testimony as, in the Timaeus, the first men gave of the names of the gods
('They must surely have known their own ancestors'). For the first
generation of the new cycle, who lived near the time, are supposed to have
preserved a recollection of a previous one. He also appeals to internal
evidence, viz. the perfect coherence of the tale, though he is very well
aware, as he says in the Cratylus, that there may be consistency in error
as well as in truth. The gravity and minuteness with which some
particulars are related also lend an artful aid. The profound interest and
ready assent of the young Socrates, who is not too old to be amused 'with a
tale which a child would love to hear,' are a further assistance. To those
who were naturally inclined to believe that the fortunes of mankind are
influenced by the stars, or who maintained that some one principle, like
the principle of the Same and the Other in the Timaeus, pervades all things
in the world, the reversal of the motion of the heavens seemed necessarily
to produce a reversal of the order of human life. The spheres of
knowledge, which to us appear wide asunder as the poles, astronomy and
medicine, were naturally connected in the minds of early thinkers, because
there was little or nothing in the space between them. Thus there is a
basis of philosophy, on which the improbabilities of the tale may be said
to rest. These are some of the devices by which Plato, like a modern
novelist, seeks to familiarize the marvellous.

The myth, like that of the Timaeus and Critias, is rather historical than
poetical, in this respect corresponding to the general change in the later
writings of Plato, when compared with the earlier ones. It is hardly a
myth in the sense in which the term might be applied to the myth of the
Phaedrus, the Republic, the Phaedo, or the Gorgias, but may be more aptly
compared with the didactic tale in which Protagoras describes the fortunes
of primitive man, or with the description of the gradual rise of a new
society in the Third Book of the Laws. Some discrepancies may be observed