Page:The Dialogues of Plato v. 1.djvu/27



Rh Greek antiquity of a series of Epistles, continuous and yet coinciding with a succession of events extending over a great number of years.

The external probability therefore against them is enormous, and the internal probability is not less : for they are trivial and unmeaning, devoid of delicacy and subtlety, wanting in a single fine expression. And even if this be matter of dispute, there can be no dispute that there are found in them many plagiarisms, inappropriately borrowed, which is a common note of forgery (compare 330 C foil, with Rep. iv. 425 E, 426 B, vi. 488 A: 347 E with Phaedrus 249 D : 326 A, B and 328 A with Rep. v. 473 C, D, &c.). They imitate Plato, who never imitates either himself or any one else ; reminiscences of the Republic and the Laws are continually recurring in them; they are too like him and also too unlike him, to be genuine {see especially Karsten, Commentatio Critica de Platonis quae feruntur Epistolis, p. iii foil.). They are full of egotism, self-assertion, affectation, faults which of all writers Plato was most careful to avoid, and into which he was least likely to fall (ib. p. 99 foil.). They abound in obscurities, irrelevancies, solecisms, pleonasms, inconsist- encies (ib. p. 96 foil.), awkwardnesses of construction, wrong uses of words (ib. pp. 58, 59, 117, 121). They also contain historical blunders, such as the statement respect- ing Hipparinus and Nysaeus, the nephews of Dion (328 A), who are said to ' have been well inclined to philo- sophy, and well able to dispose the mind of their brother Dionysius in the same course,' at a time when they could not have been more than six or seven years of age — also foolish allusions, such as the comparison of the Athenian empire to the empire of Darius (332 A, B), which show a spirit very different from that of Plato ; and