Laws

Whether, then, he means the law given together with generation, or the one given afterward — yet from God is both the law of nature and the law of learning, being one, as Plato too in the Statesman says there is one legislator, and in the Laws one who will understand the things of music, teaching by these that the Word is one and God is one.

Plato has established this in his laws, and the same rule prevailed in Greece, as appears from the following passage in Euripides, “our fathers of old did well in banishing from their intercourse and sight any one that had shed another’s blood;

Inasmuch as, "Six days," He says, "shall you labour, and do all your works;

Plato (‘Laws,’ iii.

whence too in the Laws he himself prescribes to Megillus and Clinias to provide a place for the city to be founded.

For instance, the law does not sanction suicide (and what it does not expressly sanction, it forbids).

It would be long to speak of Plato's inconsistency, who in the Timaeus denies that the father of this world can be named, while in the books of the Laws he holds that we ought not to inquire at all what god is.

for I am well aware that for you who are citizens by birth it is sufficient to perform public services as the laws require;

And that I was ready on my father’s behalf to take the oath which the law prescribes when an heir is sued in court on a charge brought against one who is dead,— that, namely, I believed that my father never agreed to pay the plaintiff the money which Lycon left, and that the plaintiff was not introduced to my father by Lycon;

We have something similar in the Laws of Plato:

Poste for the observation that the ideal institutions of Plato’s Laws include something strongly resembling the Roman Pignoris Capio;

For the first prophet, Moses, who set forth, beginning from the past, the founding of the world and the sprouting of the human race, and presently the avenging force of the flood upon the iniquity of that age, by his prophesying down to his own time, and thereafter through his own affairs, gave forth images of things to come;

For this cause, namely to root out the very material of idolatry, the divine law proclaims, "You shall not make an idol," and joining to it, "Nor the likeness of those things which are in heaven and which are in earth and which are in the sea," it has interdicted to the servants of God arts of this kind throughout the whole world.

At any rate, fathers develop self-control in their sons by making them weep, and teachers impress good lessons upon their pupils in the same way, and the laws, too, turn the citizens to justice by making them weep.