deducted; or once more, we may compare the ignorance of solid geometry of
which he complains in the Republic and the puzzle about fractions with the
difficulty in the Laws about commensurable and incommensurable quantities
--and the malicious emphasis on the word gunaikeios (Laws) with the use of
the same word (Republic). These and similar passages tend to show that the
author of the Republic is also the author of the Laws. They are echoes of
the same voice, expressions of the same mind, coincidences too subtle to
have been invented by the ingenuity of any imitator. The force of the
argument is increased, if we remember that no passage in the Laws is
exactly copied,--nowhere do five or six words occur together which are
found together elsewhere in Plato's writings.

In other dialogues of Plato, as well as in the Republic, there are to be
found parallels with the Laws. Such resemblances, as we might expect,
occur chiefly (but not exclusively) in the dialogues which, on other
grounds, we may suppose to be of later date. The punishment of evil is to
be like evil men (Laws), as he says also in the Theaetetus. Compare again
the dependence of tragedy and comedy on one another, of which he gives the
reason in the Laws--'For serious things cannot be understood without
laughable, nor opposites at all without opposites, if a man is really to
have intelligence of either'; here he puts forward the principle which is
the groundwork of the thesis of Socrates in the Symposium, 'that the
genius of tragedy is the same as that of comedy, and that the writer of
comedy ought to be a writer of tragedy also.' There is a truth and right
which is above Law (Laws), as we learn also from the Statesman. That men
are the possession of the Gods (Laws), is a reflection which likewise
occurs in the Phaedo. The remark, whether serious or ironical (Laws), that
'the sons of the Gods naturally believed in the Gods, because they had the
means of knowing about them,' is found in the Timaeus. The reign of
Cronos, who is the divine ruler (Laws), is a reminiscence of the