¹ Given what Socrates is asking here and how he often phrases similar questions elsewhere (e.g., Meno 72c and Euthyphro 6d), the term eidos is obtrusively absent here.

² Or rather, he moves the comrade to make no objection to this definition; nowhere in the dialogue does he actually accept it, and in his immediate response he alters it to remove its strangest feature.

³ Or rather, what law wants—i.e., being.

⁴ All translations from the Greek are my own and follow the text of John Burnet in Platonis Opera, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907).

⁵ This strange view, that law is in some sense a faculty in us, is hinted at, although not developed at length, by Leo Strauss, who sees law as an “act of the soul” (“On the Minos,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern [New York: Basic Books, 1968], 66–67). Strauss's typically rich and layered account has influenced the overall argument here substantially. The importance of law as a faculty is also recognized by Janssens, David, “Law's Wish: The Minos on the Origin and Unity of the Legal Order,” Nederlands tijdschrift voor rechtsfilosofie en rechtstheorie 32, no. 1 (2003): 28–29Google Scholar, and Christopher Bruell, On the Socratic Education: An Introduction to the Shorter Platonic Dialogues (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 7–8.

⁶ This beginning poses yet another puzzle: the Minos opens with an expression of the longing to find out what law is, but the being of law turns out to be a longing to find out what is. Is the Minos, then, a longing to discover the being of the longing to discover being? In itself this would not be particularly surprising—all Platonic dialogues are finally about philosophy. Moreover, in three dialogues that deal more or less directly with law, the Minos, the Crito, and the Laws, Plato seems to point to an uncanny kinship between law and philosophy. Still, this kinship is curious. Socrates was put to death under the laws of the city of Athens. And Platonic dialogues in their celebration of philosophy as the attempt to transform opinion into knowledge regularly seem to sketch a permanent tension between philosophy and law. That the Minos means for us to wonder what the meaning is of this uncanny kinship is clear (see Seth Benardete, Plato's “Laws”: The Discovery of Being [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 2).

⁷ This last would require us to read hēmin as locative—a use more ordinarily found in poetry.

⁸ See Benardete, Plato's “Laws,” 195.

⁹ For the difference between gold and stone as universals, see Strauss, “On the Minos,” 66.

¹⁰ This would mean we ought to pay special attention to the various dative pronouns that show up in this opening exchange—e.g., soi at 313b5, 8, and c3 and moi at 313c4 and 6.

¹¹ Socrates had ended the elaboration of his abrupt question by saying, “If, then, there is something ready to hand for you, speak” (313b5). Is nomos what makes things ready to hand?

¹² Speech as communication is not separable from speech as articulation. Consider Heracleitus, fragment 1.

¹³ He glosses this interpretation in his definition of hearing as “sensation which through the ears makes clear to us sounds [phōnas]” (314a5–6). The dative pronoun is placed so that it may be taken either with the verb “to clarify” or with the noun “sounds.” “Sounds for us” are just pragmata. If this were not enough, Socrates further confirms that he has pragmata on the mind in the noun phōnē itself, which may mean either “sound” or “voice.”

¹⁴ It is therefore perhaps not altogether surprising that Aristotle should make natural right a species of political right (see Nicomachean Ethics1134b18–19).

¹⁵ See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1134b24–30.

¹⁶ What Aristotle would have called a hexis.

¹⁷ A word that also means pebbles—compare 313b1.

¹⁸ The genitive “of the city” (poleōs) may be either subjective or objective, and so indicate either the laws governing the city or those it lays down, or, of course, both.

¹⁹ The ambiguity shows up beautifully in Socrates's remark at 314c4–5: “And perhaps you are speaking beautifully. But we shall soon know/be [eisometha] better in this way.” On the basis of what Socrates is about to say they will either know better, and so he will lay down a standard that will govern them as self-conscious beings, or they will be better, in which case they will be formed without necessarily being aware of what forms them. And if eisometha should mean both, they would come to be something on the basis of what they think they know themselves to be doing.

²⁰ The word Socrates uses here, chrēsta, means originally the good as useful.

²¹ The comrade replies, “To me at least it does not seem” (ouk emoige dokei); it is now the dogma of the comrade, whether good or bad we do not know, that the law cannot be the dogma of the city.

²² Although the sentence in which he does so is curiously constructed so that its subject, anthrōpoi, does not appear until quite late so that one is left wondering what the agent is that does not discover what the law wants.

²³ This is not unlike Aristotle's account of virtue as simultaneously being at the mean and discovering and choosing the mean (Nicomachean Ethics 1106b36–1107a8 ).

²⁴ There are other indications of the importance of human sacrifice (and cannibalism) in the speech. The comrade mentions the Lukaia. This seems to have been a festival on Mt. Lykaion that was connected to the story about Lykaion providing a banquet for the gods in which he served them one of his grandsons. He received his name, which means “wolf,” for this. Similarly Athamas attempted to sacrifice his son in order to avert a famine.

²⁵ Consider the connection between this and the “golden cord” of the law at Laws 644d–645c. It is not enough for the law to manipulate us. To preserve our natures as subjects, it must do so in such a way that we obey willingly.

²⁶ See, for example, Gorgias 449b, 461d and Lesser Hippias 364c.

²⁷ This is connected to the double meaning of deinos—as both canny and uncanny—that is at the heart of the first stasimon in Antigone (333–83).

²⁸ Minos “came to be with Zeus” (suggignesthai—319c5, d4), “went frequently into him” (phoitan—319c6, e2), and was the one who was with (sunnousiastēs—319e1) Zeus.

²⁹ Socrates himself connects dia, “on account of,” with Dia, the accusative of “Zeus,” at Cratylus 395e–396c.

³⁰ At Laws 817bff., the Athenian invents an answer to give to the tragic poets who seek admission to the city he, Kleinias, and Megillus are founding. He tells them that “we ourselves are as much as possible the poets of the most beautiful and best tragedy.” Their regime is the imitation of the most beautiful and best life, the truest tragedy, and this beautiful drama can be brought into being only by the true law.

³¹ Compare Sophocles, Antigone 441–96.