d ended their lives among the
thirty tyrants? Who would imagine that Lysias, who is here assailed
by Socrates, is the son of his old friend Cephalus? Or that Isocrates
himself is the enemy of Plato and his school? No arguments can be drawn
from the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the characters of
Plato. (Else, perhaps, it might be further argued that, judging from
their extant remains, insipid rhetoric is far more characteristic of
Isocrates than of Lysias.) But Plato makes use of names which have
often hardly any connection with the historical characters to whom they
belong. In this instance the comparative favour shown to Isocrates may
possibly be accounted for by the circumstance of his belonging to the
aristocratical, as Lysias to the democratical party.

Few persons will be inclined to suppose, in the superficial manner
of some ancient critics, that a dialogue which treats of love must
necessarily have been written in youth. As little weight can be attached
to the argument that Plato must have visited Egypt before he wrote the
story of Theuth and Thamus. For there is no real proof that he ever went
to Egypt; and even if he did, he might have known or invented Egyptian
traditions before he went there. The late date of the Phaedrus will have
to be established by other arguments than these: the maturity of the
thought, the perfection of the style, the insight, the relation to the
other Platonic Dialogues, seem to contradict the notion that it could
have been the work of a youth of twenty or twenty-three years of age.
The cosmological notion of the mind as the primum mobile, and the
admission of impulse into the immortal nature, also afford grounds for
assigning a later date. (Compare Tim., Soph., Laws.) Add to this that
the picture of Socrates, though in some lesser particulars,--e.g. his
going without sandals, his habit of remaining within the walls,
his emphatic declaration that his study is human nature,--an exact
resemblance, is in the main the Platonic and not the real Socrates. Can
we suppose 'the young man to have told such lies' about his master
while he was still alive? Moreover, when two Dialogues are so closely
connected as the Phaedrus and Symposium, there is great improbability in
supposing that one of them was written at least twenty years after the
other. The conclusion seems to be, that the Dialogue was written at
some comparatively late but unknown period of Plato's life, after he had
deserte