Minos

Key Words of the Dialogue

Each entry says what the word meant in Athens, what the dialogue does with it, and how it is rendered. The Glossary at the back lists the renderings with the places where they matter.

Law (nomos)

Nomos meant both “law” and “custom”: the laws written up by a city and voted by its Assembly, and the usages a people keeps without writing them down. The dialogue begins by asking what it is “as a whole” (313b), and the companion’s answers draw on both senses: “what is accepted” is custom, “a resolution of the city” is the written law. The word also had a sense in music: a nomos, a nome, was a traditional piece for the flute or the cithara, and Socrates speaks of “the laws for the flute” (318b) and the one “most skilled in law” among flute-players (317e). The English renders nomos “law” every time, so that the play can be followed; the notes say where the musical sense is in play. The word comes from the verb nemein, “distribute”, which the argument uses at 317d (see Distribute, distributor; tend).

Accept, what is accepted (nomizein, ta nomizomena)

Nomizein, the verb made from nomos, meant “hold as customary”, and so “accept”, “believe”, “think”. The companion’s first definition is ta nomizomena, “what is accepted” (313b), the things a people holds as right; the question Socrates imagines being put to them turns on the root: “what is accepted is accepted by law” (314a). The verb recurs throughout the argument: just things are “accepted” as just, things that weigh more as heavier, the things that are as being (315e–316b), those who know “accept the same things” (316d), and Minos set down as lawful usages “what he accepted as fine” (320a–b). The English renders it “accept” every time. It cannot keep the root, which the Greek hears in every use, but it keeps the repetition. The series’ earlier volumes, where the word is incidental, render it as the sense asks: “consider” (Lovers 133b), “hold” (Alcibiades I 130d).

Lawful, lawless (nomimos, ta nomima; anomos, anomia)

Nomimos, “lawful”, is what accords with nomos; ta nomima, “lawful usages”, are the customs and rules of a people or a craft. The dialogue uses them to tie law to justice and to what is: “the lawful too are lawful by law” (314c), and “Whoever misses what is, then, misses the lawful” (316b). The writings of the crafts are “writings and lawful usages” (316e–317a), and “whatever is right, we shall say it is lawful” (317b). Anomos and anomia, “lawless” and “lawlessness”, are what lacks law: the lawless are unjust (314d), and what is not right, though it seems law to those who do not know, “is lawless” (317c). The English keeps one rendering for each, so that the family of nomos stays visible.

Distribute, distributor; tend (nemein, dianemein, dianomē; nomeus)

Nemein meant “distribute”, “deal out”, and also “pasture”, “graze” a flock; from it comes nomos itself, and nomeus, which meant both “distributor” and “herdsman”. At 317d–318a Socrates uses the family to say what a law is: the farmer is “a good distributor” of seeds, giving each soil those due to it, and his “laws and distributions” are right; the flute-player distributes strokes for the tunes, the trainer food to the body. With a herd as its object the verb is “tend”: the trainer tends “the human herd in its body”, the shepherd the sheep (318a). The two senses meet again at the end, where the best lawgivers are “distributors and shepherds of men” (321c), and the last question asks what the good lawgiver distributes to the soul (321d). The English keeps “distribute” and “distributor” every time, and “tend” where the object is a herd.

Resolution, decree, opinion (dogma, psēphisma, doxa)

A dogma was what “seemed good” (dokein) to a body that decided, as in the Assembly’s formula “it seemed good to the people”; a psēphisma was a measure passed by vote. The companion’s second answer is “These resolutions and decrees” (314b). Socrates turns dogma into doxa, “opinion”, from the same verb: “political opinion” (314c). The argument then works with opinion: law is not the base opinion, so it is the decent one, and decent opinion is true opinion (314e–315a). Doxa also meant one’s standing in others’ opinion, and at the end the poets “have great power over opinion”, so that Minos “has come to be held in worse opinion” (320e–321b). The English renders dogma “resolution”, psēphisma “decree” and doxa “opinion” throughout, the last as the series does.

Decent and base (chrēstos, ponēros)

Chrēstos, from the verb “use”, meant “useful”, “good” in the sense of serviceable and honest; ponēros, “bad”, “worthless”, “wicked”. The argument needs the pair at 314e: there are “decent resolutions, and base ones”, law was “not base”, and so law is “the decent” opinion. They return in the warning at 319a: one must learn “to distinguish decent men from base”, for of all these the base human being is “the most polluted”. The English uses “decent” and “base”, as the series does, and keeps “good” for agathos, the word of 314d (“seek it as a good”) and of the good lawgiver and distributor (317d–321d).

What is; find, discover (to on; heuriskein, exeuriskein)

To on, “what is”, the participle of “to be” with the article, meant both “what exists” and “what is so”, “the truth”. The dialogue’s central definition is that law “wishes to be the discovery of what is” (315a), and its proof is that “it is the things that are that are accepted as being” (316b). The finding of things is first the work of craft: “craft … is our finding of things” (314b). The Greek has two verbs, heuriskein, “find”, with heuresis, “finding”, and the compound exeuriskein, “discover”, with exeuresis, “discovery”; the English keeps them apart. Law is “the discovery of what is” at 315a, and “the finding of what is” in the recapitulation at 317d; and Minos’ laws are unmoved “as of one who discovered well the truth” (321b).

Wish (boulesthai)

The definition says that law “wishes to be” the discovery of what is (315a). Boulesthai is the ordinary verb for wishing and wanting; said of a thing, it can also mean “mean” or “tend to be”, and Lamb’s Loeb translation takes it so here (“tends to be”). The English keeps “wish”, because Socrates’ answer to the companion turns on the gap between what law wishes and what men achieve: people who do not always use the same laws “are, it turns out, not always able to discover what law wishes, what is” (315b).

Writing, those who know (syngramma; epistēmōn, epistasthai)

A syngramma was any written work, a treatise or a code. Socrates’ answer to the objection rests on the writings of the crafts: “a writing about the health of the sick” (316c), writings on farming, gardening and cookery, and the writings about the ordering of a city, writings “which people call laws, writings of kings and good men” (317a–b). Those who write them are “those who have knowledge” (epistēmones) and “those who know how” (epistasthai, with an infinitive expressed or understood), and the argument turns on the fact that they “will not write different things at different times about the same things” (317b). The English keeps “writing” throughout; it renders epistēmōn “one who has knowledge” and epistasthai “know how”, as the series does, and keeps “know” for eidenai, the word of “those who know” (316d, 317c) and of the souls that do not know (321d).

Kingly; statesmen (basilikos; politikoi)

Basilikos, “kingly”, is the word Socrates gives the craft of ruling: “the statesmen and the kingly men” are those who know how to rule cities (317a), “what is right is kingly law” (317c), and the king’s laws are best for souls (318a). Rhadamanthys had been educated “not in the whole of the kingly craft, but in service to the kingly craft” (320c). Politikos, from polis, “city”, is “political” in “political opinion” (314c); the politikoi are “statesmen”, as in the series, and their works are “statesmen’s writings” (317a).

Being with; confidant (synousia, synousiastēs, syngignesthai; oaristēs)

Synousia, “being with”, was the ordinary word for time spent together, and for the bond between a teacher and his pupils. Socrates reads Homer’s word for Minos, oaristēs, “confidant”, from oaroi, “confidences”, as meaning “one who is with another in words” (319e); Minos “used to come to be with Zeus in the ninth year, in words” (319c), and “this being with was, as I say, through words, for education towards virtue” (320b). The English keeps “being with” and “come to be with” as the series does (the Theages), and renders synousiastēs, a word new to the series, “one who is with”, so that the family is heard.

Education, sophist (paideia, paideuein; sophistēs)

Paideia, from pais, “child”, meant the rearing and training of the young, and so “education”; paideuein is “educate”. The praise of Minos turns on his being educated by Zeus: Zeus “is a sophist”, and Minos went to him “to be educated by Zeus, as by a sophist” (319c). Sophistēs had once meant any master of a skill or of wisdom; by Socrates’ time it was the name of the paid teachers, and Socrates gives it to Zeus as Minos’ teacher, whose craft is “a very fine one” (319c). Rhadamanthys “had been educated by Minos” (320b–c), and the report the companion asks about makes Minos “an uneducated and harsh man” (320e). The English keeps “education”, “educate” and “sophist”.