law, and invited thought as to the reality behind such
confusion.

We may understand the materials upon which Greek philosophers were
working if we look at an exhortation addressed by Demosthenes to an
Athenian jury. Men ought to obey the law, he said, for four reasons:
because laws were prescribed by God, because they were a tradition
taught by wise men who knew the good old customs, because they were
deductions from an eternal and immutable moral code and because they
were agreements of men with each other binding them because of a moral
duty to keep their promises. It was not long since that men had
thought of legal precepts as divinely revealed, nor was it long since
that law had been a tradition of old customs of decision. Philosophers
were seeking a better basis for them in eternal principles of right.
In the meantime in political theory, at least, many of them were the
agreements of Athenian citizens as to how they should conduct
themselves in the inevitable clashes of interests in everyday life.
What was needed above all was some theory of the authority of law
which should impose bonds of reason upon those who enacted, upon those
who applied and upon those who were subject to law in such an
amorphous legal order.

A sure basis of authority resting upon something more stable than
human will and the power of those who govern to impose their will for
the time being was required also for the problem of social control in
the Greek city-state. In order to maintain the general security and
the security of social institutions amid a strife of factions in a
society organized on the basis of kinship and against the wilfulness
of masterful individuals boasting descent from gods, in order to
persuade or coerce both the aristocracy and the mass of the low born
to maintain in orderly fashion the social _status quo_, it would not
do to tell them that law was a gift of God, nor that what offended the
aristocrat as a radical bit of popular legislation enacted at the
instance of a demagogue was yet to be obeyed because it had been so
taught by wise men who knew the good old customs, nor that Demos
chafing under some item of a class-possessed tradition was bound by
it as something to which all citizens had agreed. The exigencies of
the social order called for a distinction between [Greek: nomos] and
[Greek: ta nomizomena]--between law and rules of law. The Minos, which
if not actually a dialogue of Plato's seems clearly Platoni