principal subjects in the Statesman may be conveniently embraced
under six or seven heads:--(1) the myth; (2) the dialectical interest;
(3) the political aspects of the dialogue; (4) the satirical and
paradoxical vein; (5) the necessary imperfection of law; (6) the
relation of the work to the other writings of Plato; lastly (7), we may
briefly consider the genuineness of the Sophist and Statesman, which
can hardly be assumed without proof, since the two dialogues have
been questioned by three such eminent Platonic scholars as Socher,
Schaarschmidt, and Ueberweg.

I. The hand of the master is clearly visible in the myth. First in the
connection with mythology;--he wins a kind of verisimilitude for this
as for his other myths, by adopting received traditions, of which he
pretends to find an explanation in his own larger conception (compare
Introduction to Critias). The young Socrates has heard of the sun rising
in the west and setting in the east, and of the earth-born men; but he
has never heard the origin of these remarkable phenomena. Nor is Plato,
here or elsewhere, wanting in denunciations of the incredulity of 'this
latter age,' on which the lovers of the marvellous have always delighted
to enlarge. And he is not without express testimony to the truth of his
narrative;--such testimony as, in the Timaeus, the first men gave of the
names of the gods ('They must surely have known their own ancestors').
For the first generation of the new cycle, who lived near the time, are
supposed to have preserved a recollection of a previous one. He also
appeals to internal evidence, viz. the perfect coherence of the tale,
though he is very well aware, as he says in the Cratylus, that there may
be consistency in error as well as in truth. The gravity and minuteness
with which some particulars are related also lend an artful aid. The
profound interest and ready assent of the young Socrates, who is not too
old to be amused 'with a tale which a child would love to hear,' are a
further assistance. To those who were naturally inclined to believe that
the fortunes of mankind are influenced by the stars, or who maintained
that some one principle, like the principle of the Same and the Other
in the Timaeus, pervades all things in the world, the reversal of the
motion of the heavens seemed necessarily to produce a reversal of the
order of human life. The spheres of knowledge, which to us appear wide
asunder as the poles, astronomy and medici