ry other
excellent invention of political or any other sort of wisdom have
utterly disappeared?

CLEINIAS: Why, yes, my friend; and if things had always continued as
they are at present ordered, how could any discovery have ever been
made even in the least particular? For it is evident that the arts were
unknown during ten thousand times ten thousand years. And no more than
a thousand or two thousand years have elapsed since the discoveries of
Daedalus, Orpheus and Palamedes,--since Marsyas and Olympus invented
music, and Amphion the lyre--not to speak of numberless other inventions
which are but of yesterday.

ATHENIAN: Have you forgotten, Cleinias, the name of a friend who is
really of yesterday?

CLEINIAS: I suppose that you mean Epimenides.

ATHENIAN: The same, my friend; he does indeed far overleap the heads
of all mankind by his invention; for he carried out in practice, as you
declare, what of old Hesiod (Works and Days) only preached.

CLEINIAS: Yes, according to our tradition.

ATHENIAN: After the great destruction, may we not suppose that the state
of man was something of this sort:--In the beginning of things there was
a fearful illimitable desert and a vast expanse of land; a herd or two
of oxen would be the only survivors of the animal world; and there might
be a few goats, these too hardly enough to maintain the shepherds who
tended them?

CLEINIAS: True.

ATHENIAN: And of cities or governments or legislation, about which we
are now talking, do you suppose that they could have any recollection at
all?

CLEINIAS: None whatever.

ATHENIAN: And out of this state of things has there not sprung all that
we now are and have: cities and governments, and arts and laws, and a
great deal of vice and a great deal of virtue?

CLEINIAS: What do you mean?

ATHENIAN: Why, my good friend, how can we possibly suppose that those
who knew nothing of all the good and evil of cities could have attained
their full development, whether of virtue or of vice?

CLEINIAS: I understand your meaning, and you are quite right.

ATHENIAN: But, as time advanced and the race multiplied, the world came
to be what the world is.

CLEINIAS: Very true.

ATHENIAN: Doubtless the change was not made all in a moment, but little
by little, during a very long period of time.

CLEINIAS: A highly probable supposition.

ATHENIAN: At first, they would have a natural fear ringing in their ears
which would prevent their descending