ess and the life of the spirit; to
be good men, as we can be if we will, and to know that all else will
follow.

This is one of the regions in which the ancients might have learned much
from us, and in which we still have much to learn from them, if once we
can shake off our temporal obsessions and listen.

NOTE

As an example it is worth noticing, even in a bare catalogue, the work
done by one of Aristotle's own pupils, a Peripatetic of the second
rank, Dicaearchus of Messene. His _floruit_ is given as 310 B. C. Dorian
by birth, when Theophrastus was made head of the school he retired to
the Peloponnese, and shows a certain prejudice against Athens.

One of the discoveries of the time was biography. And, by a brilliant
stroke of imagination Dicaearchus termed one of his books +Bios
Hellados+, _The Life of Hellas_. He saw civilization as the biography of
the world. First, the Age of Cronos, when man as a simple savage made no
effort after higher things; next, the ancient river-civilizations of
the orient; third, the Hellenic system. Among his scanty fragments we
find notes on such ideas as +patra+, +phratria+, +phyle+, as Greek
institutions. The _Life of Hellas_ was much used by late writers. It
formed the model for another +Bios Hellados+ by a certain Jason, and for
Varro's _Vita Populi Romani_.

Then, like his great master, Dicaearchus made studies of the
Constitutions of various states (e. g. Pellene, Athens, and Corinth);
his treatise on the Constitution of Sparta was read aloud annually in
that city by order of the Ephors. It was evidently appreciative.

A more speculative work was his _Tripoliticus_, arguing that the best
constitution ought to be compounded of the three species, monarchic,
aristocratic, and democratic, as in Sparta. Only then would it be sure
to last. Polybius accepted the principle of the Mixed Constitution, but
found his ideal in the constitution of Rome, which later history was to
prove so violently unstable. Cicero, _De Republica_, takes the same line
(Polyb. vi. 2-10; Cic. _De Rep._ i. 45; ii. 65). Dicaearchus treated of
similar political subjects in his public addresses at Olympia and at the
Panathenaea.

We hear more about his work on the history of literature, though his
generation was almost the first to realize that such a subject had any
existence. He wrote _Lives of Philosophers_--a subject hitherto not
considered worth recording--giving the biographical facts followed by
ph