Identifying the Preludes in Plato’s Laws

Abstract The Athenian in Plato’s Laws famously proposes that laws should have persuasive preludes and he offers many examples of such preludes over the course of the dialogue. I consider the relation between these preludes and the wide-ranging meta-legislative discourse that occupies much of the dialogue. It is widely believed that those meta-legislative discussions count as legislative preludes too, even though the Athenian does not explicitly identify them as such. However, two putative examples of such preludes – the long discussion of the Socratic paradox at 860c–864c, and the eloquent affirmation of the rule of law at 874e–875d – do not possess the features essential to legislative preludes as characterized by the Athenian in Book 4 and illustrated in his many explicit examples. The analogy of the slave physician deployed in Book 9 does not show that these meta-theoretical remarks are preludes, and neither does the Athenian’s assertion in Book 4 that the whole of their conversation has been ‘preludes to laws’ (722d). While the notion of a prelude is capacious and elastic, that of the legislative preludes is not. The legislative prelude is a narrowly specified genre of discourse and occupies a relatively small footprint within the text of the Laws .