are forgeries. (Compare Bentley's Works (Dyce's
Edition).) Of all documents this class are the least likely to be
preserved and the most likely to be invented. The ancient world swarmed
with them; the great libraries stimulated the demand for them; and at a
time when there was no regular publication of books, they easily crept
into the world.

(b) When one epistle out of a number is spurious, the remainder of
the series cannot be admitted to be genuine, unless there be some
independent ground for thinking them so: when all but one are spurious,
overwhelming evidence is required of the genuineness of the one: when
they are all similar in style or motive, like witnesses who agree in the
same tale, they stand or fall together. But no one, not even Mr. Grote,
would maintain that all the Epistles of Plato are genuine, and very few
critics think that more than one of them is so. And they are clearly all
written from the same motive, whether serious or only literary. Nor is
there an example in Greek antiquity of a series of Epistles, continuous
and yet coinciding with a succession of events extending over a great
number of years.

The external probability therefore against them is enormous, and the
internal probability is not less: for they are trivial and unmeaning,
devoid of delicacy and subtlety, wanting in a single fine expression.
And even if this be matter of dispute, there can be no dispute that
there are found in them many plagiarisms, inappropriately borrowed,
which is a common note of forgery. They imitate Plato, who never
imitates either himself or any one else; reminiscences of the Republic
and the Laws are continually recurring in them; they are too like
him and also too unlike him, to be genuine (see especially Karsten,
Commentio Critica de Platonis quae feruntur Epistolis). They are full of
egotism, self-assertion, affectation, faults which of all writers Plato
was most careful to avoid, and into which he was least likely to
fall. They abound in obscurities, irrelevancies, solecisms, pleonasms,
inconsistencies, awkwardnesses of construction, wrong uses of words.
They also contain historical blunders, such as the statement respecting
Hipparinus and Nysaeus, the nephews of Dion, who are said to 'have been
well inclined to philosophy, and well able to dispose the mind of their
brother Dionysius in the same course,' at a time when they could not
have been more than six or seven years of age--also foolish allusions,