Page:The works of Plato, A new and literal version, (vol 6) (Burges, 1854).djvu/134

 written by a disciple of Plato, and suggests rather that they are the production of some philosopher, who concocted them from a faithless representation of the doctrines promulgated in the Socratic, Stoic, Academic, and Peripatetic schools; and this too with so little judgment, as frequently to give an unintelligible definition, when he might have found an intelligible one elsewhere, as I have shown on various occasions in the notes. Socrates, it is true, as remarked by Menage on Diogenes L. vii. 60, is said by Aristotle in Metaphys. i. 6, and xiii. 4, and Theopompus the rhetorician, quoted by Arrian on Epictetus ii. 17, to have paid considerable attention to Definitions; and this may be inferred from some instances furnished by Xenophon in Memorab. iv. 6. But it is to Zeno and his followers that we must refer the practice of laying down Definitions, as the basis of subsequent discussions. For they were accustomed to apply to moral philosophy the principle they had learnt from the Pythagoreans, as the groundwork of physical philosophy, developed by mathematics, as may be inferred from the Life of Pythagoras by Diogenes; who appeals to Phavorinus to prove that "Pythagoras made use of definitions through his 'Mathematical Wood;' and still more so did Socrates and his followers; and so did Aristotle and the Stoics." Menage too, on Diogen. L. vii. 60, remarks that a mass of such definitions are to be found in the Life of Zeno alone.

To the preceding proofs that the author of the Definitions was some philosopher of Alexandria, may be added those which Cousin has adduced. He remarks that Ἁξίωσις, in the sense of "dignity" or "majesty," does not belong to the period of Plato, nor even to any age of good Greek; and neither does Λογισμὸς σεμόντατος. So too Ἁγάπησις is not a word of Plato or his time; while on the unintelligible definition of the word Ὅνομα, "a noun," he observes that "the language used there is altogether of the Alexandrine school, and is better suited to a treatise by Dionysius the Areopagite than to one attributed to Plato."

G. B.