saw with acute prevision, those centrifugal forces had come to be
ruinously in excess of the centripetal. Its rapid, empiric,
constitutional changes, its restless development of political
experiment, the subdivisions of party there, the dominance of faction,
as we see it, steadily increasing, breeding on itself, in the pages of
Thucydides, justify Plato's long-drawn paradox that it is easier to
wrestle against many than against one. The soul, [25] moreover, the
inward polity of the individual, was the theatre of a similar
dissolution; and truly stability of character had never been a
prominent feature in Greek life. Think of the end of Pausanias failing
in his patriotism, of Themistocles, of Miltiades, the saviours of
Greece, actually selling the country they had so dearly bought to its
old enemies.

It is something in this way that, for Plato, motion and the philosophy
of motion identify themselves with the vicious tendency in things and
thought. Change is the irresistible law of our being, says the
Philosophy of Motion. Change, he protests, through the power of a true
philosophy, shall not be the law of our being; and it is curious to
note the way in which, consciously or unconsciously, that philosophic
purpose shapes his treatment, even in minute detail, of education, of
art, of daily life, his very vocabulary, in which such pleasant or
innocent words, as "manifold," "embroidered," "changeful," become the
synonyms of what is evil. He, first, notes something like a fixed
cycle of political change; but conceives it (being change) as, from the
very first, backward towards decadence. The ideal city, again, will
not be an art-less place: it is by irresistible influence of art, that
he means to shape men anew; by a severely monotonous art however, such
art as shall speak to youth, all day long, from year to year, almost
exclusively, of the loins girded about.