In these circumstances, the fact that Peisistratus, whatever his real character may have been, is described as the leader of the most _backward_ section of the population, is entirely in agreement with the rest of the picture. For throughout, in Herodotus’ presentation of him, Peisistratus is the man of paradoxes. His father, before his birth, had accepted the omen of the cauldron spontaneously boiling; the son was to kindle a great fire where there was no light--but only plenty of fuel. So again, Peisistratus, unlike the Sibyl, at each rejection offers Athens more. The rejected party-leader becomes Athena’s man, the man of an united Attica; and Athena’s man, whom Athena’s people expelled, rests not till he can offer, of his own, every corner stone of an Athenian Empire in its greatest days. And so here, again, there is _stasis_ between rich and poor, between primitive and advanced, between sedentary and nomad--so far as nomadism was practicable in Attica; and it is the λεπτὰ τῶν προβάτων, as with Perdiccas and with David, which produce, in due time, the great man. It is a miniature, of course, this sketch of the sixth-century Attica, as befits its modest part in the scheme of the Herodotean drama; but the handling of it is none the less significant, on that account, of the way in which the idea of conflicting νὁμοι is allowed to model and interpret the materials. I have tried, in brief space, to indicate some ways in which our knowledge of the Greek world, fragmentary as it is, enables us to recover some at least of the broad lines of method by which the early history of Man, and the causes of his variations and of his social states, were being investigated in the fifth century and before: and to interpret some of the results which were reached, in the light of the reasoning which led to them, and the principles by which they were interpreted in antiquity. We have seen that in some points Greek anthropology had gone surprisingly far, in speculation, and in acute observation too; and we have seen it baffled, in other directions, by puzzles and mistakes which seem trivial to us. And we have seen, in the particular instance of one who was at the same time a great historian and an alert observer of anthropological fact, something of the way in which pre-Socratic stages of theory worked out when they were applied to research in the hands of an ordinary man. Above all, I have ventured to suggest--what I hope it may be for others to carry forward--an inquiry into the anthropological basis of the political doctrine of Socrates; and so to link him, on this side of his thought, with that great body of naturalist work, which I would gladly believe that he came not to destroy but to fulfil. FOOTNOTES: [64] The Muses were the daughters of Mnemosyne: but who was their Father? [65] Schol. _Od._ xix. 163. [66] _Fr._ 64 (Didot). [67] _Fr._ 25 (Didot). [68] Plut. _De Plac. Phil._ v. 19 (Ritter and Preller, 7th ed., 16).