Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/334

 310 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE Plato could still write (709 f.) : " Give me a tyrant-governed city to form our community from ; let the tyrant be young, docile y brave, temperate, and so far fortunate as to have at his side a true thinker and lawgiver!' That is just at the end of the first half of. the long work: the Laxvs must have taken years in writing, and there is a demonstrable change of style after Book IV. In the second half we have nothing more of Plato's hopes for a kingdom of this world, unless we connect with them that sad passage where he faces and accepts a doctrine that he would have denied with his last breath ten years before — that there is, after all, an Evil World-Soul ! (p. 896). The other writings of the late period are pure philosophy. The Sophistes and Politicus are sequels to the Thecetetus; they follow in method the unattractive 'dichotomy' of the Parmenides. The Sophistes is a demonstration of the reality of Not-Being, the region in which the Sophist, who essentially Is-Not whatever he professes to be, has his existence. The Philcbus, an inquiry into the Good — it is neither Knowledge nor Pleasure, but has more analogy to Knowledge — is remarkable for conducting its metaphysics without making use of the so-called Theory of Ideas ; its basis is the union of Finite and Infinite, of Plurality and Unity. It appears from the statistics of language to have been composed at the same time as the first half of the Laws. The Timceus, on the origin of the world, and the Critias, on that of human society, go with the second half of the Laivs. The Timceus is either the most definitely futile, or the least understood of Plato's specu- lations ; an attempt to construct the physical world out of abstract geometrical elements, instead of the atoms of Democritus. The Critias fragment treats of the glory