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called the first and one of the greatest of jurists. In his view (as we 

 have seen) man is by nature a political animal, and hence his natural 

 state is in society. Hence political justice — by which term he denoted 

 the justice obtaining between the citizens of the State, and which he 

 defined as consisting in conformity to the law (or nomas) of the State — 

 is, in fact, the only justice. "For," he says, "the term justice implies 

 the case of those who have laws {nomoi) to which they are subject,"* 

 and hence justice can exist only "in the case of those between whom 

 laws exist," or, in other words, between men in society. In his view, 

 therefore, the terms, justice and the law (nomas), connote the same 

 essential idea, and dift'er only in this, that the one denotes the rule, 

 and the other, conformity to the rule ; as is in effect asserted in his 

 proposition that "the administration of law is the determination of the 

 just and the unjust," j; or, in other words, the administration of justice. 

 Having thus identified political justice with the justice actually existing 

 in and enforced by the State, or, in other words, the law, he proceeds to 

 say that it is partly natural and partly legal. To use his own language, 

 "Of the political just, one part is natural, and the other, legal. The 

 natural is that which everywhere is equally valid and depends not upon 

 being, or not being received, but the legal is that which was originally a 

 matter of inditference, but which, when enacted, is so no longer ; as the 

 price of a ransom being fixed at a mina, or the sacrificing a goat and not 

 two sheep, and further, all particular acts of legislation as the sacrificing 

 to Brasidas, and all those matters which are the subjects of decrees." % 



And in the Rhetoric a precisely corresponding division is made of the 

 law. "Let the acting unjustly," he says, "be defined as the voluntary 

 commission of hurt in contravention of law. Now law is either common 

 or peculiar, nomos koinas or nomas idios." The peculiar law I call that 

 by whose written enactments men direct their policy ; the common law, 

 whatever unwritten rules appear to be recognized among all men.§ 



And in another place the same idea is thus more fully expressed : "Law, 

 now I understand, to be either peculiar or common {idios or koinos) ; tlie 

 peculiar to be that which has been marked out by each people in refer- 

 ence to itself, and this is partly written and partly unwritten, {h) The 

 common law I call that which is conformable merely to the dictates of 

 nature. For there does exist naturally a universal sense of right and 

 wrong, which, in a certain degree, is intuitively divined, even should no 

 intercourse with each other, nor any compact have existed ; which senti- 

 ment the Antigone of Sophocles enters uttering that it was just, namely, 

 to bury Polynices, though forbidden, since by nature, this was a deed of 

 justice ; for, by no means, is it for this or the next day merely that this 

 maxim is in force, but forever ; nor is there any one that knows from 

 whom it proceeded. And as Empedocles says on the subject of not slay- 



* Ethics, Bk. V, Chap, vi, fol. 4. % Id., Bk. v, Chap, vii, fol. 1. 



t Id., Bk. V, Chap, vi, fol. 4. g Rhetoric, Bk. i, Chap, x, fols. 2, 3. 



