The arguments which Plato uses for the being of a God, have an extremely modern character: first, the consensus gentium; secondly, the argument which has already been adduced in the “Phaedrus” (245 C), of the priority of the self-moved. The answer to those who say that God “cares not,” is, that He governs by general laws; and that he who takes care of the great will assuredly take care of the small. Plato did not feel, and has not attempted to consider, the difficulty of reconciling the special with the general providence of God. Yet he is on the road to a solution, when he regards the world as a whole, of which all the parts work together towards the final end.
We are surprised to find that the scepticism, which we attribute to young men in our own day, existed then (compare Republic VII 538); that the Epicureanism expressed in the line of Horace (borrowed from Lucretius)—
“Namque Deos didici securum agere aevum,”
was already prevalent in the age of Plato; and that the terrors of another world were freely used in order to gain advantages over other men in this. The same objection which struck the Psalmist—“when I saw the prosperity of the wicked” (Psalms 73:3)—is supposed to lie at the root of the better sort of unbelief. And the answer is substantially the same which the modern theologian would offer:—that the ways of God in this world cannot be justified unless there be a future state of rewards and punishments. Yet this future state of rewards and punishments is in Plato’s view not any addition of happiness or suffering imposed from without, but the permanence of good and evil in the soul: here he is in advance of many modern theologians. The Greek, too, had his difficulty about the existence of evil, which in one solitary passage, remarkable for being inconsistent with his general system, Plato explains, after the Magian fashion, by a good and evil spirit (X 896 E; compare “Theaetetus” 176, “Statesman” 269 E). This passage is also remarkable for being at variance with the general optimism of the Tenth Book—not “all things are ordered by God for the best,” but some things by a good, others by an evil spirit.
The Tenth Book of the Laws presents a picture of the state of belief among the Greeks singularly like that of the world in which we live. Plato is disposed to attribute the incredulity of his own age to several causes. First, to the bad effect of mythological tales, of which he retains his disapproval; but he has a weak side for antiquity, and is unwilling, as in the Republic (Books II and III), wholly to proscribe them (Laws X 886). Secondly, he remarks the self-conceit of a newly-fledged generation of philosophers, who declare that the sun, moon, and stars, are earth and stones only; and who also maintain that the Gods are made by the laws of the state. Thirdly, he notes a confusion in the minds of men arising out of their misinterpretation of the appearances of the world around them: they do not always see the righteous rewarded and the wicked punished. So in modern times there are some whose infidelity has arisen from doubts about the inspiration of ancient writings; others who have been made unbelievers by physical science, or again by the seemingly political character of religion; while there is a third class to whose minds the difficulty of “justifying the ways of God to man” has been the chief stumbling-block. Plato is very much out of temper at the impiety of some of his contemporaries (X 888); yet he is determined to reason with the victims, as he regards them, of these illusions before he punishes them. His answer to the unbelievers is twofold: first, that the soul is prior to the body (X 891 E); secondly, that the ruler of the universe being perfect has made all things with a view to their perfection (X 903 C, 904). The difficulties arising out of ancient sacred writings were far less serious in the age of Plato than in our own.
We too have our popular Epicureanism, which would allow the world to go on as if there were no God. When the belief in Him, whether of ancient or modern times, begins to fade away, men relegate Him, either in theory or practice, into a distant heaven. They do not like expressly to deny God when it is more convenient to forget Him; and so the theory of the Epicurean becomes the practice of mankind in general. Nor can we be said to be free from that which Plato justly considers to be the worst unbelief—of those who put superstition in the place of true religion. For the larger half of Christians continue to assert that the justice of God may be turned aside by gifts, and, if not by the “odour of fat, and the sacrifice steaming to heaven,” still by another kind of sacrifice placed upon the altar—by masses for the quick and dead, by dispensations, by building churches, by rites and ceremonies—by the same means which the heathen used, taking other names and shapes. And the indifference of Epicureanism and unbelief is in two ways the parent of superstition, partly because it permits, and also because it creates, a necessity for its development in religious and enthusiastic temperaments. If men cannot have a rational belief, they will have an irrational. And hence the most superstitious countries are also at a certain point of civilization the most unbelieving, and the revolution which takes one direction is quickly followed by a reaction in the other. So we may read “between the lines” ancient history and philosophy into modern, and modern into ancient. Whether we compare the theory of Greek philosophy with the Christian religion, or the practice of the Gentile world with the practice of the Christian world, they will be found to differ more in words and less in reality than we might have supposed. The greater opposition which is sometimes made between them seems to arise chiefly out of a comparison of the ideal of the one with the practice of the other.
To the errors of superstition and unbelief Plato opposes the simple and natural truth of religion; the best and highest, whether conceived in the form of a person or a principle—as the divine mind or as the idea of good—is believed by him to be the basis of human life. That all things are working together for good to the good and evil to the evil in this or in some other world to which human actions are transferred, is the sum of his faith or theology. Unlike Socrates, he is absolutely free from superstition. Religion and morality are one and indivisible to him. He dislikes the “heathen mythology,” which, as he significantly remarks, was not tolerated in Crete, and perhaps (for the meaning of his words is not quite clear) at Sparta (X 886 B, C: compare III 680 C). He gives no encouragement to individual enthusiasm; “the establishment of religion could only be the work of a mighty intellect” (X 909 E). Like the Hebrews, he prohibits private rites; for the avoidance of superstition, he would transfer all worship of the Gods to the public temples (X 909 D). He would not have men and women consecrating the accidents of their lives (X 909 E). He trusts to human punishments and not to divine judgments; though he is not unwilling to repeat the old tradition that certain kinds of dishonesty “prevent a man from having a family” (XI 913 C). He considers that the “ages of faith” have passed away and cannot now be recalled (XII 948 B). Yet he is far from wishing to extirpate the sentiment of religion, which he sees to be common to all mankind—Barbarians as well as Hellenes (X 886 A). He remarks that no one passes through life without, sooner or later, experiencing its power (X 888 B, C). To which we may add the further remark that the greater the irreligion, the more violent has often been the religious reaction.
It is remarkable that Plato’s account of mind at the end of the Laws goes beyond Anaxagoras, and beyond himself in any of his previous writings. Aristotle, in a well-known passage (Metaphysics I 4) which is an echo of the “Phaedo” (97, 98), remarks on the inconsistency of Anaxagoras in introducing the agency of mind, and yet having recourse to other and inferior, probably material causes. But Plato makes the further criticism, that the error of Anaxagoras consisted, not in denying the universal agency of mind, but in denying the priority, or, as we should say, the eternity of it (XII 967). Yet in the “Timaeus” (31 and following) he had himself allowed that God made the world out of preexisting materials: in the “Statesman” (273 B) he says that there were seeds of evil in the world arising out of the remains of a former chaos which could not be got rid of; and even in the Tenth Book of the Laws (896 E) he has admitted that there are two souls, a good and evil. In the “Meno,” the “Phaedrus,” and the “Phaedo,” he had spoken of the recovery of ideas from a former state of existence. But now he has attained to a clearer point of view: he has discarded these fancies. From meditating on the priority of the human soul to the body, he has learnt the nature of soul absolutely. The power of the best, of which he gave an intimation in the “Phaedo” and in the Republic, now, as in the “Philebus,” takes the form of an intelligence or person. He no longer, like Anaxagoras, supposes mind to be introduced at a certain time into the world and to give order to a preexisting chaos, but to be prior to the chaos, everlasting and evermoving, and the source of order and intelligence in all things. This appears to be the last form of Plato’s religious philosophy, which might almost be summed up in the words of Kant, “the starry heaven above and the moral law within.” Or rather, perhaps, “the starry heaven above and mind prior to the world.”
IV. The remarks about retail trade, about adulteration, and about mendicity, have a very modern character. Greek social life was more like our own than we are apt to suppose. There was the same division of ranks, the same aristocratic and democratic feeling, and, even in a democracy, the same preference for land and for agricultural pursuits. Plato may be claimed as the first free trader, when he prohibits the imposition of customs on imports and exports, though he was clearly not aware of the importance of the principle which he enunciated (VIII 847 B, C). The discredit of retail trade he attributes to the rogueries of traders, and is inclined to believe that if a nobleman would keep a shop, which heaven forbid! retail trade might become honourable (XI 918). He has hardly lighted upon the true reason, which appears to be the essential distinction between buyers and sellers, the one class being necessarily in some degree dependent on the other. When he proposes to fix prices “which would allow a moderate gain” (XI 920), and to regulate trade in several minute particulars, we must remember that this is by no means so absurd in a city consisting of 5,040 citizens, in which almost everyone would know and become known to everybody else, as in our own vast population. Among ourselves we are very far from allowing every man to charge what he pleases. Of many things the prices are fixed by law. Do we not often hear of wages being adjusted in proportion to the profits of employers? The objection to regulating them by law and thus avoiding the conflicts which continually arise between the buyers and sellers of labour, is not so much the undesirableness as the impossibility of doing so. Wherever free competition is not reconcileable either with the order of society, or, as in the case of adulteration, with common honesty, the government may lawfully interfere. The only question is—Whether the interference will be effectual, and whether the evil of interference may not be greater than the evil which is prevented by it.
He would prohibit beggars, because in a well-ordered state no good man would be left to starve (XI 936 B). This again is a prohibition which might have been easily enforced, for there is no difficulty in maintaining the poor when the population is small. In our own times the difficulty of pauperism is rendered far greater, (1) by the enormous numbers, (2) by the facility of locomotion, (3) by the increasing tenderness for human life and suffering. And the only way of meeting the difficulty seems to be by modern nations subdividing themselves into small bodies having local knowledge and acting together in the spirit of ancient communities (compare Aristotle Politics VI 5, §§ 5–11)
V. Regarded as the framework of a polity the Laws are deemed by Plato to be a decline from the Republic, which is the dream of his earlier years (Laws V 739). He nowhere imagines that he has reached a higher point of speculation. He is only descending to the level of human things, and he often returns to his original idea. For the guardians of the Republic, who were the elder citizens, and were all supposed to be philosophers, is now substituted a special body, who are to review and amend the laws, preserving the spirit of the legislator. These are the Nocturnal Council, who, although they are not specially trained in dialectic, are not wholly destitute of it; for they must know the relation of particular virtues to the general principle of virtue (XII 965). Plato has been arguing throughout the Laws that temperance is higher than courage, peace than war, that the love of both must enter into the character of the good citizen. And at the end the same thought is summed up by him in an abstract form. The true artist or guardian must be able to reduce the many to the one, than which, as he says with an enthusiasm worthy of the “Phaedrus” or “Philebus,” “no more philosophical method was ever devised by the wit of man” (XII 965 C). But the sense of unity in difference can only be acquired by study; and Plato does not explain to us the nature of this study, which we may reasonably infer, though there is a remarkable omission of the word, to be akin to the dialectic of the Republic.
The Nocturnal Council is to consist of the priests who have obtained the rewards of virtue, of the ten eldest guardians of the law, and of the director and ex-directors of education; each of whom is to select for approval a younger coadjutor. To this council the “Spectator,” who is sent to visit foreign countries, has to make his report (XII 951 and following). It is not an administrative body, but an assembly of sages who are to make legislation their study. Plato is not altogether disinclined to changes in the law where experience shows them to be necessary; but he is also anxious that the original spirit of the constitution should never be lost sight of.
The Laws of Plato contain the latest phase of his philosophy, showing in many respects an advance, and in others a decline, in his views of life and the world. His Theory of Ideas in the next generation passed into one of Numbers, the nature of which we gather chiefly from the Metaphysics of Aristotle. Of the speculative side of this theory there are no traces in the Laws, but doubtless Plato found the practical value which he attributed to arithmetic greatly confirmed by the possibility of applying number and measure to the revolution of the heavens, and to the regulation of human life. In the return to a doctrine of numbers there is a retrogression rather than an advance; for the most barren logical abstraction is of a higher nature than number and figure. Philosophy fades away into the distance; in the Laws it is confined to the members of the Nocturnal Council. The speculative truth which was the food of the guardians in the Republic, is for the majority of the citizens to be superseded by practical virtues. The law, which is the expression of mind written down, takes the place of the living word of the philosopher. (Compare the contrast of “Phaedrus” 275 E, and Laws X 891 A; also the plays on the words νοῦς, νόμος, νοῦ διανομή (Laws IV 714 A; XII 957 C); and the discussion in the “Statesman” (293 and following) of the difference between the personal rule of a king and the impersonal reign of law.) The State is based on virtue and religion rather than on knowledge; and virtue is no longer identified with knowledge, being of the commoner sort, and spoken of in the sense generally understood. Yet there are many traces of advance as well as retrogression in the Laws of Plato. The attempt to reconcile the ideal with actual life is an advance; to “have brought philosophy down from heaven to earth,” is a praise which may be claimed for him as well as for his master Socrates. And the members of the Nocturnal Council are to continue students of the “one in many” and of the nature of God. Education is the last word with which Plato supposes the theory of the Laws to end and the reality to begin (Laws, sub fin.).
Plato’s increasing appreciation of the difficulties of human affairs, and of the element of chance which so largely influences them, is an indication not of a narrower, but of a maturer mind, which had become more conversant with realities. Nor can we fairly attribute any want of originality to him, because he has borrowed many of his provisions from Sparta and Athens. Laws and institutions grow out of habits and customs; and they have “better opinion, better confirmation,” if they have come down from antiquity and are not mere literary inventions. Plato would have been the first to acknowledge that the Book of Laws was not the creation of his fancy, but a collection of enactments which had been devised by inspired legislators, like Minos, Lycurgus, and Solon, to meet the actual needs of men, and had been approved by time and experience.
In order to do justice therefore to the design of the work, it is necessary to examine how far it rests on an historical foundation and coincides with the actual laws of Sparta and Athens. The consideration of the historical aspect of the Laws has been reserved for this place. In working out the comparison the writer has been greatly assisted by the excellent essays of C. F. Hermann (“De vestigiis institutorum veterum, imprimis Atticorum, per Platonis de Legibus libros indagandis,” and “Juris domestici et familiaris apud Platonem in Legibus cum veteris Graeciae inque primis Athenarum institutis comparatio”: Marburg, 1836), and by J. B. Telfy’s “Corpus juris Attici” (Leipzig, 1,868).
The Laws of Plato are essentially Greek: unlike Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, they contain nothing foreign or oriental. Their aim is to reconstruct the work of the great lawgivers of Hellas in a literary form. They partake both of an Athenian and a Spartan character. Some of them too are derived from Crete, and are appropriately transferred to a Cretan colony. But of Crete so little is known to us, that although, as Montesquieu (Esprit des Lois, IV 6) remarks, “the Laws of Crete are the original of those of Sparta and the Laws of Plato the correction of these latter,” there is only one point, viz. the common meals, in which they can be compared. Most of Plato’s provisions resemble the laws and customs which prevailed in these three states (especially in the two former), and which the personifying instinct of the Greeks attributed to Minos, Lycurgus, and Solon. A very few particulars may have been borrowed from Zaleucus (Cicero de Legibus, II 6), and Charondas, who is said to have first made laws against perjury (Aristotle Politics II 12, § 11) and to have forbidden credit (Stobaeus Florilegium 44, p. 204, Gaisford). Some enactments are Plato’s own, and were suggested by his experience of defects in the Athenian and other Greek states. The Laws also contain many lesser provisions, which are not found in the ordinary codes of nations, because they cannot be properly defined, and are therefore better left to custom and common sense. “The greater part of the work,” as Aristotle remarks (Politics II 6, § 4), “is taken up with laws”: yet this is not wholly true, and applies to the latter rather than to the first half of it. The book rests on an ethical and religious foundation: the actual laws begin with a hymn of praise in honour of the soul (V 726 following). And the same lofty aspiration after the good is perpetually recurring, especially in Books X, XI, XII, and whenever Plato’s mind is filled with his highest themes. In prefixing to most of his laws a prooemium he has two ends in view, to persuade and also to threaten. They are to have the sanction of laws and the effect of sermons. And Plato’s “Book of Laws,” if described in the language of modern philosophy, may be said to be as much an ethical and educational, as a political or legal treatise.
But although the Laws partake both of an Athenian and a Spartan character, the elements which are borrowed from either state are necessarily very different, because the character and origin of the two governments themselves differed so widely. Sparta was the more ancient and primitive: Athens was suited to the wants of a later stage of society. The relation of the two states to the Laws may be conceived in this manner:—The foundation and ground-plan of the work are more Spartan, while the superstructure and details are more Athenian. At Athens the laws were written down and were voluminous; more than a thousand fragments of them have been collected by Telfy. Like the Roman or English law, they contained innumerable particulars. Those of them which regulated daily life were familiarly known to the Athenians; for every citizen was his own lawyer, and also a judge, who decided the rights of his fellow-citizens according to the laws, often after hearing speeches from the parties interested or from their advocates. It is to Rome and not to Athens that the invention of law, in the modern sense of the term, is commonly ascribed. But it must be remembered that long before the times of the Twelve Tables (BC 451), regular courts and forms of law had existed at Athens and probably in the Greek colonies. And we may reasonably suppose, though without any express proof of the fact, that many Roman institutions and customs, like Latin literature and mythology, were partly derived from Hellas and had imperceptibly drifted from one shore of the Ionian Sea to the other (compare especially the constitutions of Servius Tullius and of Solon).
It is not proved that the laws of Sparta were in ancient times either written down in books or engraved on tablets of marble or brass. Nor is it certain that, if they had been, the Spartans could have read them. They were ancient customs, some of them older probably than the settlement in Laconia, of which the origin is unknown; they occasionally received the sanction of the Delphic oracle, but there was a still stronger obligation by which they were enforced—the necessity of self-defence: the Spartans were always living in the presence of their enemies. They belonged to an age when written law had not yet taken the place of custom and tradition. The old constitution was very rarely affected by new enactments, and these only related to the duties of the Kings or Ephors, or the new relations of classes which arose as time went on. Hence there was as great a difference as could well be conceived between the Laws of Athens and Sparta: the one was the creation of a civilized state, and did not differ in principle from our modern legislation, the other of an age in which the people were held together and also kept down by force of arms, and which afterwards retained many traces of its barbaric origin “surviving in culture.”
Nevertheless the Lacedaemonian was the ideal of a primitive Greek state. According to Thucydides (I 18) it was the first which emerged out of confusion and became a regular government. It was also an army devoted to military exercises, but organized with a view to self-defence and not to conquest. It was not quick to move or easily excited; but stolid, cautious, unambitious, procrastinating. For many centuries it retained the same character which was impressed upon it by the hand of the legislator. This singular fabric was partly the result of circumstances, partly the invention of some unknown individual in prehistoric times, whose ideal of education was military discipline, and who, by the ascendency of his genius, made a small tribe into a nation which became famous in the world’s history. The other Hellenes wondered at the strength and stability of his work. The rest of Hellas, says Thucydides (III 93; compare IV 108), undertook the colonisation of Heraclea the more readily, having a feeling of security now that they saw the Lacedaemonians taking part in it. The Spartan state appears to us in the dawn of history as a vision of armed men, irresistible by any other power then existing in the world. It can hardly be said to have understood at all the rights or duties of nations to one another, or indeed to have had any moral principle except patriotism and obedience to commanders. Men were so trained to act together that they lost the freedom and spontaneity of human life in cultivating the qualities of the soldier and ruler. The Spartan state was a composite body in which kings, nobles, citizens, perioeci, artisans, slaves, had to find a “modus vivendi” with one another. All of them were taught some use of arms. The strength of the family tie was diminished among them by an enforced absence from home and by common meals. Sparta had no life or growth; no poetry or tradition of the past; no art, no thought. The Athenians started on their great career some centuries later, but the Spartans would have been easily conquered by them, if Athens had not been deficient in the qualities which constituted the strength (and also the weakness) of her rival.
The ideal of Athens has been pictured for all time in the speech which Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles, called the Funeral Oration. He contrasts the activity and freedom and pleasantness of Athenian life with the immobility and severe looks and incessant drill of the Spartans. The citizens of no city were more versatile, or more readily changed from land to sea or more quickly moved about from place to place. They “took their pleasures” merrily, and yet, when the time for fighting arrived, were not a whit behind the Spartans, who were like men living in a camp, and, though always keeping guard, were often too late for the fray. Any foreigner might visit Athens; her ships found a way to the most distant shores; the riches of the whole earth poured in upon her. Her citizens had their theatres and festivals; they “provided their souls with many relaxations”; yet they were not less manly than the Spartans or less willing to sacrifice this enjoyable existence for their country’s good. The Athenian was a nobler form of life than that of their rivals, a life of music as well as of gymnastic, the life of a citizen as well as of a soldier. Such is the picture which Thucydides has drawn of the Athenians in their glory. It is the spirit of this life which Plato would infuse into the Magnesian state and which he seeks to combine with the common meals and gymnastic discipline of Sparta.
The two great types of Athens and Sparta had deeply entered into his mind. He had heard of Sparta at a distance and from common Hellenic fame: he was a citizen of Athens and an Athenian of noble birth. He must often have sat in the law-courts, and may have had personal experience of the duties of offices such as he is establishing. There is no need to ask the question, whence he derived his knowledge of the Laws of Athens: they were a part of his daily life. Many of his enactments are recognized to be Athenian laws from the fragments preserved in the Orators and elsewhere: many more would be found to be so if we had better information. Probably also still more of them would have been incorporated in the Magnesian code, if the work had ever been finally completed. But it seems to have come down to us in a form which is partly finished and partly unfinished, having a beginning and end, but wanting arrangement in the middle. The Laws answer to Plato’s own description of them, in the comparison (IX 858 B) which he makes of himself and his two friends to gatherers of stones or the beginners of some composite work, “who are providing materials and partly putting them together:—having some of their laws, like stones, already fixed in their places, while others lie about.”
Plato’s own life coincided with the period at which Athens rose to her greatest heights and sank to her lowest depths. It was impossible that he should regard the blessings of democracy in the same light as the men of a former generation, whose view was not intercepted by the evil shadow of the taking of Athens, and who had only the glories of Marathon and Salamis and the administration of Pericles to look back upon. On the other hand the fame and prestige of Sparta, which had outlived so many crimes and blunders, was not altogether lost at the end of the life of Plato. Hers was the only great Hellenic government which preserved something of its ancient form; and although the Spartan citizens were reduced to almost one-tenth of their original number (Aristotle Politics II 9, §§ 16, 17), she still retained, until the rise of Thebes and Macedon, a certain authority and predominance due to her final success in the struggle with Athens and to the victories which Agesilaus won in Asia Minor.
Plato, like Aristotle, had in his mind some form of a mean state which should escape the evils and secure the advantages of both aristocracy and democracy. It may however be doubted whether the creation of such a state is not beyond the legislator’s art (compare IV 709), although there have been examples in history of forms of government, which through some community of interest or of origin, through a balance of parties in the state itself, or through the fear of a common enemy, have for a while preserved such a character of moderation. But in general there arises a time in the history of a state when the struggle between the few and the many has to be fought out. No system of checks and balances, such as Plato has devised in the Laws, could have given equipoise and stability to an ancient state, any more than the skill of the legislator could have withstood the tide of democracy in England or France during the last hundred years, or have given life to China or India.
The basis of the Magnesian constitution is the equal division of land (V 737 following). In the new state (V 744 D), as in the Republic (IV 421, 422), there was to be neither poverty nor riches. Every citizen under all circumstances retained his lot, and as much money as was necessary for the cultivation of it (IX 855 B), and no one was allowed to accumulate property to the amount of more than five times the value of the lot, inclusive of it (V 744 D, E). The equal division of land was a Spartan institution, not known to have existed elsewhere in Hellas. The mention of it in the Laws of Plato affords considerable presumption that it was of ancient origin, and not first introduced, as Mr. Grote and others have imagined, in the reformation of Cleomenes III. But at Sparta, if we may judge from the frequent complaints of the accumulation of property in the hands of a few persons (Aristotle Politics II 9, § 14), no provision could have been made for the maintenance of the lot. Plutarch indeed speaks of a law introduced by the Ephor Epitadeus soon after the Peloponnesian War, which first allowed the Spartans to sell their land (Agis, c. 5): but from the manner in which Aristotle refers to the subject, we should imagine this evil in the state to be of a much older standing. Like some other countries in which small proprietors have been numerous, the original equality passed into inequality, and, instead of a large middle class, there was probably at Sparta greater disproportion in the property of the citizens than in any other state of Hellas. Plato was aware of the danger, and has improved on the Spartan custom. The land, as at Sparta, must have been tilled by slaves, since other occupations were found for the citizens (VII 806 E; VIII 835 E). Bodies of young men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty were engaged in making biennial peregrinations of the country. They and their officers are to be the magistrates, police, engineers, aediles, of the twelve districts into which the colony was divided (VI 760 and following). Their way of life may be compared with that of the Spartan secret police or Crypteia, a name which Plato freely applies to them (VI 763 B) without apparently any consciousness of the odium which has attached to the word in history.
Another great institution which Plato borrowed from Sparta (or Crete) is the Syssitia or common meals. These were established in both states, and in some respects were considered by Aristotle to be better managed in Crete than at Lacedaemon (Politics II 10, §§ 7–10). In the Laws (VIII 842 B) the Cretan custom appears to be adopted: that is to say, if we may interpret Plato by Aristotle, the cost of them was defrayed by the state and not by the individuals (Aristotle Politics II 9, §§ 31, 32); so that the members of the mess, who could not pay their quota, still retained their rights of citizenship. But this explanation is hardly consistent with the Laws XII 955 D, E, where contributions to the Syssitia from private estates are expressly mentioned. Plato goes further than the legislators of Sparta and Crete, and would extend the common meals to women as well as men: he desires to curb the disorders, which existed among the female sex in both states (VI 781), by the application to women of the same military discipline to which the men were already subject. It was an extension of the custom of Syssitia from which the ancient legislators shrank, and which Plato himself believed to be very difficult of enforcement.