Plato, Laws, Book I — Greek text with English translation

If, then, these practices are necessary in war,—namely, messing in common for safety’s sake, and the appointment of relays of officers and privates to act as guards,— they must be carried out equally in time of peace. For (as he would say) peace, as the term is commonly employed, is nothing more than a name, the truth being that every State is, by a law of nature, engaged perpetually in an informal war with every other State. And if you look at the matter from this point of view you will find it practically true that our Cretan lawgiver ordained all our legal usages, both public and private, with an eye to war, and that he therefore charged us with the task of guarding our laws safely, in the conviction that without victory in war nothing else, whether possession or institution, is of the least value, but all the goods of the vanquished fall into the hands of the victors.

And there is a third judge we must mention (third and best in point of merit),—if indeed such a judge can be found,— who in dealing with a single divided family will destroy none of them but reconcile them and succeed, by enacting laws for them, in securing amongst them thenceforward permanent friendliness.

For everyone now brings forward and devises just the class which he needs: one man deals with inheritances and heiresses, another with cases of battery, and so on in endless variety. But what we assert is that the devising of laws, when rightly conducted, follows the procedure which we have now commenced. Indeed, I greatly admire the way you opened your exposition of the laws; for to make a start with goodness and say that that was the aim of the lawgiver is the right way. But in your further statement that he legislated wholly with reference to a fraction of goodness, and that the smallest fraction, you seemed to me to be in error, and all this latter part of my discourse was because of that. What then is the manner of exposition I should have liked to have heard from you? Shall I tell you?

and in regard to all their forms of intercourse he must observe and watch their pains and pleasures and desires and all intense passions, and distribute praise and blame correctly by the means of the laws themselves. Moreover, in the matter of anger and of fear, and of all the disturbances which befall souls owing to misfortune, and of all the avoidances thereof which occur in good-fortune, and of all the experiences which confront men through disease or war or penury or their opposites,— in regard to all these definite instruction must be given as to what is the right and what the wrong disposition in each case. It is necessary, in the next place, for the law-giver to keep a watch on the methods employed by the citizens in gaining and spending money, and to supervise the associations they form with one another, and the dissolutions thereof, whether they be voluntary or under compulsion; he must observe the manner in which they conduct each of these mutual transactions, and note where justice obtains and where it is lacking. To those that are obedient he must assign honors by law, but on the disobedient he must impose duly appointed penalties. Then finally, when he arrives at the completion of the whole constitution, he has to consider in what manner in each case the burial of the dead should be carried out, and what honors should be assigned to them. This being settled, the framer of the laws will hand over all his statutes to the charge of Wardens—guided some by wisdom, others by true opinion—to the end that Reason, having bound all into one single system, may declare them to be ancillary neither to wealth nor ambition, but to temperance and justice. In this manner, Strangers, I could have wished (and I wish it still) that you had fully explained how all these regulations are inherent in the reputed laws of Zeus and in those of the Pythian Apollo which were ordained by Minos and Lycurgus, and how their systematic arrangement is quite evident to him who, whether by art or practice, is an expert in law, although it is by no means obvious to the rest of us.