wear, as at Athens, a joyous and festive look; there are to be Bacchic
choruses, and men of mature age are encouraged in moderate potations. On
the other hand, the common meals, the public education, the crypteia are
borrowed from Sparta and not from Athens, and the superintendence of
private life, which was to be practised by the governors, has also its
prototype in Sparta. The extravagant dislike which Plato shows both to a
naval power and to extreme democracy is the reverse of Athenian.

The best-governed Hellenic states traced the origin of their laws to
individual lawgivers. These were real persons, though we are uncertain how
far they originated or only modified the institutions which are ascribed
to them. But the lawgiver, though not a myth, was a fixed idea in the mind
of the Greek,--as fixed as the Trojan war or the earth-born Cadmus. 'This
was what Solon meant or said'--was the form in which the Athenian
expressed his own conception of right and justice, or argued a disputed
point of law. And the constant reference in the Laws of Plato to the
lawgiver is altogether in accordance with Greek modes of thinking and
speaking.

There is also, as in the Republic, a Pythagorean element. The highest
branch of education is arithmetic; to know the order of the heavenly
bodies, and to reconcile the apparent contradiction of their movements, is
an important part of religion; the lives of the citizens are to have a
common measure, as also their vessels and coins; the great blessing of the
state is the number 5040. Plato is deeply impressed by the antiquity of
Egypt, and the unchangeableness of her ancient forms of song and dance.
And he is also struck by the progress which the Egyptians had made in the
mathematical sciences--in comparison of them the Greeks appeared to him to
be little better than swine. Yet he censures the Egyptian meanness and
inhospitality to strangers. He has traced the growth of states from their