Of all existing constitutions that of Sparta approached nearest to the ideal of Plato, or, rather, he regarded it as the least degraded. He liked the conservatism of the Spartans, their rigid discipline, their haughty courage, the participation of their daughters in gymnastic exercises, the austerity of their manners, and their respect for old age; but he found much to censure both in their ancient customs and in the characteristics which the possession of empire had recently developed among them. He speaks with disapproval of their exclusively military organisation, of their contempt for philosophy, and of the open sanction which they gave to practices barely tolerated at Athens. And he also comments on their covetousness, their harshness to inferiors, and their haste to throw off the restraints of the law whenever detection could be evaded.[124] So far we have spoken as if Plato regarded the various false polities existing around him as so many fixed and disconnected types. This, however, was not the case. The present state of things was bad enough, but it threatened to become worse wherever worse was possible. The constitutions exhibiting a mixture of good and evil contained within themselves the seeds of a further corruption, and tended to pass into the form standing next in order on the downward slope. Spartan timocracy must in time become an oligarchy, to oligarchy would succeed democracy, and this would end in tyranny, beyond which no further fall was possible.[125] The degraded condition of Syracuse seemed likely to be the last outcome of Hellenic civilisation. We know not how far the gloomy forebodings of Plato may have been justified by his own experience, but he sketched with prophetic insight the future fortunes of the Roman Republic. Every phase of the progressive degeneration is exemplified in its later history, and the order of their succession is most faithfully preserved. Even his portraits of individual timocrats, oligarchs, demagogues, and despots are reproduced to the life in the pages of Plutarch, of Cicero, and of Tacitus.