d had begun to shape it into a heroic
poem.

This was the tradition:--Nine thousand years before the time of Solon,
the goddess Athene, who was worshipped also in Sais, had given to her
Athenians a healthy climate, a fertile soil, and temperate people strong
in wisdom and courage. Their Republic was like that which Socrates
imagined, and it had to bear the shock of a great invasion by the people
of the vast island Atlantis. This island, larger than all Libya and Asia
put together, was once in the sea westward beyond the Atlantic
waves,--thus America was dreamed of long before it was discovered.
Atlantis had ten kings, descended from ten sons of Poseidon (Neptune),
who was the god magnificently worshipped by its people. Vast power and
dominion, that extended through all Libya as far as Egypt, and over a
part of Europe, caused the Atlantid kings to grow ambitious and unjust.
Then they entered the Mediterranean and fell upon Athens with enormous
force. But in the little band of citizens, temperate, brave, and wise,
there were forces of Reason able to resist and overcome brute strength.
Now, however, gone are the Atlantids, gone are the old virtues of
Athens. Earthquakes and deluges laid waste the world. The whole great
island of Atlantis, with its people and its wealth, sank to the bottom
of the ocean. The ideal warriors of Athens, in one day and night, were
swallowed by an earthquake, and were to be seen no more.

Plato, a philosopher with the soul of a poet, died in the year 347
before Christ. Plutarch was writing at the close of the first century
after Christ, and in his parallel Lives of Greeks and Romans, the most
famous of his many writings, he took occasion to paint an Ideal
Commonwealth as the conception of Lycurgus, the half mythical or all
mythical Solon of Sparta. To Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus, as well as to
Plato, Thomas More and others have been indebted for some part of the
shaping of their philosophic dreams.

The discovery of the New World at the end of the fifteenth century
followed hard upon the diffusion of the new invention of printing, and
came at a time when the fall of Constantinople by scattering Greek
scholars, who became teachers in Italy, France and elsewhere, spread the
study of Greek, and caused Plato to live again. Little had been heard of
him through the Arabs, who cared little for his poetic method. But with
the revival of learning he had become a force in Europe, a strong aid to
the Ref