Statesman | Page 8

open air.
Such was the age of Cronos, and the age of Zeus is our own. Tell me,
which is the happier of the two? Or rather, shall I tell you that the
happiness of these children of Cronos must have depended on how they
used their time? If having boundless leisure, and the power of
discoursing not only with one another but with the animals, they had
employed these advantages with a view to philosophy, gathering from
every nature some addition to their store of knowledge;--or again, if
they had merely eaten and drunk, and told stories to one another, and to
the beasts;--in either case, I say, there would be no difficulty in
answering the question. But as nobody knows which they did, the
question must remain unanswered. And here is the point of my tale. In
the fulness of time, when the earthborn men had all passed away, the
ruler of the universe let go the helm, and became a spectator; and

destiny and natural impulse swayed the world. At the same instant all
the inferior deities gave up their hold; the whole universe rebounded,
and there was a great earthquake, and utter ruin of all manner of
animals. After a while the tumult ceased, and the universal creature
settled down in his accustomed course, having authority over all other
creatures, and following the instructions of his God and Father, at first
more precisely, afterwards with less exactness. The reason of the
falling off was the disengagement of a former chaos; 'a muddy vesture
of decay' was a part of his original nature, out of which he was brought
by his Creator, under whose immediate guidance, while he remained in
that former cycle, the evil was minimized and the good increased to the
utmost. And in the beginning of the new cycle all was well enough, but
as time went on, discord entered in; at length the good was minimized
and the evil everywhere diffused, and there was a danger of universal
ruin. Then the Creator, seeing the world in great straits, and fearing that
chaos and infinity would come again, in his tender care again placed
himself at the helm and restored order, and made the world immortal
and imperishable. Once more the cycle of life and generation was
reversed; the infants grew into young men, and the young men became
greyheaded; no longer did the animals spring out of the earth; as the
whole world was now lord of its own progress, so the parts were to be
self-created and self-nourished. At first the case of men was very
helpless and pitiable; for they were alone among the wild beasts, and
had to carry on the struggle for existence without arts or knowledge,
and had no food, and did not know how to get any. That was the time
when Prometheus brought them fire, Hephaestus and Athene taught
them arts, and other gods gave them seeds and plants. Out of these
human life was framed; for mankind were left to themselves, and
ordered their own ways, living, like the universe, in one cycle after one
manner, and in another cycle after another manner.
Enough of the myth, which may show us two errors of which we were
guilty in our account of the king. The first and grand error was in
choosing for our king a god, who belongs to the other cycle, instead of
a man from our own; there was a lesser error also in our failure to
define the nature of the royal functions. The myth gave us only the
image of a divine shepherd, whereas the statesmen and kings of our
own day very much resemble their subjects in education and breeding.

On retracing our steps we find that we gave too narrow a designation to
the art which was concerned with command- for-self over living
creatures, when we called it the 'feeding' of animals in flocks. This
would apply to all shepherds, with the exception of the Statesman; but
if we say 'managing' or 'tending' animals, the term would include him
as well. Having remodelled the name, we may subdivide as before, first
separating the human from the divine shepherd or manager. Then we
may subdivide the human art of governing into the government of
willing and unwilling subjects--royalty and tyranny--which are the
extreme opposites of one another, although we in our simplicity have
hitherto confounded them.
And yet the figure of the king is still defective. We have taken up a
lump of fable, and have used more than we needed. Like statuaries, we
have made some of the features out of proportion, and shall lose time in
reducing them. Or our mythus may be compared to a picture, which is
well drawn in outline, but is not yet enlivened by