At the beginning of the third book, Plato abruptly asks the question, What is the origin of states?  The answer is, Infinite time.  We have already seen—­in the Theaetetus, where he supposes that in the course of ages every man has had numberless progenitors, kings and slaves, Greeks and barbarians; and in the Critias, where he says that nine thousand years have elapsed since the island of Atlantis fought with Athens—­that Plato is no stranger to the conception of long periods of time.  He imagines human society to have been interrupted by natural convulsions; and beginning from the last of these, he traces the steps by which the family has grown into the state, and the original scattered society, becoming more and more civilised, has finally passed into military organizations like those of Crete and Sparta.  His conception of the origin of states is far truer in the Laws than in the Republic; but it must be remembered that here he is giving an historical, there an ideal picture of the growth of society.

Modern enquirers, like Plato, have found in infinite ages the explanation 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