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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: Phaedrus, the Republic, the Phaedo, or the Gorgias, but may be more aptly
compared with the didactic tale in which Protagoras describes the fortunes
of primitive man, or with the description of the gradual rise of a new
society in the Third Book of the Laws. Some discrepancies may be observed
between the mythology of the Statesman and the Timaeus, and between the
Timaeus and the Republic. But there is no reason to expect that all
Plato's visions of a former, any more than of a future, state of existence,
should conform exactly to the same pattern. We do not find perfect
consistency in his philosophy; and still less have we any right to demand
this of him in his use of mythology and figures of speech. And we observe
that while employing all the resources of a writer of fiction to give
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