Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/22

12. Who does not see that this is a stupid matter-of-face misconception of Plato's joke at the beginning of the Gorgias? .

I may remark, by the way, that the Professor seems to have no notion that one piece of evidence differs from another in historical value. He places precisely the same reliance upon an anecdote, whether gleaned from Plutarch, or the Pseudo-Plutarch, or Philostratus, as upon a statement of Thucydides. Now I maintain that these anecdotes cannot possibly be relied on as containing even a nucleus of fact. For on what authority do they come to us? Collected and repeated by the compilers of, who abounded in the Alexandrian and Augustan times, a class of persons who had no more power or inclination to sift fact from fiction than our own Mr Joseph Miller, ""And chewed by blind old Scholiasts o'er and o'er,"" they cannot be converted into history by the endorsement of the most respectable name 600 years after date. They were assignats without assets when firest issued, and it is only by fraud or folly that they are current now. The good sense of Plutarch discards those which bear falsehood on their front; he admits, without enquiry, all which are vraisemblable. It does not follow that we are bound to admit them as true. How seldom we can rely upon an anecdote even of our own time? They are invented for the most part, like fables, as a convenient vehicle for the transmission of a moral lesson or a good saying; sometimes great men, warriors, politicians, authors, are the interlocutors, sometimes lions, foxes, owls; and I no more believe that Pericles and Alcibiades actually said the good things assigned to them, that I accept Phædrus and Lafontaine as historians. Some of the Greek anecdotes probably come from misunderstood jests of comic dramatists; some, perhaps, may have a basic of fact, and be derived from continuous tradition; but which these are we have no means of testing. We may have use of each and all the words Athenæus (p. 506. ) applied to one:.