A Study On The Laws Of Plato (Book ?-?)

Plato's latest dialogue Laws, consisting of12books, is one of an important work on political theory from Classical Greece. In this writing, continuing with the dialogue form, Plato provides a lots of thinking over law and political system or regime through a planned city Magenesia, and uses the results to legislate various laws and to construct the regime for the city. Generally, the first three books are regarded as an preface to the whole work. In these books of Laws, Plato gradually describes many topics related with legislation and regime, at the end comes to the conclusions both what is the principle for legislation and what is the guide for creating a regime of a city. The thesis, based on the latest critical Bude edition of Laws, provides a new translation of the first three books with short notes, and the present translation is sometimes compared with another avaible Chinese version in some points. After tranlating and deviding the text, following the theme of law-giving and regime, the thesis summarises and analyses the development of various argumentations and their relations, and considers their significance.This thesis includes preface, main part, conclusion. In preface, it gives a concise introduction to the life of Plato, besides, it also makes short remarks on the outline of Book ? to ?, style, date of writing, title, etc. Then, this part gives an overview the history of Laws'research, main concerns of the thesis, and the method.The main part of the thesis is consist of three chapters, including translation with short notes and summaries and analysises of various topics. In chaper one, the first part gives a translation and notes of Book One; the second part makes clear the process how the main topics are raised, and discusses topics like legislation, virtue, wine and education and clarifies their relations. In chapter two, the fisrt part is a rendering of Book Two with notes; the second part considers the re-definition of education, music and virtue and shows their relation to laws. In chapter three, the first part provides a translation with notes of Book Three; then, seeing from political lessons and law, the second part recounts topics such as method and aim of examining regimes, prehistory of political society, the Dorian league and mixed constitution, history and regimes of Persia and Athens, and examines these surveys in respect of legislation. In the part of conclusion, the thesis explicates Plato's theory with regard to law and virtue, virtue and education, and legislation and regime, and appraises the value of these thinking by aged Plato.