Page:Laws (vol 1 of 2) (Bury, 1926).pdf/15



to tradition, Plato was born in 427 B.C. and died in 347 B.C., leaving behind him as his last work the Laws. We may, therefore, suppose that the last decade of his life was mainly occupied with its composition. The internal evidence of the work itself sufficiently confirms tradition. Not only does it lack the charm and vigour of the earlier dialogues, but it is marked also by much uncouthness of style, and by a tendency to pedantry, tautology and discursive garrulity which seems to point to the failing powers of the author. Moreover, the author himself indicates his own advanced age by the artistic device of representing the three interlocutors in the dialogue as old men, and by the stress he repeatedly lays upon the fact of their age, as well as upon the reverence due from the young to the old.

The scene is laid in Crete, and it is during a walk from Cnosus to the grotto of Zeus on Mount Ida, on a long midsummer day, that the conversation here related is supposed to have taken place. Of the three old men, one is an Athenian, one (Clinias) a Cretan, one (Megillus) a Spartan. The protagonist is the Athenian, and nearly all the talking is done by him. His companions are little more than listeners, rather dull of wit, and incapable of adding vii