The first side of Kleinias: Death is the worst thing

To understand the first side of Kleinias’s mixed feelings on death, we must analyze three things: his opening statement on the telos of Cretan law; his response to the Stranger’s inquiry regarding that statement; and the implications both of these have for Kleinias’s view of civic virtue.

After questioning the origin of Dorian law, the Stranger asks Kleinias why Cretan law has “ordained the common meals, and also the gymnastic training and the weapons you employ” (625c6–8). In response, Kleinias explains and defends the principles behind his lawgiver’s choices. In doing so, as Balot suggests, Kleinias defines his regime’s telos without using that word.Footnote ¹⁴ Scholars have often noted in Kleinias’s reply a harsh conception of politics, nature, and man’s place in nature: not only does the “nature” of the Cretan land compel the use of certain weapons and practices, but “by nature there always exists for everyone an undeclared war among all cities,” and this war persists “throughout the whole of life” (625c, 626a). Peace is only war by another name. Thus, both non-human nature and the nature of interstate relations are sufficiently hostile to compel constant vigilance and defense (see 625e). Though Kleinias claims it is “easy for anyone to understand” Cretan ways, he also proudly deems “the many” too “mindless” to face the harsh view of nature informing those ways (625c and 625e; cf. 627a). The opposite of mindlessness consists in squarely recognizing man’s bitter situation in an inhospitable natural world and a ruthlessly competitive political realm. Political wisdom means acknowledging the ever-present prospects of enslavement and violent death and responding to them with the construction of an apparently comprehensive legislation whose telos is war.

But the telos of wise legislation is not war simply. Kleinias claims that triumph in war is necessary because without it “nothing is really beneficial, neither possessions nor customs”; only through triumph do “all the goods of the defeated become those of the victors” (626b). Victory in war is good because of the goods it yields. From this addendum, one might conclude that the telos of lawgiving with which Kleinias is most concerned is the “‘guarding’ and possession of material wealth.”Footnote ¹⁵ Still, if Kleinias is right that the state of war compels the legislator to order what “defense requires” even during so-called “peacetime” (see 625e–626a), the spoils of war would hardly be enjoyable. If victories are instrumental to spoils, the world’s harshness would seem only to make spoils instrumental to successful defense in war. As Bobonich notes, “Kleinias’ statement does not make determinate the relations among victory in war, the goods the victors obtain, and the aims of the legislator.”Footnote ¹⁶

But there is something more important to note about Kleinias’s statement: it leaves no room for virtues as splendid ends in themselves that lawgivers must aim to foster in citizens. Defense and gain of “good things” here are the only—if unclearly ranked—goals of legislation. The civic and moral virtues, especially the virtue of courage, might be means to these goals, but little else. In fact, Kleinias makes no mention of courage or any other virtue in his statement on the aims of Cretan law. Contrary to Balot, Kleinias does not move “quickly” from his observations on human and nonhuman nature “to his conclusions about the regime’s appropriate telos, war, and from there, to its most prized and all-important virtue, courage.”Footnote ¹⁷ Nor can we conclude from his statement that Kleinias sees in war the best means toward revealing and facilitating the truly peak experience in life—manly and courageous action.Footnote ¹⁸ Politics, according to Kleinias’s statement, is a constant struggle for defense and possessions in a world that offers only a tenuous—not to mention ambiguous—place for the enjoyment of goods. There is no place for the pursuit of the civic virtues, including courage, as ends.

Thanks to the Stranger’s prodding, we soon see that Kleinias takes his thesis on Cretan law to the extreme: he applies it not only to cities, but to neighborhoods, households, and individuals as well. Neighborhoods, he agrees, should be ordered so as to defeat other neighborhoods in war, and the same goes for households and “one man in relation to another man” (626c). Indeed, “all are enemies of all in public” (626d). Kleinias thus subscribes to the radical view that, on every level, peace is only a name. There is no genuine or stable common good, and a state of war permeates all human relations.Footnote ¹⁹ As Lutz notes, Kleinias thinks that lawful neighborhoods and households can defeat unlawful neighborhoods and households.Footnote ²⁰ But Kleinias’s agreement with his lawgiver that peace is only a name, together with his summary statement that “in public, all are enemies of all,” points further: at bottom, or when pressed, lawful neighborhoods and households are enemies with each other as well (626e, emphasis added). And as with neighborhoods and households, so with individual citizens.

If Kleinias formerly implied that there was no room for law to aim at civic or moral virtues as ends, he makes a similar implication here for the individual. If among cities peace is only a name, so too is it only a name between “one man in relation to another man”; “all are enemies of all in public.” Like wisely legislated cities, well-ordered individuals aim at defense and gain of good things above all else. The virtues, including courage, are at best means that the individual employs in pursuing these goals. Thus, in the war of all against all, the survival of the individual would seem to be more important to Kleinias than the survival of one’s family, neighbors, or city. Kleinias implies that one’s own death is, at bottom, the worst thing. For death constitutes the most extreme loss of one’s security and possessions.

This is the first side of Kleinias’s beliefs about virtue and death that we see in the dialogue. But almost immediately after seeing it, we discover something else: Kleinias holds some victories as choiceworthy and others not. This position contradicts his initial evaluation of victory as the simply good provider of other goods. He agrees there are situations, “not the least in cities,” when the “better men are victors over the majority and the worse” so that “the city would correctly be said to be superiorFootnote ²¹ to itself and would very justly be praised for such a victory” (627a). But sadly, there are also times when the better men lose—when, according to Kleinias, the city is inferior to itself. Superiority is therefore not simply identical with victory or strength. Thus, Kleinias shows his belief in a quality of character—we might say virtue, though he does not use the term—that sometimes loses but is nonetheless better than the character of the more numerous and often victorious. Indeed, the Stranger calls the better men who lose the “just” men, and Kleinias does not protest (627b). Might does not simply make right. As Robert Ballingall puts it, “victory is best not when securing for ourselves the good things, but when expressing in ourselves certain virtues.”Footnote ²² Thus, if Kleinias formerly implied that the pursuit of self-protection and property is best, and that virtue rightly understood could only be a means to that pursuit, he also believes in the worthiness of a form of civic virtue that is not determined by, or subordinated to, these narrow interests.

That Kleinias cannot fully abide by his own interpretation of Cretan law and the primacy of narrow self-interest only becomes more apparent as the dialogue progresses. The Stranger suggests that a wise lawgiver would enact laws for the sake of friendship, doing so “with a view not to war, but to its opposite,” namely, peace (628a). And though Kleinias could reply that friendship and internal stability are themselves merely means to defense and “good things,” he does not. When the Stranger then suggests that lawgiving would be rational in aiming for peace, goodwill, and happiness, again, Kleinias does not respond that these are only means to defense and “good things” (see 628c–628d). Instead, he simply and uncomfortably remarks that, while the Stranger’s argument appears true, Kleinias himself would be surprised if “our customs and those of Lacedaimon were not directed, in entire seriousness, to what pertains to war” (628e). Despite his own interpretation of the Cretan regime’s telos, then, Kleinias is not simply convinced that law can and must aim only at defense and possession of good things. Nor is he simply convinced that the individual can and must aim only at these goals even at the cost of one’s fellow citizens. Indeed, we are about to see that on some level, he believes that virtue, and the virtue of courage in particular, outweighs such goals. In seeing this other side of Kleinias’s beliefs about virtue, we see also the other side of his beliefs about death. We see that he is not fully convinced that one’s own death is the worst thing.

The second side of Kleinias: Death is not the worst thing

Kleinias’s admiration for courage surfaces only after the Stranger temporarily directs his attention away from his interpretation of Cretan law and toward Tyrtaeus. This man’s “martial poems glorifying valour in combat were a staple in Spartan culture” and were adopted by Crete (see 629b).Footnote ²³ The Stranger quotes one of Tyrtaeus’s poems, and when we look to that poem itself we see that Tyrtaeus “had praised not the fruits of war but the virtue of war”: courage.Footnote ²⁴ As Leo Strauss notes, “the conversation thus turns from war (or peace) to virtue as choiceworthy for its own sake as the end of legislation.”Footnote ²⁵

If Kleinias formerly implied that courage was only a means to defense and gain, this is not how Tyrtaeus sees things. In fact, he praises the possession of courage more highly than the possession of such goods: he “would not memorialize a man” who was “wealthiest” or possessed “many good things (and then he mentions just about all of them), unless that man were always best in war,” says the Stranger (629b). And Tyrtaeus “cannot at all abide” those who look most to their own safety: “men who do not dare to look on bloody death, / and staying near assail the foe” (629e). This is not merely because Tyrtaeus “assumed that military prowess was instrumental to protecting one’s own belongings and way of life.”Footnote ²⁶ Rather, as Annas notes, the poem “forcefully praises warrior courage above every other thing.”Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, in the next lines of the poem, Tyrtaeus claims that courageously facing bloody death in battle “is virtue, this is the best prize among human things / and the noblest for a young man to win.”Footnote ²⁸ Though the Stranger does not quote these lines, he can be sure that Kleinias is familiar with them; when the Stranger asks his interlocutors whether they know the poem, both answer positively (see 629b). Thus, in Tyrtaeus’s poetry, cowardice is a vice, and courage is a virtue admirable in itself apart from its utility—even when it risks violent death. True, the Stranger subsequently points out “many mercenaries” whose courage in “the war Tyrtaeus mentions” is simply instrumental to their own gain, but these are not the men Tyrtaeus praises (630b). It is likewise true that the Stranger invokes another poet, Theognis, to argue that lawgiving must aim at the whole of virtue rather than courage alone. But the Stranger himself claims also that, “as for what Tyrtaeus praised especially, it is something noble,” that is, not merely useful (630c).

Kleinias does not protest this characterization of Tyrtaeus or the courage he praises in his poetry. In fact, despite Kleinias’s initial statement on Cretan law and his claim that all are enemies against all, it is more than likely that he subscribes to Tyrtaeus’ views himself. Indeed, the Stranger goes out of his way to attribute agreement with Tyrtaeus to the Cretan, thereby inviting him to disagree if he wishes:

Kleinias says nothing to the contrary. Kleinias is serious about courage as a virtue. Indeed, Kleinias now shows his belief that his lawgiver was serious about courage too. For when the Stranger criticizes Tyrtaeus for praising only the lowest virtue, the virtue that is “something noble” but still merely “fourth in number and in claim to honor,” Kleinias expresses shock: “Stranger, we are consigning our lawgiver to a pretty low rank among lawgivers” (630d, emphasis added, see also 667a)! This is the same lawgiver whom Kleinias deemed wiser than the mindless many (see 625e).

Still, despite his admiration for Tyrtaean courage, Kleinias sympathizes on some level with the Stranger’s criticism. He never denies the Stranger’s claim that “any lawgiver worth much of anything” would look beyond courage (the virtue only of “foreign and external war”), and would look to “the whole of virtue” (630b and see 630c). Indeed, Kleinias signals his assent to this criticism even while expressing his shock in its regard; for he counts himself among the “we” who are diminishing his own lawgiver (630d).Footnote ²⁹ Only a few pages later, Kleinias is explicitly open to hearing critiques of Cretan laws in favor of laws that promote the whole of virtue as their highest goal.Footnote ³⁰

If Kleinias is of two minds about the virtue of courage, he is also of two minds about death. From his initial statement on his lawgiver’s intention, the ubiquity of war, and the harshness pervading political life, we see the importance Kleinias places on survival, on successfully fighting off danger and death in a war-filled world. More crucial, he sees the ubiquity of war and the primacy of self-defense in domestic and interpersonal life. On the other hand, his regard for Tyrtaean poetry, together with his conviction that his own wise lawgiver admired that poetry, betrays something else: an admiration for nobly and courageously risking—even sacrificing—one’s own life in war. On some level, Kleinias sees “facing bloody death” (not to mention the whole of virtue) as more than a means to victory and survival, as more than a means to fighting off danger and death in a war-filled world. And at times, he may even admire virtue as something outranking other goods it may provide. For despite his initial, “realistic” analysis of the aims of legislation, Kleinias (the Stranger brings out) feels compelled by an understanding of legislation that would place virtue as its highest goal. To put it succinctly, then, we may say that, for Kleinias, not only is survival both the most important and not the most important thing, but so is virtue (especially as courage). But this is to say: death, both for the city and the individual, is both the worst thing and not the worst thing. And as we can see in other Platonic characters, not to mention in ourselves, Kleinias is not alone in thinking both (consider Alcibiades 115d–e, Laches 190e–194b).

As Balot brings out, Kleinias’s emphasis on danger and defense in his opening exchanges with the Stranger betrays a deep sense of vulnerability—even if the Cretan thinks himself braver than the mindless many for facing the harsh realities of the world. Indeed, insofar as Kleinias is a product of Crete’s militaristic laws, his “initial presentation suggests that fear—a hyperawareness of the possibility of loss—lies at the heart of the Cretan regime’s telos .”Footnote ³¹ But even further, in impressing upon its citizens the ubiquity of interstate war and therewith their own vulnerability, Cretan law may even encourage, inadvertently, the more extreme views that Kleinias harbors: that a state of war persists between individuals, that one’s own security is most important, and that virtue is at best a means to this security. At the same time, in endorsing Tyrtaean poetry, Cretan law fosters another extreme in citizens like Kleinias: the notion that courage is of such nobility and splendor that it outweighs in importance the very vulnerability its possessor faces. Thus, if we consider Kleinias a representative type that his regime and laws produce, Crete inadvertently encourages vacillation between two extremes in the individual citizen’s psyche: a great fear of “bloody death” and a tremendous hope in the courage that faces it; a fear that one’s own death is the worst thing, and a conviction that one’s own death is not the worst thing.

The Stranger’s first statement: Wise lawgiving, virtue, and death

Kleinias is both compelled and troubled by the Stranger’s suggestion that a wise lawgiver “will never set down laws with a view to anything but the greatest virtue” (630c). But the Stranger assuages Kleinias’s trepidation at the implied criticism of the Dorian lawgivers: it is not the lawgivers themselves, says the Stranger, but our—that is, Kleinias’s—interpretation of their legislation that is defective (630d–631a). While Kleinias was correct to begin from virtue when he started out interpreting Cretan laws (or so the Stranger says) he should have gone further than the virtue of courage alone (631a). But as Susan Sauvé Meyer notes, Kleinias “did not in fact begin by invoking virtue” at all;Footnote ³² he rather started with war and its bitter necessities, a start that left no room for virtue as an end. It was the Stranger who brought out Kleinias’s concealed admiration for civic courage and, shortly thereafter, for a kind of lawgiving that aims above all at the whole of virtue. Now that this other side of Kleinias has surfaced, the Stranger makes a new statement on the proper aim of legislation—a statement he hopes Kleinias is disposed to accept. Though the Stranger presents this statement merely as a better interpretation of Cretan law’s telos, it is clear enough that the statement is the Stranger’s own creation. As Annas suggests, the Stranger uses the rhetoric of reinterpretation to “enlarge” his interlocutors’ conception of law “from within.”Footnote ³³

According to this famous reinterpretation, “it should have been said” that the Dorians are renowned because they have correct laws (631b). Correct laws “make those who use them happy. For they provide all the good things” (631b3–7). But the good things that correct laws provide are not exclusively material, nor are they simply procured through victory in war as they were said to be in Kleinias’s original defense of Cretan ways (see 626b). Some goods, what the Stranger names “the human goods,” are indeed bodily: health is the first and highest, followed by strength, beauty, and wealth (631c). But other goods, the “divine goods,” are qualities of character—they are the human virtues: prudence (or intelligence) is highest,Footnote ³⁴ followed by moderation, justice,Footnote ³⁵ and, both last and least, courage. Kleinias should have said that the city’s attainment of the divine goods (the virtues) is the necessary and sufficient condition for its attainment of the human goods: “if a city receives the greater it will also acquireFootnote ³⁶ the lesser. If not, it will lack both” (631b8–c1). But this premise implies that the attainment of virtue is also the necessary and sufficient condition for the city’s happiness. For happiness, apparently, means here the city’s possession of all eight of the enumerated goods. Thus, so long as legislation concerns itself with the virtues (and their proper ranking), it need not concern itself with the human goods—focus on the virtues, and the rest will take care of itself. This does not imply, as did Kleinias’s initial remarks, that the virtues are merely means to other, bodily goods. But it does suggest that the virtues are key goods in and of themselves that somehow, if obtained and rightly prioritized, supply the human goods.

The Stranger’s statement also contrasts in its emphasis with Tyrtaeus’s outlook. Tyrtaeus emphasized the heroic individual sacrifices that virtue demands (above all, in war), but he also praised “facing bloody death” in battle as an end worthy of pursuit in its own right, as worth pursuing even beyond the goods it provides for others and requires oneself to risk. The Stranger’s statement, on the other hand, never mentions “facing bloody death,” makes only “an oblique reference to war,” and gestures only quietly toward sacrifice (632a and 632c).Footnote ³⁷ In fact, far from emphasizing sacrifice, the Stranger’s statement on the divine and human goods simultaneously stresses virtue’s intrinsic goodness (he refers to the virtues only as divine goods) and suggests that virtue guarantees goods beyond itself—it guarantees happiness itself. To put it differently, though the Stranger now places happiness above virtue as the highest goal of legislation (contrast 630c), he also makes virtue the core ingredient of and condition for that happiness without explicitly attributing to virtue a sacrificial or death-defying character. Broadly speaking, then, the Stranger’s statement on what Kleinias should have said, in comparison to Kleinias’s actual views (both cynical and Tyrtaean), is less warlike, less preoccupied with avoiding violent death and facing it in self-sacrifice. If we focus on the Stranger’s ranking of the virtues and contrast it with the Tyrtaean preeminence of battlefield courage, we see that the Stranger’s proposed outlook fosters something of a calmer spirit in citizens who accept it over the views espoused by Kleinias and Tyrtaeus alike. A law code that places courage on the bottom rung and emphasizes prudence (or intelligence) and then moderation above all else may reduce the civic focus on battle and pain. That is, a citizenry that could adopt—even if only partially—the Stranger’s thesis on the eight goods would be less fiery, less militaristic, but also less troubled by and focused on the prospect of bloody death in the first place. If in one way or another Kleinias was fixated on the prospect of death, this new outlook is not.

Thus, what Kleinias should have said, in comparison to what he and Tyrtaeus have already said, is conspicuously less warlike. But for that reason, it leaves us wondering how exactly the virtues could guarantee the human goods, the highest of which is health, when political life will require sacrifices on the part of individual citizens. It leaves us wondering how exactly virtue guarantees happiness and for whom that happiness is guaranteed. Indeed, not once does the Stranger say that an individual citizen’s virtue is necessary and sufficient to guarantee that individual’s happiness. He says only that if a city has the former (virtue), it will have the latter (happiness)—a proposition that he will later contradict (see 627a–d, 638a–b). Thus, we may agree with Sauvé Meyer over E. B. England that the Stranger here intends only a “political” version of his thesis on virtue, not a “personal” version that promises human goods to virtuous individuals.Footnote ³⁸ But Ballingall is right all the same: the difficulty remains that virtue “does not always or even usually produce health, beauty, strength, or prosperity, whether in the virtuous person herself or in those she dutifully serves.”Footnote ³⁹ Keeping the highest form of virtuous sacrifice in mind, how could the divine goods surmount mortal dangers and secure human goods, whether for the city or for its individual citizens?

The Stranger has not simply overlooked this question. He is aware, of course, that citizens die: “When [the wise lawgiver] comes to what is the end [telos] of the whole (or every) political regime, he sees what sort of burial there ought to be for each of those who have come to an end, and what honors ought to be distributed to them” (632b–c). In some way, the telos of the whole (or every) political regime involves the manner in which citizens view death, both of their fellow citizens and of themselves. The Stranger’s statement on the telos has been underexamined by scholars, but it has multiple possible meanings.

Literally, it means that funerals and honors for the dead should be the last subjects discussed when constructing a legal code for a political regime—in fact, these are almost the last subjects in the interlocutors’ subsequent construction of Magnesian laws (see 960b). But why should such laws come at the end? Sauvé Meyer has noticed that the Stranger’s statement from 631d–632c contains “life cycle milestones.”Footnote ⁴⁰ André Laks has noted that the subsequent order in which the “preambles-with-laws appear in the course of the work reflects, globally speaking, the main stages of human life.”Footnote ⁴¹ The Stranger will claim that the first law that a lawgiver would lay down, if he were to proceed “according to nature,” should pertain to “the first cause of childbirth in cities” (720e). One of the Stranger’s final legal preludes is addressed to the elderly who are about to die (see 922c–923c). This suggests that the Stranger sees some significance in modeling the creation of a law code after the life cycle itself. But why? The thought seems to be this: a law code whose very form and substance reflect the life cycle, the repeating process of coming into being and passing away, could give its citizens occasion for reflection on their own mortality and finitude. It may even encourage what we may call a “gentle realism,” a view that sees human life as part of a greater cyclical process, wherein individuals grow and die, but leave behind likenesses of themselves, likenesses who will in turn grow, die, and reproduce (see 717d, 721b–721c, 776b, and 785b). This view would acknowledge the sadness of death while offering some consolation in the thought that there is continuation in the cyclical process of the cosmos, a process in which one takes a limited part.

But there is more to the Stranger’s remark about the “telos of the whole (or every) political regime.” We would go too far to read it as a veiled suggestion that the entire purpose of the regime is to shape its citizens’ understanding of death. Still, it is worth noting that this is the only moment in the Laws when the Stranger explicitly claims the regime has any telos.Footnote ⁴² At the very least, the Stranger’s playful use of telos makes us wonder whether the capstone or culmination, so to speak, of the regime consists in the way in which its citizens view death’s significance, that is the significance of one’s own, one’s loved ones’, and one’s fellow citizens’ mortality. And as the Stranger’s statement suggests, it is not merely violent death in battle that will be considered—it will not only be battle-felled soldiers who receive funerals and post-mortem honors—but the citizen’s death as such. Though the Stranger does not explicitly state it, his remark suggests that a wisely crafted law code must deliberately address the civic contemplation of and posture toward mortality itself in a variety of civic life’s aspects, including marriage and procreation (cf. 632a and 721b–721c).

At the very least, per the Stranger’s remark, a law code must shape its citizens’ thoughts from “beginning to end,” or, so to speak, from cradle to grave (653c, see also 631e). It must educate citizens in “fits of anger, in terrors, in disturbances that come over souls in bad fortune and the release from such things that comes with good fortune, in the experiences brought upon by diseases and wars and poverty” as well as their opposites (632a).Footnote ⁴³ Thus, insofar as a law code must work its way into citizens’ souls and shape their posture toward suffering and joys alike, it will inform their outlook as their proximity to death waxes, wanes, and, inevitably, waxes again. Law’s guidance of our pursuit of joy on one hand and avoidance of suffering on the other is informed, if only implicitly, by some view of death.

We have seen that Kleinias, a product of Cretan laws, was left vacillating between two views of virtue and thus two evaluations of death. But the Stranger’s statement at 631b–632b has not adequately shown what kind of outlook must replace Kleinias’s; it has suggested only that law can indeed aim at virtue above the lower goods; that wise law has the capacity to make citizens less preoccupied with “facing bloody death” than Cretan law does; and that law has the capacity to influence how citizens understand death. We find a fuller replacement for Kleinias’s outlook only later in book II, when the Stranger discusses how correct law should have the poets praise virtue.

The Stranger’s second statement: Lawful poetry, virtue, and death

In book II, the Stranger claims that “the correct lawgiver” must persuade or compel poets “to create poetry correctly by depicting in rhythms and harmonies the postures and songs of moderate, courageous, and wholly good men” (660a). This statement marks a return to the question of how correct lawgiving might teach citizens to view virtue. As we will see, it also marks a return to the question of how wise legislation must form citizens’ stance toward death.

Kleinias cannot imagine any place “nowadays” where poets and lawgivers adhere to the Stranger’s mandate except his native Crete and Lacedaimon. At least Dorians follow “these standards” of correct poetry and lawgiving “more than among the rest of the Greeks” (660d). The Stranger, however, has not supposed that such standards are followed anywhere. Rather, he was only “describing what I wish would come to pass in regard to music” (660c). In what follows, the Stranger summarizes Dorian poetry’s current teaching of virtue and juxtaposes it with a new teaching that poets must provide in the future. After we consider both teachings, we can see how the new teaching carries with it a new approach to death.

According to the Stranger’s summary, the Dorians currently “compel the poets” to say “The good man, being moderate and just, is happy and blessed, whether he be great and strong or small and weak, whether he be rich or not. Even if someone is ‘richer than Cinryas or Midas,’ if he is unjust, he is a wretch and lives a life of misery.” (660e). The virtues of moderation and justice alone are necessary and sufficient to guarantee the happiness of the individual—or at least this is what the Stranger claims the Dorian poets are compelled to say. In fact, the Stranger has changed Tyrtaeus’s poetry such that it praises moderation and justice rather than courage, thereby making it less warlike and somewhat closer to the Stranger’s statement on law at 631b–d that ranked moderation and justice above courage.Footnote ⁴⁴ But in contrast to that statement, happiness here does not require the possession of human goods like strength, beauty, or wealth, and health is here conspicuously absent from the enumerated goods. Nor does virtue guarantee the possession of human goods. Just men may be poor, ugly, and weak, yet also happy, while unjust men will be unhappy despite their surpassing wealth, beauty, and strength. Apparently, the so-called human goods do not matter for the individual’s happiness at all. Here, then, in contrast with the statement at 631b–d, virtue is all that counts and vice is wretchedness itself, unaffected by any other supposed human goods. As Andrew Patch notes, this is a high estimation of virtue, especially in light of its failure to guarantee health while still promising happiness.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet it is not unheard of; it is not so far from what Glaucon, for example, hopes that justice can be (cf. Republic 358b–d and 361d).

But there is another side to Dorian poetry. According to the Stranger, “your poet,” i.e. Tyrtaeus, declares the following “if, that is, he speaks correctly” (660e): “if [a man] were unjust, I would not want such a man to remain bold after ‘seeing bloody death,’ or win a victory in running against ‘the North wind of Thrace,’ or ever to obtain any of the things said to be good” (660e–661a). It is safe to assume that the “things said to be good” include the human goods such as strength and wealth that the Stranger’s Tyrtaeus has just mentioned (see 660e and 661a). The thought, then, is this: Tyrtaeus does not want the unjust man to obtain any of the so-called goods because the unjust man, on account of his injustice, does not deserve them; if anyone should have them, it is the just man. This does not necessarily mean that in the Stranger’s rendition of Tyrtaeus’s poetry, “the possession of virtue guarantees the possession of the human goods,” as Strauss claims.Footnote ⁴⁶ But it does amount to a tacit concession that “the things said to be good” are good in fact and thus that virtue is not the whole or only good. Even more, it amounts to a concession that goods extrinsic to virtue matter for the individual’s happiness. Dorian poetry, according to the Stranger’s summary, vacillates in its account of the happiness that virtue alone can provide.

In the wake of this summary, the Stranger proceeds to give a new teaching on virtue. And this time he ascribes it neither to Dorian poetry nor to Tyrtaeus but to the three interlocutors together, if not in their thought, at least in their speech to citizens;Footnote ⁴⁷ it is what “presumably you two and I speak” (661b, emphasis added, see also 661d). While the Stranger has summarized what “you compel the poets to speak,” it is only this new teaching that the Stranger says “you will persuade and you will compel” the poets to speak (660e and 661c–d, emphasis added). Contrary to Lutz’s reading, the Stranger does not impute the new teaching of virtue to Tyrtaeus.Footnote ⁴⁸ Nor does the Dorian view belong to the Stranger. Annas assumes that Plato and his Stranger endorse, in addition to the new teaching on virtue, Dorian poetry’s “stronger thesis” that virtue is the only good.Footnote ⁴⁹ Annas thus sees in this passage Plato’s failure to maintain a consistent position on the priority of virtue in a happy life. But in order to ground this reading, she must infer a word that is not in the text.Footnote ⁵⁰ True, the Stranger expresses approval for the other side of Dorian poetry: “your poet, if he speaks correctly,” would not want unjust men to obtain any of the things said to be good (660e7–8). But as we are about to see, the Stranger’s new teaching allows him to agree with the poet’s demand on grounds that differ from the poet’s own.

Now speaking in his own name, the Stranger first notes a basic premise: “the things said to be good by the many are not correctly so described”—or, at any rate, they are not always good for everyone. The good things, according to the many, are as follows:

The new teaching on virtue is that these things, “beginning with health, are all best when possessed by just and pious men, but all worst when possessed by unjust men” (661b). The possession of such things harms the vicious and benefits the virtuous. Unlike the current Dorian poetry, this new teaching does not insist that virtue is the only good and then tacitly concede that virtue is not the only good. In the new teaching, virtue is both a good in itself and the necessary condition for the other things to be goods if one possesses them at all.Footnote ⁵¹ Thus the Stranger can say that Tyrtaeus “speaks correctly” in demanding that the unjust not receive so-called goods, but he can agree with this demand on grounds that differ from Tyrtaeus’s own. For while Tyrtaeus does not want the unjust to obtain so-called goods because they do not deserve to gain and benefit from them, the Stranger’s new teaching suggests that the unjust should not obtain so-called goods because doing so would only compound the harm they do to themselves through their own vice.

This new conception of virtue comes with a new teaching about death. As the Stranger puts it, “to live as an immortal for the whole of time while possessing all of the things said to be good except for justice and the whole of virtue is the greatest evil” (661c; see also 661d–e). A man utterly lacking in virtue, regardless of any other possession he holds, will be wretched; the shorter his life, the better (661c). Death, according to the new teaching, is the greatest of goods for the worst of men.Footnote ⁵² We might wonder whether death is therefore the greatest of evils for the best of men. But the Stranger never makes this claim, and it is more in keeping with his teaching to say that the worst of evils for the best of men is, in fact, to become vicious and then “to live as an immortal for the whole of time while possessing all of the things said to be good.” Death may be especially bad for the virtuous man insofar as it constitutes a loss of his activity and possession of virtue, but, contrary to Kleinias’s cynical view, it is not the worst thing for individuals. The virtuous man would not choose immortality and material gain at the cost of his virtue (see also 661d–e).

Thus, immortality and avoidance of death are not the most important things according to this teaching. As for “the many” who do not live by this teaching, they desire what they regard as the “perfection of complete blessedness”: “to possess all [the so-called good things] and then to become immortal” (661b). That is, the many have something akin to what Diotima attributes to eros in Plato’s Symposium: a hope to possess the good for oneself for all time (Symposium 206a–b, 207a). Even more, the many are in a hurry; they want to gain immortality “as quickly as possible.” They worry that if they do not do so soon, they never will; a hurried flight from mortality characterizes their desires. But with the successful adoption of the new teaching of virtue, this timorousness would not permeate the civic mind to the same extent. For, according to this teaching, it is the quality of a life lived in virtue that makes life (and other things) worth possessing at all; it makes life itself a good secondary to virtue. True, the Stranger implicitly includes immortality in a list of those things that are “best” (661b–c) for the just man if he attains them. But he does not say here that obtaining immortality is possible or guaranteed for the just man. Nor, however, does he say it is impossible. Neither confirming nor refuting the possibility of attaining immortality, the Stranger focuses the citizen’s attention on the virtue available to us for so long as we may live. Thus, when the interlocutors start to build their legislation for Kleinias’s colony, the Stranger makes the following remark: “We do not hold, as the many do, that preservation and mere existence are what is most honorable for human beings; what is most honorable is for them to become as best as possible and to remain so for as long a time as they may exist” (707d).

This is not to say that the Stranger’s prescribed civic poetry would make a citizenry transcend all yearning for immortality or fear of death. The Stranger has already suggested that all human beings fear death to some extent. When he presented Kleinias with the thought experiment of a “fear drug” by which one might train citizens in courage, the Stranger claimed that even “the most courageous human being” would at some point experience “total terror” (648a). Indeed, a virtuous man, he says, would “go away before taking the last drink” of the fear drug “because he was afraid of the weakness all human beings have in the face of the drink” (648e, cf. Phaedo 117c–118a). But even if the Stranger’s civic poetry would not eradicate the fear of death and yearning for immortality, it would at least make a citizenry of stouter stuff than “the many” in the Stranger’s description of them.

This new approach to virtue, and the attitude toward death that it reflects, has its advantages over the Dorian view. As the Stranger suggested in book I, legislation must teach citizens what is noble when facing “disturbances that come over the souls in bad fortune” (632a). There will be times when circumstances strongly challenge the Dorian notions that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness and that the unjust must not gain any human goods. There will be times when the virtuous tragically die, sacrifice themselves, or lose loved ones, and there will be times when the vicious make great apparent gains at the expense of the just and pious. The adoption of the Stranger’s new teaching can furnish a degree of consolation in such times (death is not the worst thing, and the vicious are not truly gaining goods for themselves anyway) and temper the pursuit and use of the human goods in most times (what good is wealth, strength, even life itself without my virtue?). Annas claims that “the Laws is not dealing with the problem of bad things happening to good people, and how we are to think about this.”Footnote ⁵³ But the foregoing analysis suggests that the Stranger is dealing with this problem, if not through a rigorous philosophical defense, then at least with a new public teaching to be espoused by civic poetry.

As for Kleinias, we saw that an uneasy combination of cynicism with Tyrtaean idealism has left him unsure of whether one’s own death is or is not the worst thing. If citizens could consistently adopt the Stranger’s new teaching of virtue, they would leave behind the harsher side of Kleinias’s views—that virtue is no more than a means to secure one’s own security and possession of “good things.” In doing so, they would leave behind the notion that death is the worst thing. But they would also be less warlike, less preoccupied with “facing bloody death,” insofar as the Stranger’s new teaching praises the whole of virtue rather than courage alone. The Stranger is aware of Kleinias’s predicament. When trying to persuade him of the new teaching on virtue, the Stranger asks whether a man “who possesses in a lasting way health, wealth, and tyrannical power—and for you two, I add exceptional strength and courage along with immortality”—is unhappy and miserable if he is unjust and insolent (661d–e, emphasis added). Of no surprise to the Stranger, Kleinias is not persuaded (see 661e). The Stranger sees in his Dorian interlocutors both an admiration for facing bloody death and a hope to escape death altogether. But if the Stranger is right, law and lawful poetry can help citizens embrace a kind of outlook on virtue that does not lead them to vacillate between a tremendous fear of death and a tremendous hope in overcoming it. This new civic view may be less hotheaded in comparison to Tyrtaeus’s zealous remarks on the preeminence of courage, but it may also be characterized by a kind of measured calm and toughness and a cooler acceptance of necessity.