trades (Laws; Republic):  or the advantage of the middle condition (Laws; Republic):  the tendency to speak of principles as moulds or forms; compare the ekmageia of song (Laws), and the tupoi of religion (Republic):  or the remark (Laws) that ’the relaxation of justice makes many cities out of one,’ which may be compared with the Republic:  or the description of lawlessness ’creeping in little by little in the fashions of music and overturning all things,’—­to us a paradox, but to Plato’s mind a fixed idea, which is found in the Laws as well as in the Republic:  or the figure of the parts of the human body under which the parts of the state are described (Laws; Republic):  the apology for delay and diffuseness, which occurs not unfrequently in the Republic, is carried to an excess in the Laws (compare Theaet.):  the remarkable thought (Laws) that the soul of the sun is better than the sun, agrees with the relation in which the idea of good stands to the sun in the Republic, and with the substitution of mind for the idea of good in the Philebus:  the passage about the tragic poets (Laws) agrees generally with the treatment of them in the Republic, but is more finely conceived, and worked out in a nobler spirit.  Some lesser similarities of thought and manner should not be omitted, such as the mention of the thirty years’ old students in the Republic, and the fifty years’ old choristers in the Laws; or the making of the citizens out of wax (Laws) compared with the other image (Republic); or the number of the tyrant (729), which is nearly equal with the number of days and nights in the year (730), compared with the ’slight correction’ of the sacred number 5040, which is divisible by all the numbers from 1 to 12 except 11, and divisible by 11, if two families be deducted; or once more, we may compare the ignorance of solid geometry of which he complains in the Republic and the puzzle about fractions with the difficulty in the Laws about commensurable and incommensurable quantities —­and the malicious emphasis on the word gunaikeios (Laws) with the use of the same word (Republic).  These and similar passages tend to show that the author of the Republic is also the author of the Laws.  They are echoes of the same voice, expressions of the same mind, coincidences too subtle to have been invented by the ingenuity of any imitator.  The force of the argument is increased, if we remember that no passage in the Laws is exactly copied,—­nowhere do five or six words occur together which are found together elsewhere in Plato’s writings.

In other dialogues of Plato, as well as in the Republic, there are to be found parallels with the Laws.  Such resemblances, as we might expect, occur chiefly (but not exclusively) in the dialogues which, on other grounds, we may suppose to be of later date.  The punishment of evil is to be like evil men (Laws), as he says also in the Theaetetus.  Compare again the dependence of tragedy and comedy on one another,