From the Beginning to Plato

388 PLATO: ETHICS AND POLITICS
fluidity: the communism is to extend not only through a small class of guardians
and auxiliaries, but ‘so far as possible throughout the whole city’ (c1–2). This
corresponds to a more fluid psychology; the golden cord of reason has to contend
with other cords that are hard and steely (I.644d7–645b1), but the field of conflict
is not defined as tripartite (cf. [11.2]). However, reason was never immune to
corruption, and the removal of the barriers that constituted partition fits a new
anxiety that incarnation is always infection. It is not in human nature to acquire
autocratic power without becoming full of insolence and injustice (IV.713c6–8,
cf. XII.947e7–8). Our mortal nature inclines us to sacrifice public interest to
private gain, ‘creating a darkness within itself (IX.875b6–c2). Only by the grace
of God could a man be born with a character that would enable him safely to
apply his intelligence and dispense with laws; as it is, true freedom is hardly to
be found anywhere (c2–d3). The main obstacle to philosophical rule is nothing
more contingent than our humanity.
Hence the second-best city is humanly the best. While still in fact evidently
impracticable (cf. [11.3], 266–8, 311–12), it conveys more concretely what
might be adequate to human needs if circumstances were different and consent
obtainable. Though knowledge itself should never be enslaved to law (c7–d1),
there is no security for any city in which the law is not master of the rulers (IV.
715c6–d6). By a revision of Athenian practice, with an age-limit and an election
instead of lot, officials are to be answerable to scrutiny by a board of auditors
(XII.945e4–946e4); when autocracy is out of the question, even bureaucracy
must be kept under control. Laws are to be prefaced by explanations and
exhortations (IV.718b2–723d4). We may wonder whether these would not
encourage jurors to apply the spirit rather than the letter of each law, but their
intention seems simply to win comprehension and compliance (718c8–d7). It is
illustrated profusely, almost compulsively, how minutely laws must define and
differentiate the types of criminal offence. That some details of regulation must
be left by the founding legislator to experiment and experience (e.g. VI.770b4–8)
was also recognized in the less law-bound Republic (IV.427a2–7); here, even these
are to become virtually immutable after ten years’ trial (Laws VI.772b5–c7).
Later revision must be excused by necessity, and will be inhibited by procedural
obstacles (c7–d4). Where nature is weak, safety lies in a straitjacket.
Plato’s morality is a melodrama, and the Laws denies it a happy ending. He
always tends to dualisms, of Forms and world, soul and body, reason and
unreason, unity and division, education and corruption. Social dramas are
mirrored by conflicts within each soul. When he writes, ‘There is a strange, wild,
lawless kind of desire that is present even in those of us who seem most
moderate’ (Republic IX.572b4–6), the idealist is shaking hands with the cynic:
Jacques Vergès, the French lawyer who defends the undefendable, has remarked,
‘There is in the heart of the most honest man a cesspool filled with hideous
reptiles.’ A political Utopia that intends to make a heaven of earth has to make way
for a second-best polity that is truer to man’s fallen nature. We read Plato now
not in order to share the consolations of hope or despair, but to be reminded of