is not talking in the air. Students of the Academy had been actually
called on to give new constitutions to Greek states. For the Greeks
the constitution was not merely as it is so often with us, a matter of
political machinery. It was regarded as a way of life. Further, the
constitution within the framework of which the ordinary process of
administration and passing of decrees went on, was always regarded as
the work of a special man or body of men, the lawgivers. If we study
Greek history, we find that the position of the legislator corresponds
to that assigned to him by Plato and Aristotle. All Greek states,
except those perversions which Aristotle criticises as being "above
law," worked under rigid constitutions, and the constitution was only
changed when the whole people gave a commission to a lawgiver to draw
up a new one. Such was the position of the AEsumnetes, whom Aristotle
describes in Book III. chap, xiv., in earlier times, and of the pupils
of the Academy in the fourth century. The lawgiver was not an ordinary
politician. He was a state doctor, called in to prescribe for an
ailing constitution. So Herodotus recounts that when the people of
Cyrene asked the oracle of Delphi to help them in their dissensions,
the oracle told them to go to Mantinea, and the Mantineans lent them
Demonax, who acted as a "setter straight" and drew up a new
constitution for Cyrene. So again the Milesians, Herodotus tells us,
were long troubled by civil discord, till they asked help from Paros,
and the Parians sent ten commissioners who gave Miletus a new
constitution. So the Athenians, when they were founding their model
new colony at Thurii, employed Hippodamus of Miletus, whom Aristotle
mentions in Book II, as the best expert in town-planning, to plan the
streets of the city, and Protagoras as the best expert in law-making,
to give the city its laws. In the Laws Plato represents one of the
persons of the dialogue as having been asked by the people of Gortyna
to draw up laws for a colony which they were founding. The situation