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 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.’