LAWS, BOOK IV
pleted. He should always venerate them, by never failing to provide a continual memorial, and assigning to the deceased a due share of means which fortune provides for expenditure. Every one of us, if we acted thus and observed these rules of life, would win always a due reward form the gods and form all that are mightier than ourselves, and would pass the greatest part of our lives in the enjoyment of hopes of happiness. As regards duties to children, relations, friends and citizens, and those of service done to strangers for Heaven's sake, and of social intercourse with all those classes,--by fulfilling which a man should brighten his own life and order it as the law enjoins,--the sequel of the laws themselves, partly by persuasion and partly (when men's habits defy persuasion) by forcible and just chastisement, will render our State, with the concurrence of the gods, a blessed State and prosperous. There are also matters which a lawgiver, if he shares my view, must necessarily regulate, though they are ill-suited for statement in the form of a law; in dealing with these he ought, in my opinion, to produce a sample for his own use and that of those for whom he is legislating, and, after expounding all other matters as best he can, pass on next to commending the task of legislation.
CLIN. What is the special form in which such matters are laid down?
ATH. It is by no means easy to embrace them all in a single model of statement (so to speak); but let us conceive of them in some such way as this, in case we may succeed in affirming something definite about them.
CLIN. Tell us what that "something" is. 301
