ABSTRACT
The constitution proposed in the Laws is Spartan, without its harshness, unacceptable for most people, and ‘with the addition of philosophy, to be practised principally among the ruling class, this being the supreme merit of the Platonic systems of politics’. George Gemisttos Plethon provides a classification of opinion which may be accepted by different people. Plethon continues in his Laws, as in the case of man and his happiness, there are many differences in the opinions about the nature of things. For Plethon, the poets and the sophists, who are contrasted here with the lawgivers and the philosophers, are not justly considered to be the right ‘expounders ’ of these problems. According to Plethon, the most glorious of them are Parmenides, Timaeus of Locri, Plutarch, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus. Plethon claims that all the aforementioned thinkers agreed among themselves about the majority of things and that their doctrines seemed to be the best for ‘those who were concerned with what is better’.
