Dialogues of Plato - MobileReference [216]
CLEINIAS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: I should wish you to understand that what has preceded and what is about to follow, has been, and will be said, with the intention of explaining what need the men of that time had of laws, and who was their lawgiver.
CLEINIAS: And thus far what you have said has been very well said.
ATHENIAN: They could hardly have wanted lawgivers as yet; nothing of that sort was likely to have existed in their days, for they had no letters at this early period; they lived by habit and the customs of their ancestors, as they are called.
CLEINIAS: Probably.
ATHENIAN: But there was already existing a form of government which, if I am not mistaken, is generally termed a lordship, and this still remains in many places, both among Hellenes and barbarians (compare Arist. Pol.), and is the government which is declared by Homer to have prevailed among the Cyclopes:--
'They have neither councils nor judgments, but they dwell in hollow caves on the tops of high mountains, and every one gives law to his wife and children, and they do not busy themselves about one another.' (Odyss.)
CLEINIAS: That seems to be a charming poet of yours; I have read some other verses of his, which are very clever; but I do not know much of him, for foreign poets are very little read among the Cretans.
MEGILLUS: But they are in Lacedaemon, and he appears to be the prince of them all; the manner of life, however, which he describes is not Spartan, but rather Ionian, and he seems quite to confirm what you are saying, when he traces up the ancient state of mankind by the help of tradition to barbarism.
ATHENIAN: Yes, he does confirm it; and we may accept his witness to the fact that such forms of government sometimes arise.
CLEINIAS: We may.
ATHENIAN: And were not such states composed of men who had been dispersed in single habitations and families by the poverty which attended the devastations; and did not the eldest then rule among them, because with them government originated in the authority of a father and a mother, whom, like a flock of birds, they followed, forming one troop under the patriarchal rule and sovereignty of their parents, which of all sovereignties is the most just?
CLEINIAS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: After this they came together in greater numbers, and increased the size of their cities, and betook themselves to husbandry, first of all at the foot of the mountains, and made enclosures of loose walls and works of defence, in order to keep off wild beasts; thus creating a single large and common habitation.
CLEINIAS: Yes; at least we may suppose so.
ATHENIAN: There is another thing which would probably happen.
CLEINIAS: What?
ATHENIAN: When these larger habitations grew up out of the lesser original ones, each of the lesser ones would survive in the larger; every family would be under the rule of the eldest, and, owing to their separation from one another, would have peculiar customs in things divine and human, which they would have received from their several parents who had educated them; and these customs would incline them to order, when the parents had the element of order in their nature, and to courage, when they had the element of courage. And they would naturally stamp upon their children, and upon their children's children, their own likings; and, as we are saying, they would find their way into the larger society, having already their own peculiar laws.
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN: And every man surely likes his own laws best, and the laws of others not so well.
CLEINIAS: True.
ATHENIAN: Then now we seem to have stumbled upon the beginnings of legislation.
CLEINIAS: Exactly.
ATHENIAN: The next step will be that these persons who have met together, will select some arbiters, who will review the laws of all of them, and will publicly present such as they approve to the chiefs who lead the tribes, and who are in a manner