or genesis of justice ἢ τὴν ἐκ τοῦ Διὸς καὶ τῆς κοινῆς φύσεως. And Cicero, sometimes speaking for himself, sometimes for the Stoics, repeatedly says, e.g., de Fin. ii. 18-19, that nisi aequitas, fides, iustitia proficiscantur a natura et si omnia haec ad utilitatem referantur virum bonum non posse repperiri. Horace as a convinced Epicurean quietly and dogmatically reaffirms the Epicurean opinion. The protest in Plato's Laws, 892, against a purely materialistic conception of nature and the natural anticipates and includes Epicurean utilitarianism and all similar theories. Absolute materialism allows the term "natural" only in application to the movements and qualities of natural bodies. The entire moral order which man discovers or creates in his world is a later non-natural artificial invention. Thus far all is fairly obvious, but Horace goes on to point out a distinction which Plato does not dwell upon in the Laws but which he is careful to make elsewhere and which, I think, modern commentators have overlooked. Philosophies of absolute materialism or unqualified relativity may lay it down that, strictly speaking, nothing is natural but the movements of natural bodies or the immediate animal sensations. But in ordinary speech the utilitarian moralist may concede that the "good" in the sense of the "useful" or the "pleasurable" is an idea given by nature, though the just is not. Nature, and our human nature, does distinguish what we like from what we dislike, and what we like we call "good." In this sense "good" and "bad" are distinguished by nature. What the utilitarian denies is that original nature can also distinguish between the just and the unjust. These are subsidiary artificial conceptions devised to help us get what we like and avoid what we dislike, to secure the good and shun the evil. Cf. Plato Republic 359 A, Tò μèv EKOEÚYELV Tò dè aipeîv. This distinction may be Epicurean. Diogenes Laertius (ii. 8. 93) attributes in terms to the Cyrenaics the statement: μŋdév Tɩ eivai φύσει δίκαιον ἢ καλὸν ἢ αἰσχρόν· ἀλλὰ νόμῳ καὶ ἔθει. But by whatever pathway the idea came to Horace it is ultimately derived from the passage of Plato's Theaetetus which Professor Wilamowitz has recently misinterpreted in support of his fancy 1 Cf. my note on the passage in Classical Philology, IX, 316. that the second half of the Theaetetus was hastily thrown together by Plato when he received his invitation to visit Sicily a second time. The extreme uncompromising form of Protagorean relativity, Plato has been arguing (pp. 161-71), abolishes all distinctions, is repugnant to common sense, and makes rational discussion impossible. But those who do not carry the theory to these extravagant conclusions might take their stand on a distinction1 and admit compromises. They, for example, lack the hardihood to affirm that good and evil, utility and inutility, are mere matters of opinion and arbitrary legislation (172 A). But they do maintain that justice and injustice depend solely on positive enactment and are relative to the opinion of the enactors. "And that," says Plato (172 B), "is the way in which those who do not go the whole length of the theory of Protagoras conduct their wisdom."2 The discussion of the "idea of good" in the Republic 505 D starts from the same distinction. This abatement in Plato of extreme Protagorean relativity by the recognition of a distinction between the good or useful which nobody will affirm to be a mere matter of opinion and the just which many maintain is only that, is, then, evidently the ultimate source of the similar distinction in Horace (113-14): Nec natura potest iusto secernere iniquum, Dividit ut bona diversis, fugienda petendis. But, as already said, the Platonic passage has recently acquired another interest through the misinterpretation by which Professor Wilamowitz supports his hypothesis that the Theaetetus, hastily patched up from materials on hand while Plato was packing his trunk for Sicily, is as badly composed as the Iliad. In his Platon, II, 230, he renders the words which I have already interpreted as follows in order to express Plato's intended meaning: "wer sich ihnen nichts ganz verschworen hat hält eben darum von ihrer ganzen Lehre nichts." That is, he fails to see that those who un 1 171 D, Η καὶ ταύτῃ ἂν μάλιστα ἵστασθαι τὸν λόγον, κ.τ.λ. 2 "Proceed somewhat on this wise in their philosophy" (Campbell). 3 καὶ ὅσοι γε ἂν μὴ παντάπασι τὸν Πρωταγόρου λόγον λέγωσιν, ὧδέ πως τὴν σοφίαν ǎyovo. This is Burnet's text. I prefer, as Wilamowitz does, Campbell's dσo ye dh and λéyovov, but we are not now concerned with text criticism. παντάπασι τὸν Πρωταγόρου λόγον λέγουσιν are those who accept the compromise or qualification which Plato has just set forth, and that ¿dé πws, K.T.λ. merely repeats that this or something like this is their position. He insists that ¿dé, к.7.λ. must point forward to an intended condemnation of the "ganze Lehre" and takes Tv σopiav ayovσw to mean "judge this wisdom thus." On these blunders he bases the argument that the transition to the next topic is forced and that the famous digression contrasting the philosopher with the lawyer stands in no intelligible relation to what precedes. We expect a condemnation of the doctrine, he says: Aber Sokrates gibt das Verwerfungsurteil nicht ab, sondern sagt sie denken über diese Weisheit so das gibt nur eine lange Abschweifung. "Wir haben ja Zeit." Nun denken wir, legt Sokrates los. Statt dessen; "Wieder ist mir klar geworden, dass ein Philosoph vor Gericht sich blamieren muss." Wir sind eben so konsterniert wie Theodorus und sagen πῶς δὴ οὖν λέγεις. All this is nodus in scirpo. The course of the thought and the real transition are perfectly clear and simple. This change of front, this position supposed to be taken up by those who don't push the Protagorean doctrine to extremes, raises still another question. for discussion. Xóyos. . . . EK λóyou. If, which I do not believe either necessary or probable, dé Tws is forward-looking, it looks forward only to the discussion of this question. "Well," says Theodorus, "we have leisure, have we not?"—and this idea of the contrast between the leisure of philosophy and the petty preoccupations of the lawyer and the politician is what forms the transition to the wonderful portrayal of the two types, which in accordance with the principles of his art Plato aptly introduces to relieve the tedium of uninterrupted dialectics. In 177 C 6 the discussion is picked up at precisely the point at which it is dropped. We are reminded of the exact issue that has been formulated, and the new Xoyos is taken up for examination. Apart from the certainty of the meaning of the Greek, nobody who reads the entire 1 Incidentally I may note that was on ovv Xéyeis, of course, does not express consternation or surprise. 2 Cf. Euripides Troades 706, ἀλλ ̓ ἐκ λόγου γὰρ ἄλλος ἐκβαίνει λόγος, which Professor Murray prettily renders: "Ah, how thought to thought still beckons," but which in view of the context I should be tempted to paraphrase "Life is just one after another." thing passage attentively and follows the thought can have any doubt that this is the intended connection of ideas. The matter is now fully explained in the Chicago dissertation of Mrs. Grace Hadley Billings on The Art of Transition in Plato, page 24. Professor Wilamowitz' further argument that the digression must have been composed to express Plato's disappointment at the failure of the political ambitions with which he composed the Republic shatters on the consideration of its close resemblance to the treatment of the same theme in the Gorgias and the Republic itself, but I will leave the working out of this comparison and these parallels to the reader.1 If Professor Wilamowitz would frankly admit that he has misconstrued Plato in his haste and that this passage therefore affords no support to his theory of the composition of the Theaetetus, I should be glad to express regret for the harshness of harping on what would then be a mere oversight. But if he insists on his impossible translation, and continues to bolster up his ingenious analyses of the defective composition of the Iliad and the Platonic dialogues by what are demonstrably misinterpretations of the text, I shall be driven to aggravate my offense by repeating the words of Professor John Burnet in the Classical Quarterly for October, 1920: "Most of his conjectures are wrong and many of them suggest doubts as to his knowledge of Platonic Greek." 1 Cf., e.g., Gorgias 486 B, 526 E, 527 A; Republic 517–18. THE "UNINUNDATED LANDS" IN PTOLEMAIC AND ROMAN EGYPT BY W. L. WESTERMANN PART II ATTITUDE OF THE GOVERNMENT, OWNER, AND TENANT The aẞpoxos y in Egypt was that land which was not reached by the Nile flood, but was actually capable of irrigation by the expenditure of extra labor in running deep field laterals into it. The amount of the aẞpoxos in any section varied with the height of the annual inundation. The important fact as to the government's attitude toward this category of grain land is that, in so far as our present testimony goes, the rulers of Egypt demanded and received from the "unflooded" land certainly as high a rate of taxes and rentals as it received from the flooded lands, possibly even a higher rate. The proof of this statement is to be found in an analysis of P. Brux. I. Previous discussions of this important document have always been conducted upon the assumption that the administrative, or ownership, categories (temple land, royal domain, private land) were the all-important factors. Actually the vital distinctions are the production categories (flooded, unflooded, and dry). Of P. Brux. I there has been preserved the lower part of eleven columns, about two-thirds of each column being lost. The outer portions of columns I and XI are gone. The tabulation in this record is by "sown land," σTоpiμŋ yî, and “unflooded land," äßpoxos Yŷ. The term "sown land" or "seed land" is here the same as "flooded land," Beßpeyμévn yî.2 The report is drawn up by oḍpayides, or land divisions, of which the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth divisions are sufficiently well preserved to give a thoroughly trustworthy picture. I have analyzed and tabulated below the estimates 1 Musée Belge, VIII (1904), 102; Wilcken, Papyruskunde, Chrestomathie, p. 273. 2 Cf. Wessely, Stud. Pal., X, 50, ἰδιωτικῆς) ἀβρόχ(ου) ἀπὸ σπορᾶς, and P. Teb. I, 60, 51-4, where the "sown land," kσrapμévn, is contrasted with the aσropos ẞeßpeyμévn, the flooded land which was not sown. [CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY XVI, April, 1921] 169 |