete proponent. That Megillos the Spartan, rather than Kleinias the Cretan, should respond to this charge is in itself somewhat remarkable.

Megillos begins with a strong assertion of the superiority of Spartan law and practices (636e-637a), and thereby shows Kleinias two things: 1) he, the eldest of the three discussants (712c8), is on Kleinias’ “side” (i.e. the Doric side) against the youngest

(892d7), the Athenian; and 2) he is patriotic (cf. also 638a1-2). Both of these clearly impress the old Cretan statesman. Having done this, he attacks the ritual drinking parties

(note that he does not attack drinking per se – cf. Minos 320a; Xenophon, Lac. Pol. 5.2-

6), which in his opinion are rather spuriously legitimized by the worship of Dionysus everywhere else in Greece (637b1-6). Since the Athenian is the only member of the present group who is from a city in which this practice occurs, there is a rhetorical sense in which this can be seen as an attack on Athens, in response to the Athenian’s attack on

Crete. Megillos strengthens this by criticizing what he had once seen among the

Athenian’s people (637b2-3), but then gives as his broadest example what he had seen in

Sparta’s own colony, Tarentum, at the Dionysia (637b3-5).35

34 The Athenian opens the discussion with the most overt – though very diplomatic – reference to the Peloponnesian War in the Laws (636b2-4; cf. with Pangle 1988, 515n34). Zuckert (2009, 53-4) is incorrect that no such references exist in the Laws, and it seems important that the all of the characters in the dialogue are intent on treating this subject only obliquely, and with extreme delicacy. 35 It should be noted that this, together with the fact that he is currently in Crete, indicates that Megillos is unusually well traveled for a Spartan. Cf. 953c-d, 961a, and Herodotus 1.67-8.

27 Of course, both the myth of Minos and that of Ganymede, in Homer, would seem themselves to provide divine legitimacy for symposia, had the Stranger not specifically interpreted away the aspects thereof that would do so. But the Stranger wants the god

Dionysus to be introduced into the conversation – a god who, it must be noted, is never mentioned by Homer in either of his epics.36 He shows Megillos what he needs said by

Megillos, by conspicuously leaving it out of his own account twice. And Megillos shows that he understands this not only by then saying it, but also by doing the same thing himself in doing so: the example he uses is what he has seen in the Spartan colony of

Tarentum.37 Tarentum, as was widely known, was colonized by the vast number of children who were born of liaisons between (married) Spartan women and their Helot slaves (see Pangle 1988, 516n42).38 Megillos asks for this fact to be noticed, by mentioning Sparta’s colony – rather than only the Athenians he had already criticized

(and virtually any other city in Greece would have served as an example as well) – and thereby leads the Stranger to the latter’s criticism of Sparta’s proverbially “loose” women

(637c2).

This allows the Athenian to show his own patriotism, under the guise of which he is excused in Kleinias’ eyes for insultingly mentioning the “looseness” of Spartan women

(637c1-2) – a topic, it should be said, that Megillos could not patriotically have broached himself, but which he clearly pointed to by mentioning the very existence of Tarentum.

36 He is of course mentioned in the “Homeric Hymns” (there are three such hymns devoted to him specifically), but Plato does not seem to treat these as genuinely Homeric in origin. As far as I know, he does not make reference to these hymns in any of his dialogues. 37 See also Appendix 2. 38 England (1921, vol. I, 233) questions with surprise whether Plato has put “an argument for the Athenian into Megillus’ mouth,” but writes off any awareness about this on Megillos’ part tout court. The dismissal is undefended.

28 That this was deliberate on his part is reinforced by a rather singular exchange in

Book 8: the one and only instance in the Laws in which Megillos voices his wholehearted approval of a law while acknowledging that Kleinias may differ (842a3-6). And Kleinias does indeed differ, deferring his answer (indefinitely, as it turns out) until later (c7-9).

What is being legislated are radically different laws and customs (different from Cretan and Spartan laws and customs) for the erotic interactions between women and men, and men and boys (see especially 841c4-842a2). What is more, it is once again Megillos who facilitates the entire discussion on this subject (837b-839d), and the Stranger deliberately asks him to do so (837d7-8).39 Megillos wanted precisely the issues with which he was ostensibly “attacked” by the Stranger, raised and involved in the discussion. Kleinias, apparently, did not – and Megillos seems to have known it.40 What initially appears to be an insulting exchange between he and the Stranger in Book 1 seems on more careful study to be collusion, not hostility.41

But to Kleinias’ eyes, Megillos and the Stranger have displayed clear evidence of one of the greatest political virtues (according to him), patriotism.42 Moreover, he has also seen that Megillos is very much on his side, if needs be, against the impropriety of the Stranger. But this display of virtue and fraternity has also blinded pious Kleinias (for his piety, see especially 885e7-886a5) to the gross impiety that the Stranger has

39 The Stranger addresses Megillos as “friend” twice here (837d8 and e2-3), immediately following a discussion about the equivocal meanings of the word “friend” (837a-d). What does he mean here by this word? 40 As the Stranger also knows, at least by the time of the discussion in Book 8 (837e2-6; cf. with 659d-e, 665c, and 903b). 41 It should be noted that, in pursuing this line of conversation with the Stranger, Megillos has followed the Stranger’s explicit suggestion that each blame “some aspect of the law of the others” (634c). 42 Pangle (1988, 395-6) notes that the Athenian deliberately provokes Megillos’ attack, and assumes thereby the image of a patriot in the Dorians’ eyes. He does not note that Megillos does precisely the same thing.

29 committed, and that Megillos has in fact seconded. To the Stranger’s impious assertion that the Cretans’ invented divine beliefs for their own purposes, Megillos asserted that the

Athenians (and other Greeks) had done the same. He did not in any way deny that stories about the divine (including Cretan stories) were human-originated, nor did he even attribute the myth of Ganymede to the greatest of human creators of divine myths, Homer

– and such attribution would have been entirely accurate (Il. 20.232-5). Instead he hid his agreement with the Stranger on this issue in his disagreement on another. It would appear that Megillos did in fact hear the subversive sense of the Stranger’s question that opened the dialogue. It would also appear that he has now answered it. Unlike Kleinias, Megillos makes known that, for him, “some human” or another is responsible for existent laws.43

But he says this in a way that Kleinias’ focus, and therefore his understanding, will be directed elsewhere. Megillos has become the advocate and confidant of both Kleinias and the Stranger. He is the man in stasis whom both sides rightly trust (Benardete 2000, 17), the man who does not remain impartial, but takes both sides. That taking the Stranger’s side as well is deceptive, to a certain degree, does not diminish his genuine advocacy for

Kleinias’ as well: Megillos largely shows (rather than tells) Kleinias how the latter’s position is more open to the Stranger’s than he thinks, or is habitually inclined to entertain.

This train of conversation opens up the discussion of symposia that will take up the rest of Book 1 (and bracket the discussion of education in Book 2). As we have already noted, Kleinias is highly reluctant to entertain such a discussion, even when he is forced to admit that there is some prima facie sense to the Stranger’s initial comments on

43 See also Appendix 1.

30 learning through experience to moderate – rather than simply flee – pleasures. Despite

Kleinias’ reluctance, Megillos consistently ensures that the discussion takes place, and in such a way as to be appealing to Kleinias’ sensibilities and habituated character. The ways in which he does this vary, from expressions of patriotism and seeming hostility toward the Stranger (as we have seen), to at least one startling display of extreme respect and friendliness for him (642b-d). This latter, the third such instance in Book 1, once again follows a moment in which Kleinias is in a state of disbelief over one of the

Stranger’s proposals (the possibility that symposia might be beneficial for education –

641c8-d2). Megillos now reveals that he and his family are the proxenoi (advocates) for

Athenians in Sparta, and that Athens is, in a sense, a “second fatherland” for him. He also vouches, as a Spartan and Doric patriot, for the possibility of the Athenian’s trans- patriotic “true” goodness – a goodness not compelled by his city,44 but in him “by his own nature” and by “divine share of fate” (cf. 951b).45 In other words, he makes the strongest possible case for the Stranger that can at the same time remain politically feasible. Kleinias, having heard this, adds his own story concerning familial affinities for

Athens (642d-643a). This, as the Stranger recognizes, marks the point at which they can approach the topics at hand with any reasonable hope of mutual understanding: “It seems likely that you are eager to take your parts and listen. And I am willing to take mine, though it’s in no way easy to do – but it must be tried” (643a2-4). The journey they will take, as he now lays it out, is to start with education, and continue “until it reaches the god” (a7). They are now ready to begin.

44 n.b. Megillos here makes a telling statement: people who are “good” because they are compelled to be so by their laws, are not “truly” (alêthôs) good, but “artificially” (plastôs) so. (642c8-d1; cf. 710a-b). And only (monoi) Athenians – i.e. not Cretans or Spartans – can be good in a true way, though this is very very rare. 45 See Saunders’ illuminating note on this passage (1972, 4-5).

31 Pangle (1988, 396) is certainly correct that a “political philosopher who wishes to bring about fundamental changes is more likely to succeed if he appears to be not merely an old conservative, but a ‘foreigner’ in some sense.”46 But he or she also requires welcome into the “host” culture which is to be the site of such change, and this welcome requires a different – much more self-effacing – political philosopher. To use examples that Pangle himself uses (ibid), though to change the context, Alfarabi, Maimonides, and

Marsilius of Padua (in the Islamic, Judaic, and Christian contexts, respectively) were such philosophers. And the analogy of these philosophers in the Laws is given in the character of Megillos, who is able to accomplish the difficult reconciliation of

“foreigner” and “native,” both in himself, and for the city and philosophy. From the position of genuine philosophy, a position attained and attainable only by a very few (and the author of this paper does not pretend to be among them), “human affairs are worthy of no great seriousness” (803b2-3). But to make a place for philosophy within the city

(cf. Plutarch, Life of Nicias 23.4), which is to say to pursue a political philosophy, “it is necessary to be serious about them” (803b3-4). Not fortunate (b4), but necessary.

***

Thus in order to understand the Laws, it is necessary to understand the unique role that Megillos plays throughout the dialogue. Moreover, it is also necessary to understand the play of characters in the Laws in order to understand how, as a whole, it is devoted to exploring how, and why, to re-invest politics with the higher purpose of the philosophical and soul-crafting life, if that higher purpose has been lost (cf. Alfarabi, Attainment of

Happiness sec. 63, 47:6). To understand, that is, why it is today the timeliest of books.

46 Pangle uses a way of writing that seems to have affinities with both the Stranger’s and Megillos’ way of speaking. I doubt it is an accident that the passage cited above could just as well apply to Megillos, if not more so.

32 At the outset of the Laws, the major theme is that the intentions of the lawgiver often (perhaps always) tend to get lost in the practices and habits that arise out of the laws he or she has devised. That this theme is also self-reflexive – the tendency also applies to the laws that are discussed in the Laws – is key to understanding why the laws (and

Laws) must themselves educate their subjects (or some of their subjects) to revise and reshape the very laws that must maintain the appearance of immutability (cf. 879b with

709b-c; also 634e, 769a-771a, 802b-c, 960b-c; Republic 497c-d; Aristotle, Pol. 1254b38-

1255a1; and Lewis 1998, 3). Readings of the Laws that begin and end with the proposition that “Plato” believed he had discovered close-to-perfect laws that should never be altered (e.g. Klosko 1988, 82-3; Nightingale 1999, 118-122 and 1993, 290-300;

Morrow 1960, 570-1) quite profoundly miss the major opening (and in many ways governing) theme of the work.47 While it is certainly true that law qua law must authoritatively establish a static version of the thought that originally informed it (653a-c,

656d-657b, 659d-660b, 663b-c, 965c-e48) – which is to say, doxa, or “opinion” – it must also stimulate the activity of true thought, which in those to whom “nature” allows it, is anything but static (665c, 951b-c, 835c, 875c; cf. Aristotle, Nic. Ethics 1137b13-29,

1113a29-33; Protrepticus fr. 5).49

47 Nightingale (1999, 118) cites 798a-b as essentially establishing “Plato’s” belief in the permanence of his laws. But in this passage the Stranger speaks only of “some divine good fortune (eutuchian)” allowing laws to remain unchanged. The reality, however, as he makes pointedly clear, is that “no lawgiver is capable of ruling over fortune (tuchês) (879b1-2; cf. 948d). “Plato” could only believe in the permanent stability of “his” laws if he honestly believed that “divine good fortune” would accompany them for all time. Is there not a significant likelihood that he did not believe this was likely, and that the Laws anticipates this (cf. 757d-758a)? 48 Cf. Saunders’ (1972, 128-9) note on this passage. 49 Consider the important difference of Muses at 658e8-659a1: “Almost the noblest Muse is she who delights the best [beltistous – a word also used to describe the aristocratic class], and the sufficiently educated; but the noblest is she who delights the one man distinguished in virtue and education.”

33 To put it perhaps too simply, it is to these two levels that the characters of

Kleinias and Megillos correspond. For Kleinias and the level of opinion, laws must have a single reasoning (logos) on any given subject – there can be only one, stable level of meaning. Likewise, “knowledge” is, for him, something attained and retained as a

“known thing” – as something explained (cf. 957b, Aristotle, Nic. Ethics 1095a18-b22).

For Megillos, laws simply are in constant motion, as is the world and the activity of true thought. The single logos with which law is obliged to speak, must contain within itself multiple logoi, only one of which engages the obedience that opinion simply is.

Knowledge is, for him, a restless and unceasing activity that must be recognized as transitioning to ignorance when it comes to rest in the solidity and comfort of mere

“known things” or explanations (cf. Aristotle Nic. Ethics 1104a4-10, Tarnopolsky 2011,

21). These two levels are constantly reflected in the discourse on law in the Laws:

Kleinias consistently hears “one speech on one subject,” and misses the different discourse that Megillos and the Stranger are engaged in (cf. 719c-d with 811c-12a; 961e;

Philebus 52b6-d1).

And this is the way it must be, for the restlessness of thought by its nature threatens the stability – and the desire for stability – that opinion is (cf. 670c1-2).

Megillos is aware of this, and carefully effaces himself: nothing he does overtly contests

Kleinias’ form of traditionalism (including, perhaps especially, piety). Indeed, everything he says is calculated to support that traditionalism, even as it works to transform it, and to retrieve the truly traditional intention of the lawgiver, which is the cultivation not merely of soldiers for the purpose of victory in external war, but of the human totality in its place in the whole: warriors of the spirit whose victories over themselves are the highest human

34 achievements (666e-667a). Thus in Plato’s political masterpiece, which he created both externally and internally to be studied over and over again (811b-12a, 890e-91a, 822d-

23a, 858e-59a, 957d), the education of Megillos is the primary, though subtle, focus. That this is not immediately apparent would seem to be a part of the education created by Plato for his reader. That it must become apparent would also seem to be a part of that most careful education, or of the safeguard (sôtêria) of that education (653a).

The Stranger can rightly say that in the practice of symposia, when directed nobly, they may well have found a “safeguard” (sôtêria) of education (653a1-3).50 It is such a safeguard in the very way in which the Stranger now nobly directs it: it provides the opportunity to question and examine that education and its results, and to introduce new practices by which that education may be guided beyond the habit of merely inculcating habits (cf. Republic 619b7-d1). It is to be noted that of all of the political topics and aspects discussed within the conversation about symposia, the only thing that will be dropped from the rest of the Laws is the symposia themselves (the last reference to a symposium per se is near the end of Book 2, at 671e). They are never mentioned within the conversation (Books 4-12) concerning the actual city that is to be founded.51

Their function, in discussion, is to facilitate the acceptable introduction of necessary but

50 A safeguard is not necessarily part of the education, but stands somehow outside of it, as it were. Just as in the Timaeus, the eyelid is said to be a “safeguard (sôtêria) for vision” (45d7-8), not a participant in vision. The word’s root noun, sôtêr (“saviour”) is an epithet of Zeus – the god mentioned most often in the Laws. 51 Which conversation, it should be noted, is itself entirely hypothetical. The three interlocutors never actually do establish any laws in the Laws. This is fundamental to the Laws. Not one law is ever actually legislated by anyone in the space of the dialogue, even in the space of the fictionality of the dialogue. There are no laws in the Laws.

35 (seemingly) novel arrangements, and then to disappear. These arrangements include seven (an entirely accidental number) major things:

1) The very idea of the necessity for a safeguard of education – which the

topic of symposia proves by example (653a, 654d, anticipated at 632c, and

anticipating 960b-c, 968a-969c,52 inter alia). Within this necessity is

encompassed a subsidiary necessity: a “profitable falsehood” (663d-664a;

cf. 838b-839d).

2) The further illustration that such a safeguard, by its nature, is itself

potentially volatile, and requires the most careful circumspection.53 This

applies, necessarily, also to subsidiary necessities thereto (671d, 673e-

674b; cf. 968e-969a).

3) A psychological approach to human beings as naturally disordered,

conflictual multiplicities, who require a rhythm and harmony if they are to

be ordered at all – both within themselves, and with their communities

(653a-654a, 659d-660a, 661d-662b, 664e-665a, 673c-d – in this last

passage, what had before been said only of the young, is now said of every

living being; cf. 691c-d, 692b).

4) A reconfiguration of what “virtue” (aretê) is conceived to be, such that it

is directed toward the dual ends of good citizen (643d-644a), and good

human being – i.e. private human being (653b-c, 654e). The third

52 These last passages discuss or allude to the infamous “nocturnal council,” repeatedly called a “safeguard” of the laws (960b7, 968a7, 969c2, inter alia). 53 It is also very dangerous to undertake. The “safeguarding” undertaken by the Stranger and Megillos with Kleinias requires destabilizing the current “shadow-images” of Just and Unjust (663c) – and indeed requires revealing them to be such shadows. As Socrates points out in the Republic, this can lead to murderous rage on the part of people for whom those shadows are reality itself (Rep. 517a4-6).

36 definition of education in Book 2, which has as its goal the “pulling and

leading children toward the logos said to be correct by the law” (659d1-3)

must somehow bring about the first, and encourage the second at the same

time (659d-660a, 666e-667a). And as Strauss (1975, 38) notes, the virtues

that transcend the polis must also serve it.

5) An awareness that all such orders tend to become over-habitual, and

eventually valorize only communal habits (i.e. the “good citizen” and/or

“well-trained jobholder” becomes all) (643d-644b, 666e).

6) A distinction drawn between propositional and dispositional education,

knowledge, and virtue (654c-d, 665c; cf. 688e-689d, 691a).

7) The introduction of the god Dionysus – god of wine, tragedy, and mania

(the whole of the discussion, but in particular 672a-d).

These new arrangements will all be fundamental to the later discussion of the

Laws, though the vehicle of their introduction will simply vanish from the conversation.

Drinking of wine in general will of course be mentioned again, and legislated, but the context of the supervised symposium is completely absent from the remainder of the book. The salutary possibilities afforded by symposia when rightly (perhaps better, precisely – cf. Republic 340c-342e with 472c-473e) directed – directed, that is, by perfectly moderate and sober human beings (671d5-8) – are truly only available to the city that has already developed virtues that transcend that city’s activity (673e3-674a3).54

By silently abandoning the “perfect” symposium, Plato signals the perspective shift from the Republic to the Laws.

54 Cf. Pangle 1988, 422-3; Benardete 2001, 86-7.

37

Chapter 2: De l’homme et du citoyen

καµατος εστι τοις αυτοις µοχθειν και αρχεσθαι. - Heraclitus fr. DK 84b

(It is weariness to labour at the same things and to be always beginning.)

Books 1 through 3 of the Laws are focused on the virtues of the lawgiver. Book 4 begins to consider the city from and for the perspective of its citizens, but this ends up highlighting an oversight from the earlier discussion about lawgivers: they had not discussed the manner of speaking for the laws: should they merely command, persuade and command, or teach (and hence attempt to persuade) first, then command? The latter being decided on (with Megillos once more facilitating the innovation, in explicit distinction from the “Laconic way”), Kleinias requests that they make a second beginning. In a manner of speaking, then, the laws for human beings in the city begin with Book 5.

The first mention of ordinary human responsibility (aition – for one’s actions, desires, etc.) in the Laws comes at the outset of Book 5 (727b). Before this point, only the responsibility of gods and lawgivers have been mentioned (624a, 672d, 693a-b), and it is noteworthy that when the Stranger turns to the taking – or not taking – of responsibility

(not the assigning of responsibility) by the ordinary human, he insists on a distinction between honouring or harming one’s soul: those who assume the responsibility (heauton aition) for their actions and sufferings (including “most of their greatest wickedness’s” –

727b5-6)55 and for crafting their souls honour their own souls, and those who do not do so harm their own souls. Their own souls. The entirety of the discussion (727b-728d) is

55 Note that the Stranger is not speaking only of our own wicked actions, but also the greatest “evils” we have suffered. This is of course to make a distinction that would make no sense from the “other side” of taking full responsibility for oneself as a whole.

38 focused around this self-honouring and harming, and it is this discussion that serves as the opening of the “prelude” to the entire body (and soul) of legislation (or outline of legislation) that follows (734c).56 And it is crucially important that the greatest dishonour to one’s own soul is not the “errors” (hamartêmata) and “greatest wickedness’s” (727b5-

6) that one commits (or “suffers”), but the refusal to take responsibility for them. This is a principle that is never abandoned in the Laws, though it must inevitably make practical concessions to the human (all-too-human) revenge-drive, in some cases to such an extent that it seems to disappear entirely.

But it never does disappear entirely, and remains the crux of the Stranger’s efforts. His opening words, the opening words of the dialogue, had asked, literally, whether “a god or some human has taken responsibility (aition eilêphe) for setting down

(your/the) laws” (624a1-2). This “second and better beginning” (723e1) suggests, but does not command, definitively that the responsibility for how one lives can and ought to be assumed by the human being or citizen. It does not suggest that this responsibility can or ought to be assigned to the human being or citizen. A person’s soul is considered an object worthy of piety; perhaps it is piety (Pangle 1976, 1070, 1076). Regardless, as much as “the god is the highest measure of all things” (716c4-5), he is no longer conceived by the Stranger as the only measure: the god is only “much more [a measure] than some human” (716c5-6).57 The human being who honours his or her soul properly is by that act

56 By contrast, in Book 10, Kleinias will insist that the theological “proofs” and persuasion “would be almost the noblest and best prelude to all the laws” (887b8-c2; cf. Strauss 1975, 142). This is based fundamentally on the gods not only existing and being good, but in them “honouring justice differently (diapherontôs) than human beings” (887b7-8). Kleinias is simply unable to imagine an inwardly compelled justice as self-honouring and self-shaping (cf. 661c-662a). 57 This obviously references the enigmatic and highly ambiguous aphorism attributed to Protagoras: “pantôn chrematôn metron estin anthrôpos, etc.” (Theaetetus 152a2-4; rendered radically less ambiguous at Cratylus 385e6-386a3).

39 (by that way of life) alone, also a measure of all things – the reverse is perhaps equally true. At the root of the Stranger’s politico-spiritual legislation, the human soul stands, potentially, as both a subject and object58 of divine piety. But that piety is never forced on any citizen in the Laws.

It would be difficult to overstate the simply shocking magnitude of this move, in

Plato’s time: we can see it only from ours, a time in which Plato’s “discovery” has been accepted for so long that to oppose it now is unorthodox. But our modern habituation to soul-devotion as a concept also tends to obscure just how radical this philosophical movement, or attempt, still is. What would it mean to actually take complete responsibility for one’s actions, including and especially one’s errors and greatest evils?

That is, not just to say it, but to do and live it – to live without “blaming others…and always excusing oneself” (727b6-7; cf. 731d-e, Euthyphro 2b1-3, Republic 619c5-6)? To never feel, “I didn’t mean to do that, or for those consequences to entail from what I did,” but instead to acknowledge (without reluctance) that the discrepancy between what “I” meant or intended, and what followed from my actions, does not excuse me but instead shows me that I do not know myself. I do not know, that is, the manifold desires and drives that move me, because they are as yet my masters – masters whom I obey precisely because I wrongly believe myself to be their masters (cf. 863b6-9 and e2-3;

Saunders 1968, 425-6). I believe that I have a desire, when in fact it is the desire that has me, and that shapes my own vanity of “agency” to its purposes. I may also believe that a particular desire is absent in me (this can occur especially when I consider such a desire to be bad or shameful or ignoble), and thereby ignore its very real presence. In both

58 I use “subject” and “object” provisionally – I find no ultimate separation between these concepts, such as we now imagine, in Plato or in ancient Greek in general.

40 cases, reconfiguring the relationship within my self as a whole requires first recognizing the presence and power of the desires and drives within that self, not in order to expiate those drives and desires, but to understand them, take responsibility for them, and remove myself from my enslavement to them.59 To know oneself in this broader and more accurate sense is ipso facto to care for and craft oneself.60 This is the process that

Dostoevsky, for example, vividly illustrates with his character Raskolnikov, who must come to understand that regardless of what he thought he intended to do when planning and justifying (to himself) his robbery, in actuality he wanted to murder. Or as

Zarathustra puts it, “his soul wanted blood, not loot; he was thirsting for the joy of the knife!” (TSZ 1.6 “On the Pale Criminal”; Nietzsche 2005, 34).

It would not be too much to say that this is the highest sense of to ta hautou prattein (Republic 433a8). At its fullest, what it implies is a disintegration of such categories of human consciousness as subject and object, passive and active. Taking responsibility for oneself means understanding the entirety of one’s consciousness as oneself – a soul “die nichts enthält als sich” – “containing nothing but herself,” as Rilke so beautifully put it in his “Bowl of Roses” (Rilke 1997, 80-83):

if self-containing means: to take the world and wind and rain and patience of the spring-time and guilt and restlessness and muffled fate and somberness of evening earth and even the melting, fleeing, forming of the clouds

59 L. Pangle (2009, 472), remarks that “[t]aking responsibility for one’s errors as Plato depicts it need not mean taking responsibility for the whole chain of antecedent causes…” Within the context of what she is discussing – the taking, or not taking, of responsibility by a criminal offender for his or her actions – I agree, and her insights are excellent. But this waiver does not apply to the higher project, in which “taking responsibility for the whole chain of antecedent causes” is precisely the point, for they comprise who I am. 60 To some extent, the behavioural approaches to depression of modern behavioural activation (BA) treatment, and cognitive-behavioural (CB) therapy, approach at least the initial therapeutic processes of a Platonic taking of responsibility for oneself. BA treatment and CB therapy both begin by suspending habitual attitudes about psychic causality, in favour of establishing correlations of behavioural activity in general, all of which activities are potential foci for therapeutic work (Dimidjian et al. 2011; Jacobson et al. 1996).

41 and the vague influence of distant stars, and change it to a handful of Within?

It should be noted that a soul self-crafted in this way would live without the binary category upon which penal law so fundamentally depends: perpetrator and victim61 (this does not mean such a soul would not recognize the necessity and efficacy of this category for others). This is so because from this perspective, all assigning of

“blame” is specious; only taking responsibility oneself has any value. Such a soul would never truly blame anyone else for anything (Apology 35e1; 38c1-5)62 – this is the very ground of its freedom and eudaimonia.

It is responsibility so understood that aligns with the opening question of the

Laws: for “some human being” to genuinely “take responsibility for the laws” – to safeguard the laws – would require experiencing responsibility in this most expansive way, a way that reveals all assignment of responsibility within the current laws to be ultimately specious. But specious does not mean unnecessary.

Laws at their highest can educate those citizens so disposed toward taking this heavy but liberating responsibility themselves: they can be protreptic, and so the

Stranger’s are. But it goes without saying that no system of legal adjudication could – or should – possibly assign this self-transformative work as a sentence or civic obligation. It would be beyond any reasonable sense of communal justice, not to speak of realistic expectation, to require this of every citizen (especially those whom we designate as

61 The novels of Imre Kertész, who was interned at Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenage boy, seem to me to be among the most profound examples of taking this enormous responsibility upon oneself, precisely because he was the very picture of a victim. See in particular his Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, The Pathseeker, and Liquidation. 62 When Socrates speaks to those who have condemned him to die (Apology 38c1-5), he of course notes that others will blame (oneidizein) them – but this is merely acknowledging what others are bound to do, and in no way means that Socrates himself blames those jurists. Socrates uses reproach (oneidizein) only as instructive – as exhortative to self-reflection (Apology 41e1-42a2; cf. Laws 730b).

42 “victims” of criminal violation). The continual outward appearance of a thing reasonably marks the extent of coercive law’s interest.

But coercive law does not mark the extent of the Stranger’s interest, nor, I think,

Megillos’. While citizens of the city are encouraged (persuaded, and/or compelled) to act the precepts of law, rather than simply pay them lip service (732e-733a; cf. 729c), there remains the crucial difference between doing this with one’s body, and doing it with body and soul.63 The Stranger draws our attention to this as he ends his “prelude” to the laws, noting that a life of virtue is more pleasant than one of vice, when that virtue resides “in body or [i.e. not simply ‘and’] also [i.e. not simply ‘or’] in soul” (kata sôma ê kai kata psuchên) (734d5). The law requires of every citizen no more than the support of his or her body and speech. But it also exhorts those who are already looking for something more, to go further, to take responsibility for and craft themselves as complete citizens or human beings.

This points not just to one essential dispositional difference, but to two. On the one hand, some (perhaps most) citizens of the regime will necessarily live without consonance (at least not complete consonance) between their desires and what they actually do, between their souls and the actions performed – in speech and in deed – by their bodies. On the other hand, the consonance that fewer people do achieve will differ according to the horizon of that consonance: the complete citizen will live, with his or her body and soul, within the horizon of the just and noble and true things, as they are defined by the law; the horizon of the complete human being will not be bound by such

63 It seems wiser to look for a definition of soul here than to define what the Stranger describes with a (now) common definition of soul. It should be noted that the distinction drawn is not between “body” and “soul,” but between “body” and “body and soul.” It cannot be stated too strongly just how much this distinction between distinctions matters.

43 limits (cf. Laws 875b-d with 711e-712a, 744a, 835c; Theaetetus 166a-168c).64 To draw out what is at stake in these differences requires a brief anticipatory consideration of the principles of penal law and political justice, as the Stranger presents them in Book 9 of the Laws.

The penal code outlined in Book 9 is fundamentally informed by the Socratic maxim that “no one is willingly unjust.” To begin with, it should be noted that the

Stranger’s prescription has nothing to do with what is now called “forgiveness,” a word for which there is no Greek equivalent, and a concept that I, at least, can make no tolerable sense of. Rather, it is rooted in the possibility of understanding (sungnômein) – which is to say coming to live – that “the unjust person is not willingly unjust” (ho adikos…ouch hekôn adikos – 731c2-3; see 860c-864c for an extensive discussion).65 It is crucial that this principle is not something that the Magnesian citizens are to be educated to know about. Merely “knowing” that this is true (and noble and just) without one’s disposition (one’s actual experience of pleasure and pain) aligning with and supporting such “knowledge,” is not, per the Stranger, knowledge at all.66 In fact, this is precisely

64 Cf. also Aristotle, Politics 1284a3-b34; 1288a24-29; Nic. Ethics 1113a29-33, 1143b11-14; Protrepticus fr. 5. 65 Cf. Protagoras 345c-e, Gorgias 509e, Meno 77b-e, Republic 505d-e, inter alia. For a spiritual (which also means a practical) meditation on this principle, see also section 42 of the Manual of Epictetus; and Marcus Aurelius, Meditations [Eis heauton – literally, To Himself] 7.22, 7.26, 7.63, 8.14, 9.27, 10.30, 10.37, 11.18, and 12.16, all of which can be read as responses to the spiritual exercise of Epictetus. Also Luke 23:34 – “Father, remit their penalty [αφες αυτοις], they know not what they do” (which, it should be noted, no early manuscripts include); and Acts 7:60. 66 1) Here we might recall Plato’s Socrates, responding to Simmias’ ironic comment in the Phaedo, to the effect that virtually everybody would agree with Socrates that the proper pursuit of philosophy is the “practice of dying and being dead” (64a7-8). Socrates responds that, “they would be speaking the truth [αληθη]…except for overlooking their own truth [του σφας µη λεληθεναι]” (64b8-9). It is difficult to capture Socrates’ wit, or the Greek grammar, in translation. It is important here that he is playing on the root ληθη that is common to both αληθη and λεληθεναι. Cf. also 64a6, and Gorgias 505c3-5, where Socrates says of Callicles that “this man cannot abide being benefited and the very experience with which this logos is concerned, being corrected.” 2) Consider also the explicitly stated purpose of all of Epicurus’ scientific investigations: “…we must not suppose that any other object is to be gained from the knowledge of celestial things, whether they

44 what he calls “the ultimate and greatest ignorance” (689a8-9) – to acknowledge a truth with one’s reasoning, but not live that truth with one’s experience of pleasure, pain, and desire (688e-689a, 696c; cf. 654c-d, 655e-656d). Such acknowledgment can, and more often than not does, seem to be wisdom, but is in fact ignorance of the greatest magnitude

(691a). Knowledge without “virtue” (aretê – the “excellence” lived in practice) is not knowledge. We now speak of having the “courage of our convictions.” The Stranger (and

Socrates) would quite sensibly say that without the accompanying courage, the conviction itself evidently does not truly exist – an intellectual vanity is neither conviction nor knowledge.

The “Socratic paradox” that knowledge is virtue is only a paradox from the perspective of someone (and we are speaking here of most people, including me) who does not and perhaps cannot live what he or she “knows” (Protagoras 352c-356c).

Consonance (harmonia) of what one “knows,” and what one does, is the only thing worthy of approaching the name knowledge – even if one is wrong about one believes one knows. If one is wrong about this, but nevertheless lives according to it in a genuine way (i.e. an internally compelled way), one could be said to be of lesser knowledge, or more ignorant, than someone who is correct in his or her belief concerning what is known, and lives accordingly. But this is separated by whole orders of magnitude from are considered in connection with other arguments or on their own, than αταραξια and πιστις βεβαιος, as is the case with all other studies” (Letter to Pythocles 85.9 – 86.1, my emphasis; ed. Bailey, p. 56; cf. Vatican Fragments 29 and 45, Kuriai Doxai 10-12). Consider also Nietzsche in Ecce Homo: “—I turned my will to health, to life, into my philosophy” (EH 1. 2, p. 9); “Philosophy, as I have understood and lived it so far…” (EH Foreword 3, p. 4, my emphasis). 3) In The Warriors, his truly profound and personal reflection on “men in battle,” J. Glenn Gray notes how often the forum of war reveals precisely the abyss that most often lies between our “knowledge” – particularly concerning what we idealize to ourselves – and who we are: “If the war [i.e. the “second” “world” war] taught me anything at all, it convinced me that people are not what they seem or even think themselves to be. Nothing is more tempting than to yield oneself, when fear comes, to the dominance of necessity and to act irresponsibly at the behest of another. Freedom and responsibility we speak of easily, nearly always without recognition of the iron courage required to make them effective in our lives” (Gray 1998, 169). Cf. Epictetus, Discourses 4.1.

45 the ignorance of someone who would reasonably agree with this hypothetically more knowledgeable person, but did not live his or her life according to that reasonable agreement. From the Socratic perspective, the latter is the more ignorant by far, precisely because he or she rightly “knows” that life should be lived differently than it is by them.

It is the consonance of the soul with “knowledge or (ê) opinions or (ê) reasoning

(logôi)” (689b2) that begins to approach knowledge proper, or at the very least a lesser ignorance – regardless of the veracity of the “knowledge” or opinions or reasoning. At its lowest (though the lowest knowledge – or highest ignorance – is still much higher than the greatest ignorance), this is the consonance of the soul with opinion about what is best, provided that that opinion “establishes order in every man” (864a3). This level of knowledge is what the Stranger says the citizens are to call67 “justice” (864a4), and what matters for this political justice is the obedience of the soul to the (even, and perhaps most often, arbitrary) dictates of its “opinion concerning what is best” (864a1) – either of the polis or certain private individuals (864a2-3)68 – and not whether that opinion is

“somehow mistaken” (864a4), nor whether this soul-obedience leads to injuring someone else or oneself (864a8, b7). Pangle (2009, 468) suggests that this seems to mean that “we are speaking now of erroneous opinions that result in orderly self-control rather than law- breaking.” But the Stranger does not say or imply that such a soul would automatically be a law-abiding soul; he in no way implies that “orderly self-control” always or often or

67 Just previously in the same passage, the Stranger had said what “I say” (legô) injustice is: the tyranny in the soul of desires, thumos, passions, fear, envy, etc., whether or not it does anyone injury (863e6-864a1). When he defines justice, he does not say that he says this is what justice is, but that “it must be said” (phateon) that this is what justice is (cf. Saunders 1968, 432n2). 68 I disagree with Pangle (1988, 533n13; who is echoing England 1921, vol 2, 402-3; and Saunders 1968, 432) that this passage in the Greek “as it stands seems unintelligible.” Toutôn refers here both to “opinions about what is best” and what actually is “the best”; esesthai is from eisiêmi, not eimi. What is discussed is therefore “however [a] city or certain private individuals might have [originally] brought these things in [i.e. what is best and opinions about what is best]”; not (per Pangle, ad loc.) “however a city or private individuals may believe this will be.”

46 ever means “law-abiding” (in the sense of the laws of the polis) and in fact the very word

“law” (nomos) is conspicuous by its absence from his definition of justice. Moreover, he will immediately go on to suggest that justice conceived as such is, along with thumos and desire, one of the three main causes of “going astray” (hamartanomenôn) from the laws (864b6-7; cf. 864a8-c2).69 As Saunders (1968, 430 and 432-3) and Strauss (1975,

133) note, the Stranger, while ostensibly “repeating” what he had earlier said were the three causes of such going astray (spiritedness, pleasure, and ignorance; at 863b-c), now replaces, or refines the definition of, “ignorance” with the activity of this justice. The justice of the polis would appear to be not so much the lowest sort of knowledge, as the highest form of ignorance (cf. Pangle 2009, 468).70 Without consonance of desires and reason, there can be no phronêsis (689d), but consonance thereof does not guarantee phronêsis.71 No law or instruction can plant the seed of inward compulsion that must exist – perhaps “by nature” – in order for a human being to go beyond the horizon of mere citizenship or discipleship. They can provide at best – and this is no small thing – the most fertile ground possible in which that seed might grow (and for many seeds, it should be remembered, difficult and seemingly inhospitable ground is in fact the only fertility possible),72 and the space to grow should it take root. As Pangle notes, “the most education can do is habituate the passions in preparation for a consonance with reason

69 England (1921, vol. 2, 403-4) insists that, “Clearly Plato never wrote that” (in which assumption he is followed by Diès). Yet there are no alternative readings presented in any of the MSS. We must be wary of importing our preconceived notions of what Plato would or would not have said, before learning from him what he is inclined to teach us. 70 This justice is therefore akin to, if not identical with, the “political courage” discussed by Socrates in the Republic (430c2). 71 The Stranger continues: only the “noblest and greatest of consonances would, with greatest justice, be called wisdom (sophia)” (689d6-7). 72 Cf. footnote above (Chapter 1) on the necessity of suffering for wisdom. Consider in particular Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed 3.21-23, on the Book of Job relating the story of Job coming to philosophy.

47 that may occur at some later time” (Pangle 1988, 405, cf. 426-6). But to reiterate, this is no small thing.

The Stranger must therefore strike a balance between philosophically protreptic laws, and laws that in fact do assign responsibility, and are at the same time viably educative for both the average and the complete citizen (cf. 880d-e). It is the delicacy of this balance that necessitates a “safeguard,” as becomes particularly clear with the penal law that begins with Book 9.

It behoves us to remember that Plato has very carefully crafted the first three books of the Laws to indicate that the project as a whole is not and cannot remain static throughout time – though it must, to a certain extent, appear to do so. In fact, that project must itself engender and educate the very people who will – and who need to – critically re-evaluate and redirect the project. Yet it cannot rely on its complete citizens to do this

(and in fact must acknowledge that such citizens will actively oppose it), because those citizens are necessarily incapable of evaluating the horizon which itself forms the patterns and limits of their evaluating capacity. Should a complete citizen become truly capable of critically evaluating this horizon, he or she will by that fact alone have transcended being a complete citizen (neither the Stranger nor Plato ever suggest that people are bound to a single dispositional “category” of being from birth to death – cf. especially 929c5-6). By way of a provocative example, we could say that just as Homer anticipated and required his greatest student, Plato, so too did Plato anticipate and require his own greatest student, Nietzsche: “Whoever is a teacher from the ground up takes all things seriously only in relation to his students – even himself.”73 In these cases, the students’ ostensible

73 My translation, and my emphasis, from Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil aphorism 63 (Nietzsche 1966, vol. 2, 320). I deliberately preserve a literal translation of “from the ground up” for Nietzsche’s “von Grund

48 “betrayals” of their teachers are in fact the most profound fulfillments of their highest teachings.

Needless to say (a very interesting figure of speech that bears independent consideration), the examples of Homer, Plato, and Nietzsche suggest a richer, more spiritual, and temporally longer conception of politics than is generally confronted today.

For all of these philosophers, politics is a project of centuries and millennia, and not merely of “creatures of a day” (ephêmeroi – 923a3, Republic 617d7; with which cf.

Thucydides 2.53.2); i.e. not merely a consideration of a current political situation, tendency, or crisis (though it is of course also that). Importantly, the more reserved teaching directed toward those few individuals who can and ought to challenge the progression of that teaching, is not directed toward the petty “political” leaders who wish to stand outside the law, but rather especially toward that rare individual – every few centuries or millennia – “whose conscience includes the entirety of the development of the human species” (Nietzsche, BGE 61).

“Alles Groβe steht im Sturm”

The Platonic regime does not one-sidedly care for the diseased souls of criminals, and ignore the care of the victims. Instead, it is based on the fundamental assumption that both criminals and victims require serious therapeutic attention. A murderer, for example, who kills in the heat of passion, reveals by his act a disordered inner regime too unhealthy to resist the desires and envy which seize him. On the other hand, while the

aus,” instead of a more idiomatic expression, such as “through and through,” for example. Nietzsche was almost singularly aware of the significance of language to our being, and it would not have been lost on this philologist par excellence that that the expression in German that was signified by “von Grund aus,” would in Greek have been “κατ’ ’άκρης” – that is, not “from the ground up,” but “from the peak down.”

49 victim’s family and friends are permitted a limited satisfaction of their human (all-too- human) need for revenge (thus later we will find out that even stones and donkeys are to be subject to judicial procedure and punishment, should they happen to injure/”murder” someone – 873e-874a),74 this very need reveals the disorder in their own souls. For (to quote from a different, but very related context) someone who merely indulges his revenge:

“…is gracious to a graceless thing – spiritedness [thumos] – and gorges his anger [orgên] with wicked feasts; making the part of his soul that was at one time tamed by education savage again, he becomes a beast through living in ill humor, and receives as a gift in return the bitterness of his spiritedness” (935a3-7, trans. Pangle).

And indeed this is so of the wider political order: to merely satisfy the spirit of revenge is virtually guaranteed to cause it to spiral massively out of control. This is so because, rather than being also transfigured, it is only pandered to and cultivated, to the point where it can no longer even be satisfied. From this perspective, the regime of the

Laws cares for the victims of crimes (and the broader society) just by caring for the criminals themselves – and by transforming the point of view that holds these to be mutually exclusive possibilities, a point of view that is itself symptomatic of soul

(individual and cultural) gorged and gorging on the spirit of revenge. Pace Allen (2001,

200-1), it is not, from a Platonic perspective, “only the wrongdoer” who is “diseased by wrongdoing.” To read the Laws, and Plato in general, this way is to reveal one’s own focus on the criminal and his or her punishment in the dialogue; i.e. is to demonstrate the deep and perhaps unconscious desire for revenge in one’s own soul. The Stranger’s focus is on the much broader “therapy for souls” – all souls – which the “art of politics” simply is (650b7-9; cf. Gorgias 464b4-c4). However, Allen’s mistaken focus is and has been a

74 A common judicial practice in ancient Greece (Loomis 1972, 87), but Plato is by no means limited to the prejudices of his time – cf. Republic 469d7-e2, on dogs that attack stones thrown at them.

50 common one, and Plato in fact anticipated it: the character of Kleinias embodies (perhaps better, en-souls) the secret envy and desire for revenge whose most frequent manifestation is the figure of the upstanding, righteous, and indignant defender of justice.

What is particularly insidious about this manifestation is that it so often hides the underlying “heap of sicknesses” and “ball of wild snakes” (to borrow Zarathustra’s expressions) that give rise to it, both from the person herself, and from others.75 For this reason, among many others, Plato furnished his philosophical endeavours with a safeguard. The many Kleiniases of the world will always turn even the most spiritual philosophical efforts toward buttressing the very desires and drives that those efforts are intended to transfigure, for the noblest things can be put to the basest use (819a3-6,

937d6-8; cf. Republic 497d, Symposium 180e, Meno 87e-89a, Euthydemus 281d, Crito

76 46b). And “lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 94).

That being said, we must acknowledge that philosophy, and indeed any educative effort, has inherent dangers that cannot be done away with without doing away with these

75 When the Stranger, at the outset of Book 9, assigns penalties of death (to citizens) for temple robbery and inciting civil war (853d-856e), Kleinias responds, “Beautiful (Kalôs)” (856e4). As Benardete (2000, 263) insightfully notes, this is a “gentle” echo of Leontius’ response in the Republic (439e6-440a3) to the sight of the executed criminals by the walls of Athens: “Oh beautiful sight!” (kalou theamatos). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra comes to realize this early in his “untergang,” when he recognizes that not only the criminal (a murderer who pointedly evokes Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov) is a “heap of sicknesses” and a “ball of wild snakes,” but so too, in all likelihood, is the judge who sentences him to death (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1.6 “On the Pale Criminal”; Nietzsche 2005, 33-5). What Zarathustra does not yet realize, but must come to see, is that he too is such a ball of snakes, and that his very loathing for the judge whose desire for revenge veils itself in righteousness is itself Zarathustra’s desire for revenge against him, and against the smallness of the human, all-too-human (TSZ 3.2.2 “On the Vision and the Riddle” [ibid, 136-8]; and 3.13 “The Convalescent” [ibid, 188-93]). 76 The difference between the Stranger’s claim that “no human being, without having been a slave, would ever become a praiseworthy master” (762e2-3; cf. Nietzsche, BGE 188), and the phrase “Arbeit macht frei,” inscribed over the gates of Auschwitz, is propositionally negligible (as is the difference, for example, between Socrates’ “to ta hautou prattein” [Republic 433a8], and Buchenwald’s inscription, “Jedem das Seine”). But the purpose to which such an understanding (or lack thereof) is put, and why and in what way it is done, makes all the difference. Plato draws our attention to this in the Symposium, where he has his Pausanias suggest that nothing is, in itself, noble or base, but that everything depends on how something is done (180e). The important irony there is that Pausanias is himself putting this very argument into the service of a base cause.

51 very necessary efforts entirely (as Zarathustra says, “how should the highest soul not have the worst parasites?” – TSZ 3.12.19 [Nietzsche 2005, 182]; cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric

1355b1-6). And there are such projects that simply are inherently harmful (as the

Stranger reminds us at 810c).77 It is for these reasons that Plato did not write the Laws as a dialogue between only the Stranger and Kleinias. The attentive and thoughtful Megillos is always listening, and will stay to help found the city (969c-d). And I would suggest that his infrequent but crucial direct interventions in the dialogue, without which the most important hurdles cannot be overcome, mirror the requirements of the philosophical

“safeguard” of the Laws, as its project unfolds throughout centuries and millennia. These requirements are to critically evaluate and re-evaluate that project, in the actual face of its unfolding – its progress, corruption, or derailment by chance, but also whether or not the intentions of the original lawgiver (i.e. Plato) were, in the Platonic sense of this word,

“good” (agathos) (688a-d).78

This is of course to say that the “Cretan” polis designed in the Laws is not at all intended to be solely Cretan, nor even a polis as we now understand the term –

77 But we must be very careful when we assess the relationship between a philosophy and its perversions. That Nietzsche’s writings, for example, were abused by the Nazis is certainly true, and there was obviously an effort made in that regime to warp his teachings into pseudo-philosophical justifications of the Nazi program. But that this was more than convenient for the Nazi intelligentsia to do is anything but clear, and the direct causal relationship that many scholars see between Nietzsche and the Nazis (with the former held to have “inspired” the latter) may in fact be more reflective of a certain secret and perverse vanity of academia, than it is of reality (I strongly advise a very close and careful reading of Zarathustra’s prologue on this point, which demonstrates how – and why – Nietzsche actually predicted this very circumstance). 78 What precisely such requirements entail is, by the very nature of those requirements, impossible to generalize to a greater degree than this: those requirements are to the highest degree tied to the variation of particular circumstances, and to limits at which general rules and laws either collapse, or permit of transformation. They therefore cannot be spoken of in terms of different prescriptions for action and behaviour, but rather demand a different disposition and character than can be determined by mere prescription. One can perhaps understand most easily (which is not to say easily) what is entailed here by reflecting on the philosophical/political projects of Al-Farabi, Maimonides, and Nietzsche, all of whom are forecasted in the character of Megillos. I cannot address the work of these three thinkers here, but am currently at work on expansive treatments of this topic concerning the latter two.

52 Augustine’s use of civitas, in De civitate dei, is far more germane.79 And the lawgivers

Minos and Lycurgus, who supposedly built their laws for the sole purpose of victory in war, are stand-ins for Homer, “the educator of Hellas” (Republic 606e1-2), who gave the

“Greeks” their first spiritual sensibility of being “Greek,” and did so precisely by uniting them – in his Iliad – for the sole purpose of victory in war. As Lampert (2002, 259) puts it, echoing an awareness that has been discussed since antiquity (cf. (?)Longinus, On the

Sublime 13.4):

Plato’s true rival in imperial endeavor is none other than Homer. The ambition of the Athenian philosopher places him in a contest beyond all possible Olympic contests, a contest with the educator of Hellas for spiritual rule over the Hellenes. In this greatest of human contests Homer and Plato are ultimately allies who aim to establish the rule of human wisdom, but it is a contest nonetheless because the times dictate that the Homeric gods and heroes, the means to Homer’s rule, be supplanted by Platonic ones.

What is at stake is not the political rule of a single city (no matter how ideal or practical), but the struggle for dominance in the spiritual arena, in the arena that claims and creates the minds and dispositions of all human beings under its jurisdiction, decisively informing not only what we think, but also and especially the grounding aspects (the “tools”) with which we think, feel, and indeed perceive. And this struggle continues to matter today, because Plato won. Behind the Christian and Islamic “soul,” for example, is the Platonic soul (this applies also to at least the Lurianic Kabbalah soul in Judaism). Behind the very tools of thought with which Euro-Americans think, such as

“ideas” and “concepts,” are the Platonic “ideas” and “forms.” The principle of non-

79 The name of the city in logos, “Magnesia” (first so called by the Stranger at 848d3) is not accidental or without meaning (704a2-b1). As Socrates notes in the Ion (533d3), magnetic stones are called “Magnesian” (whence the English word, “magnet”). He then goes on to build a metaphor from this describing the “divine power” of Homer’s Muse, in which she is likened to a Magnesian stone which draws iron rings to itself, and in doing so infuses them with the power to do the same. But the stone at the top of the link remains the sole true power, and without it, all of the other iron rings lose theirs (Ion 533d-534a, 535e-536d). The Magnesia of the Laws is intended to usurp and replace the Muse of Homer’s “Magnesian’ power.

53 contradiction? Plato. The human as willing agent? Plato. Appearance versus reality?

Plato. Our deep interest in theorizing politics? Plato.

We still live in Plato’s polis.

The problem, or rather the quandary, is that these are all “noble” or “profitable” fictions, for Plato himself (Republic 414b4-c1, Laws 663d9). As Montaigne (2002, 379) rightly noted, in his “Apology for Raymond Sebond”:

[W]here [Plato] writes on his own, he makes no certain prescriptions. When he plays the lawgiver, he borrows a domineering and assertive style, and yet mixes in boldly the most fantastic of his inventions, which are as useful for persuading the common herd as they are ridiculous for persuading himself; knowing how apt we are to accept impressions, and most of all the wildest and most monstrous. [para.] And therefore in his Laws, he takes great care that they shall sing in public only poems whose fabulous fictions tend to some useful purpose; and, it being so easy to imprint all sorts of phantasms on the human mind, he thought it an injustice not to feed it rather on profitable lies than on lies that were either useless or harmful.

The (diverse and divergent) descriptions of these many fictions, throughout the dialogues, are obviously intended to have normative effects beyond those dialogues.

Plato is aware, as are his Socrates and his Athenian Stranger, that the human as a psycho- physiological totality is fundamentally mimetic: an attractive enough image of the human soul, for example, however fictional, will be imitated, represented, and enacted

(mimêsthai means all of these things), and thereby, in a manner of speaking, brought into being over time (in Kant’s terms, what is originally a regulative ideal becomes a constitutive one). As Socrates puts it to Adeimantus in the Republic (395c9-d2: cf. Laws

656b), “Have you not perceived that imitations (mimêseis), if they continue from youth onward, set into habits and nature, in body and sounds and in thought?” Of course, such an image will have diverse mimetic permutations, but its enactment in principle is the same. “Law,” as Socrates tells his anonymous comrade in the Minos (315a4), “wants to

54 be the invention (exeuresis)80 of what is.” Two and a half millennia later, most of us still believe we can objectively “evaluate” Plato’s concepts, without realizing that they have become the very tools with which we evaluate (including the concept of “concept”): to put it purely in terms of thinking, what we think about is what we think with. This is how nomos creates “what is.”81

But to put it only in this general way is to obfuscate one of Plato’s central concerns. As the Stranger notes early in the Laws, mimetic capacities and tendencies are not uniform: “each person proceeds with his own disposition and representations

(mimêsesi)” (655d3). Law as instruction can enjoin responsive behaviours within a more or less limited range. But law as a philosophical paradigm for enactment (mimesis) opens on to a broader range of representations by and within the dispositions which the law’s audience necessarily bring to bear. And this is especially so with law that cannot speak

“with one logos on each single subject” (719d2-3), but rather “entirely resembles a kind of poetry” (811c9-10),82 and will in fact be used as the model for other poetry (811d) – law that is specifically designed to be “the tragedy most beautiful and best” (817b2-3).

This is so with the penal law in Book 9 as well, for as much as the discussion there turns

80 Exeuresis has a Herodotean ambiguity that Socrates is most certainly playing with in this sentence. It can mean “discovery,” in the sense of something found; but it can also mean an invention (for its usage in the latter sense, see Herodotus 1. 94. 2-4, in which passage Herodotus plays – very self-consciously – with the ambiguity between finding something out, and inventing it. So far as I know, this word is not attested before Herodotus’ use of it in his Inquiries). Plato chooses this word, rather than either heuresis (a finding, or discovery) or exeurêma (an invention), deliberately exploiting its ambiguity. Law also wants to be the invention of what is. The context in which Socrates suggests this is very much to the point here, given that he is discussing with his unnamed “Comrade” why some laws aim at “what is,” (to on) and others do not. 81 “What is” is a translation of to on, or hê ousia, not to einai. Never in the Platonic dialogues does anyone suggest that to einai can be created, nor even that anything can be “beyond” it, even “the good” (cf. Republic 509b5-9: Socrates here says to Glaukon that “the good” is “beyond tên ousian,” not beyond to einai – the absence in the Greek is striking). The participial forms (!) of einai (“to be”), on and ousia, would best be understood as “moments of Becoming masked as Being” (“obstinately persisting as the real,” as Blanchot somewhere writes). Within this understanding, to einai could be rendered simply “Being.” 82 The contexts of these two passages (719c-d and 811c-812a) are essential.

55 around persuasion and compulsion using argument, the fullness of that argument (that logos) itself is a mimetic paradigm that exceeds the sum of its parts.

Thus the Laws, especially in Book 9, go to some length to introduce ostensibly descriptive, but in reality normative, considerations into the penal law, whose purpose is to stress reflection on what the “soul” is aware, or believes she is aware, of. Among the most important of these – and still important today – is the role that “premeditation” comes to play in adjudicating criminal prosecutions. The radical nature of this change escapes our notice today, but it certainly would not have done so for Plato’s Athenian contemporaries, for whom premeditation (even and especially in murder trials) was of no legal consequence at all (Loomis 1972, 93).

This change allows the Stranger to introduce another novelty to mitigate the standard penalty of death or permanent exile (which, in contemporary cities, were automatic in many cases), which is the curative periods of incarceration for periods of between one and three years. Here, however, is something to be noted. The worst penalty, per the Stranger, is not death but life in prison, and he reserves it for only one type of criminal: the crafty atheist who uses his intelligence to deliberately seduce more gullible

(and presumably spiritually despairing) citizens into exploitative schemes grounded in a

(knowingly) false religious doctrine. These criminals, if found guilty, are to be incarcerated for life in a prison (whose name is to be simply something like “Retribution”

– timôria, 908a6-7) in the land outside of the city proper and, when dead, are to have their corpses cast out unburied, completely outside of the bounds of Magnesia (909a8- c6). No free man will be permitted to have contact with them ever again. For these, and only these, criminals, does the Stranger suggest legislation that seems to be purely

56 exemplary to other citizens, and without any curative pretensions (not even death to cure an incurable life). The modern North American sentiment that life in prison is more

“humane” than the penalty of death is not shared by the Athenian Stranger. For “we are not such rulers, as the many are, for whom preservation (sôizesthai)83 and mere being are worthy of the greatest honour for human beings; rather [it is honourable] for us to become the best [possible], and to exist only (monon) for as long as we might exist as such” (707d2-5; cf. 727c7-d2, 957e4-958a3, Gorgias 511b-512b).

This entails a turn toward human excellence, and one cannot turn toward human excellence (arête) without also turning toward the possibility of human illness (kakia).84

Every human striving risks a fall equal to or greater than its effort to go higher (Republic

497d8-9). The only efforts not susceptible to such falls are the extremes of mediocrity (if the paradox be permitted), which stand to lose nothing, but also to gain nothing.

Naturally, these also will go under, as all human things – high, low, or mediocre – eventually will. But they will not fall so far in their going under, and this, for many, blesses the anticipation.

One could say, though one is not obliged to say, and perhaps it is best at times not to say – and it is certainly best at all times to be careful in saying – that even those who are not philosophers, in their own ways, also say and do that life is the practice of dying,

καὶ ἀληθῆ γ᾽ ἂν λέγοιεν…πλήν γε τοῦ σφᾶς µὴ λεληθέναι (Phaedo 64b8-9).

83 This verb has the same root as the noun sôtêria: sôzein – to save, safeguard, or preserve. 84 These words are usually translated as “virtue” and “vice” respectively, and so they must be to indicate their significations as moral value, in the Greek. But what their moral value is must also be understood, and that cannot, unfortunately, be signified with such now thoroughly christianized conceptions and connotations of “virtue” and “vice.” There is, especially, no existential direction toward another world (such as “heaven”) behind these words in Greek: both their practice and purpose are for this world, and this is so even and especially where they are connected with the divine (the divine is also of this world).

57

Chapter 3: Penality and Revenge

For the promotion of health. – One has hardly begun to reflect on the physiology of the criminal, and yet one already stands before the irrefutable insight that there exists no essential difference between criminals and the insane: presupposing one believes that the usual mode of moral thinking is the mode of thinking of spiritual health. - Nietzsche, Dawn §202 (Nietzsche’s emphases)85

We should note immediately that the penal law is quite clearly not separate from, but a part of, the education of the laws (880d8-e6; cf. 857e, 874d; Benardete 2000, 253-4;

Whitaker 2004, 151; Pangle 1988, 500). What we note, however, is not what is intended to be noted by every citizen or most citizens. The penal law is a “shameful” but necessary part, and indeed foundation, of education (853b-c). But, as Benardete (ibid, citing 927c7- d3) rightly notes, “the ordinary citizen, however, takes in, and is expected to take in, with his law-abidingness a self-congratulatory vanity that assures him that the punitiveness of this part of the law had not in any way contributed to his behaviour” (cf. 857e, 870e-

871a). For the citizen who indulges this vanity, for the criminal who must be corrected/punished, and for all those who celebrate punishing of those who transgress the law, the philosophically protreptic effort of the laws has failed. Meeting this failure is the main focus of the penal law.

But it should be briefly noted that this is not its only focus. The penal law must also anticipate at least partial successes of its philosophical efforts, and recognize that these successes themselves introduce problematic elements to the community as a whole.

Withdrawal from involvement in the “lower” justice of the city will not be permitted in

Magnesia. In this city, for example, Socrates would have been compelled to go to the

85 Nietzsche does not suggest that this is the “usual” mode of thinking, only that most of us believe it is, and that this affects our own “usual” mode of thinking.

58 assistance of Leon of Salamis, and not just refuse to participate in his extra-judicial murder (Apology 32c-d; Xenophon, Hellenica 2.3.38-9). Nor could he have completely avoided ever bringing anyone before a magistrate (Euthyphro 2b3-5). The laws must anticipate such disdain for civic justice, and especially the resentment and envy this is likely to give rise to on the part of those who require justice so understood.86 Obviating this resentment is a crucial part of bringing philosophy into the city, and this receives particular attention in the penal law concerning piety, and the theology developed in

Book 10 (the “successes” can be imagined to develop an unorthodox conception of, and relationship with, the divine, which might well appear to be atheism to orthodox believers).

But let us turn to the “shameful” part of the penal law. It should first be noted that the Stranger approaches criminal transgression not from a single participant’s (i.e. criminal, victim, adjudicator, etc.) point of view, but from a diagnostic perspective that considers the impact of crime on all of its participants. That is, he does not ground his therapeutic approach in blame, but understands the very need to blame and seek retribution as itself symptomatic of a terrible disease in the soul of each person infected by the crime: the victim, the criminal, the judges who adjudicate and assign punishment

86 A person who lives without feeling poisonous envy (phthonos) will by that fact alone excite it in many others, who would like to see such an example obliterated – most of all from their own consciousness. Someone who lives in such a way that it is perfectly and publicly obvious that he would never make use of a judicial court for his own purposes (Euthyphro 2b1-3), will find himself brought before that court, under different auspices to be sure, but for that very reason. For he has demonstrated that that system, which grounds meaning for so many others, has no meaning whatsoever for him – and he thereby threatens the meaning system of those others. One wonders very much if the lethal hatred for him would have arisen, had Socrates on occasion prosecuted deliberately gratuitous lawsuits. And if he had not been the sort who would not flee his death sentence (imagine the shame before him felt by everyone who had done so or would do so, in the same situation), would he have received it to begin with? Could the political moderation of such a person not include, perhaps, an occasional public pettiness (a second-best bed willed to one’s spouse, for example; or chronic complaints of chronic ill-health, cured only by long walks in the Upper Engadine)? Reminders of humanity, for humans who have not necessarily experienced the rarer forms of human experience?

59 in the case, and the broader public offended by the crime. Those who take satisfaction in revenging a crime – or in beholding that revenge – are, within this understanding, as unfortunate and ill as the criminal who took satisfaction from the crime itself (cf.

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1.6, “On the Pale Criminal”). This does not, of course, mean that their illnesses are identical. However, from this perspective, what in modern times is known as the “victims’ right movement” is, inasmuch as it seeks ever- heavier retributive punishments for crime (see Morgan and Smith 2005, 355; Erez and

Tontodonato 1992),87 in fact ignoring the well-being of victims altogether by pandering to and feeding their appetites for revenge, rather than recognizing that those appetites themselves demand therapeutic attention. This holistic approach is extremely important to the education advocated in the Laws, an effort which the penal law completes.

The best English article on Book 9 of the Laws in decades is far and away

Lorraine Pangle’s “Moral and Criminal Responsibility in Plato’s Laws” (Pangle 2009).

She is able to show that the Laws not only provides a theoretical framework (and legitimacy) for the modern restorative justice project, but in fact anticipates that project by millennia, and in decisive ways remains its most practically applicable approach in an always non-ideal world. Plato, as Pangle demonstrates, effects a meaningful and possible compromise between his own philosophic understanding of justice and living well, on the one hand; and the (ubiquitous) political reality that cannot participate in that understanding, other than with envy or admiration (the difference is of course crucial), and which absolutely requires at least a minimal level of satisfaction for its experiences of rage, indignation, licentiousness, and desire for revenge.

87 This is of course not at all to say that this is the only or even predominant goal of this broad “movement.” I am addressing an aspect, not the whole, of this movement.

60 That being said, the crux of my own interpretation depends on three subtle but important distinctions from Pangle’s:

1) Pangle (458-9, 461, 465-7) rightly notes that the Stranger must compromise with

the seemingly ineradicable desire for revenge that seizes the vast majority

of people when they are, or feel, injured. But he does not merely

compromise – he uses this desire to develop a project whereby that desire

might be gradually undermined. With sufficient attention to the text

(compare especially 857a-b with 864c; cf. carefully, Strauss 1975, 134),

one sees that the Stranger deliberately provokes this desire in Kleinias,

then uses precisely that response as his opportunity to infuse the spirit of

the law with the principle that “no one is willingly (hekôn) unjust” (731c2-

3; 860c-864c)

2) Pangle (467 and n16) insists that the Stranger capitulates to Kleinias in his penal

program, and “really does begin to speak of voluntary injustices.” While

this is in a certain sense correct, it misses the essential point, which is that

the Stranger explicitly admits that the terms voluntary and involuntary are

only images (eikones) that, while necessary for laws, are no more true

because of that (867a-c). From its opening lines (624a), Plato has

constructed the Laws as a dialogue that profoundly questions the

relationship between what is “just,” “necessary,” and/or “best,” with what

is true (cf. especially 663d-e).88

88 Other major terms subtly compared and contrasted with “true” include “persuasive” (Pangle 1976, 1062) and “beautiful” (kalos – which also means “noble”).

61 3) While Pangle (457-60) rightly stresses the Socratic maxim that knowledge is

virtue, and the importance of this to “the peculiarly interior meaning

Socrates and the Athenian [i.e. Stranger in the Laws] give to justice [i.e.

one of the virtues]” (459), her consideration of what this means remains

inadequate for an understanding of the “knowledge/virtue” that the

Stranger intends to provoke with his nomoi. As illustrated above, in

Chapter 2, for the Stranger (as for Socrates – cf. Meno 74b-76e)

knowledge is only knowledge when it is aretê (virtue), aretê is only aretê

when it is knowledge. There are no qualitative, and certainly no

quantitative, differences. Knowledge cannot increase or decrease, become

more or less powerful, nor “apprehend the truth” without prevailing (pace

Pangle, 457, 459). Ignorance, on the other hand, is precisely susceptible to

such gradations.

I have discussed the third point at length in Chapter 2, and its significance in relation to the penal law will become clearer as I proceed. A discussion of the second point will point to the importance of the first.

At 867a-c, the Stranger once again makes the most of the distinction between

“most just” (a1-2) and “most true” (b3). The “most just” thing to say about murders that occur out of spiritedness (thumos) – both those committed in a sudden passion, and those

“with malice aforethought” – is that they be “said (legomenous) to be somewhere in- between voluntary and involuntary” (a1-2), though each is in fact only an “image” (a2) of voluntary (in the case of premeditated murder) or involuntary (in the case of murder in the heat of passion). The “best and most true” thing to do, on the other hand, is to simply

62 “establish both as images, dividing them according to whether or not they are deliberated beforehand” (b3-4). What is just to say, and what is in fact true (and best), differ very much indeed here (cf. 860d9-e2). But the true logos is politically the weaker (cf. 645a4- b1), and the just logos the stronger, and the Stranger’s head is not in the Clouds. He can make this weaker (i.e. truer) argument, but he cannot make the weaker argument the stronger (Aristophanes, Clouds 1148-1153; Apology 19b5-c1). When he begins again to legislate, he does indeed describe crimes as voluntary or involuntary, and so, as Pangle

(2009, 457 and n16) notes, “really does begin to speak of voluntary injustices.” But he has made it very clear here that this is not, according to him, true. It is only “most just to say.”

What is more, what he is able to introduce by way of considering thumotic crimes ends up applying to every “voluntary” crime. The “image” of voluntary that attaches to crimes committed out of thumos, but deliberated on beforehand, necessarily attaches to all “voluntary” crimes as an image, since all such crimes involve not only one of the three causes of error, but all of them; i.e. where the initial thumotic impulse is not discharged, but develops into a calculated premeditation of a later injury (866e). The

“purely” thumotic response is an impulse that immediately seizes a person (866d) – it is always presented by the Stranger as uncalculating (alogiston) by itself (see especially

863b4), and in recapitulating the nature of crimes whose origins lie in thumos, he makes clear that they are all involuntary (869e4-5), despite earlier assigning to some the image of voluntary. Premeditation – the image of the voluntary – entails compounding this impulse with the calculation of “pleasures, desires, and envies” (869e5-8), or perhaps better, compounding such calculation with this impulse. But pleasures, desires, and

63 envies are always described by the Stranger as powers that seize and hold their victim – the perpetrator, in a criminal case – not things that that person has control over: the

“biggest thing that creates the biggest penalties for voluntary murder” (870c3-5)89 is love of wealth, per the Stranger, but this desire “overpowers” (kratousa, 870a1-2) the soul, and exists both “because of nature” (dia phusin, 870a5-6) and “lack of education”

(apaideusian, 870a6). In other words, this desire is as involuntary as it is terrible and destructive. The particular injury arising from such a desire may be “voluntary” (in the sense of “wanted”) within the enslavement to that desire, and the affair may indeed be

“completely unjust,” but the two do not connect to actually equal a “voluntary”

“injustice” (869e5-6).90

All of this is to say that the spirit that pervades the penal law is, without exception, that “no one is willingly unjust.” It is very true that this argument in no way throws off its mantle of the weaker political argument. But it likewise never relinquishes its position as the truer argument. The Stranger “speaks of,” but never believes in, voluntary injustice, and his care in presenting both the just and the true argument at once is itself to be written into the city’s constitution.

Having considered this, we can now address the Stranger’s provocation of

Kleinias with his law concerning theft, which provokes the response which brings about the conversation on voluntary and involuntary injustice in the first place. Pangle (2009,

89 Note that the Stranger does not say that they actually lead to voluntary murders – they lead only to the “biggest penalties” (megistas dikas) for murders thought of as, or justly said to be, voluntary. 90 The Stranger deliberately separates “voluntary” from “completely unjust” when he turns to speak of such occurrences, saying that they must speak of “ta…peri ta hekousia kai kat’ adikian pasan” (869e5-6). The change in prepositions shows that these are not one, but two somehow distinct subjects – the difference this makes in the Greek is greater than can be accurately rendered in English. The injury is somehow voluntary; the injustice is not (on the very important distinction the Stranger draws between injury and injustice, see Saunders 1968 and Roberts 1987).

64 458-9, 461, 465-7), as we have mentioned, rightly notes that the Stranger must compromise with the need for revenge which is so ubiquitous and powerful in the political community. But the Stranger deliberately provokes this response from Kleinias – he is not merely responding to a surprise (cf. 857a-b with 864c). Let us see how this is so, then consider why.

The Athenian Stranger begins his discussion of penalties for lawbreakers with the crimes against the very existence of the political community. As he moves through the most serious crimes (temple robbery, treason, and inciting civil war), he prescribes a single penalty: death. These crimes strike at the foundations of any political order, and regardless of personal responsibility, their perpetrators must be removed permanently (cf.

958c). To these penalties, Kleinias agrees (853a-856e). However, we will soon see that his reasons for desiring such penalties are not the same as the Athenian’s.

The fourth crime that the Athenian turns to is theft, and the penalty he assigns for it is clearly inspired by his maxim that “no one unjust is ever willingly unjust”91 – we aim

91 The idea that no one is willingly unjust occurs so many times throughout the Platonic dialogues, that it is easy to miss the question in what we might call the flip side of this λογος: is anyone, with the possible exception of Socrates himself, ever willingly just? The closest Socrates ever comes to addressing this question explicitly is in his final words to the jurors at his trial (Apology of Socrates 41c8-42a5), and the suggestion there is that the answer may well be No (see especially 41d3-8). At the least, in Socrates’ opinion, it is No concerning all of the jurors: by their condemnation, those who voted for the death penalty unwillingly and unintentionally granted Socrates what he is confident is “better” (βελτιον) for him – to die and be free of πραγµατα (things, matters, affairs); by implication, the intention of those who did not condemn him was to grant what they believed to be better (more just?), but despite their “good” intentions, they did not know how to be just concerning Socrates. All of this is of course complicated by the final three sentences that Socrates speaks there. In the first two (41e1-42a2), he instructs those who condemned him (and curiously enough, not those who would have acquitted him) how they might actually be just to both himself and his sons: act toward his sons in the same way that they have just finished condemning Socrates for acting toward themselves. And in the last sentence, and in at least seeming contradiction (though it is important that it is not in fact a contradiction) to what he has just said about it being “clear” to him (µοι δηλον) that it is “better” (βελτιον) that he die now, he tells them that no one can know which of them “goes to a better thing [αµεινον πραγµα]” – he being put to death, or they living – “except/unless the god [does].” It is not humanly knowable whether death or life is better for any of us, and all of our conceptions of justice necessarily occur within this extreme and unavoidable limitation of our knowledge (cf. Laches 195c7- 196a3). In fact, it is not humanly knowable if there even is death (note that Socrates specifically does not say that he goes to “death,” which would be θανατος, but to “dying” or “being put to death”

65 at what we think is “good;” we are often wrong about that; when we are correct we often err (hamartanomen); and regardless, we are largely driven by the chaotic conflicts that our souls are composed of (904c). No one has an inherent faculty of “will” (a concept that Greek would not even be able to express for almost a millennium after Plato)92, with which to order these conflicts, and which alone would make (and allow) him or her to be

“responsible” in any sense whatsoever. The penalty for theft (and, we now see, for other crimes, even the most heinous) is not intended as a retributive punishment. Those who steal will repay twice the amount stolen – whether great or small (857a-b).

This suggestion meets with strenuous objection from Kleinias (857b), who is suddenly aware that the Athenian’s penalties have no interest in retribution. He demands to know why crimes that vary should not have varying punishments. We note, of course, that when the Athenian had earlier assigned death as the single penalty for varying crimes, Kleinias was in no way concerned, and in fact agreed to this penalty with an almost careless “Kalôs” – “Beautiful” (856e4). So his objection now is not exactly as theoretical as he makes it seem, shall we say.

To this clearly petty objection, however, the Athenian replies: “Well done,

Kleinias! I was almost being carried away when you hit me, waking me up and reminding me of the things I was thinking about earlier: that nothing concerning law-giving has in any way whatsoever been completely cultivated, as can be said from what’s just come

[αποθανουµενων]. Everything beyond, and including, that moment is radically unknowable). It is even to be doubted whether “the god” can know this – there is a deliberate ambiguity in Socrates’ last statement here. Scholars are divided as to whether he says “πλην η” or “πλην ει τω θεω,” but it does not really matter how it is written – the dialogues were written to be listened to, and both sound identical to the ear. The first implies that the god does know; the second that the god might. 92 An enormously insightful and persuasive argument is made for this by Albrecht Dihle, in his The Theory of the Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley, 1982). Useful (and persuasive) correctives are supplied by Schlabach 1994; and Kahn 1988, 234-259 – it should be noted that both corrective efforts suggest later dates than Dihle (who focuses on Augustine’s project) for the modern (especially Christian) conception of “will.”

66 up” (857b9-c4). This is, in other words, a frank declaration that neither god nor man has ever fully realized the possibilities inherent in giving laws. It is not at all coincidental that the Stranger now speaks the word “philosophy” for the first time in the entire dialogue

(857d2), though ever so carefully, nor is it surprising that Kleinias is confused (857e2).

How did this happen? Why did theft, simply understood, follow the three capital crimes? The robbery of temples is capital because it is such a flagrant violation of the sacred, not because it is theft simply (cf. 864d1-2). Strauss’ (somewhat disingenuous; i.e. deliberately misleading) suggestion is that the initial rubric is not capital crime, but crimes against the city, of which individual murder is not one (Strauss 1975, 128). But individual murder, and wounding, is considered a crime against the city in the Laws

(878c5-d4).

What is more, the Stranger does not in fact come back to theft, after the long digression entailed by Kleinias’ objection. He says he will return to where they left off, but he does not do so – nor does he ever mention theft simply in his “recapitulation” of where they had “left off” (864c10-d3). In fact, theft will turn out to be a civil crime, not addressed again until the beginning of Book 10, and not comprehensively addressed until

Book 11. The Stranger’s mention of theft, in the “natural” order of the laws, seems to make no sense at all.

But it does make sense. The Stranger has introduced his radical reconsideration of justice under the very rubric that is the most threatening to it, and to all forms of justice.

He has appealed to the love of money – by mentioning a threat thereto – very specifically in order to have precisely it be the aegis under which his philosophical principle of justice be shepherded into the city, and there remain. The most common and debilitating vice

67 (cf. especially 831c-832b, 870a-c) is the most useful guardian for the most uncommon judicial contemplation. The Stranger entrusts his philosophical insight not to the best guardian, but to the guardian that will last – and the love of money will last as long as humans do. The Stranger turns this unfortunate aspect of humanity to good purpose – de necessitate virtutem facit.

Tying this principle to theft also makes sense for another reason. There is simply no way that the conversation between these three old men will be remembered verbatim by all of its participants, nor is everything discussed to be automatically included in the legislation to come (858b-c; cf. the lengthy discussion of the manifold and unavoidable difficulties which force legislation to compromise – often substantially – with existing circumstances, at 704a-712a and 745e-746d; also 736b5-6 with 636a4-5). In order to ensure that this principle not only finds favor particularly with Kleinias, but will also be remembered by him as fundamental, it must be presented in a way that is specifically memorable to him. As Kleinias has let slip earlier (661d-662a, and especially 832a-b),93 his acknowledgement that “love of money” is base and harmful (705a-b) does not mean that he does not share in that love himself (cf. his response at 922d4-9 with 729a2-b2).

He seems to know that he should not, but he nevertheless, like so many, does94 – he is, in

93 I agree with England (1921, vol. 2, 332-3), Saunders (1972, 70-1), Pangle (1988, 532n6), and Burnet (ad loc.) that the disputed lines in 832a-b belong to Kleinias. There is no reason to disregard the fact that all of the MSS attribute the key interjections at 832a10-b3 and b5-6 to him, despite the objections of Wilamowitz, Hermann, and Burges. There is not one MS that attributes any of these lines to Megillos (as the objectors insist they ought to be), and it makes perfect dramatic sense for Kleinias to reveal just how personally he has taken the Stranger’s castigation of the love of money here. Wilamowitz usefully summarizes (and supports, in his authoritative way) the objections, all of which rest on a supposed dramatic inconsistency (Wilamowitz-Möllendorff 1920, 396-407). I see no compelling reason whatsoever to agree. Kleinias is irritated by the Stranger’s disgust because he is personally offended by it, and therefore angrily cuts the Stranger short. In his shame, he betrays his true nature and disposition. Cf. 650b6-9. 94 To address both Kleinias’ limited memory in particular, and also his position as a “lover of money,” consider the “worthy titles to rule” (discussed in Book 3 at 690a-c), which he completely forgets in Book 4 (“What titles?” – 714e2). He seems to forget they were even mentioned – is this perhaps because the

68 the Stranger’s terms, in the greatest ignorance about this desire. And as with most law- abiding “lovers of gain” (philokerdeis), the punishment of theft is important for him because he imagines his own wealth being stolen; in his memory, the principle that “no one is willingly unjust” will be tied to increasing the revenge on thieves, not the mitigation of penalties for homicide that the Stranger uses it for. One can be reasonably sure that this so important conversation will number among the “notes” that Kleinias is taking (Epinomis 980d3-4), however much his understanding thereof is limited.

Finally, with this approach the homicide law is unencumbered, directly, by the general contemplation of justice and human will that precede it, or the question of the purpose of law that follows it. The considerations which most directly apply to it must appear at least not to arise from it. The discussion of the principle “no one unjust is willingly unjust” is provoked by the Stranger’s (deliberately out of place) attempt to legislate against theft. The question of why law even exists is prompted (arbitrarily) by the legislation of non-lethal wounds inflicted (874e-875d). Thoughtful consideration of such things is only possible in situations that do not command the revenge-drive to marshal all of its forces. Such consideration can parenthesize, but not dominate, situations which do so command. To put it another way, they can only obliquely affect those human experiences in which drives are supreme. The indignation that is at the root of the desire for revenge when one has been robbed or wounded, is not generally at the root of this desire when one’s loved ones have been killed, or when one imagines being killed oneself. One can, within limits, imagine compensation for theft or injuries, but the

Stranger does not list wealth as a worthy title to rule? It should be noted that in Book 11, concerning the civil law based fundamentally around private money and property, the Stranger only once addresses Megillos (and that one time with Kleinias, on the subject of proper judgment concerning all crimes – 934c). By contrast, he addresses Kleinias six times by name in Book 11 (918c, 922b, c, and e, 923c, and 926a).

69 life of a lost loved one is irreplaceable, to say nothing of imagining the loss of one’s own life. The Stranger’s laws are as much inspired by psychological insight, as they are by

“rational” consideration. The latter suggests that human life is not worthy of much seriousness. The former recognizes that this is, nevertheless, the sanctum sanctorum for the majority of human beings. Even if the Stranger could initially, with Kleinias, attach

“the involuntariness of all injustice” to the homicide law, this would be a precarious place to set it down for future generations. Clauses resembling understanding or clemency in relation to homicide are easy targets for abolishing, when the public spirit of revenge rises (consider the efforts – sadly successful as of 15 February 2011 – of the current

Canadian government to repeal the “faint hope clause” for prisoners serving life sentences).

This is to say that the penal law in Book 9 must be attended to with at least two approaches in mind. One must examine the penal law simultaneously in terms of what it valorizes, and what it reflects upon. While responsibility for one’s actions is valorized, this is based on the insight that such responsibility in fact does not (yet) exist. The image of “voluntary” attached to injustice is not reflective of a present human reality, but may have much to do with creating the future mimetically. Like the great deeds and heroic dispositions of Homer’s characters, this image is intended to shape the dispositions of those who “imitate” it, not only at one time, but over centuries. But just as the images of

Homer’s Achilles or Odysseus only worked in this way because their “imitators” recognized that they were in fact not Achilles or Odysseus, so the image of human will can only shape through mimesis if those human beings who enact it recognize that they in fact do not have such a will at present. Seen as such, the Stranger does not in fact “dilute

70 his own insight about the involuntariness of crime in offering legislation” (Pangle 2009,

468). Rather, by juxtaposing that insight with the politically unavoidable category of

“voluntary,” he provides for a way (a long road, to be sure) in which that insight might be used to bring something like human will into being. “No one is voluntarily unjust” is a limited expression of the Stranger’s (and Socrates’) broader insight: No one (or almost no one – 875d2-3), at present, is voluntarily anything. The penal law, educating toward human will, is in many ways the education proper of the Laws.

Holding apart the Socratic insight into the involuntariness of injustice, from the penal law that must insist on the category of voluntary crimes as an image, performs two interrelated functions. On the one hand, that insight itself inspires at least a mitigation of the retribution for criminal offenses. On the other hand, the image of “voluntary” is one that can excite admiration, as well as a salutary shame in the face of one’s present inability to actually live that image as a reality. As Tarnopolsky (2010, 119) has insightfully articulated, this “Platonic respectful shame” involves “not just pointing out

[people’s] past mistakes and errors (as is the case with the Socratic elenchus), but also greeting them on their own grounds to then slowly lead them to new ways of seeing the world” (cf. ibid, 57-60, 138-40). The Platonic effort is not only to temper destructive and vengeful drives, but also and especially to transform their volatilities into new ways of living, by way of new mimetic – and therefore imaginative – activity.

This is to say that the Stranger does not only bow to the inevitable retributive instinct, with its need for the spectacle of punishment, in the Laws. He certainly does recognize the political necessity of assuaging this instinct, but as a necessity to cooperate with (709a-c), not merely to bow to. If an overarching principle of the Laws is to always

71 (if sometimes only barely) acknowledge the limits of practical, political reality (and it is, e.g. 742e, 745e), that principle is itself wedded constantly to another: necessity, against which “it is said that not even a god is capable of using force” (741a4-5), is nevertheless, to a certain degree, susceptible to persuasion (709a-c; Timaeus 48a2-5). The necessary spectacle of retributive judgment and punishment can also be so crafted as to be, at the same time, both a valorization of human will, and a visceral reminder of its lack – both in the world and in oneself (cf. 934c, 957c-e). It is in the tension between the Socratic insight (that no one is willingly unjust), and the image of voluntary that obtains in the spectacle of retributive punishment, that this mimetic activity is at work. The mere

“dilution” of that insight into a version acceptable to “the many” cannot do this on its own, and this is why the Stranger makes such a huge and psychologically insightful effort to ensure that that insight will have a place in the actual laws that are yet to be written.

This is not to say that the mimetic praxis of willing will in fact lead to human will

– the phantasia of human will does not necessarily have a possible realisation as such just because of its powerful appeal. The image has the capacity to tempt and shame us into “enacting” it as we are, but that very enactment would necessarily be profoundly transformative of who we are: the existential result truly is a voyage to “undiscover’d country,” undiscovered not because it is a new land, but because it requires new eyes with which to see it.95 Platonic philosophy, as ancient philosophy in general, is interested not so much in describing “what is,” but in transfiguring it; not so much in a systematic politico-ontological treatise, but in “philosophy as way of living” (Hadot 2001, especially

144-193; and 2002, 101-144).

95 « Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d’aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d’avoir d’autres yeux... » (Marcel Proust, La prisonnière in À la recherche du temps perdu ; Proust 1999, 1797)

72 The praxis of enacting the image of human will – as a praxis, not a discussion about it – may, for example, open on to a very different experience and expectation of human freedom, for there may well be greater freedom in a genuine sense of responsibility than there is in what is now called “rights,” or the “freedom” of laisser aller (cf. Nietzsche, BGE aph. 188). For the Athenian Stranger, a judgment between the two can only be made by doing the heavier labour, for true judgment is itself a heavier burden than anyone who would consent to a lighter one could bear. One must “do one’s own things” (Republic 433a8) if one is to discover/invent oneself, and it is to this, I think, that Aristotle referred when he said that Plato “turns (periagei) the regime of the Laws, a little at a time, back to the Republic” (Politics 1265a2-3; cf. Laws 736c8-d4).96

96 Keeping in mind that for Aristotle, as for Plato, the real regime, “the regime itself” (he politeia autê), is the educational regime, not the institutional arrangement of offices (see Politics Book 7, from 1331b24 to the end of Book 8).

73

Conclusion

In the final analysis, both the individually protreptic and the broader mimetic projects of the Laws are, at their cores, attempts to foster genuine human responsibility.

An obvious difference between them is that while the former can be potentially realized within the space of one’s lifetime (by those who are already inwardly so compelled), the latter is a project for centuries of slow and arduous transformation. Both projects use and transfigure already present human volatilities to accomplish themselves. The desire for revenge against “injustice,” for example, inasmuch as it is the desire to find a will behind that injustice in order to even have something with which to justify that revenge, is turned inward, potentially into the desire to create such a will within oneself. The soul, re- imagined by the Stranger (and by Plato) as something to craft and honour, rather than as merely a completely given life-principle, is the site of this creation.

But this comes, as Plato knows, with attendant dangers, and this is why the need for safeguards is stressed from the beginning to the end of the Laws, and why the character of Megillos – who is capable of the reflection needed to be such a safeguard – is crucial. As the Stranger demonstrates in Book 2, with the example of supervised symposia, what is volatile can be put to salutary use, but only if it is tended to with extreme care by those rare human beings who themselves are less susceptible to that volatility’s erotic attractions. Without these “safeguards,” such efforts should not even be attempted (673e-674b), and the Stranger very carefully assesses the characters of his interlocutors from the outset for this very reason. Only because Megillos subtly but

74 clearly reveals (to the Stranger) his capacity to be such a safeguard can the larger project of the Laws be a transformative one, rather than simply restrictive.

Why this is so inheres in the nature of transformation itself, and its difficulties.

For in order to appeal to the habituated characters of human beings, such an effort must necessarily excite precisely what is need of transformation – which is also precisely what resists transformation. The danger lies in this resistance being successful, for in that case there is every likelihood that the efforts themselves will be assimilated to, and will augment, what they are attempting to transform.

To put this in the more specific terms of the Laws, if the very tools and efforts philosophically implemented to transfigure revenge and inspire toward responsibility and something like human will, are put in the service of revenge by forgetting that the image of human will is an image – i.e. if it is taken to simply exist now and for everyone – then the “wilfully evil soul” provides the ultimate target for revenge. One would have to expect a massive potentiation of the revenge-drives themselves; and penal systems not of mitigated, but of maximized, severity. Everything great risks a fall.

Not only might our public (and private) anger at those who offend us escalate to catastrophic levels, but we also might well forget the “iron courage” required for us to take any true responsibility, or experience any true freedom (Gray 1998, 169). Rather than facilitating the higher philosophical project, its very tools could be coopted

(consciously or more likely not) to eclipse it entirely. And, as with both Crete and Sparta at the outset of the Laws, the habitual practices that attend all political life tend to calcify and present themselves as the “traditional” and only correct way of life that respect the intentions of the original lawgiver – and the power of this belief can quite easily be

75 divorced from any real connection or access to the lawgiver’s intentions. The Laws, from the beginning, treats this as the rule, not the exception.

This is to say that both the Stranger in the Laws, and Platonic political philosophy in general, not only anticipate challenges, but fundamentally require them, and we can understand the historical unfolding of Plato’s political and philosophical enterprise only in this light. Plato’s true heirs are not those who complacently favour whatever

“Platonism” happens to be current, but those who challenge such habituations by carefully considering Plato’s intentions, and the value of those intentions – and as with

Megillos, what appears to be hostility on the part of such a challenger can in fact be the close engagement of an admirer who is drawing philosophy, and political philosophy, back to its origins (cf. Machiavelli, Discourses 3.1). The prospect of genuine philosophy emerges more in the tension created by Nietzsche’s challenge to Plato than in the dedication of adherents to particular Platonisms. In the Laws, with its tensions between

Megillos and the Stranger, and its noble but dangerous attempt to transfigure revenge into human responsibility, Plato shows us how this is so, and why.

76

Appendix 1: Megillos and the Gods

There is another aspect of Megillos’ character that should be considered. We have seen that he quietly agreed with the Stranger that divine myths often have human origins, for very human (all-too-human) reasons. And concerning the divine origin of Spartan law

(i.e. Apollo), Megillos offers no explicit personal commitment. Stepping back a little, it can be seen that the Stranger himself had a suspicion at least concerning Megillos’ relationship with the gods. When he spoke to Megillos and Kleinias in turn, concerning the intentions of their respective lawgivers, he quite specifically spoke to Megillos only of the human lawgiver of Lacedaimonia (633a5); however, the moment he turned to

Kleinias, he stressed the divine origin of both Doric legislations (634a1; cf. 662c5-7).97

What is Megillos’ belief concerning the gods? Plato seems to have constructed this aspect of his character with careful attention. The only time in the Laws that Megillos even remotely suggests a personal belief in a divinity is equivocal, to say the least. In

Book 3, he says that “if some god” (ei…tis…theos) would promise arguments as good and long as those that preceded, he would wish to draw out even this longest day of the year, the day that “the god (tou theou) turns away from summer toward winter” (i.e. the summer solstice) (683b7-c5).98 The god that turns is obviously the sun, and the mention

97 Mere moments before, the Stranger had made a distinction that is illustrative of his own reservations about the divine origin of the laws, while at the same time deeply respectful of at least Kleinias’ piety. The laws of Crete and Sparta, he says (in a speech designed to show what Kleinias ought to have told the Stranger about the purpose of Cretan law), “are said (legomenois) to be from Zeus and Pythian Apollo” (632d2-3). When he then says that they “were set down by Minos and Lycurgus” (d3-4), he does not say that this is only “said” to be (cf. 645b6, 657a8). As with Megillos earlier, there is a great deal of difference between accepting that something is “said,” and accepting that it is actually true. When Megillos actually does agree with something that “many” say, he goes out of his way to say so (642c6-8; as does the Stranger – 658e6-8). 98 Pangle translates “we are close to the day” when the solstice will occur. This is a possibility, but the sense seems to me to be the alternative possibility: not the day, but the precise moment in that day, is approaching. The Laws takes place during the longest day of the year (cf. Benardete 2000, 1).

77 of “some god” is so nondescript as to neither assert nor deny belief in whatever deity is thereby alluded to. It is also noteworthy that Megillos – unlike Kleinias and the Stranger

– never once swears by a god or gods in the Laws. And when, in Book 7, the Stranger presents an exaggerated picture of the city’s citizens as being essentially puppets of the gods, and passing most of their time performing sacrifices and choruses for those gods, it is Megillos who angrily interjects: “You’re completely disparaging our human race,

Stranger!” (804b5-6). When a similar myth had been suggested earlier (644d-645d), though with the stress on human responsibility, law, and calculation, Megillos had expressed no objection. Finally, in Book 10, in which theology is treated most extensively, Megillos enters the conversation only briefly at the beginning (891a8 and b7), and then only to stress the necessity that the lawgiver defend the gods’ existence – he speaks in terms of political, not metaphysical, necessity. After this brief interjection, he falls completely silent until the closing lines of the Laws (969c-d).

The picture that Plato therefore gives of Megillos is highly suggestive of an agnostic concerning the gods, if not an outright – if discreet – atheist. It is surely remarkable that Plato allows nothing definitively to be attributed to Megillos, with respect to the divine, other than his support for the political responsibility for the gods.

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Appendix 2: The Laws and Homer

The exchange (Ganymede/symposia/loose women) between the Stranger and

Megillos quite precisely takes up the major themes of the Homeric verses evoked at the beginning of the dialogue: a catamite companion of Zeus (presented directly by the

Stranger as a lie) at a symposium; the symposium as operating under the aegis of

Dionysus (presented directly by Megillos as a lie); and the proverbial looseness of

Spartan women – exemplified by Helen of Sparta, laterally Helen of Troy – which in the

Odyssey is the underlying doubt that prompts Odysseus to tell his lie, to his wife

Penelope, in the first place: he is afraid that she might have been unfaithful to him, and is merely lying in wait to kill him, as Clytaemnestra did with her husband, Agamemnon.

First Ganymede: the Stranger accuses the Cretans of having invented this story to support their practices of homosexuality. But this story would seem to have as much

“doctrinal” weight as the myth of Minos – Homer tells the story in the Iliad, in a way that would require no embellishment to support divine homosexuality (Il. 20.232-5). Nor would the lines concerning Minos that the Stranger evoked at the outset, which he specifically robbed of this meaning. What is more, the Stranger deliberately (636d4-5) limits the myth of Ganymede to its homosexual aspects, dropping what Homer had himself included: Ganymede is not only Zeus’ beloved, but also his cupbearer at symposia. In other words, he more or less leads Megillos to the specific charge against the Athenians that he needs made: their drunkenness at symposia, and their manipulation/invention of divine myths to legitimize them.

79 But let us consider this more fully. The proverbial “looseness of women” in

Sparta has its proverbial figure in Helen.99 But proverbial consciousness is itself “loose” even with its mythical origins: Helen could not possibly have been “loose” because of

Lycurgus’ laws and their ignorance of women. Even in mythical time, Helen and the

Trojan War predate Lycurgus by many generations at least (and probably many centuries), and there is in fact nothing in Homer to suggest that the inhabitants of Sparta that he wrote of were Dorians – i.e. the Spartans that Homer wrote of (such as Helen and

Menelaus) preceded not only Lycurgus, but also the Dorian invasion and occupation of the Peloponnese (see Megillos’ criticism of Homer at 680c7-d1, which should always be remembered when considering Homeric references in the Laws).100 Moreover, this example, unlike those of Ganymede and Dionysian symposia, has nothing to do with manipulating myths about divinity for the sake of granting permission for “venal” acts.

Or does it? Is the suggestion perhaps that Homer himself did this (is Helen an excusatory role model for dissolute Spartan women?)? Or – and/or – that Lycurgus’ laws must ultimately take complete responsibility for everything as far as justice is concerned, yet in truth had to be adapted to the particular and intransigent habits which comprised the very people for whom they were designed?

The suggestive example of Helen is itself suggestive of reconsiderations about traditionalism itself, inasmuch as traditionalism is a specific kind of mythologizing of the past. “Traditional” traditionalism reveres, as Kleinias reveres, the habits and practices to which the traditionalist has become habituated to and practiced in, in his/her youth.

99 Pangle (1988, 516n43) lists pertinent passages in the Laws and other ancient Greek sources, all of which should be consulted. 100 If Helen is historical, this means that her descendants are in actuality the people(s) conquered by the Dorians: they are the Helot slaves.

80 Fathers and forefathers (as well as mothers and foremothers) are invoked, and sacralize these habits and practices. In other words, the traditionalism that Kleinias represents tends to make the present, or near-present, its object of worship, despite (and because of) its claim to represent a tradition reaching back to time immemorial and the gods who engendered it. To put it another, less glorious way, this “traditionalism” reveres the habits of the present, and co-opts the past in order to do so – knowledge of genuine connection

(or lack thereof) to the past ostensibly revered is subordinated completely to the myth of a traditionally supported present habit (793a9-d5). And this traditionalism is absolutely necessary – but also ultimately lethal – to any law, and its purpose.

What is more, any attempt to reach back beyond the beneficial mythology to the original intent of the lawgiver is, from the perspective of Kleinian traditionalism, radically untraditional. The truly traditional retrieval of the oldest things is a threat to the nominally (i.e. the justly) traditional defense of the newest things. We find a modern equivalent to this in the traditions and traditionalisms of Platonic political philosophy.

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