Page:Laws (vol 1 of 2) (Bury, 1926).pdf/49

Rh the highest goodness and to that alone; and this (to quote Theognis) consists in “loyalty in danger,” and one might term it “complete righteousness.”

But that goodness which Tyrtaeus specially praised, fair though it be and fitly glorified by the poct, deserves nevertheless to be placed no higher than fourth in order and estimation.’

CLIN. We are degrading our own lawgiver, Stranger, to a very low level!

ATH. Nay, my good Sir, it is ourselves we are degrading, in so far as we imagine that it was with a special view to war that Lycurgus and Minos laid down all the legal usages here and in Lacedaemon.

CLIN. How, then, ought we to have stated the matter ? -

ATH. In the way that is, as I think, true and proper when talking of a divine hero. That is to say, we should state that he enacted laws with an eye not to some one fraction, and that the most paltry, of goodness, but to goodness as a whole, and that he devised the laws themselves according to classes, though not the classes which the present devisers propound. 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