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 (Pol.), ‘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.  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 (B.C. 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).