Page:The works of Plato, A new and literal version, (vol 6) (Burges, 1854).djvu/439



This is a continuation of the same subject; for what is said on prayer is rather accidental, and only introductory to the main purpose of the dialogue. It is nothing inferior in elegance to the former. Some have attributed it to Xenophon, but it is undoubtedly Plato's, and designed as a second part to the former.

I could be glad if it were as easy to fix the time of it, as Dacier would persuade us, who boldly fixes it Ol. 93, 1, but there are facts alluded to in it, that will neither be reconciled to that date, nor indeed to one another; and besides, it is better to allow Plato to be guilty of these inaccuracies in chronology, than of those improprieties of character which must be the consequences of Dacier's supposition. It is plain that Socrates continues, as in the preceding discourse, to treat Alcibiades with a certain gentle superiority of understanding, and that he prescribes to, and instructs him in, a manner extremely proper to form the mind of a youth just entering into the world, but ill-bred and impertinent to a man of forty years of age, who had passed through the highest dignities of the state and through the most extraordinary reverses of fortune. Plato himself may convince us of this, by what he makes Socrates say in the first Alcibiades, p. 127, §48: "But now you ought to take courage. For if you had perceived that you were suffering so at the age of fifty, it would have been difficult to take care of yourself. But now you are at the very time of life, when it is meet for you to perceive it."

The principal difficulties are that he speaks of Pericles as yet living, who died Ol. 87, 4, and of the murder of Archelaus king of Macedon as a fact then recent, which did not happen till Ol. 95, 1, the same year with Socrates's death, and near five years after that of Alcibiades.

P. 141. Τα παιδικα.] Cratems conspired with Hellenocrates and De- camnichus to murder that prince, (Archelaus of Macedonia,) as he was hunting. Aristotle calls him Cratæus, and gives a fuller account of this conspiracy than any other author. Aristot. Politic, v. 10. Archelaus had promised him one of his daughters in marriage, for he had two, but gave one to the king of Elimea and the other to his own son Amyntas.