ATHENIAN: Such survivors would necessarily be unacquainted with the arts and the various devices which are suggested to the dwellers in cities by interest or ambition, and with all the wrongs which they contrive against one another.
CLEINIAS: Very true.
ATHENIAN: Let us suppose, then, that the cities in the plain and on the sea-coast were utterly destroyed at that time.
CLEINIAS: Very good.
ATHENIAN: Would not all implements have then perished and every other excellent invention of political or any other sort of wisdom have utterly disappeared?
CLEINIAS: Why, yes, my friend; and if things had always continued as they are at present ordered, how could any discovery have ever been made even in the least particular? For it is evident that the arts were unknown during ten thousand times ten thousand years. And no more than a thousand or two thousand years have elapsed since the discoveries of Daedalus, Orpheus and Palamedes,—since Marsyas and Olympus invented music, and Amphion the lyre—not to speak of numberless other inventions which are but of yesterday.
ATHENIAN: Have you forgotten, Cleinias, the name of a friend who is really of yesterday?
CLEINIAS: I suppose that you mean Epimenides.
ATHENIAN: The same, my friend; he does indeed far overleap the heads of all mankind by his invention; for he carried out in practice, as you declare, what of old Hesiod (Works and Days) only preached.
CLEINIAS: Yes, according to our tradition.