age" of simplicity, from which man had fallen away, was
generally accepted as truth; and leading thinkers combined it with
the doctrine of a gradual sequence of social and material improvements
[Footnote: In the masterly survey of early Greek history which
Thucydides prefixed to his work, he traces the social progress of the
Greeks in historical times, and finds the key to it in the increase of
wealth.] during the subsequent period of decline. We find the two
views thus combined, for instance, in Plato's Laws, and in the earliest
reasoned history of civilisation written by Dicaearchus, a pupil of
Aristotle. [Footnote: Aristotle's own view is not very clear. He thinks
that all arts, sciences, and institutions have been repeatedly, or
rather an infinite number of times (word in Greek) discovered in the
past and again lost. Metaphysics, xi. 8 ad fin.; Politics, iv. 10,
cp. ii. 2. An infinite number of times seems to imply the doctrine of
cycles.] But the simple life of the first age, in which men were not
worn with toil, and war and disease were unknown, was regarded as
the ideal State to which man would lie only too fortunate if he could
return. He had indeed at a remote time ill the past succeeded in
ameliorating some of the conditions of his lot, but such ancient
discoveries as fire or ploughing or navigation or law-giving did
not suggest the guess that new inventions might lead ultimately to
conditions in which life would be more complex but as happy as the
simple life of the primitive world.

But, if some relative progress might be admitted, the general view of
Greek philosophers was that they were living in a period of inevitable
degeneration and decay--inevitable because it was prescribed by the
nature of the universe. We have only an imperfect knowledge of the
influential speculations of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles, but
we may take Plato's tentative philosophy of history to illustrate the
trend and the prejudices of Greek thought on this subject. The world was
created and set going by the Deity, and, as his work, it was perfect;
but it was not immortal and had in it the seeds of decay. The period of
its duration is 72,000 solar years. During the first half of this period
the original uniformity and order, which were impressed upon it by the
Creator, are maintained under his guidance; but then it reaches a point
from which it begins, as it were, to roll back; the Deity has loosened
his grip of the machin