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65 C h a pte r 4 Laws 4 and the Cyclopes The opening discussion of the constitutions of Crete and Sparta in Laws 1 (624a–626b) reveals two features central to the creations of laws,constitutions, and education: they are received from a god through a human intermediary (Zeus through Minos in the case of Crete, Apollo through Lycurgus in the case of Laconia). Second, aspects of the constitution develop out of the interactions of human groups with the terrain they inhabit. The Athenian Stranger asks the Cretan, Cleinias, why does your law demand the common messes and the gymnastikē and weapons you employ (625c)? Cleinias replies that their gymnastikē has emerged from the landscape of Crete: it is not flat, so the Cretans do not use horses, but run. When running, light arms like bows and arrows are necessary. So, because of the landscape they inhabit, the Cretans have developed a particular set of military practices and a gymnastikē that supports that military practice.This chapter traces a part of the workingout of these two themes, the relation between terrain and political character and the role of the divine in a politeia, in the earlier and central books of the Laws. My discussion begins from the point about the relationship between constitution and terrain. I will examine the opening of Book 4, where the Stranger explains the significance for the development of virtue in the new city of the city’s having a proper location and the right type of productive land; the new city’s virtue will depend upon her being isolated from other cities and agriculturally self-sufficient. I will discuss this analysis in light of the Cyclopes of the Odyssey, another isolated and agriculturally self-sufficient group, whom the Stranger invokes in Book 3 as an example of the most just type of rule. The landscape the Cyclopes inhabit and the landscape the new city will inhabit,I will argue,indicate that the citizens of the new city will,like the Cyclopes, be characterized by hostile and closed-minded stances toward what comes to them from outside. I will turn next to a discussion of how the very opening of the Laws (as I have noted above) points to the crucial necessity of openness to the strange for the creation of laws and constitutions through its mention of the divine and mortal lawgivers of Crete and Sparta. 66 chapter 4 Openness to the strange reveals itself here as openness to the divine, a theme that the Laws pursues through the figure of Dionysus. In the final section of the chapter, I will examine what I take to be the key features of Dionysus for the Laws: his ability to drive humans to madness in his rites and his violent punishment of cities that refuse to be open to the divine. Plato’s use of the Odyssey and of Dionysus myth, then, invites us to challenge some of the claims that the Stranger so authoritatively makes about the sources and nature of virtue in a city. The Situation of the City When concrete discussion of the construction of the new city begins in Book 4, the Stranger, following the precedent of the conversation with which the Laws begins, first asks Cleinias, at 704a–b,“What must one think the city is going to be? ...I’m not asking what name it has at present or what it will be necessary to call it . . . What I mean to ask about it now is rather this: whether it will be on the sea or inland.”1 Cleinias answers that the city will be eighty stades from the sea and will have access to good harbors along the coast. Further, the land around it is highly productive, lacking in nothing (704b).There is no neighboring polis near it, because “an ancient migration from the place has left the land deserted for an incalculably long time” (704c).2 Further, the terrain overall is rough, as is the rest of Crete, and does not provide any good stands of fir, pine, cypress, pitch pine, or plane trees, the trees used for shipbuilding (705c).The new city, then, will be inland, isolated from other cities, surrounded by land rich for agriculture but lacking ships’ timber. Since the goal of any constitution is the rearing of citizens who possess all the parts of virtue (a point developed in the early pages of Book 1, 630a and following), the Stranger’s response to Cleinias...

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