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4. We remark with surprise that the progress of nations or the

natural growth of institutions which fill modern treatises on

political philosophy seem hardly ever to have attracted the

attention of Plato and Aristotle. The ancients were familiar with

the mutability of human affairs; they could moralize over the

ruins of cities and the fall of empires (Plato, Statesman, and

Sulpicius' Letter to Cicero); by them fate and chance were deemed

to be real powers, almost persons, and to have had a great share

in political events. The wiser of them like Thucydides believed

that 'what had been would be again,' and that a tolerable idea of

the future could be gathered from the past. Also they had dreams

of a Golden Age which existed once upon a time and might still

exist in some unknown land, or might return again in the remote

future.