would have had more point, if we were
acquainted with the writings against which Plato's humour is directed.
Most of the jests appear to have a serious meaning; but we have lost the
clue to some of them, and cannot determine whether, as in the Cratylus,
Plato has or has not mixed up purely unmeaning fun with his satire.

The two discourses of Socrates may be contrasted in several respects
with the exhibition of the Sophists: (1) In their perfect relevancy to
the subject of discussion, whereas the Sophistical discourses are wholly
irrelevant: (2) In their enquiring sympathetic tone, which encourages
the youth, instead of 'knocking him down,' after the manner of the
two Sophists: (3) In the absence of any definite conclusion--for while
Socrates and the youth are agreed that philosophy is to be studied, they
are not able to arrive at any certain result about the art which is to
teach it. This is a question which will hereafter be answered in the
Republic; as the conception of the kingly art is more fully developed in
the Politicus, and the caricature of rhetoric in the Gorgias.

The characters of the Dialogue are easily intelligible. There is
Socrates once more in the character of an old man; and his equal in
years, Crito, the father of Critobulus, like Lysimachus in the Laches,
his fellow demesman (Apol.), to whom the scene is narrated, and who once
or twice interrupts with a remark after the manner of the interlocutor
in the Phaedo, and adds his commentary at the end; Socrates makes
a playful allusion to his money-getting habits. There is the youth
Cleinias, the grandson of Alcibiades, who may be compared with Lysis,
Charmides, Menexenus, and other ingenuous youths out of whose mouths
Socrates draws his own lessons, and to whom he always seems to stand in
a kindly and sympathetic relation. Crito will not believe that Socrates
has not improved or perhaps invented the answers of Cleinias (compare
Phaedrus). The name of the grandson of Alcibiades, who is described as
long dead, (Greek), and who died at the age of forty-four, in the year
404 B.C., suggests not only that the intended scene of the Euthydemus
could not have been earlier than 404, but that as a fact this Dialogue
could not have been composed before 390 at the soonest. Ctesippus,
who is the lover of Cleinias, has been already introduced to us in the
Lysis, and seems there too to deserve the character which is here given
him, of a somewhat uproarious young man. B