The mention of Minos the great lawgiver, and of Rhadamanthus the righteous
administrator of the law, suggests the two divisions of the laws into
enactments and appointments of officers. The legislator and the judge
stand side by side, and their functions cannot be wholly distinguished.
For the judge is in some sort a legislator, at any rate in small matters;
and his decisions growing into precedents, must determine the innumerable
details which arise out of the conflict of circumstances. These Plato
proposes to leave to a younger generation of legislators. The action of
courts of law in making law seems to have escaped him, probably because
the Athenian law-courts were popular assemblies; and, except in a mythical
form, he can hardly be said to have had before his eyes the ideal of a
judge. In reading the Laws of Plato, or any other ancient writing about
Laws, we should consider how gradual the process is by which not only a
legal system, but the administration of a court of law, becomes perfected.

There are other subjects on which Plato breaks ground, as his manner is,
early in the work. First, he gives a sketch of the subject of laws; they
are to comprehend the whole of human life, from infancy to age, and from
birth to death, although the proposed plan is far from being regularly
executed in the books which follow, partly owing to the necessity of
describing the constitution as well as the laws of his new colony.
Secondly, he touches on the power of music, which may exercise so great an
influence on the character of men for good or evil; he refers especially
to the great offence--which he mentions again, and which he had condemned
in the Republic--of varying the modes and rhythms, as well as to that of
separating the words from the music. Thirdly, he reprobates the prevalence
of unnatural loves in Sparta and Crete, which he attributes to the
practice of syssitia and gymnastic exercises, and considers to be almost
inseparable from them. To this subject he again returns in the eighth