The Concealed Artistry of the Minos and the Hipparchus

Despite being labeled as works of doubtful authenticity, the Minos and the Hipparchus are remarkably artful and thought-provoking. They are designed to be studied together with Plato's Laws and illustrate the misleading disjunction with which the latter begins: who is responsible for good laws, a god or a man? The Minos satirizes excessive reliance on divine revelation while the Hipparchus takes on the pretensions of a merely human legislator. What emerges from them jointly is a picture of the ideal citizen as a rare combination, a high-spirited intellectual and a humble theist.