nge
and growth may have taken place in his philosophy (see above). That
twentieth debatable portion scarcely in any degree affects our judgment
of Plato, either as a thinker or a writer, and though suggesting some
interesting questions to the scholar and critic, is of little importance
to the general reader.

MENEXENUS

INTRODUCTION.

The Menexenus has more the character of a rhetorical exercise than any
other of the Platonic works. The writer seems to have wished to emulate
Thucydides, and the far slighter work of Lysias. In his rivalry with the
latter, to whom in the Phaedrus Plato shows a strong antipathy, he is
entirely successful, but he is not equal to Thucydides. The Menexenus,
though not without real Hellenic interest, falls very far short of
the rugged grandeur and political insight of the great historian. The
fiction of the speech having been invented by Aspasia is well sustained,
and is in the manner of Plato, notwithstanding the anachronism which
puts into her mouth an allusion to the peace of Antalcidas, an event
occurring forty years after the date of the supposed oration. But
Plato, like Shakespeare, is careless of such anachronisms, which are not
supposed to strike the mind of the reader. The effect produced by these
grandiloquent orations on Socrates, who does not recover after having
heard one of them for three days and more, is truly Platonic.

Such discourses, if we may form a judgment from the three which are
extant (for the so-called Funeral Oration of Demosthenes is a bad and
spurious imitation of Thucydides and Lysias), conformed to a regular
type. They began with Gods and ancestors, and the legendary history of
Athens, to which succeeded an almost equally fictitious account of later
times. The Persian war usually formed the centre of the narrative; in
the age of Isocrates and Demosthenes the Athenians were still living on
the glories of Marathon and Salamis. The Menexenus veils in panegyric
the weak places of Athenian history. The war of Athens and Boeotia is
a war of liberation; the Athenians gave back the Spartans taken at
Sphacteria out of kindness--indeed, the only fault of the city was too
great kindness to their enemies, who were more honoured than the friends
of others (compare Thucyd., which seems to contain the germ of the
idea); we democrats are the aristocracy of virtue, and the like. These
are the platitudes and falsehoods in which history is disguised. The
taking of