A defect in Plato’s criminal jurisprudence is his remission of the punishment when the homicide has obtained the forgiveness of the murdered person; as if crime were a personal affair between individuals, and not an offence against the State.  There is a ridiculous disproportion in his punishments.  Because a slave may fairly receive a blow for stealing one fig or one bunch of grapes, or a tradesman for selling adulterated goods to the value of one drachma, it is rather hard upon the slave that he should receive as many blows as he has taken grapes or figs, or upon the tradesman who has sold adulterated goods to the value of a thousand drachmas that he should receive a thousand blows.

II.  But before punishment can be inflicted at all, the legislator must determine the nature of the voluntary and involuntary.  The great question of the freedom of the will, which in modern times has been worn threadbare with purely abstract discussion, was approached both by Plato and Aristotle—­first, from the judicial; secondly, from the sophistical point of view.  They were puzzled by the degrees and kinds of crime; they observed also that the law only punished hurts which are inflicted by a voluntary agent on an involuntary patient.

In attempting to distinguish between hurt and injury, Plato says that mere hurt is not injury; but that a benefit when done in a wrong spirit may sometimes injure, e.g. when conferred without regard to right and wrong, or to the good or evil consequences which may follow.  He means to say that the good or evil disposition of the agent is the principle which characterizes actions; and this is not sufficiently described by the terms voluntary and involuntary.  You may hurt another involuntarily, and no one would suppose that you had injured him; and you may hurt him voluntarily, as in inflicting punishment—­neither is this injury; but if you hurt him from motives of avarice, ambition, or cowardly fear, this is injury.  Injustice is also described as the victory of desire or passion or self-conceit over reason, as justice is the subordination of them to reason.  In some paradoxical sense Plato is disposed to affirm all injustice to be involuntary; because no man would do injustice who knew that it never paid and could calculate the consequences of what he was doing.  Yet, on the other hand, he admits that the distinction of voluntary and involuntary, taken in another and more obvious sense, is the basis of legislation.  His conception of justice and injustice is complicated (1) by the want of a distinction between justice and virtue, that is to say, between the quality which primarily regards others, and the quality in which self and others are equally regarded; (2) by the confusion of doing and suffering justice; (3) by the unwillingness to renounce the old Socratic paradox, that evil is involuntary.