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* In Themistocles, Op. i. p. 440. *The Ionian and Eleatic sages.ANCIENT GREECE.[CHAP. xiv.obey, but love their magistrates that it was ; necessary togrow accustomed even in boyhood to regard order and harmony as beautiful and useful, disorder arid confusion ashateful and injurious," From the fragments of the writingsof the early Pythagoreans, as of Archytas, Diotogenes, andthat they were not blindly atHippodamus/ we perceivetached to a single form of government ;but only insistedthat there should be no unlawful tyranny.Where a royalgovernment existed, kings should be subject to the laws,and act only as the chief magistrates. 2 They regarded amixed constitution as the best ;and although they were farfrom desiring unlimited democracies, they desired quite aslittle unlimited aristocracies ;but even where the administration resided principally in the hands of the upper class,they reserved a share of it for the people. 3Though the political agency of the society terminated withits dissolution, the Pythagorean lessons by no means becameextinct.They were extended through Greece with the writings of the Pythagoreans, who were paid with high prices but;in that country they gained political importance, only so faras they contributed to the education of individual distinguished men. Of these, we need only to mention Epaminonclas.In Greece, the sophists are generally considered to havebeen the first, who applied philosophy to political science,which then became a subject of scientific instruction. YetPlutarch, in a remarkable passage, 4 speaks of a politicalschool which had been kept up in Athens, from the time ofSolon." Themistocles," says he, " could not have been apupil of Anaxagoras, as some contend. He was a discipleof Mnesiphilus, who was neither an orator, nor one of thephysical philosophers 5 ;but who was employed on that kindof wisdom, which consists in political skill and practicalsagacity, and which, from the time of Solon, had been preserved as in a school." That a man like Solon should havegathered around himself a circle which he made acquaintedwith his thoughts and maxims, was not only natural, but1Meiners considers all these writings as not genuine. His reasoning however does not apply to the political fragments, which are to be found in cap.xii. and xlm.r* See in particular the fragments of Archytas. Serm.8xliv. p. 314.Compare the fragment of Diotogenes, cap. xlvi. p. 329