esteemed a virtue, has superseded all the rest. In the second stage of
decline the virtues have altogether disappeared, and the love of gain
has succeeded to them; in the third stage, or democracy, the various
passions are allowed to have free play, and the virtues and vices are
impartially cultivated. But this freedom, which leads to many curious
extravagances of character, is in reality only a state of weakness and
dissipation. At last, one monster passion takes possession of the whole
nature of man--this is tyranny. In all of them excess--the excess first
of wealth and then of freedom, is the element of decay.

The eighth book of the Republic abounds in pictures of life and fanciful
allusions; the use of metaphorical language is carried to a greater
extent than anywhere else in Plato. We may remark,

(1), the description of the two nations in one, which become more and
more divided in the Greek Republics, as in feudal times, and perhaps
also in our own;

(2), the notion of democracy expressed in a sort of Pythagorean formula
as equality among unequals;

(3), the free and easy ways of men and animals, which are characteristic
of liberty, as foreign mercenaries and universal mistrust are of the
tyrant;

(4), the proposal that mere debts should not be recoverable by law is a
speculation which has often been entertained by reformers of the law
in modern times, and is in harmony with the tendencies of modern
legislation. Debt and land were the two great difficulties of the
ancient lawgiver: in modern times we may be said to have almost, if not
quite, solved the first of these difficulties, but hardly the second.

Still more remarkable are the corresponding portraits of individuals:
there is the family picture of the father and mother and the old servant
of the timocratical man, and the outward respectability and inherent
meanness of the oligarchical; the uncontrolled licence and freedom of
the democrat, in which the young Alcibiades seems to be depicted, doing
right or wrong as he pleases, and who at last, like the prodigal,
goes into a far country (note here the play of language by which the
democratic man is himself represented under the image of a State having
a citadel and receiving embassies); and there is the wild-beast nature,
which breaks loose in his successor. The hit about the tyrant being a
parricide; the representation of the tyrant's life as an obscene dream;
the rhetorical surprise of a more miserable