Plato's Laws on Abusive Slander and the Misuse of Public Money

Charalambos Apostolopoulos
Scientific Yearbook of the Department of Early Childhood Education, University of Ioannina, Vol. 3 (2004)
doi: 10.12681/jret.961

Bibliographic reference: Apostolopoulos, Ch. (2015). “Plato's laws on abusive slander and the misuse of public money.” Scientific Yearbook of the Department of Early Childhood Education, University of Ioannina, 3, 9–23. https://doi.org/10.12681/jret.961. Published 4 August 2015. Online ISSN 2241-200X; print ISSN 1108-4634.

CHARALAMBOS APOSTOLOPOULOS
PLATO'S LAWS ON ABUSIVE SLANDER AND THE MISUSE OF PUBLIC MONEY

In memory of my father, Ioannis K. Apostolopoulos, 1910–2004

“Sixty years after the end of the war, a flood of eyewitness accounts from the year 1945 is appearing. This creates the possibility of an exceptionally satisfying comparison between the perspective of the victors and that of the defeated...”

“...The most interesting book, however, comes from a Soviet soldier. This perspective remains foreign to the German public to this day. Even East German journalism, with its ideological bombast about heroes of the Soviet army, was never really able to revise the German image of the coarse, uncultivated Russian soldier. A change finally became possible with the ‘Germany Diary’ of Red Army soldier Wladimir Gelfand. Gelfand, who initially wanted to become a writer and worked as a teacher until his death in 1983, also describes the acts of violence committed by his own army. Victory is followed by ‘looting’ and rape, things Gelfand condemns in his diary entries. He sensed that such violent acts would shape Germans' image of members of the Red Army for a long time. Bitterly, he noted that ‘they regard us as good-hearted and simple, but at the same time as rough — yes, even savage — people; they often ridicule us even though we are the victors and rulers...’”

— Tillmann Bendikowski, “The Hour of the Victors” (Die Stunde der Sieger), April 2005 issue of Financial Times Deutschland/Kompakt.

Author's note. The valuable stimulus for a deeper engagement with Plato's Laws — chronologically his last work, yet first in size and in the breadth of its reflections on political philosophy and philosophical-pedagogical ethics — came to me at Humboldt University in Berlin in the winter semester 2004/2005, when I took part in a seminar of the same name under the supervision of the distinguished Professor Volker Gerhardt.

Instead of a Preface

It is now widely acknowledged that “in recent years Greek society has changed noticeably in the direction of antisocial behavior, unrestrained self-interest, the ‘jungle.’”¹ The spread of corruption throughout society² indeed requires us “to become conscious of the definitions: corruption is complete decay, total deterioration. And social corruption is the complete decay of social relations, the destruction or disabling of the preconditions of collective life. Social corruption consists in attitudes of egocentric self-protection, aggressive self-interest, the priority given to individual security, convenience and pleasure, and the irrationality of impulses of self-love.”³

But becoming conscious of these definitions may also be helped by shaking off that thick blanket of oblivion which seems to have covered everything in our unfortunate country: roads, road signs and road rollers, even the “teachers” themselves.⁴ It is time, for example, to rise to the level of Plato's strict a-letheia — truth as un-concealment — so that we may grasp our wretched condition in all its depth and nakedness.⁵ After all, what other meaning can philosophical work have today if it is not problem-oriented, if it does not wish to become a detached and superfluous activity of scholars who merely multiply the stock of specialized bibliography? For we seem to be sliding toward ever more primitive forms of social organization and are close to becoming “a loose society of modern nomads, in which only the law of seizure will apply,”⁶ or even toward the “mutually hostile Greek disposition,” barbarization and decline.

Spengler also writes that “the Greeks of today are a formation of the Magian civilization, which developed first through the Christian Church, later through the sacred language of that Church, and finally through the name of that Church” (ibid., p. 220 ff.). By nations he means, more specifically, “peoples that represent a civilization,” distinguishing them by this very word from formations before and after civilization. What internally binds these most important of all large associations is not only a strong sense of “we”: “at the basis of the nation lies an idea” (p. 210). By contrast, “what primitive peoples and the fellaheen experience is the often-mentioned zoological up-and-down, an unplanned becoming in which, without goal and without planned duration, much happens but ultimately nothing important” (p. 211).

“There are peoples of Apollonian, Faustian and Magian type” (p. 210), depending on the particular psyche of the unity they constitute. The Apollonian soul belongs to ancient Greek civilization (from 1100 BC), the Faustian to Western European civilization (from AD 900), and the Magian to Arab civilization (the first millennium AD), which also includes early Christianity, the religious philosophy of the Church Fathers, Gnosticism and Neoplatonism. See in detail Charalambos Apostolopoulos, “Man, Culture and Technology in Oswald Spengler,” Hellenic Philosophical Review 18 (2001), pp. 141–173, especially 142 ff. Magian civilization produced “as its last great popular creation the Arab people” (p. 210), since, in Spengler's view, peoples in general “are not creators with respect to their inner form and their entire appearance, but works” of one or another major spiritual civilization.

It is also important to understand the meaning of the adjective “Magian.” The following passage from The Decline of the West is especially revealing: “The Classical thinker ‘beholds,’ like Aristotle's deity; the Arab, as alchemist, seeks the magic means, the philosopher's stone, with which he may acquire the treasures of nature without effort; the Western European aims to shape the world according to his will” (UdA, 1186; my translation, emphasis in the original). Spengler's own footnote, particularly illuminating for the identity of the modern Greek, adds: “It is the same spirit that characterizes the concept of ‘business’ — activity in general, but also transaction, bargaining (der Geschäftsbegriff) — among Jews, Persians, Armenians, Greeks and Arabs, distinguishing it from the corresponding concept among Western European peoples.”

“The Magian nation as such has no earthly homeland” (Greek trans., p. 221); it constitutes a religious community, like Islam in the case of the Arab people. “Magian history” is for its people “the progressive realization of a world-plan devised by God, which between the beginning and the end of the world is carried out upon peoples and through peoples” (ibid., p. 222). Thus, in Spengler's conclusion, “a nation of Magian type is the community of the faithful, the union of all who know the right path to salvation, and the ijma — the consensus — of this faith binds them inwardly” (ibid., p. 215; explanation added).

In an age, therefore, “stained everywhere by the filth of the plundering of public wealth,”⁷ an age that indeed seems to have been inaugurated by Andreas Papandreou's unprecedented — even for the most underdeveloped African country — catalytic phrase, “Mr. So-and-so was entitled to give himself a gift, but not five hundred million,”⁸ we should listen to Plato's voice in the last book of his Laws, where he declares: “If anyone steals anything belonging to the public, whether great or small, he must be subject to the same trial.”⁹ And, as we shall see, that trial may mean the death penalty when the offender is one of our own citizens.

In a place that often resembles the “pit of snakes” and poisonous scorpions of J. S. Bach's famous cantata,¹⁰ where the humanizing value of such fundamental moral sentiments as shame and justice is completely absent — to recall the corresponding Protagorean theorem¹¹ — it is useful to remember what Plato says about those who “light-heartedly” gravely insult and abuse others in a manner that can only be characterized as Rufmord,¹² a manner approached by the following apostolic passage:

Their throat is an open grave;
with their tongues they have practiced deceit;
the poison of vipers is beneath their lips.
Their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness;
their feet are swift to shed blood;
destruction and misery are in their paths,
and the way of peace they have not known.
There is no fear of God before their eyes.¹³

Vakalopoulos writes that “homo homini lupus finds its complete application in our country” (ibid., p. 270), because in the Greek “envy, the offspring of pathological and wounded egoism, shameless ‘Greek’ envy, appears with particular intensity...” (p. 266), cancelling every deeper effort at coordination and cooperation or at creating tradition and continuity. “Not only politicians are free from no envy expressed in violent and unjust behavior; scholars and scientists also display it toward worthy colleagues. Our history presents countless examples of great scientists persecuted by envious colleagues. One need only glance at the recently published Memoirs of E. Papanoutsos to see pitiful cases in which intellectuals — unfortunately — slandered him and acted as informers against him.”

Vakalopoulos continues with similar scenes in public services, citing stories by Alekos Damianidis and Nikos Papaspyrou, in which unworthy superiors encourage an atmosphere of informing and turn their services into miserable wasps' nests that are difficult to break up. This, he says, explains the envy of incapable and undignified directors — promoted by politicians — toward capable employees or collaborators. Their only aim is to diminish, humiliate and destroy them in order to preserve their own dominance. “Most Greeks have not yet become conscious of the destructive power of ‘Greek envy’” (p. 267).

Drawing evidently on strong personal experience, Vakalopoulos goes on to describe “unworthy and insecure” superiors who “become lions against the capable and, abusing the power of their office, harm them as much and in whatever way they can. An Iago, if he rises to power, is capable through slander and intrigue of undermining the life of an entire service, an office, a laboratory or even an entire university faculty, thanks to his completely convincing transformations and the indifference of Pontius Pilates. This is the deeper meaning of the saying ‘office reveals the man’” (p. 269). Here, indeed, Demosthenes' “one also needs brilliant fortune” applies absolutely if one is not to find oneself among the numerous “evil, insecure, vain and sadistic people who decide on your case or your future, or even your fate, and proceed unconsciously, unscrupulously and shamelessly toward injustice, even to the point of criminality” (p. 268).

1. Insult, Slander and Public Order in Book XI of the Laws

In Book XI of the Laws, which mainly presents the provisions of family and civil law that should govern a well-ordered state, Plato also sets out his views on the penal treatment of those who speak abusively and slander others. Remarkably, the relevant law follows the legislative provision excluding the insane from public spaces and precedes the provision that expels beggars from the city and the country.

For the ideal Platonic state excludes extreme poverty by definition,¹⁴ since even the most elementary form of organized society must provide in advance for those of its members who, despite prudence, self-discipline and virtue in general, happen to have fallen into misfortune. Only such free citizens, or even slaves, deserve our compassion, according to Plato — not those who are merely hungry or suffer for some other reason. The legislator is therefore called upon to issue without hesitation the inflexible law: “Let there be no poor person among us in the city.”¹⁵ If someone nevertheless persists in obtaining a livelihood through unacceptable begging,¹⁶ the officials entrusted with guarding the marketplace, city and countryside — market wardens, city wardens and rural wardens — must drive him out of their respective jurisdictions, ultimately banishing him beyond the borders “so that the country may be wholly cleansed of such a creature.”¹⁷

As for the insane, here too Plato is absolute: he legislates their complete exclusion from the city's public space under the responsibility of their relatives, who otherwise must pay a fine proportionate to their financial standing. This brief reference to madmen, however, serves as an introduction to the law dealing with what are called crimes against honor and reputation. For Plato regards as more or less mentally diseased those hot-headed and ill-mannered people who, “light-heartedly” and on the slightest pretext, insult, revile and slander others.¹⁸ Let us look more closely at his densely meaningful and strikingly topical text:

“Many people are mad in many ways. Some are those we have just mentioned, driven so by illness; but there are also those who have become so through a bad natural temper combined with bad upbringing. When even a small quarrel arises, they shout loudly and abuse one another with slanderous words — conduct that ought nowhere and in no way to occur in a law-governed city. Let this therefore be the law concerning abusive speech for everyone: no one shall revile anyone. If one person disagrees with another in discussion, let him instruct and be instructed by the person with whom he disputes and by those present, wholly refraining from abuse. For when men curse and invoke evil upon one another and apply shameful names, trading in womanish reports about each other, first, from words — a light matter — very heavy hatreds and enmities are born in fact. The speaker, pleasing anger, that graceless passion, fills himself with evil nourishment; reawakening the savage element of the soul that education once tamed, he becomes beast-like and hard to live with, accepting a bitter reward from anger. Moreover, in such exchanges people very often pass on to saying something ridiculous about their opponent. No one who becomes accustomed to this has ever failed either entirely in seriousness of character or lost a great part of magnanimity. For these reasons, no one shall ever utter any such thing in a sanctuary, at public sacrifices, at contests, in the marketplace, in a court, or at any common public gathering. The magistrate in charge of each place shall punish anyone who does so; otherwise he shall never compete for the prize of excellence, since he shows no concern for the laws and does not carry out the legislator's commands. If in other places anyone, whether beginning the abuse or replying to it, does not refrain from such words, then any older person who happens to be present shall defend the law...”

“…and, by blows if necessary, separate those who have yielded to anger and made friends with that evil companion; otherwise he himself shall incur the prescribed penalty.”

Thus, for Plato, it is no simple matter to draw a boundary around mental illness when one is confronted with the frightening debasement of the soul produced by anger and wounded egotism. Madness here consists not only in the immediate eruption of passion or a sudden fit, but also in a settled intellectual habit and disposition of soul that persistently combines an unbridled temper with an extremely powerful instinct for retaliation and revenge.^27–28

Plato strictly forbids even ridicule of citizens by poets, except perhaps in a very few cases in which a kind of censure is allowed when it is offered without passion, “in play,” for the sake of admonition and the combating of cowardice.^29–32 For obstinate violators of the law he therefore prescribes, as the higher penalty, expulsion from the country on that very day.

The imposition of punishment, blame in general and, complementarily, praise are directed toward something deeper that seems to constitute the essential goal of Platonic legislation: the establishment of certain moral principles and rules of upbringing and education that promote the highest good both for the city and for the soul — inner peace and concord. This is realized when the first and best of all victories is achieved: victory over oneself, that is, self-mastery; or, correspondingly, when the best part of the citizen body prevails in the city.³³ The attainment of this supreme virtue, which marks the ultimate harmonization of the state or the soul with cosmic order, lawfulness and hierarchy,³⁴ is the pre-eminent criterion for the formulation and application of Plato's laws, which encompass and regulate the work of human practical life.

This intensive institution-building is conceived at every step as an act of decisive civilization and humanization, a transcendence of primitivism, as the careful study of the law on abusive slander just quoted clearly shows. In the Laws, his final work, Plato thus emerges as an educator with intellectual clarity and authority in no way inferior to that of the Republic. Indeed, the Laws seem to surpass the Republic in the abundance of experience and maturity of judgment drawn from the depth of a philosophical observation permeated by an exceptionally acute and detailed analysis of the whole sphere of human action.³⁵

Good and worthy citizens — those who have achieved self-mastery, faithfully serving reason as the most refined human “metal,” directed toward what is best and expressed precisely through the law of Plato's state — have evidently prevailed amid a whirlpool and competition of the various centrifugal forces and instincts within the self. War therefore becomes a constitutive axis of Plato's late political philosophy. In the Laws, the discussion among the Athenian Stranger, the Spartan Megillus and the Cretan Clinias, the latter two representing the Dorian doctrine of war, ranges from interstate war to the unceasing struggle among social groups, among individuals and among the powers within one and the same individual soul. In the first book Clinias even expresses the totalizing view of war that the principal aim of politics is war and preparation for it.³⁶

The peculiar many-sidedness of the Platonic dialogue, which leaves room for interpreting a subject from different points of view, perhaps does not allow either an unambiguous endorsement of Clinias's pragmatic conception or, conversely, its idealistic and value-based rejection.³⁷ What remains certain is that war contributes decisively to Plato's broader educational and political perspective: it defines the goals of politics and helps the Laws — for example through common mobilization against an external enemy — to achieve the unity of the new ideal state. It is hardly accidental that this state seems to be called “Magnesia,” the city of the Magnetes,³⁸ a city whose laws bind and hold its citizens together as magnets do.³⁹ Hence Plato's severity toward whatever divides citizens and sets them against one another, such as abusive slander.

2. Theft of Public Money and the Auditors in Book XII

Plato's ethical profile appears with equal force in the twelfth and final book of the Laws. Already at its beginning he discusses theft and misappropriation of public money:

“The theft of money reveals a mentality unworthy of a free citizen, while robbery signifies shamelessness. As for the sons of Zeus, none of them ever committed such an act out of deceit or violent disposition. No one, therefore, should light-heartedly be deceived and persuaded by poets and certain other myth-makers that, if he steals or robs, he commits no injustice but only what even the gods do. This is neither true nor even plausible; whoever breaks the law by such actions can be neither a god nor a child of a god. The legislator knows these things far better than all the poets in the world. Whoever accepts our views is fortunate, and may he remain fortunate forever; whoever is not persuaded must henceforth face the following law. If anyone steals public property, he shall receive the same penalty regardless of the amount appropriated. For one who steals little acts from the same motives, merely with less success, as one who commits the greater wrong by taking large sums that do not belong to him. The law therefore requires differentiation in the severity of punishment not according to the amount stolen, but according to whether the offender is curable or incurable. If a foreigner or a slave who has stolen public property is brought to trial, the kind of punishment or the amount of the fine shall be determined according to the likelihood that his offense is curable. A citizen, however, brought up under our education, who is caught — in the act or otherwise — stealing or robbing his fatherland, shall be punished with death as an incurable case.”⁴⁰

After a brief parenthesis categorically excluding anarchy — that is, a way of life without control and guidance — from the lives not only of all human beings but even of “animals subordinate to human beings,”⁴¹ Plato discusses at length a matter of fundamental importance to the state: the authority before which magistrates, the executive officeholders, must render an account at the end of their term. These are the euthynoi, the supreme public officials who “straighten,” who make upright what or whoever has become “crooked,” for example under the weight of an office exceeding his capacities.⁴²

The importance of this institution of auditors is vital for the very existence and preservation of the city, since its prosperity and progress — or its fragmentation into many “cities,” that is, hostile factions, and consequent ruin — depend on their quality. “Therefore the auditors must in every respect be men admirable in every virtue” (Laws XII, 945e 2–3). The task, then, is to find those almost divine auditors who will save the city of the Magnetes. Plato proceeds to describe in detail the manner of election and operation of this supervisory authority.

The auditors judge, jointly and individually, the manner in which departing magistrates exercised their authority, and they publish in writing in the marketplace the results of their investigations together with their recommendations for penalties against those who failed to fulfill the obligations of office. For grave offenses even the death penalty may be proposed. Those found guilty may appeal; if their appeal is rejected, however, the court must impose twice the original penalty.⁴³

The auditors receive the highest honors both during their lives and after death. They are all regarded as priests of Apollo and Helios, and during their supervisory term they reside in the sanctuary of those gods. Each year one of them is elected high priest, and that year bears his name. After death they are buried ceremonially in special tombs, dressed in white, amid acclamations and hymns sung by the flower of the youth.⁴⁴

A characteristic mark of Plato's high democratic sensitivity and ethics — his magnanimous political theory has often been misunderstood and underestimated to an exasperating degree⁴⁵ — is that even this supreme supervisory authority, the “salt,” so to speak, of the state, may be challenged by anyone who wishes to bring a charge (947e 7), and is subject to lawful scrutiny by the competent highest courts. If an unworthy member abuses his office and “displays,” as the original text says, “human nature” (ibid.),⁴⁶ he is stripped of precedence and honors.