ABSTRACT
Of Platds general view of law something has already been said. Of the specific reforms of contemporary Greek law which he suggests it is hardly necessary, or possible, to say much here. They belong to the history oflaw rather than to that of political theory. In the history of law they occupy an important place. They are based, as we have seen, on the technical and systematic study of jurisprudence which was apparently pursued in the Academy by the side of the study of mathematics. A thorough examination of the laws of Sparta and Athens - especially of Athens - had gone to their making; and just as they rested on the laws of the past, so too they were destined to influence the laws of the future - the laws of the Hellenistic States, and, through them, the laws of Rome.1 The Laws contains perhaps the first attempt made in Greece to frame a code which is not merely based on the laws of a single State, but embraces Greek law in general, and is not a mere tabulation, but a scientific study, with a constant reference to the first principles of social conduct. It is for Greece what Bentham's Theory of Legislation is for England. It is a serious contribution to jurisprudence, permeated by the legal sense, and going into legal detail. Plato is interested in legal procedure, and he lays down the rules of pleading to be followed in the courts (855 D-866 A) ; he discusses the law of contract, of succession, and of property in general: he regulates minutely the rights of the passing stranger to pluck the grapes of the vineyard and the apples and pears in the orchard (844 D-845 C). But though we may speak of the legal sense in Plato, he hardly shows 'that artificial perfection of reason, gotten by long study of the laws', which a lawyer like Coke possessed and praised. His law is morality, and even theology, as well as law; and a trained lawyer would criticize much of the Laws on the ground that it is not law at all. There
is no firm distinction between legality and morality, or between law and religion: 1 the legal code contains elements which properly belong to moral philosophy, or, again, to what may be termed moral theology. This, indeed, is a characteristic which we may find in Greek writers other than Plato. Whatever contribution the Greeks may have made to law, they never clearly demarcated law - as a separate branch of study, with its separate principles - from the general study of conduct; and just as in their courts non-legal considerations might be alleged and acknowledged, so in their writings on law we may find what we should regard a non-legal elements adduced and accepted.
