What was the outcome of these observations on the family structure of savages, and of the speculations as to their ‘naturalness’ or the reverse? The answer is given, I think, when we look into the fourth century, and find Socrates, the last of the pre-Socratics, propounding in the _Republic_, and justifying by chapter and verse in the _Laws_, the unnaturalness, because the uselessness or inexpediency, of patriarchal society as the Greeks knew it. From Athenian politics patriarchal considerations had been eliminated in theory a century before, by that amazing revolutionary, Cleisthenes; but socially the father still owned and ruled his children; and children paid divided allegiance to their father and to the state. As presented in the _Republic_ the Socratic argument has little about it that is anthropological; the appeal is to horses and dogs, not to Sarmatians; but the actual institutions of the Ideal State, the annual mating-festivals, the κομψοὶ κλῆροι by which status is allotted to each infant after inspection by the governors, the whole classificatory system of relationship, are one and all to be found among the curious νόμοι which we know to have been recorded by the anthropologists of the century before; and recorded, too, with the definite intention of discovering what their causes were, and what were the reasons assigned for those customs by the people who practised and understood them. It is against such speculations as these, of course, and in particular against the Socratic attempt to make Amazons and Nasamonians rise up in judgement against this generation, that Aristotle was moved to restate in the first section of the _Politics_ the orthodox sociology of patriarchal Greece. That in the middle of the fourth it should have been possible for a serious person to maintain the paradox φύσει ἀρχικὸς πατὴρ υἱῶν without instant refutation by the members of his classroom, is a measure of the extent to which the followers of Socrates (though, as we have seen, not Socrates himself) had broken with the fifth-century naturalists, and perhaps even ceased to read them. But it is a measure also of the extent to which an able dialectician could make play with words like φύσις and νόμος, till it almost appeared as if any one who had any νόμοι to speak of represented a παρέκβασις from the φύσει ἄνθρωπος. No amount of _a priori_ argument as to the superior strength, or intelligence, or sheer ‘superiority’ of the human male, could obliterate the fact that here women ruled, there they fought, elsewhere they did the work instead of the man, or, bar the reflection, that it was the business of an editor of συνηγμέναι πολιτεῖαι to collect these human institutions too, before generalizing; and, in general, to distinguish τὸ παρὰ φύσιν from τὸ παράδοξον.