Page:The works of Plato, A new and literal version, (vol 6) (Burges, 1854).djvu/434

422 pursue their conversation during the hours of noon, till the sun grows lower and the heat becomes more mild.

We may nearly fix the year when this conversation is supposed to have happened. Lysias was now at Athens; he arrived there from Thurii in Italy in the forty-seventh year of his age, Ol. 92, 1. Euripides is also mentioned as still in the city; he left it to go into Macedonia, Ol. 92, 4, and, consequently, it must have happened in some year of that Olympiad, probably the 2nd or 3rd, and Plato must have written it in less than ten years afterwards, for his Lysis was written before the death of Socrates, which was Ol. 95, 1, but the Phædrus was still earlier, being his first composition; so he was between twenty and twenty-nine years of age.

P. 231, §12. In my request.] What he desired, will appear but too plainly in the course of these little orations, and must appear a most strange subject of conversation for Socrates, to all who are unacquainted with the manners of Greece. The President de Montesquieu has observed, but too justly, on the nature of their love and gallantry. Esprit des Loix, v. 1. See also Xenoph. Œconomic and Symposium; and the Symposium of Plato; see also de Legib. i. 636.

P. 231, §13. The law.] There were, indeed, laws of great seventy in Athens against this vice; but who should put them in force in such general and shocking depravity?

P. 235. Nothing from myself. Παρά γε ἐμαυτοῦ οὐδὲν.] It is observable, that Socrates, whenever he would discourse affirmatively on any subject, or when he thought proper to raise and adorn his style, does it not in his own person, but assumes the character of another, Thus, for instance, he relates the beautiful fable between Virtue and Pleasure after Prodicus; he treats of the miseries of human life in the words of the same sophist; he describes the state of souls after death from the information of Gobryas, one of the Magi; he makes a panegyric on wine in the style of Gorgias; and here he does not venture to display his eloquence, till the Nymphs and the Muses have inspired him. This is consistent with that character of simplicity and of humility which he assumed.

P. 241. Ὁστράκου μεταπεσόντος.] A proverb, taken from a game in use among children, called Ὁστρακίνδα, described by Jul. Pollux, ix. 154, and by Eustathius. They were divided into two parties, which fled or pursued each other alternately, as the chance of a piece of broken potsherd, thrown up into the air, determined it: the boy who threw it cried out Νὺξ ἥ Ἠμέρα if the black (or pitched) side came uppermost, his party ran away, and the other gave them chase; if the white one, the others ran, and they pursued them. Hence Ὁστράκου Περιστροφὴ was used to describe a total reverse of fortune. Erasmus, in his Adagia, has not explained it well.

P. 257. A pleasant bend.] Erasmus explains it in his Adagia,