The best elucidation of these difficult passages will be found in the notes and appendix to Book viii.

in J.Adam's edition of the Republic (1902).] He conceives his own Utopian aristocracy as having existed somewhere towards the beginning of the period of the world's relapse, when things were not so bad, [Footnote: Similarly he places the ideal society which he describes in the Critias 9000 years before Solon.

The state which he plans in the Laws is indeed imagined as a practicable project in his own day, but then it is only a second-best.

The ideal state of which Aristotle sketched an outline (Politics, iv.

v.) is not set either in time or in place.] and exhibits its gradual deterioration, through the successive stages of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and despotism.