A Stranger on the Shores of San Francisco

The tension between commerce and virtue was a familiar topic for the ancients. In Plato’s final work, The Laws, Cleinias asks the Athenian Stranger, widely considered a stand-in for Plato, whether or not to found a new city by the sea. He advises against it. A city “right on the sea, with a good harbor,” he says, would require “some great savior, and some lawgivers who were divine, to prevent it from coming to have many diverse and low habits.”