ABSTRACT
According to the tradition of antiquity the Laws is a posthumous work, published, within a year of Plato’s death (347), by a pupil and amanuensis, Philip of Opus. This is apparently the reason for some of the gaps, and some of the inconsistencies, which Plato, dying with the work unfinished, had left behind, and his editor did not seek to remove. The plan of the Laws may have occurred to Plato as early as 361, when we know, from the Seventh Epistle, that he was engaged with Dionysius the younger on the study of the proper ‘preambles’ to be attached to laws: its composition may be ascribed to the last ten years of his life, when he was an old man of over seventy. 1 The marks of old age are written large in many features of the Laws. Like Prospero in The Tempest – the last of Shakespeare’s plays – when he breaks his magic staff and drowns his book in the deeps, Plato has come to feel that men, who play their part in ‘this unsubstantial pageant’, are such stuff As dreams are made on.
