Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/130

 Q. TEICHMULLEB, LITERARISCHE FEHDEN, ETC. 119 reputation by saying that Socrates had never been so highly praised as by his would-be accuser Polycrates, who had clumsily fabricated the story of Alcibiades's being taught by Socrates, we can understand why Plato, speaking under the mask of Socrates, was disposed to resist these slanders, and on the one hand to write his Phaedo, on the other to use the occasion of his inves- tigations into the being of love or of philosophy, in the Symposium, for an exposition of the relations between Socrates and Alci- biades." Prof. Teichmuller's method may fairly stand or fall by this instance. Anyone who accepts it here will find little diffi- culty in its other results ; will acquiesce in the dating of the Phaedrus considerably later than the Republic, and in the deter- mination of date for the Protagoras by the mention of peltasts, who must be Iphicrates's peltasts, because the allusion thus gains in point ; nor will he shrink from the conclusion that Dionysodorus, in the Euthydemus, is Lysias. True, the very Germans have been surprised at this (the " many surprises " which his re- searches offer being mentioned with pardonable pride by Prof. Teichmiiller himself), but then it is only because they do not see that (1) Plato meant to hit Antisthenes through Lysias ; (2) Diogenes Laertius quotes Antisthenes as calling himself Taai- ff-rtKo-; ; (3) the name Dionysodorus is that of a teacher of strategy in Xenophon's Memorabilia (iii. 1, 1) ; and (4) therefore Lysias must be Dionysodorus. One more step, and we shall find ourselves accepting the result that Plato is (the phrase would lose by translation) a " deutlich bestimmtfis Centrum von Co-ordina- tionen " (ii. 9). The labour and ingenuity which these speculative combina- tions show will probably have the effect called stimulating on some readers : it is useful now and then to ask questions that can have no answer, or even to get answers to them. More readers perhaps will be deterred by the curious self-assertion, and hos- tility to holders of different opinions from his own, which Prof. Teichmiiller does not care to repress. One might almost fancy that in the subjectivity of his method he has read himself into Plato ; and that his own constant polemic has filled the fourth century B.C., in "unlimited perspective," with a good deal of the "literary feud " he there discovers. ALFBED GOODWIN.