Dialogues of Plato

is no such prohibition; and yet to this day the Carthaginians have never had a revolution. It is absurd, too, for him to say that an oligarchy is two cities, one of the rich, and the other of the poor. Is not this just as much the case in the Spartan constitution, or in any other in which either all do not possess equal property, or in which all are not equally good men? Nobody need be any poorer than he was before, and yet the oligarchy may change all the same into a democracy, if the poor form the majority; and a democracy may change into an oligarchy, if the wealthy class are stronger than the people, and the one are energetic, the other indifferent. Once more, although the causes of revolutions are very numerous, he mentions only one,k which is, that the citizens become poor through dissipation and debt, as though he thought that all, or the majority of them, were originally rich. This is not true: though it is true that when any of the leaders lose their property they are ripe for revolution; but, when anybody else, it is no great matter. And an oligarchy does not more often pass into a democracy than into any other form of government. Again, if men are deprived of the honors of State, and are wronged, and insulted, they make revolutions, and change forms of government, even although they have not wasted their substance because they might do what they liked-of which extravagance he declares excessive freedom to be the cause.

Finally, although there are many forms of oligarchies and democracies, Socrates speaks of their revolutions as though there were only one form of either of them.

j Rep. viii. 551 D.

k Ibid., 555 D.

/ Ibid., 564.

CHOICE EXAMPLES OF CLASSIC SCULPTURE.

DIONYSOS.

Photogravure from the marble head in the Capitoline Museum at Rome.

Dionysos, the word fit, ba. and by ethemette good of wine, was also called Baccht, both by Grecks and Romanse Plat

originally only.

and Semele,4

one of the gre

man the prepa

wor hipe
of Dionys