Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The relation between the opening section of Plato's Laws and Xenophon's Constitution of the Lacedaemonians usually goes unnoticed. This paper draws attention to its importance for understanding Plato's project in the dialogue. It has three sections. In the first, it will be shown that the view proposed by Plato's Athenian visitor that Lycurgus made virtue in its entirety the goal of his statecraft was anticipated in Xenophon's treatise. It has to be treated as an interpretation of the Spartan politeia, alternative to that advanced by Cleinias and Megillus, and accepted by (for example) Aristotle, which Plato could expect or at any rate hope to be taken seriously as such. In the second, the argument will focus on the contents of the legislative programme the Athenian says he had hoped to hear Cleinias ascribe to the Cretan and Spartan lawgivers. The case will be made that Plato can expect recognition by the reader (as by the Athenian's interlocutors) that the programme is properly Spartan and Cretan by virtue of its echoes of the programme attributed to Lycurgus by Xenophon. Finally, the third section will argue that in making law primarily concerned with fostering the proper development, conduct, and treatment of human beings at every stage of the life cycle, above all by provision for sound customary practices (ἐπιτηδεύματα) and the like, Plato adopts the approach to law making taken by Xenophon's Lycurgus.

On considère généralement que les deux grands platoniciens de l'ère victorienne – George Grote et Benjamin Jowett – ont défendu des perspectives opposées sur Platon. Tout ce que leurs lectures respectives ont de commun n'est pas moins important : une herméneutique « atomiste », en réaction contre toutes les tentatives de systématisation des Dialogues , et un mélange d'attention scrupuleuse portée à l'historicité des textes et d'insistance sur l'idée que donner sa place à Platon dans l'histoire de la philosophie et dans « l'échelle du progrès humain » fait partie de l'obligation qui incombe à l'historien

Barker influentially posited a development from an absolutist Republic hostile to the idea of the rule of law, through an absolutist Statesman which now engages more seriously and to a degree sympathetically with the idea, to a Laws in which the rule of law displaces the earlier absolutism. This paper demonstrates that Barker's construction is unsustainable. The Republic presents a political philosophy much more like the Laws than the absolutism of the Statesman. There is a lot of law and lawgiving in the dialogue, and no more absolutism than in the Laws itself.