in private suits all should take part; ’for he who has no share in the administration of justice is apt to imagine that he has no share in the state at all.’  The wardens of the country, like the Forty at Athens, also exercised judicial power in small matters, as well as the wardens of the agora and city.  The department of justice is better organized in Plato than in an ordinary Greek state, proceeding more by regular methods, and being more restricted to distinct duties.

The executive of Plato’s Laws, like the Athenian, was different from that of a modern civilized state.  The difference chiefly consists in this, that whereas among ourselves there are certain persons or classes of persons set apart for the execution of the duties of government, in ancient Greece, as in all other communities in the earlier stages of their development, they were not equally distinguished from the rest of the citizens.  The machinery of government was never so well organized as in the best modern states.  The judicial department was not so completely separated from the legislative, nor the executive from the judicial, nor the people at large from the professional soldier, lawyer, or priest.  To Aristotle (Pol.) it was a question requiring serious consideration—­Who should execute a sentence?  There was probably no body of police to whom were entrusted the lives and properties of the citizens in any Hellenic state.  Hence it might be reasonably expected that every man should be the watchman of every other, and in turn be watched by him.  The ancients do not seem to have remembered the homely adage that, ’What is every man’s business is no man’s business,’ or always to have thought of applying the principle of a division of labour to the administration of law and to government.  Every Athenian was at some time or on some occasion in his life a magistrate, judge, advocate, soldier, sailor, policeman.  He had not necessarily any private business; a good deal of his time was taken up with the duties of office and other public occupations.  So, too, in Plato’s Laws.  A citizen was to interfere in a quarrel, if older than the combatants, or to defend the outraged party, if his junior.  He was especially bound to come to the rescue of a parent who was ill-treated by his children.  He was also required to prosecute the murderer of a kinsman.  In certain cases he was allowed to arrest an offender.  He might even use violence to an abusive person.  Any citizen who was not less than thirty years of age at times exercised a magisterial authority, to be enforced even by blows.  Both in the Magnesian state and at Athens many thousand persons must have shared in the highest duties of government, if a section only of the Council, consisting of thirty or of fifty persons, as in the Laws, or at Athens after the days of Cleisthenes, held office for a month, or for thirty-five days only.  It was almost as if, in our own country, the Ministry or the Houses of Parliament were to change every month.  The average ability of the Athenian and Magnesian councillors could not have been very high, considering there were so many of them.  And yet they were entrusted with the performance of the most important executive duties.  In these respects the constitution of the Laws resembles Athens far more than Sparta.  All the citizens were to be, not merely soldiers, but politicians and administrators.