Professor Melissa Lane will deliver the Isaiah Berlin Lectures in Michaelmas Term 2024. Professor Lane is Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Her lectures will take place on the following Tuesdays at 5pm: 29th October, 5 November, 12 November, 19 November, 26 November and 3 December. The first lecture will be held at St Luke's Chapel and lectures two to six will be held in the L3 Lecture Room of the Andrew Wiles Building (Mathematical Institute).
19 Nov: Written laws? Ethical education in Plutarch's Lycurgus and related debates
While the previous lecture explored the framing of two major Platonic dialogues as projects of discursive legislation, this lecture turns to Plato’s meditations on the relationship between writing and law and their afterlife. I focus especially on the figure of the legendary Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus, who would be framed in a biography composed by Plutarch (a so-called middle Platonist) as having prohibited the writing down of his laws. Plutarch was intervening in an ongoing debate, articulated by Plato but also revolving around the evaluation of Lycurgan Sparta, about how the telos of a constitution could be best inculcated in its citizens: whether by using written laws, or by relying on unwritten laws that are customary and engrained through practices. Issues of flexibility, precision, memory and habituation were all at stake. Indeed, this debate was in antiquity framed not only in Platonic terms, but also in Hebraic ones, as I explain by reading Plutarch against the backdrop of Alexandrian Jewish texts. I draw implications for debates about how best to inculcate ethical values in education in subsequent generations, including our own.
