r in such good company as in the Phaedrus and Symposium.
Manners are lost sight of in the earnestness of the speakers, and
dogmatic assertions take the place of poetical fancies.

The scene is laid in Crete, and the conversation is held in the course
of a walk from Cnosus to the cave and temple of Zeus, which takes place
on one of the longest and hottest days of the year. The companions start
at dawn, and arrive at the point in their conversation which terminates
the fourth book, about noon. The God to whose temple they are going is
the lawgiver of Crete, and this may be supposed to be the very cave
at which he gave his oracles to Minos. But the externals of the scene,
which are briefly and inartistically described, soon disappear, and we
plunge abruptly into the subject of the dialogue. We are reminded by
contrast of the higher art of the Phaedrus, in which the summer's day,
and the cool stream, and the chirping of the grasshoppers, and the
fragrance of the agnus castus, and the legends of the place are present
to the imagination throughout the discourse.

The typical Athenian apologizes for the tendency of his countrymen
'to spin a long discussion out of slender materials,' and in a similar
spirit the Lacedaemonian Megillus apologizes for the Spartan brevity
(compare Thucydid.), acknowledging at the same time that there may be
occasions when long discourses are necessary. The family of Megillus is
the proxenus of Athens at Sparta; and he pays a beautiful compliment to
the Athenian, significant of the character of the work, which, though
borrowing many elements from Sparta, is also pervaded by an Athenian
spirit. A good Athenian, he says, is more than ordinarily good, because
he is inspired by nature and not manufactured by law. The love of
listening which is attributed to the Timocrat in the Republic is also
exhibited in him. The Athenian on his side has a pleasure in speaking to
the Lacedaemonian of the struggle in which their ancestors were jointly
engaged against the Persians. A connexion with Athens is likewise
intimated by the Cretan Cleinias. He is the relative of Epimenides,
whom, by an anachronism of a century,--perhaps arising as Zeller
suggests (Plat. Stud.) out of a confusion of the visit of Epimenides
and Diotima (Symp.),--he describes as coming to Athens, not after the
attempt of Cylon, but ten years before the Persian war. The Cretan and
Lacedaemonian hardly contribute at all to the argument of which the