ABSTRACT
It is by the foundation of an imaginary colony that Plato seeks to sketch the lines of the law-state and its mixed constitution. The greater part of the island of Crete, in which the scene of the dialogue is laid, is about to found a colony; and the Cretan Cleinias, who is one of the persons of the dialogue, is also one of a commission often which has been appointed to superintend its foundation (702 C). The commission has power to make the laws of the colony; and Cleinias begs the Athenian stranger to propound for its consideration a draft or sketch of a code and a constitution. 1 The case here imagined was one that often occurred in actual Greek life; and it indicates both the impulse which colonization furnished to political speculation, and the part which such speculation might play in the construction of new States. Modern colonists are apt to carry with them the laws and institutions of some one mother-country from which they have come, and to which they remain attached. 2 Greek colonies, as a rule, began a new and independent life on their own account: their population was sometimes, if not always, drawn from different sources and stocks which had been accustomed, in their original homes, to different laws and institutions; and it was natural that they should begin their life with an effort to find some new code of law and some new form of constitution in which their differences might be reconciled. 1 Plato sees that there may be advantages in colonists of a single stock, who possess from the start community of race, of language, of law, and of religion (708 C). 2 On the other hand, united as they are, they are prone to cling blindly to the laws and institutions of their original home; and colonists drawn from different stocks, though they may find it hard to pull together, will be more likely to accept new laws and institutions. Accordingly the colonists of the imaginary colony are to be drawn not only from the whole of Crete, but also from the Peloponnese (708 C); and the commission is to have power to adopt laws not only on the Cretan model, but also on foreign models if it considers that they are better (702 C). 3 The colony will thus be like the confluence of springs from many sources into a single lake (736 B), and the legislator will be able to require that the waters shall all be pure, and the colonists shall all be good material.
