He has never reflected that without progress there cannot be order, and that mere order can only be preserved by an unnatural and despotic repression.

The possibility of a great nation or of an universal empire arising never occurred to him.

He sees the enfeebled and distracted state of the Hellenic world in his own later life, and thinks that the remedy is to make the laws unchangeable.

The same want of insight is apparent in his judgments about art.

He would like to have the forms of sculpture and of music fixed as in Egypt.