Plato’s Minos and the Form of Human Sacrifice

Recent interpretations of Plato’s Minos have generally focused on what it might reflect about the state of Hellenic natural law theory, or on the relationship between divine commands and human or political law. These readings often find it challenging to incorporate the third, poetic-historical section of the dialogue with the preceding two major parts. The argument in this article is that the Minos is profitably read through the lens of the Platonic distinction between lovers of logos and lovers of sights and sounds. Through this frame, the dialogue as a whole is revealed to a meditation on law and its opposite, human sacrifice. The perennial tension between law and human sacrifice corresponds to a permanent antagonism in the city between rule through logos and rule through spectacle.