Statesman. It is remarkable that in the Sophist and Statesman (Soph.),
Plato, speaking in the character of the Eleatic Stranger, has already put
on the old man. The madness of the poets, again, is a favourite notion of
Plato's, which occurs also in the Laws, as well as in the Phaedrus, Ion,
and elsewhere. There are traces in the Laws of the same desire to base
speculation upon history which we find in the Critias. Once more, there is
a striking parallel with the paradox of the Gorgias, that 'if you do evil,
it is better to be punished than to be unpunished,' in the Laws: 'To live
having all goods without justice and virtue is the greatest of evils if
life be immortal, but not so great if the bad man lives but a short time.'

The point to be considered is whether these are the kind of parallels
which would be the work of an imitator. Would a forger have had the wit to
select the most peculiar and characteristic thoughts of Plato; would he
have caught the spirit of his philosophy; would he, instead of openly
borrowing, have half concealed his favourite ideas; would he have formed
them into a whole such as the Laws; would he have given another the credit
which he might have obtained for himself; would he have remembered and
made use of other passages of the Platonic writings and have never
deviated into the phraseology of them? Without pressing such arguments as
absolutely certain, we must acknowledge that such a comparison affords a
new ground of real weight for believing the Laws to be a genuine writing
of Plato.

V. The relation of the Republic to the Laws is clearly set forth by Plato
in the Laws. The Republic is the best state, the Laws is the best possible
under the existing conditions of the Greek world. The Republic is the
ideal, in which no man calls anything his own, which may or may not have
existed in some remote clime, under the rule of some God, or son of a God
(who can say?), but is, at any rate, the pattern of all other states and