Plato’s Minos Lexicon

Introduction

Minos asks what law is, then asks who can give it well. The conversation moves from what people accept and what cities decree to the discovery of what is, from the writings of experts to the distributions of a good ruler, and from disagreement about customs to disagreement about the reputation of an ancient king. Its last question is nevertheless still open: what does the good lawgiver distribute to a soul to make it better? The preceding praise of Minos does not supply the answer that the two speakers cannot give.

This lexicon is a companion to the supplied Diotimos Editions Greek and English Minos of 2026. It explains the words, persons, examples, argumentative transitions, and textual choices that matter in that edition. Full articles develop relations and difficulties; a defined vocabulary register gives shorter, context-specific explanations with actual Greek forms; subsidiary phrase glosses explain constructions that lose force when broken into individual words. Three indexes provide routes by vocabulary, passage, and theme.

The levels should be used together. An index pointer is not another lexical definition, and the same word can need several contextual records without becoming several different headwords. Conversely, a single English rendering can conceal distinctions worth recovering: the edition's “finding” translates both εὕρεσις, the activity or result invoked in the definition of law, and εὕρημα, the city's invention of tragedy. Repeated terms acquire new tasks as the conversation proceeds. “Opinion” first describes a city's judgment and later the public standing that poets can damage; “distribute” joins agriculture, music, bodily training, kingship, and Homer's allocation of praise.

Title authorship and the speaking situation

The printed title is ΜΙΝΩΣ ἢ ΠΕΡΙ ΝΟΜΟΥ, “Minos, or On Law.” Minos is not a speaker. He enters the conversation only when its search for old and good lawgivers reaches Crete. The title makes his later rehabilitation prominent, while the subtitle identifies the subject with which Socrates begins. Both belong to the transmitted framing of the work; neither authorizes treating every familiar theme of Plato's political philosophy as a word or doctrine present here.

The supplied Introduction places the work, following the ancient catalogue reported by Diogenes Laertius, first in the ninth tetralogy, before Laws, Epinomis, and Letters. Ancient inclusion and modern doubts about authorship are distinct facts. The edition describes the dispute without deciding it; this companion does likewise. “The dialogue,” “its Socrates,” and “the argument” are therefore more accurate subjects for interpretive claims than an unqualified “Plato believes.” The dramatic Socrates is also not automatically a historical source for what the historical Socrates said on a particular occasion.

There are two interlocutors, Socrates and an unnamed companion. The speaker list's ΕΤΑΙΡΟΣ supplies the label “Comp.” in the English. The conversation gives neither a narrated setting nor a secure dramatic date. The companion identifies with Athenian usages and an Athenian account of Minos; Socrates eventually speaks as one of the Athenians who retaliate against Minos in tragedy. These first-person affiliations matter more to the argument than an invented biography of the unnamed man. The closing mention of their age gives a reason for shame at ignorance, not their precise ages.

The estimate concerning Lycurgus' laws at 318c is explicitly qualified and depends on an uncertain chronology. It cannot securely date either the conversation or its composition. Nor does the transition from short questions to an extended account of Minos introduce a new narrator: the claims about Homer, Zeus, education, law, and tragedy remain statements made by Socrates to his companion.

How to read the Greek and the references

Stephanus references identify the ancient work, not a page of this lexicon. “315a” means the a section of page 315 in the traditional numbering; “315a–b” crosses into the next section. The supplied edition also reproduces Burnet's lines and line numbers. A quotation that crosses a section boundary retains a range rather than being forced into the section in which it ends. The passage index includes every section actually present; 313d and 313e are not manufactured to fill a numerical sequence.

Greek headwords normally appear in a recognizable dictionary form, but the register separately prints the form actually found in the dialogue. These are different kinds of evidence. A nominative headword can organize a genitive or accusative occurrence; it does not claim that the nominative itself occurs there. An explanatory phrase heading can collect a construction rather than a single lemma. Editorial reading articles are identified as such. Words found only in a title, a speaker label, an apparatus alternative, or an explanatory note do not become attested spoken vocabulary by proximity to the dialogue.

The places sections use short Greek citations to locate the interpretive claim. Semicolons between separately presented extracts are editorial separators, not reproductions of a Greek question mark; an ellipsis marks an omission within an extract. Continuous text is restored where a word is divided at the end of a printed line. Conventional acute and grave accents may differ when a form is cited independently; the register preserves the source's printed form. Angle brackets remain significant: they identify editorial supplements, especially the answer concerning the Persians at 316a and the relative pronoun at 321d. The companion follows the supplied reading text and reports consequential alternatives; it is not a new critical edition or manuscript collation.

The English follows the supplied translation when it identifies a rendering. Explanatory English may be fuller than a translation equivalent. “Law” is retained for νόμος even in the musical passages, because that consistency lets the reader follow the dialogue's movement between civic rule and nome. “Accept” keeps the recurrence of νομίζειν visible, but cannot reproduce its audible relation to νόμος. “Distributor” and “tend” expose different uses of the νέμειν family. No single gloss replaces attention to the object, construction, speaker, and argumentative situation.

The path of the argument

The question and the first proposal 313a to 314b

Socrates asks what law is “for us.” The companion asks which law he means. The examples of gold and stone distinguish the shared character under inquiry from the different instances that possess it: Socrates asks what law is as a whole. The companion offers “what is accepted.” Socrates separates speech from spoken things, sight from visible things, and hearing from audible things, then uses the same pattern to separate law from accepted things. That sequence establishes a demand for explanation; whether the analogy itself settles the relation between law and custom remains a question for the reader.

Sight and hearing then become examples of perception revealing objects. Knowledge reveals what is learned; medicine finds what is healthy or sickly; prophecy, “as the prophets say,” finds what the gods intend. Law is invited into this explanatory field. The qualification about prophets belongs to Socrates' wording and should survive any summary. The sequence does not silently equate all perception, knowledge, craft, and law.

Resolution opinion and what law wishes 314b to 315b

The companion turns to resolutions and decrees, calling law a resolution of the city. Socrates recasts that as political opinion. They agree that law and justice are fine and beneficial, whereas lawlessness and injustice destroy; an indiscriminately defined civic resolution can be base, so it cannot yet be law as they have characterized it. If law is opinion, Socrates proposes, it must be decent opinion; decent opinion is accepted as true opinion, and true opinion as discovery of what is. The conclusion says that law “wishes” to be that discovery.

Several commitments are doing work. The moral characterization of law narrows what will count as law. The move from decent to true opinion is assented to rather than independently demonstrated. Law's being opinion remains conditional in the formulation at 314e. Most importantly, βούλεται distinguishes what law is directed toward from what people succeed in discovering. The companion's objection states the definition without that verb; Socrates immediately restores it. Human failure and law's aim are thus separated before the argument turns to actual differences in practice.

Different customs and common inquiry 315b to 316c

The companion's evidence is both geographical and historical: Carthaginians, Greeks in Lycaea, descendants of Athamas, and changing Athenian funeral usages. The Greek examples prevent a simple contrast between Greek rightness and foreign error. The funeral examples show that even “we” do not always follow the same usages. These are his reported examples, not ethnographic discoveries independently established by this lexicon.

Socrates proposes putting the inquiry in common instead of exchanging separate long speeches. The resulting questions obtain agreement that just things are just, heavier things heavier, and fine things fine. Persians, Carthage, and Lycaea enter as sites of such agreement. The human sacrifices themselves are not individually reassessed. The step to “what is” gives a common standard and connects missing it with missing the lawful, but agreement about predicates does not by itself identify every contested practice correctly. The companion's continuing inability to be persuaded at 316b–c preserves this pressure within the dialogue.

Expert writings and right law 316c to 317d

Medical writings introduce an identifiable craft and practitioners who know their subject. Those who know, Greek or non-Greek, are said to accept the same things about the same things, always. Writings and lawful usages of medicine, agriculture, gardening, and cookery prepare the application to the ordering of cities. The relevant writers are statesmen and kingly men who know how to rule.

The standard becomes explicit: what is right is lawful; what is not right is lawless, however much it seems law to the ignorant. This is not a denial that people use the name “law” for bad enactments. Socrates expressly distinguishes that use from the standard being defended. Nor is the argument a historical survey proving that practitioners never disagree: its force depends on “those who know” and “the same things.” At 317d Socrates recapitulates law as the finding of what is, now without “wishes.” The wording should be compared with the earlier formulation rather than silently made identical to it.

Fitting distribution and the king 317d to 318a

A good farmer distributes seeds fittingly to soils; a good musician distributes strokes for tunes; a trainer distributes the food appropriate to bodies. The recurring language of νόμος and νομεύς gives a practical shape to law's rightness. Distribution is not merely division into equal shares. It requires a discriminating fit between what is supplied and what receives it.

The herdsman sense of the family then comes forward. A trainer tends the human herd with respect to the body; the shepherd and oxherd tend their respective animals. The king's laws are assigned to human souls. Socrates presses for agreement, and receives it, but the precise contents that improve souls are not yet specified. The final exchange will return to exactly this gap.

Surviving music and the oldest civic laws 318b to 318d

Marsyas and Olympus exemplify good old lawgiving in music. Their surviving tunes are called divine and are said to move and reveal those in need of the gods. Socrates then asks for an old king whose lawful usages similarly survive as divine. The companion thinks of Sparta and Lycurgus, but their best usages are said to have come from Crete. Antiquity, survival, divine association, and goodness become linked questions, without being simply interchangeable meanings of a single word.

Minos and the education given by Zeus 318d to 320d

The companion accepts Rhadamanthys' justice but repeats a harsh picture of Minos. Socrates attributes that picture to Attic tragedy and opposes Homer and Hesiod. His solemn warning about praising and blaming good people makes the question of interpretation also a question of piety.

Homer's “nine-yearly confidant” becomes, in Socrates' reading, one who repeatedly meets Zeus in words for education. The unusual ἐννέωρος is uncertain in Homer; the lexicon distinguishes the quoted word from Socrates' construction of its meaning. His explanation of ὀαριστής through ὄαροι similarly belongs to the argument, rather than independently proving every detail of a lost educational history. The alternative drinking-companion reading is opposed through Minos' legislative practice and presumed consistency of belief and action. The specific Cretan law prohibits drinking with one another to drunkenness; it must not be carelessly enlarged into a prohibition of every kind of drinking.

At 319b–e the poetic quotation and Socrates' explanation must be distinguished. The supplied note reports several possible senses of ἐννέωρος in Homer; the conversation itself interprets the phrase through repeated association in words and education by Zeus.

Rhadamanthys is assigned an educated but subordinate judicial function; Talos guards written laws in the villages. Socrates explains the name “bronze” through bronze tablets. Hesiod's scepter becomes Zeus' education by which Minos guided Crete. These are the dialogue's versions of the figures, and should not be replaced by other familiar versions of their myths.

Poetry reputation and the sign of stability 320d to 321c

The companion asks why Minos acquired his bad reputation. Socrates explains poets' power over opinion and makes Athenian tragedy a vehicle of vengeance for war and tribute. His praise of epic poets and his warning about poetic power coexist: the dialogue does not apply one simple verdict to every poet or every poetic representation. Its account of tragedy's antiquity is also an assertion in this conversation, not a secure chronology established here.

Minos' unmoved laws are offered as the greatest sign of his goodness and discovery of the truth about civic administration. The companion calls the account reasonable; Socrates continues conditionally, “if what I say is true.” The evidential language matters. A persuasive account, an offered sign, and a completed proof should not be flattened into one category. The passage closes by returning to the lawgiver as distributor and shepherd.

The last question 321c to 321d

Food and labors name the body's improving distributions: one supports growth, the others exercise and firm the body. The corresponding psychic question receives no answer. Socrates includes both speakers in the shame that their souls appear ignorant of what is within them, where their good and poor condition lies. Their earlier confidence about kingly law does not excuse this ignorance.

The ending does not retract every earlier distinction. It does prevent treating the dialogue as if it had delivered a complete account of psychic education. Zeus, virtue, words, law, and good distribution have all been named; identifying their precise effective content remains the unresolved demand. A good reading keeps both the positive argument and this limit in view.

Using the companion

A first reading can follow the argument map and passage index alongside the dialogue. A second can follow a word family across articles: law and acceptance; finding and discovery; opinion and reputation; rightness and fitting distribution; education and association; praise, evidence, and poetic authority. The final question is a useful test of every proposed synthesis: does it explain what the text actually establishes, or does it supply the answer that the speakers leave unsaid?

The register is selective in the scholarly sense, not arbitrary in extent. It aims to define every substantive item needed for the dialogue's examples, distinctions, reasoning, and cultural setting, with useful ordinary words where their local force matters. It does not pad the count with every repeated particle or claim to replace a complete grammatical concordance. The phrase glosses complement it by treating the small constructions that materially affect an inference, qualification, comparison, or turn of speech.

The supplied edition

Plato, Minos, Greek and English, Diotimos Editions, 2026. The title page identifies John Burnet's Oxford text of 1907 in a later impression printed by John Johnson and issued no earlier than 1936. The bilingual Greek and English text, explanatory notes, Key Words, Outline, Glossary, Editorial Note, and Note on this Edition have distinct evidential roles. The dialogue's printed Greek determines local lexical attestation; the English determines the rendering attributed to this edition; the apparatus records alternatives and editorial choices; introductory and explanatory prose gives context and interpretation.

This companion neither revises the supplied reading text nor silently incorporates every variant into it. Its citations are to Stephanus sections.

Ancient references identified by the edition

The following are guides to principal parallels and testimonia named in the supplied edition. They distinguish contextual references from the passages of Minos being explained. Their listing does not claim a fresh collation of every work or establish that two passages have identical purposes.

Diogenes Laertius 3.60 and 3.62: the ancient catalogue and classification; 2.122: Simon's reported dialogues, including one On Law Homer, Odyssey 19.174 and 19.178–179: Crete, its cities, Cnossus, and Minos as the confidant of Zeus; Odyssey 11.568–570: Minos judging the dead with a golden scepter Homer, Iliad 14.321–322: Zeus' reference to the daughter of Phoenix; Iliad 2.243: an example of the “shepherd of the people” formula Hesiod, fragment 144 in Merkelbach–West: the verses quoted at Minos 320d, preserved through this passage Plato, Republic 565d and Pausanias 8.2.3: the tradition associated with Mount Lycaeus Herodotus 7.197: the descendants of Athamas at Halus; 1.173: Europa and Minos; 1.65: the Cretan connection of Spartan laws Diodorus Siculus 20.14: the Carthaginian sacrifice reported for 310 BC; the reference is contextual testimony, not the dramatic date of Minos Aristotle, Politics 8.5, 1340a: the melodies of Olympus; 2.10, 1271b: Cretan and Spartan institutions Plato, Symposium 215c: Marsyas and Olympus, music that moves and reveals those in need of the gods and initiations Plato, Laws 1.637a and 1.639d: Spartan and Cretan attitudes toward drinking parties Plato, Phaedo 60d: putting a story into verse, relevant to the possible verbal play in “stretch out” Plutarch, Lycurgus 1: uncertainty about the lawgiver's date; Theseus 15–16: Athenian tribute and theatrical hostility to Minos Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 4.1638–1648, and Apollodorus, Library 1.9.26: other versions of Talos, to be distinguished from the bronze-tablet explanation in Minos Suda ε 191: senses connected with the uncertain funeral-attendant word; θ 282 and φ 762: Thespis and Phrynichus Stobaeus, Anthology 4.2, in Wachsmuth–Hense, volume IV, pages 120–121: the excerpt of Minos 317c–318a identified by the supplied Editorial Note Plato, Euthyphro 6b, Gorgias 500b and 519e, and Alcibiades I 109d: Socratic oaths by Zeus of Friendship

Modern lexical explanations and alternative interpretations reported by the supplied notes are attributed there to Liddell–Scott–Jones, especially for the musical sense of νόμος, the Homeric ἐννέωρος, the funeral-attendant designation, and ἐντείνω. This lexicon preserves the distinction between an uncertain Homeric expression and Socrates' interpretation of it. An etymological or lexical possibility does not by itself prove the whole historical narrative that a speaker builds upon it. The normalized register heading Νέκυια was checked against the Liddell–Scott–Jones entry in Perseus; the attested form Νεκυίᾳ remains as printed in the dialogue.

Consequential cautions

The law at 320a is a prohibition on drinking together to drunkenness. The surrounding claim about abstention from drinking parties is broader, and the edition's outline compresses the specific law too far. The companion therefore follows the actual Greek and translation when it states that rule.

The Homeric ἐννέωρος remains uncertain outside the interpretation developed by Socrates. The reading “nine-yearly confidant” displays his construal; it is not proof that every ancient use of the word means a ninth-year educational visit. The dialogue's Talos is a guardian carrying laws on bronze tablets, not automatically the bronze-bodied figure of another narrative. The quoted Hesiodic πολέων means “many” in the supplied interpretation, not “cities.” These small distinctions change the account materially.

The funeral-attendant word at 315c remains uncertain in sense and differs in spelling from the vulgate alternative. The additions at 316a and 321d remain marked as additions. The conjecture at 317d is reported as such. The Alexander in Burnet's apparatus remains unidentified, and the source does not supply the number of the Stobaean excerpt within its chapter. Those gaps are not filled by guesses.

The edition reports no fresh collation against the manuscripts and no systematic incorporation of proposals after Burnet's 1907 edition. This companion does not extend those claims. A reliable reader's aid can identify what the supplied text says, how the argument uses it, and where the evidence ends without claiming to settle every larger dispute.

Questions left open

The dialogue does not prove that every enacted rule is good, supply a historical census of all legal customs, separately refute the human-sacrifice cases, or give an exhaustive account of how to identify the genuine political expert. Its defense of Minos depends on a selection and interpretation of poetic evidence, an assumption of consistency between his beliefs and enactments, and the offered sign of durable law. The qualified responses and the final ignorance remain part of the work.

The final question asks what the lawgiver distributes to the soul to improve it. An answer such as “virtue,” “education,” or “true laws” may express a reader's synthesis, but the speakers do not supply it there. The lexicon preserves the unresolved question so that the earlier terms can be reread under its pressure.