of which he gives the reason in the Laws—­’For serious things cannot be understood without laughable, nor opposites at all without opposites, if a man is really to have intelligence of either’; here he puts forward the principle which is the groundwork of the thesis of Socrates in the Symposium, ’that the genius of tragedy is the same as that of comedy, and that the writer of comedy ought to be a writer of tragedy also.’  There is a truth and right which is above Law (Laws), as we learn also from the Statesman.  That men are the possession of the Gods (Laws), is a reflection which likewise occurs in the Phaedo.  The remark, whether serious or ironical (Laws), that ’the sons of the Gods naturally believed in the Gods, because they had the means of knowing about them,’ is found in the Timaeus.  The reign of Cronos, who is the divine ruler (Laws), is a reminiscence of the Statesman.  It is remarkable that in the Sophist and Statesman (Soph.), Plato, speaking in the character of the Eleatic Stranger, has already put on the old man.  The madness of the poets, again, is a favourite notion of Plato’s, which occurs also in the Laws, as well as in the Phaedrus, Ion, and elsewhere.  There are traces in the Laws of the same desire to base speculation upon history which we find in the Critias.  Once more, there is a striking parallel with the paradox of the Gorgias, that ’if you do evil, it is better to be punished than to be unpunished,’ in the Laws:  ’To live having all goods without justice and virtue is the greatest of evils if life be immortal, but not so great if the bad man lives but a short time.’

The point to be considered is whether these are the kind of parallels which would be the work of an imitator.  Would a forger have had the wit to select the most peculiar and characteristic thoughts of Plato; would he have caught the spirit of his philosophy; would he, instead of openly borrowing, have half concealed his favourite ideas; would he have formed them into a whole such as the Laws; would he have given another the credit which he might have obtained for himself; would he have remembered and made use of other passages of the Platonic writings and have never deviated into the phraseology of them?  Without pressing such arguments as absolutely certain, we must acknowledge that such a comparison affords a new ground of real weight for believing the Laws to be a genuine writing of Plato.

V. The relation of the Republic to the Laws is clearly set forth by Plato in the Laws.  The Republic is the best state, the Laws is the best possible under the existing conditions of the Greek world.  The Republic is the ideal, in which no man calls anything his own, which may or may not have existed in some remote clime, under the rule of some God, or son of a God (who can say?), but is, at any rate, the pattern of all other states and the exemplar of human life.  The Laws distinctly acknowledge what the Republic partly admits, that the ideal is inimitable by us,