Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/29

 PLATO 11 brought dishonor both upon himself and upon the Academy. Nevertheless, he lived to the age of eighty, and died in 348-347 B.C., leaving a competent prop- erty, which he bequeathed by a will still extant. But his foundation, the Acad emy, did not die with him. It passed to his nephew Speusippus, who succeeded him as teacher, conductor of the school, or scholarch, and was himself succeeded after eight years by Xenocrates of Chalcedon ; while another pupil of the Acad- emy, Aristotle, after an absence of some years from Athens, returned thither and established a school of his own at the Lyceum, at another extremity of the city. The latter half of Plato's life in his native city must have been one of dignity and consideration, though not of any political activity. He is said to have ad- dressed the Dicastery as an advocate for the accused general Chabrias ; and we are told that he discharged the expensive and showy functions of Choregus with funds supplied by Dion. Out of Athens also his reputation was very great. When he went to the Olympic festival of b.c. 360 he was an object of conspic- uous attention and respect ; he was visited by hearers, young men of rank and ambition, from the most distant Hellenic cities. Such is the sum of our information respecting Plato. Scanty as it is we have not even the advantage of contemporary authority for any portion of it. We have no description of Plato from any contemporary author, friendly or adverse. It will be seen that after the death of Socrates we know nothing about Plato as a man and a citizen, except the little which can be learned from his few epistles, all written when he was very old and relating almost entirely to his peculiar re- lations with Dion and Dionysius. His dialogues, when we try to interpret them collectively, and gather from them general results as to the character and pur- poses of the author, suggest valuable arguments and perplexing doubts, but yield few solutions. In no one of the dialogues does Plato address us in his own per- son. In the Apology alone (which is not a dialogue) is he alluded to even as present ; in the Phaedon he is mentioned as absent from illness. Each of the dialogues, direct or indirect, is conducted from beginning to end by the per- sons whom he introduces. Not one of the dialogues affords any positive internal evidence showing the date of its composition. In a few there are allusions to prove that they must have been composed at a period later than others, or later than some given event of known date ; but nothing more can be positively es- tablished. Nor is there any good extraneous testimony to determine the date of any one among them ; for the remark ascribed to Socrates about the dialogue called Lysis (which remark, if authentic, would prove the dialogue to have been composed during the lifetime of Socrates) appears altogether untrustworthy. And the statement of some critics, that the Phasdrus was Plato's earliest com- position, is clearly nothing more than an inference (doubtful at best, and in my judgment erroneous) from its dithyrambic style and erotic subject.