The following dialogue between Alcibiades and Pericles, Athenian general is recounted by Xenophon in Memorabilia.
Alcibiades: Please, Pericles, can you teach me what a law is?
Pericles: To be sure I can.
Alcibiades: I should be so much obliged if you would do so. One so often hears the epithet ‘law-abiding’ applied in a complimentary sense; yet, it strikes me, one hardly deserves the compliment, if one does not know what a law is.
Pericles: Fortunately there is a ready answer to your difficulty. You wish to know what a law is? Well, those are laws which the majority, being met together in conclave, approve and enact as to what it is right to do, and what it is right to abstain from doing.
Alcibiades: Enact on the hypothesis that it is right to do what is good? or to do what is bad?
Pericles: What is good, to be sure, young sir, not what is bad.
Alcibiades: Supposing it is not the majority, but, as in the case of an oligarchy, the minority, who meet and enact the rules of conduct, what are these?
Pericles: Whatever the ruling power of the state after deliberation enacts as our duty to do, goes by the name of laws.
Alcibiades: Then if a tyrant, holding the chief power in the state, enacts rules of conduct for the citizens, are these enactments law?
Pericles: Yes, anything which a tyrant as head of the state enacts, also goes by the name of law.
Alcibiades: But, Pericles, violence and lawlessness ’ how do we define them? Is it not when a stronger man forces a weaker to do what seems right to him ’ not by persuasion but by compulsion?
Pericles: I should say so.
Alcibiades: It would seem to follow that if a tyrant, without persuading the citizens, drives them by enactment to do certain things ’ that is lawlessness?
Pericles: You are right; and I retract the statement that measures passed by a tyrant without persuasion of the citizens are law.
Alcibiades: And what of measures passed by a minority, not by persuasion of the majority, but in the exercise of its power only? Are we, or are we not, to apply the term violence to these?
Pericles: I think that anything which any one forces another to do without persuasion, whether by enactment or not, is violence rather than law.
Alcibiades: It would seem that everything which the majority, in the exercise of its power over the possessors of wealth, and without persuading them, chooses to enact, is of the nature of violence rather than of law?
To be sure (answered Pericles), adding: At your age we were clever hands at such quibbles ourselves. It was just such subtleties which we used to practise our wits upon; as you do now, if I mistake not.
To which Alcibiades replied: Ah, Pericles, I do wish we could have met in those days when you were at your cleverest in such matters.
