ties. Nor can we fairly attribute any want of
originality to him, because he has borrowed many of his provisions from
Sparta and Athens. Laws and institutions grow out of habits and customs;
and they have 'better opinion, better confirmation,' if they have come
down from antiquity and are not mere literary inventions. Plato would
have been the first to acknowledge that the Book of Laws was not the
creation of his fancy, but a collection of enactments which had been
devised by inspired legislators, like Minos, Lycurgus, and Solon,
to meet the actual needs of men, and had been approved by time and
experience.

In order to do justice therefore to the design of the work, it is
necessary to examine how far it rests on an historical foundation and
coincides with the actual laws of Sparta and Athens. The consideration
of the historical aspect of the Laws has been reserved for this place.
In working out the comparison the writer has been greatly assisted
by the excellent essays of C.F. Hermann ('De vestigiis institutorum
veterum, imprimis Atticorum, per Platonis de Legibus libros indagandis,'
and 'Juris domestici et familiaris apud Platonem in Legibus cum veteris
Graeciae inque primis Athenarum institutis comparatio': Marburg, 1836),
and by J.B. Telfy's 'Corpus Juris Attici' (Leipzig, 1868).

EXCURSUS ON THE RELATION OF THE LAWS OF PLATO TO THE INSTITUTIONS OF
CRETE AND LACEDAEMON AND TO THE LAWS AND CONSTITUTION OF ATHENS.

The Laws of Plato are essentially Greek: unlike Xenophon's Cyropaedia,
they contain nothing foreign or oriental. Their aim is to reconstruct
the work of the great lawgivers of Hellas in a literary form. They
partake both of an Athenian and a Spartan character. Some of them too
are derived from Crete, and are appropriately transferred to a Cretan
colony. But of Crete so little is known to us, that although, as
Montesquieu (Esprit des Lois) remarks, 'the Laws of Crete are the
original of those of Sparta and the Laws of Plato the correction of
these latter,' there is only one point, viz. the common meals, in which
they can be compared. Most of Plato's provisions resemble the laws and
customs which prevailed in these three states (especially in the two
former), and which the personifying instinct of the Greeks attributed
to Minos, Lycurgus, and Solon. A very few particulars may have been
borrowed from Zaleucus (Cic. de Legibus), and Charondas, who is said to
have first made laws against perjury (Arist.