I believe, on these grounds, that Plato did not publish any dialogues during the life of Sokrates. An interval of fifty-one years separates the death of Sokrates from that of Plato. Such an interval is more than sufficient for all the existing dialogues of Plato, without the necessity of going back to a more youthful period of his age. As to distribution of the dialogues, earlier or later, among these fifty-one years, we have little or no means of judging. Plato has kept out of sight — with a degree of completeness which is really surprising — not merely his own personality, but also the marks of special date and the determining circumstances in which each dialogue was composed. Twice only does he mention his own name, and that simply in passing, as if it were the name of a third person.[70] As to the point of time to which he himself assigns each dialogue, much discussion has been held how far Plato has departed from chronological or historical possibility; how far he has brought persons together in Athens who never could have been there together, or has made them allude to events posterior to their own decease. A speaker in Athenæus[71] dwells, with needless acrimony, on the anachronisms of Plato, as if they were gross faults. Whether they are faults or not, may fairly be doubted: but the fact of such anachronisms cannot be doubted, when we have before us the Menexenus and the Symposion. It cannot be supposed, in the face of such evidence, that Plato took much pains to keep clear of anachronisms: and whether they be rather more or rather less numerous, is a question of no great moment.
[70] In the Apologia, c. 28, p. 38, Sokrates alludes to Plato as present in court, and as offering to become guarantee, along with others, for his fine. In the Phædon, Plato is mentioned as being sick; to explain why he was not present at the last scene of Sokrates (Phædon, p. 59 B). Diog. L. iii. 37.
The pathos as well as the detail of the narrative in the Phædon makes one imagine that Plato really was present at the scene. But being obliged, by the uniform scheme of his compositions, to provide another narrator, he could not suffer it to be supposed that he was himself present.
I have already remarked that this mention of Plato in the third person (Πλάτων δέ, οἶμαι, ἠσθένει) was probably one of the reasons which induced Panætius to declare the Phædon not to be the work of Plato.
[71] Athenæus, v. pp. 220, 221. Didymus also attacked Plato as departing from historical truth — ἐπιφυόμενος τῷ Πλάτωνι ὡς παριστοροῦντι — against which the scholiast (ad Leges, i. p. 630) defends him. Grœn van Prinsterer, Prosopogr. Plat. p. 16. The rhetor Aristeides has some remarks of the same kind, though less acrimonious (Orat. xlvii. p. 435, Dind.) than the speaker in Athenæus.
The Thrasyllean Canon is more worthy of trust than the modern critical theories by which it has been condemned.
I now conclude my enquiry respecting the Platonic Canon. The presumption in favour of that Canon, as laid down by Thrasyllus, is stronger (as I showed in the preceding [chapter]) than it is in regard to ancient authors generally of the same age: being traceable, in the last resort, through the Alexandrine Museum, to authenticating manuscripts in the Platonic school, and to members of that school who had known and cherished Plato himself.[72] I have reviewed the doctrines of several recent critics who discard this Canon as unworthy of trust, and who set up for themselves a type of what Plato must have been, derived from a certain number of items in the Canon — rejecting the remaining items as unconformable to their hypothetical type. The different theories which they have laid down respecting general and systematic purposes of Plato (apart from the purpose of each separate composition), appear to me uncertified and gratuitous. The “internal reasons,” upon which they justify rejection of various dialogues, are only another phrase for expressing their own different theories respecting Plato as a philosopher and as a writer. For my part I decline to discard any item of the Thrasyllean Canon, upon such evidence as they produce: I think it a safer and more philosophical proceeding to accept the entire Canon, and to accommodate my general theory of Plato (in so far as I am able to frame one) to each and all of its contents.
[72] I find this position distinctly asserted, and the authority of the Thrasyllean catalogue, as certifying the genuine works of Plato, vindicated, by Yxem, in his able dissertation on the Kleitophon of Plato (pp. 1-3, Berlin, 1846). But Yxem does not set forth the grounds of this opinion so fully as the present state of the question demands. Moreover, he combines it with another opinion, upon which he insists even at greater length, and from which I altogether dissent — that the tetralogies of Thrasyllus exhibit the genuine order established by Plato himself among the Dialogues.
Unsafe grounds upon which those theories proceed.
Considering that Plato’s period of philosophical composition extended over fifty years, and that the circumstances of his life are most imperfectly known to us — it is surely hazardous to limit the range of his varieties, on the faith of a critical repugnance, not merely subjective and fallible, but withal entirely of modern growth: to assume, as basis of reasoning, the admiration raised by a few of the finest dialogues — and then to argue that no composition inferior to this admired type, or unlike to it in doctrine or handling, can possibly be the work of Plato. “The Minos, Theagês, Epistolæ, Epinomis, &c., are unworthy of Plato: nothing so inferior in excellence can have been composed by him. No dialogue can be admitted as genuine which contradicts another dialogue, or which advocates any low or incorrect or un-Platonic doctrine. No dialogue can pass which is adverse to the general purpose of Plato as an improver of morality, and a teacher of the doctrine of Ideas.” On such grounds as these we are called upon to reject various dialogues: and there is nothing upon which, generally speaking, so much stress is laid as upon inferior excellence. For my part, I cannot recognise any of them as sufficient grounds of exception. I have no difficulty in believing, not merely that Plato (like Aristophanes) produced many successive novelties, “not at all similar one to the other, and all clever”[73] — but also that among these novelties, there were inferior dialogues as well as superior: that in different dialogues he worked out different, even contradictory, points of view — and among them some which critics declare to be low and objectionable: that we have among his works unfinished fragments and abandoned sketches, published without order, and perhaps only after his death.