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, 1868).

Excursus on the relation of the laws of Plato to the institutions of Crete and lacedaemon and to the laws and constitution of Athens.

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) 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 (Cic. de Legibus), and Charondas, who is said to have first made laws against perjury (Arist.  Pol.) and to have forbidden credit (Stob.  Florileg., Gaisford).  Some enactments are Plato’s