consequent on injudicious marriages and in the Philistine elevation
of physical achievements over mental culture; while the
hierarchical succession of Timocracy and Oligarchy, Democracy and
Tyranny, is dwelt on at great length and its causes analysed in a
very dramatic and psychological manner, if not in that sanctioned
by the actual order of history.

And indeed it is apparent at first sight that the Platonic
succession of states represents rather the succession of ideas in
the philosophic mind than any historical succession of time.

Aristotle meets the whole simply by an appeal to facts. If the
theory of the periodic decay of all created things, he urges, be
scientific, it must be universal, and so true of all the other
states as well as of the ideal. Besides, a state usually changes
into its contrary and not to the form next to it; so the ideal
state would not change into Timocracy; while Oligarchy, more often
than Tyranny, succeeds Democracy. Plato, besides, says nothing of
what a Tyranny would change to. According to the cycle theory it
ought to pass into the ideal state again, but as a fact one Tyranny
is changed into another as at Sicyon, or into a Democracy as at
Syracuse, or into an Aristocracy as at Carthage. The example of
Sicily, too, shows that an Oligarchy is often followed by a
Tyranny, as at Leontini and Gela. Besides, it is absurd to
represent greed as the chief motive of decay, or to talk of avarice
as the root of Oligarchy, when in nearly all true oligarchies
money-making is forbidden by law. And finally the Platonic theory
neglects the different kinds of democracies and of tyrannies.

Now nothing can be more important than this passage in Aristotle's