 Regardning the issue of the role of measure in Plato’s ethics, though harmony and order are treated as important principles in Plato’s metaphysics and ethics from early on, in his late dialogues he seems to envisage right measure in a literal sense. This explains his confidence that even physical entities can attain a relatively stable state. As he specifies both in the Timaeus and in the Philebus, not everything is in a hopeless constant flux; on the contrary, those things that possess the measure that is right for their type are stable entities and can be the objects of ‘firm and true beliefs and convictions’ (Ti. 37b–c). This applies not only to the nature of the visible universe, but also to the human body and mind, as long as they are in good condition. Plato seems to have been encouraged to embrace such theories by the advances of astronomy and harmonics in his own lifetime, so that he postulates ‘due proportion’ in an arithmetical sense as the cause of all harmony and stability. His confidence seems to have extended not only to the physical, but also to the moral state of human nature. That assumption is confirmed not only by the emphasis on right mixture in the Philebus, but also by the the discussion in the Laws about how the laws are to achieve peace in the state and harmony in the souls of the citizens. In the Laws it seems that Plato no longer regards the emotions as a menace to the virtues; rather, he sees it as the legislators’ obligation to provide an adequate balance of pleasure and pain by habituating citizens in the right way (632a–643a). This balance, through paideia, is crucial for maintaining a truly free soul (I 636e): “Pleasure and pain flow like two springs released by nature. If a man draws the right amount from the right one at the right time, he lives a happy life.” This is not the place to discuss the project Plato pursues in the Laws as a whole, which ist to determine the best possible constitution and its laws. Suffice it to note that the discussion of the right measure of pleasure and pain forms the preface to the entire project. This is an indication of a considerable shift of emphasis on the emotions in the Laws compared with Plato’s treatment of the subject in the Republic. For the form of education that provides the citizens with the right habituation (ethos) concerning the measure of pleasure and pain is the topic of the Laws’ second book. The emphasis put on the right measure and on the right object of pleasure and pain in the citizens’ sentimental education to some degree anticipates the Aristotelian conception of the moral virtues as the right mean between excess and deficiency (II 653b–c): “Virtue is this general concord of reason and emotion. But there is one element you could isolate in any account you give, and this is the correct formation of our feelings of pleasure and pain, which makes us hate what we ought to hate from first to last, and love what we ought to love.” The confidence expressed in the Laws in the power of due measure in all matters finally culminates in the famous maxim that God is the measure of all things (IV 716c–d: “In our view, it is God who is preeminently the ‘measure of all things’, much more so than any man, as they say. So if you want to recommend yourself to someone of this character, you must do your level best to make your own character reflect his, and on this principle the moderate man is God’s friend, being like him, whereas the immoderate and unjust man is not like him and is his enemy; and the same reasoning applies to the other vices too.” Because Plato, like Aristotle after him, carefully refrains from any kind of specifications about what actual right measures might be, we should treat the ‘arithmetic’ of the good life with more than a pinch of salt. That individuals differ in their internal and external conditions is as clear to Plato as it is to Aristotle. This does not shake his faith in the Laws that right habituation through the right kind of education, most of all in the arts, will provide the necessary inner equilibrium in the good citizen. 