but that we should ‘lift up our eyes to the heavens’ and try to regulate our lives according to the divine image.  The citizens are no longer to have wives and children in common, and are no longer to be under the government of philosophers.  But the spirit of communism or communion is to continue among them, though reverence for the sacredness of the family, and respect of children for parents, not promiscuous hymeneals, are now the foundation of the state; the sexes are to be as nearly on an equality as possible; they are to meet at common tables, and to share warlike pursuits (if the women will consent), and to have a common education.  The legislator has taken the place of the philosopher, but a council of elders is retained, who are to fulfil the duties of the legislator when he has passed out of life.  The addition of younger persons to this council by co-optation is an improvement on the governing body of the Republic.  The scheme of education in the Laws is of a far lower kind than that which Plato had conceived in the Republic.  There he would have his rulers trained in all knowledge meeting in the idea of good, of which the different branches of mathematical science are but the hand-maidens or ministers; here he treats chiefly of popular education, stopping short with the preliminary sciences,—­these are to be studied partly with a view to their practical usefulness, which in the Republic he holds cheap, and even more with a view to avoiding impiety, of which in the Republic he says nothing; he touches very lightly on dialectic, which is still to be retained for the rulers.  Yet in the Laws there remain traces of the old educational ideas.  He is still for banishing the poets; and as he finds the works of prose writers equally dangerous, he would substitute for them the study of his own laws.  He insists strongly on the importance of mathematics as an educational instrument.  He is no more reconciled to the Greek mythology than in the Republic, though he would rather say nothing about it out of a reverence for antiquity; and he is equally willing to have recourse to fictions, if they have a moral tendency.  His thoughts recur to a golden age in which the sanctity of oaths was respected and in which men living nearer the Gods were more disposed to believe in them; but we must legislate for the world as it is, now that the old beliefs have passed away.  Though he is no longer fired with dialectical enthusiasm, he would compel the guardians to ‘look at one idea gathered from many things,’ and to ‘perceive the principle which is the same in all the four virtues.’  He still recognizes the enormous influence of music, in which every youth is to be trained for three years; and he seems to attribute the existing degeneracy of the Athenian state and the laxity of morals partly to musical innovation, manifested in the unnatural divorce of the instrument and the voice, of the rhythm from the words, and partly to the influence of the mob who ruled at the theatres.  He assimilates