At the beginning of the second book the subject of pleasure leads to education, which in the early years of life is wholly a discipline imparted by the means of pleasure and pain.  The discipline of pleasure is implanted chiefly by the practice of the song and the dance.  Of these the forms should be fixed, and not allowed to depend on the fickle breath of the multitude.  There will be choruses of boys, girls, and grown-up persons, and all will be heard repeating the same strain, that ’virtue is happiness.’  One of them will give the law to the rest; this will be the chorus of aged minstrels, who will sing the most beautiful and the most useful of songs.  They will require a little wine, to mellow the austerity of age, and make them amenable to the laws.

After having laid down as the first principle of politics, that peace, and not war, is the true aim of the legislator, and briefly discussed music and festive intercourse, at the commencement of the third book Plato makes a digression, in which he speaks of the origin of society.  He describes, first of all, the family; secondly, the patriarchal stage, which is an aggregation of families; thirdly, the founding of regular cities, like Ilium; fourthly, the establishment of a military and political system, like that of Sparta, with which he identifies Argos and Messene, dating from the return of the Heraclidae.  But the aims of states should be good, or else, like the prayer of Theseus, they may be ruinous to themselves.  This was the case in two out of three of the Heracleid kingdoms.  They did not understand that the powers in a state should be balanced.  The balance of powers saved Sparta, while the excess of tyranny in Persia and the excess of liberty at Athens have been the ruin of both...This discourse on politics is suddenly discovered to have an immediate practical use; for Cleinias the Cretan is about to give laws to a new colony.

At the beginning of the fourth book, after enquiring into the circumstances and situation of the colony, the Athenian proceeds to make further reflections.  Chance, and God, and the skill of the legislator, all co-operate in the formation of states.  And the most favourable condition for the foundation of a new one is when the government is in the hands of a virtuous tyrant who has the good fortune to be the contemporary of a great legislator.  But a virtuous tyrant is a contradiction in terms; we can at best only hope to have magistrates who are the servants of reason and the law.  This leads to the enquiry, what is to be the polity of our new state.  And the answer is, that we are to fear God, and honour our parents, and to cultivate virtue and justice; these are to be our first principles.  Laws must be definite, and we should create in the citizens a predisposition to obey them.  The legislator will teach as well as command; and with this view he will prefix preambles to his principal laws.