previous next
[714d] or any other government—even a tyrant—if it has gained the mastery, will of its own accord set up laws with any other primary aim than that of securing the permanence of its own authority?

Clinias
Certainly not.

Athenian
Then the lawgiver will style these enactments “justice,” and will punish every transgressor as guilty of injustice.

Clinias
That is certainly probable.

Athenian
So these enactments will thus and herein always constitute justice.

Clinias
That is, at any rate, what the argument asserts.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1903)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: