public: or the description of
lawlessness 'creeping in little by little in the fashions of music and
overturning all things,'--to us a paradox, but to Plato's mind a fixed
idea, which is found in the Laws as well as in the Republic: or the
figure of the parts of the human body under which the parts of the state
are described (Laws; Republic): the apology for delay and diffuseness,
which occurs not unfrequently in the Republic, is carried to an excess
in the Laws (compare Theaet.): the remarkable thought (Laws) that the
soul of the sun is better than the sun, agrees with the relation in
which the idea of good stands to the sun in the Republic, and with the
substitution of mind for the idea of good in the Philebus: the passage
about the tragic poets (Laws) agrees generally with the treatment of
them in the Republic, but is more finely conceived, and worked out in a
nobler spirit. Some lesser similarities of thought and manner should not
be omitted, such as the mention of the thirty years' old students in the
Republic, and the fifty years' old choristers in the Laws; or the
making of the citizens out of wax (Laws) compared with the other image
(Republic); or the number of the tyrant (729), which is NEARLY equal
with the number of days and nights in the year (730), compared with the
'slight correction' of the sacred number 5040, which is divisible by all
the numbers from 1 to 12 except 11, and divisible by 11, if two families
be 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