Minos

Introduction

The dialogue

The Minos is a conversation of two: Socrates and a companion whom the dialogue does not name; the list of persons calls him only hetairos, “companion”. There is no setting and no narrator. Socrates opens with a question, “What is law, for us?” (313a), and the talk runs on to the end without a word about where or when it takes place. Burnet names the speakers at the head of each speech; from 314c he runs most of the short exchanges together into a single paragraph, and this edition does the same on both pages.

It is short, nine pages of Stephanus’ edition (313a–321d), thirteen of Burnet’s. The ancient arrangement of Plato’s works by Thrasyllus, which Diogenes Laertius preserves (3.60), puts it first in the ninth and last tetralogy, before the Laws, the Epinomis and the Letters, with the subtitle “or On Law”, and classes it as “political”; Burnet’s fifth volume opens with it. Diogenes does not list it among the dialogues that were agreed to be spurious (3.62). Whether Plato wrote it has nevertheless been doubted since August Boeckh, in 1806, gave it to Simon the shoemaker, a companion of Socrates whose dialogues, Diogenes says, included one On Law (2.122); many scholars since have thought it the work of a later writer of Plato’s school, and some have defended it as Plato’s. This edition does not argue the question.

Nothing in the conversation fixes its date. The nearest thing to a clue is a remark of Socrates about the laws of the Spartans and their lawgiver Lycurgus: they are “not yet three hundred years old, perhaps, or a little more than that” (318c). Since Lycurgus’ date was disputed already in antiquity, the remark fixes nothing.

The question and the answers

Socrates asks what law is, and he means it as a whole. Laws differ from one another no more than one piece of gold differs from another “in respect of being gold”: “each of them is law equally, not one more and another less. It is just this that I am asking: what law is, as a whole” (313a–b). The companion’s first answer is “what is accepted” (313b). Socrates shows him by examples that speech is not the things spoken, nor sight the things seen, nor hearing the things heard, and so law is not what is accepted (313b–c). What, then, is that law by which “what is accepted is accepted”? Is it “some perception or revealing”, as the things learned are learned by knowledge revealing them, or “some finding”, as medicine finds what is healthy and prophecy what the gods have in mind (314a–b)?

The companion’s second answer is “These resolutions and decrees”: law is “a resolution of the city” (314b–c). Socrates turns the word at once: “It is opinion, it seems, that you say law is: political opinion” (314c). He then gets the companion to agree that law is “something most fine”, that it preserves cities as lawlessness destroys them, and that it must be sought “as a good” (314d). Since some resolutions are “decent” and others “base”, and law was not base, law cannot simply be the city’s resolution; if it is opinion, it is decent opinion, and decent opinion is true opinion, and true opinion is “the discovery of what is”. So, Socrates concludes, “Law, then, wishes to be the discovery of what is” (314d–315a).

The argument’s main stretch

The companion objects from experience. If law is the discovery of what is, why do we not always use the same laws about the same things (315a)? Socrates answers that law wishes none the less to be the discovery of what is, and that those who do not always use the same laws “are, it turns out, not always able to discover what law wishes, what is” (315a–b). The companion presses the point: laws differ from people to people and from age to age; the Carthaginians sacrifice human beings, some of them even their own sons; so do Greeks in Lycaea and the descendants of Athamas; and the Athenians themselves once slaughtered victims before a funeral and earlier still buried their dead in the house (315b–d). Socrates now changes the method: as long as each of them speaks by himself, “in a long speech”, they will never come to terms, but if what is looked into “is put in common”, they might agree (315d–e).

In short questions he then shows that what is accepted as just, as heavier, as fine, is the same everywhere, and that “it is the things that are that are accepted as being, not the things that are not, both among us and among all others”; so “Whoever misses what is, then, misses the lawful” (315e–316b). The companion is still not persuaded, since “we never stop changing our laws up and down” (316b–c). Socrates turns to the crafts. Doctors write about health what they also accept as being, and those who know accept the same things everywhere and always; the writings of doctors are laws of medicine, as those of farmers, gardeners and cooks are laws of farming, gardening and cookery (316c–317a). The writings about the ordering of a city belong to those who know how to rule cities, “the statesmen and the kingly men”, and these are writings “which people call laws, writings of kings and good men” (317a–b). Those who know how will not write different things at different times about the same things, nor change their lawful usages; so whatever is right is lawful, and “what is right is kingly law”, while what is not right, though it seems law to those who do not know, “is lawless” (317b–c). “Rightly, then, we agreed that law is the finding of what is” (317d).

Socrates then turns to nemein, “distribute”, the verb from which the word for law comes, though he never names the connection (see Key Words, Distribute, distributor; tend). A farmer is “a good distributor” of seeds, giving each soil the seeds that are due to it, and his laws and distributions in these matters are right; so with the flute-player and the cithara-player, the trainer of the body, the shepherd and the oxherd; and the best laws “for the souls of men” are the king’s (317d–318a).

The ending

The talk turns to the oldest laws. In music, the good lawgiver of old was Marsyas, with Olympus, his beloved, whose tunes “alone move and reveal those who are in need of the gods” (318b). Among kings, the laws of the Spartans are younger; the best of them, the companion says, came from Crete, whose people use the oldest laws, and their makers were Minos and Rhadamanthys (318c–d). When the companion repeats the Athenian view of Minos as “a savage one, harsh and unjust”, Socrates calls it “an Attic tale … and a tragic one”, and sets against it Homer and Hesiod (318d–e). He reads Homer’s line on Minos as saying that he met Zeus every ninth year “in words” and was educated by him, “as by a sophist”, a privilege Homer gave to no other hero (319b–320b); Rhadamanthys, Minos’ pupil, served the kingly craft as a judge, and Talos guarded the laws in the villages of Crete (320b–c); Hesiod’s “scepter of Zeus” is the education by which Minos guided Crete (320d). Minos’ bad name, Socrates says, comes from the poets, who “have great power over opinion”: Minos made war on Athens, a city full of poets, and in tragedy, Socrates says, “we stretch Minos out and take vengeance on him” for the tribute he exacted (320e–321a). The greatest sign that he was good, Socrates says, is that his laws are “unmoved” (321b).

The last exchange returns to the distributor. If someone should ask what the good lawgiver and distributor for the body distributes to the body to make it better, they would answer, well and briefly: food and labors (321c). But if he asked what the good lawgiver and distributor distributes to the soul to make it better, Socrates asks what answer they could give and not be ashamed, and the companion admits, “This I can no longer say.” Socrates ends with the shame of it: our souls “should appear not to know the things within them”, though they have looked into the things of the body (321d).

What is most exposed

A first-time reader is likely to be troubled at four points. The first is the step from law’s being something most fine to its being true opinion (314d–315a): it shows only that a base resolution is not law. That law is opinion at all is kept a condition, “if law is opinion”, though Socrates says it appears so to him too (314e); and that decent opinion is true opinion rests on the companion’s “Yes”. The second is the answer to the companion’s objection. Socrates does not deny that cities differ in their customs; he shows that what is accepted as heavy or as fine is the same everywhere, and that the writings of those who know are the same, and from this he concludes that whatever is not right is not law at all (317c). The companion’s human sacrifices are not examined again: Carthage and Lycaea return only as places where things that weigh more are accepted as heavier (316a); the reader must decide whether they have been answered or set aside. The third is the praise of Minos (318d–321b). Its main support is Socrates’ reading of one line of Homer: he takes enneōros, “nine-yearly”, a word of uncertain sense, with “confidant”, of a meeting with Zeus every ninth year, and he takes oaristēs, “confidant”, to mean “one who is with another in words”, for education, against those who make the confidant Zeus’s “drinking-companion and playfellow”; the note at 319b gives what is known of enneōros. The fourth is the ending: the dialogue asks what the good lawgiver distributes to the soul and does not say.

The manner

The manner is plainer than in many of Socrates’ conversations. The companion is quick to answer and quick to object, and Socrates is patient with him, but there is wit. His first reply, “Why? Is there anything in which law differs from law in this very respect, in being law?” (313a), turns back the companion’s question “Which of the laws are you asking about?” The long exchanges that Burnet runs together move fast, a word or two to each answer, as when Socrates asks “Then the lawful too are lawful by law?” and, on the companion’s “Yes”, “And the lawless are lawless by lawlessness?” (314c–d). The companion’s version of Minos is answered with a joke at Athens’ expense, “That is an Attic tale you are telling, my excellent friend, and a tragic one” (318d), and the warning that follows, about the god’s indignation at those who censure the good, is solemn and a little grand. The last turn against the poets is sharp: Minos’ mistake was “waging war against this city, in which there is much wisdom besides, and poets of every sort”, and so Athens, which once paid him tribute, now takes its vengeance in tragedy (320e–321a).

On reading this edition

Each left-hand page is one page of Burnet’s Greek, line for line, with his margin and apparatus; the right-hand page opposite translates it. The letters in the margins of both pages (a–e) mark the sections of Stephanus’ pages, by which Plato is cited; the numbers 314 to 321 mark where each of his pages begins. Where Burnet runs short exchanges together, the speakers’ names follow a dash within the paragraph, in the Greek and in the English alike. Words in angle brackets ⟨ ⟩ are supplied by editors and are not in the manuscripts (316a, 321d). The notes are numbered afresh on each page. At the back of the volume are an Outline of the argument, an Editorial Note on Burnet’s text, his apparatus and the translation, a Glossary of the key terms with the places where they occur, and a Note on how this edition was made.

A note on the persons

The companion is no one in particular: the dialogue gives him no name and no age, and Socrates calls him only “my excellent friend”. He is an Athenian, for he speaks of “us” and our laws; he knows the Athenian customs he cites, and his picture of Minos, Socrates says, comes from the makers of tragedy.

Minos and Rhadamanthys are, for Socrates, “the sons of Zeus and Europa” (318d); Homer has Zeus name their mother only as the daughter of Phoenix (Iliad 14.321–322). Socrates’ Minos is the lawgiver of Crete, taught by Zeus; the Athenian tradition he rejects is that of a savage and unjust king. He does not deny the tribute that Minos exacted from Athens (321a); the story that it was a tribute of young Athenians for the Minotaur, and that Minos was always ill spoken of in the Attic theaters, is told later by Plutarch (Theseus 15–16). Talos, in Socrates’ account the guardian of the laws in the villages of Crete, called “bronze” because he carried the laws on bronze tablets, is in Apollonius of Rhodes a man of bronze who runs round the island (Argonautica 4.1638–1648). Marsyas, the satyr, and Olympus the Phrygian were the legendary masters of the flute. Lycurgus was the lawgiver of Sparta, whose date was disputed already in antiquity. Thespis was said to have been the first to produce tragedy at Athens, and Phrynichus, called his pupil, was among the earliest tragic poets after him; Socrates denies that tragedy began with either. The notes identify each of them where he appears.