Abstract
This paper addresses the guardianship of orphans in Plato’s Laws. The aim is to state whether the philosopher, through his theoretic model, wanted to correct the critical issues of the Athenian legal system that he perceived as most problematic. The paper is divided in two parts. The first one deals with the analysis of passages from Plato’s works in which the issue of the orphans’ guardianship had been addressed, in order to identify which related matters, in his opinion, deserved a corrective intervention. The second part of the paper is itself divided in two parts and deals with the analysis of the legislation on the orphans’ guardianship of Magnesia. The comparison with the Athenian and other institutions from the Greek world allows us to focus on the innovative features of this new legislation: they come out both from a personal revision by the philosopher and from the inspiration to non-Athenian models. In this way, Plato seems to try to fill the gaps of Athenian practice, even in theory.