he law in
the employment of innocent humour. A comic poet, or maker of iambic or
satirical lyric verse, shall not be permitted to ridicule any of the
citizens, either by word or likeness, either in anger or without anger.
And if any one is disobedient, the judges shall either at once expel him
from the country, or he shall pay a fine of three minae, which shall be
dedicated to the God who presides over the contests. Those only who have
received permission shall be allowed to write verses at one another, but
they shall be without anger and in jest; in anger and in serious earnest
they shall not be allowed. The decision of this matter shall be left to
the superintendent of the general education of the young, and whatever
he may license, the writer shall be allowed to produce, and whatever he
rejects let not the poet himself exhibit, or ever teach anybody else,
slave or freeman, under the penalty of being dishonoured, and held
disobedient to the laws.

Now he is not to be pitied who is hungry, or who suffers any bodily
pain, but he who is temperate, or has some other virtue, or part of a
virtue, and at the same time suffers from misfortune; it would be an
extraordinary thing if such an one, whether slave or freeman, were
utterly forsaken and fell into the extremes of poverty in any tolerably
well-ordered city or government. Wherefore the legislator may safely
make a law applicable to such cases in the following terms: Let there
be no beggars in our state; and if anybody begs, seeking to pick up a
livelihood by unavailing prayers, let the wardens of the agora turn him
out of the agora, and the wardens of the city out of the city, and
the wardens of the country send him out of any other parts of the land
across the border, in order that the land may be cleared of this sort of
animal.

If a slave of either sex injure anything, which is not his or her own,
through inexperience, or some improper practice, and the person who
suffers damage be not himself in part to blame, the master of the slave
who has done the harm shall either make full satisfaction, or give up
the slave who has done the injury. But if the master argue that the
charge has arisen by collusion between the injured party and the
injurer, with the view of obtaining the slave, let him sue the person,
who says that he has been injured, for malpractices. And if he gain a
conviction, let him receive double the value which the court fixes as
the price of the slave; a