ances and
heiresses and assaults, and the like. As you truly said, virtue is the
business of the legislator; but you went wrong when you referred all
legislation to a part of virtue, and to an inferior part. For the object
of laws, whether the Cretan or any other, is to make men happy. Now
happiness or good is of two kinds--there are divine and there are human
goods. He who has the divine has the human added to him; but he who
has lost the greater is deprived of both. The lesser goods are health,
beauty, strength, and, lastly, wealth; not the blind God, Pluto, but one
who has eyes to see and follow wisdom. For mind or wisdom is the most
divine of all goods; and next comes temperance, and justice springs from
the union of wisdom and temperance with courage, which is the fourth or
last. These four precede other goods, and the legislator will arrange
all his ordinances accordingly, the human going back to the divine,
and the divine to their leader mind. There will be enactments about
marriage, about education, about all the states and feelings and
experiences of men and women, at every age, in weal and woe, in war and
peace; upon all the law will fix a stamp of praise and blame. There will
also be regulations about property and expenditure, about contracts,
about rewards and punishments, and finally about funeral rites and
honours of the dead. The lawgiver will appoint guardians to preside over
these things; and mind will harmonize his ordinances, and show them to
be in agreement with temperance and justice. Now I want to know whether
the same principles are observed in the laws of Lycurgus and Minos,
or, as I should rather say, of Apollo and Zeus. We must go through the
virtues, beginning with courage, and then we will show that what has
preceded has relation to virtue.

'I wish,' says the Lacedaemonian, 'that you, Stranger, would first
criticize Cleinias and the Cretan laws.' Yes, is the reply, and I will
criticize you and myself, as well as him. Tell me, Megillus, were not
the common meals and gymnastic training instituted by your legislator
with a view to war? 'Yes; and next in the order of importance comes
hunting, and fourth the endurance of pain in boxing contests, and in the
beatings which are the punishment of theft. There is, too, the so-called
Crypteia or secret service, in which our youth wander about the country
night and day unattended, and even in winter go unshod and have no beds
to lie on. Moreover they wr