Minos

Outline

The divisions follow the argument. References are to Stephanus pages and sections, which stand in the margins of both pages of the text.

I. What is law? (313a–314c)

313a–b “What is law, for us?” Law does not differ from law “in this very respect, in being law”; Socrates asks “what law is, as a whole”.

313b–c The companion’s first answer: law is “what is accepted”. As speech is not the things spoken, nor sight the things seen, “So law is not what is accepted.”

313c–314b What is the law by which “what is accepted is accepted”? Is it “some perception or revealing”, or “some finding”, as medicine and prophecy find? “For craft, I suppose, is our finding of things”.

314b–c The second answer: “These resolutions and decrees”; law is “a resolution of the city”. Socrates: “It is opinion, it seems, that you say law is: political opinion.”

II. Law and true opinion (314c–315a)

314c–d The lawful are lawful by law, the just by justice; “justice and law are something most fine”, and we must “seek it as a good”.

314d–e There are “decent resolutions, and base ones”, and law was not base; so “it is not right to answer so simply that law is a resolution of the city”.

314e–315a If law is opinion, it is the decent opinion, the true one, and “true opinion is the discovery of what is”. “Law, then, wishes to be the discovery of what is.”

III. The objection from the laws of peoples (315a–316b)

315a–b The companion: “How then, Socrates, if law is the discovery of what is, do we not always use the same laws about the same things, if the things that are have indeed been discovered by us?” Socrates: those who do not “are, it turns out, not always able to discover what law wishes, what is”.

315b–d The companion’s examples: human sacrifice at Carthage, in Lycaea and among the descendants of Athamas; the old Athenian customs about the dead.

315d–e Long speeches will not settle it; “if what is looked into is put in common, we might perhaps agree”.

315e–316b Just things are accepted as just among all people, things that weigh more as heavier, and fine things as fine everywhere; “it is the things that are that are accepted as being”. “Whoever misses what is, then, misses the lawful.”

IV. The writings of those who know (316b–317d)

316b–c The companion: “when I think of how we never stop changing our laws up and down, I cannot be persuaded.”

316c–e These things, “moved about as at draughts”, are the same. A writing about health is medicine’s; those who have knowledge accept the same things, Greeks and barbarians, and always; so doctors write “just what they also accept as being”, and their writings are “laws of medicine”; and so with farming, gardening and cookery.

317a–b The writings about the ordering of a city belong to “the statesmen and the kingly men”: writings “which people call laws, writings of kings and good men”.

317b–d Those who know how will not write different things at different times about the same things; “what is right is kingly law”, and what is not right “is lawless”. “Rightly, then, we agreed that law is the finding of what is.”

V. The good distributor (317d–318a)

317d–e The farmer is “a good distributor” of seeds; so the flute-player and the cithara-player; “the one most skilled in law in these things is the most skilled flute-player”.

317e–318a The one best at distributing food to the bodies of men, the trainer, is the ablest to tend “the human herd in its body”; the shepherd tends the sheep, and his laws are best for them, as the oxherd’s for the oxen; the king’s laws are best “for the souls of men”.

VI. The oldest laws (318b–d)

318b–c The good lawgiver of old in the laws for the flute: “Marsyas, then, as is said, and his beloved, Olympus the Phrygian”, whose tunes “alone move and reveal those who are in need of the gods”.

318c–d The kings of old: the laws of the Lacedaemonians and Lycurgus are “not yet three hundred years old, perhaps”; the best of these lawful usages came from Crete, whose people “use the oldest laws among the Greeks”.

VII. Minos (318d–320d)

318d–e Minos and Rhadamanthys, “the sons of Zeus and Europa”, made the laws of Crete. The companion: Minos was “a savage one, harsh and unjust”. Socrates: “That is an Attic tale you are telling, my excellent friend, and a tragic one.”

318e–319a The warning: nothing is more impious than “to make mistakes in word and deed against the gods, and second against divine human beings”; “the most sacred is the good human being, and the most polluted the base one.”

319b–d Homer’s lines on Minos, “confidant of great Zeus”: Minos “used to come to be with Zeus in the ninth year, in words”, and alone of the heroes was educated by Zeus; in the Nekyia he judges, “holding a golden scepter”.

319d–320b The verse means that Minos was “one who was with Zeus”: “a confidant is one who is with another in words”, and Minos went to the cave of Zeus every ninth year. Those who take the confidant to be Zeus’s “drinking-companion and playfellow” are “talking nonsense”: Minos’ law in Crete forbids drinking parties, and the Lacedaemonians learned it from the Cretans; Minos did not “accept one thing and do another”, and “this being with was, as I say, through words, for education towards virtue”.

320b–d Rhadamanthys, educated by Minos, a good judge and “guardian of the laws in the town”; Talos, who went round the villages “guarding the laws in them”; Hesiod’s “scepter of Zeus” is “the education of Zeus, by which he guided Crete”.

VIII. Minos and the poets (320d–321c)

320d–321a Why Minos is called “an uneducated and harsh man”: “the poets have great power over opinion”, and Minos waged war on Athens, where tragedy is “a very old finding of this city”; in tragedy “we stretch Minos out and take vengeance on him”.

321b The greatest sign that Minos was “a good distributor”: “his laws are unmoved”.

321b–c The Cretans “use the oldest laws”; their lawgivers are “distributors and shepherds of men”, as the good general is “shepherd of the people”.

IX. The body and the soul (321c–d)

321c What the good lawgiver and distributor distributes to the body: “food and labors”.

321d What he distributes to the soul. The companion: “This I can no longer say.” Socrates: “And yet it is shameful, surely, for the soul of each of us that our souls should appear not to know the things within them”.