Laws

Laws by Plato and translated with an introduction by Benjamin Jowett. The Laws is Plato's last and longest dialogue. The conversation depicted in the work's twelve books begins with the question of who is given the credit for establishing a civilization's laws. Its musings on the ethics of government and law have established it as a classic of political philosophy alongside Plato's more widely read Republic. The genuineness of the Laws is sufficiently proved by more than twenty citations of them in the writings of Aristotle, who was residing at Athens during the last twenty years of the life of Plato, and who, having left it after his death (B.C. 347), returned thither twelve years later (B.C. 335); by the allusion of Isocrates. The suspicion which has attached to the Laws of Plato in the judgment of some modern writers appears to rest partly on differences in the style and form of the work, and on differences of thought and opinion which they observe in them. Their suspicion is increased by the fact that these differences are accompanied by resemblances as striking to passages in other Platonic writings.