not only of states, but of languages, men, animals, the world itself; like
him, also, they have detected in later institutions the vestiges of a
patriarchal state still surviving. Thus far Plato speaks as 'the spectator
of all time and all existence,' who may be thought by some divine instinct
to have guessed at truths which were hereafter to be revealed. He is far
above the vulgar notion that Hellas is the civilized world (Statesman), or
that civilization only began when the Hellenes appeared on the scene. But
he has no special knowledge of 'the days before the flood'; and when he
approaches more historical times, in preparing the way for his own theory
of mixed government, he argues partially and erroneously. He is desirous
of showing that unlimited power is ruinous to any state, and hence he is
led to attribute a tyrannical spirit to the first Dorian kings. The decay
of Argos and the destruction of Messene are adduced by him as a manifest
proof of their failure; and Sparta, he thinks, was only preserved by the
limitations which the wisdom of successive legislators introduced into the
government. But there is no more reason to suppose that the Dorian rule of
life which was followed at Sparta ever prevailed in Argos and Messene,
than to assume that Dorian institutions were framed to protect the Greeks
against the power of Assyria; or that the empire of Assyria was in any way
affected by the Trojan war; or that the return of the Heraclidae was only
the return of Achaean exiles, who received a new name from their leader
Dorieus. Such fancies were chiefly based, as far as they had any
foundation, on the use of analogy, which played a great part in the dawn
of historical and geographical research. Because there was a Persian
empire which was the natural enemy of the Greek, there must also have been
an Assyrian empire, which had a similar hostility; and not only the fable
of the island of Atlantis, but the Trojan war, in Plato's mind derived
some features from the Persian struggle. So Herodotus makes the Nile
answer to the Ister, and the valley of the Nile to the Red Sea. In the
Republic, Plato is flying in the air regardless of fact and possibility--