Laws

Ath. Do you consider that there is any truth in the ancient tales?

Clin. What tales?

Ath. That the world of men has often been destroyed by floods, plagues, and many other things, in such a way that only a small portion of the human race has survived.

Clin. Everyone would regard such accounts as perfectly credible.

Ath. Come now, let us picture to ourselves one of the many catastrophes,—namely, that which occurred once upon a time through the Deluge.

Clin. And what are we to imagine about it?

Ath. That the men who then escaped destruction must have been mostly herdsmen of the hills, scanty embers of the human race preserved somewhere on the mountain-tops.

Clin. Evidently.

Ath. Moreover, men of this kind must necessarily have been unskilled in the arts generally, and especially in such contrivances as men use against one another in cities for purposes of greed and rivalry and all the other villainies which they devise one against another.

Clin. It is certainly probable.

Ath. Shall we assume that the cities situated in the plains and near the sea were totally destroyed at the time?

Clin. Let us assume it.

Ath. And shall we say that all implements were lost, and that everything in the way of important arts or inventions that they may have had,—whether concerned with politics or other sciences,— perished at that time? For, supposing that things had remained all that time ordered just as they are now, how, my good sir, could anything new have ever been invented?

Clin. Do you mean that these things were unknown to the men of those days for thousands upon thousands of years, and that one or two thousand years ago some of them were revealed to Daedalus, some to Orpheus, some to Palamedes, musical arts to Marsyas and Olympus, lyric to Amphion, and, in short, a vast number of others to other persons—all dating, so to say, from yesterday or the day before?

Ath. Are you aware, Clinias, that you have left out your friend who was literally a man of yesterday?

Clin. Is it Epimenides you mean?

Ath. Yes, I mean him. For he far outstripped everybody you had, my friend, by that invention of his of which he was the actual producer, as you Cretans say, although Hesiod had divined it and spoken of it long before.

Clin. We do say so.