lives reversed and were restored to youth and beauty:
the dead came to life, the old grew middle-aged, and the middle-aged
young; the youth became a child, the child an infant, the infant
vanished into the earth. The connection between the reversal of the
earth's motion and the reversal of human life is of course verbal only,
yet Plato, like theologians in other ages, argues from the consistency
of the tale to its truth. The new order of the world was immediately
under the government of God; it was a state of innocence in which men
had neither wants nor cares, in which the earth brought forth all things
spontaneously, and God was to man what man now is to the animals. There
were no great estates, or families, or private possessions, nor any
traditions of the past, because men were all born out of the earth.
This is what Plato calls the 'reign of Cronos;' and in like manner he
connects the reversal of the earth's motion with some legend of which he
himself was probably the inventor.

The question is then asked, under which of these two cycles of existence
was man the happier,--under that of Cronos, which was a state of
innocence, or that of Zeus, which is our ordinary life? For a while
Plato balances the two sides of the serious controversy, which he has
suggested in a figure. The answer depends on another question: What
use did the children of Cronos make of their time? They had boundless
leisure and the faculty of discoursing, not only with one another,
but with the animals. Did they employ these advantages with a view to
philosophy, gathering from every nature some addition to their store
of knowledge? or, Did they pass their time in eating and drinking and
telling stories to one another and to the beasts?--in either case
there would be no difficulty in answering. But then, as Plato rather
mischievously adds, 'Nobody knows what they did,' and therefore the
doubt must remain undetermined.

To the first there succeeds a second epoch. After another natural
convulsion, in which the order of the world and of human life is once
more reversed, God withdraws his guiding hand, and man is left to the
government of himself. The world begins again, and arts and laws are
slowly and painfully invented. A secular age succeeds to a theocratical.
In this fanciful tale Plato has dropped, or almost dropped, the garb of
mythology. He suggests several curious and important thoughts, such
as the possibility of a state of innocence, the e