[21]. V. the Cratylus, passim.
[22]. V. Hippias Minor.
[23]. There is not the slightest evidence for assigning the Rhetoric called ad Alexandrum, and variously attributed to Aristotle and Anaximenes, to any pre-Aristotelian writer, least of all for giving it to Corax himself.
[24]. Not only have we not this: we have practically nothing of Tynnichus. His page in Bergk (iii. 379) is blank, except for the phrase which Plato himself quotes: εὕρημά τι Μοισᾶν—“a windfall of the Muses.” Of a very commonplace distich about Agamemnon’s ship, quoted by Procopius, we may apparently relieve him.
[25]. 534 D.
[26]. If the space and treatment here allotted to Plato seem exceeding poor and beggarly, it can but be urged that his own criticism of literature is so exceedingly general that in this book no other treatment of it was possible. On his own principles we should be “praising the horse in terms of the ass” if we did otherwise. It is true that besides the attitude above extolled, there are to be found, from the glancing, many-sided, parabolic discourse of the Phædrus to the mighty theory of the Republic, endless things invaluable, nay, indispensable, to the critic. It is nearly certain that, as Professor Butcher thinks, no one had anticipated him in the recognition of the organic unity necessary to a work of literary, as of all, art. But even here, as in the messages “to Lysias and all others who write orations, to Homer and all others who write poems, to Solon, &c.,” we see the generality, the abstraction, the evasiveness, one may almost say, of his critical gospel. Such concrete things as the reference to Isocrates at the end of the Phædrus are very rare; and, on the other hand, his frequent and full dealings with Homer are not literary criticism at all. In a treatise on Æsthetics Plato cannot have too large a space; in a History of Criticism the place allotted to him must be conspicuous, but the space small.
[27]. This passage, which is twenty-five lines long, is from the play Chiron, and may be found at p. 110 of the Didot edition of Meineke’s Poet. Com. Græc. Fragmenta. Egger (p. 40) only gives it in translation. It is not in the least literary but wholly musical in subject, Music appearing in person and complaining of the alteration of the lyre from seven strings to twelve.
[28]. Thus we find it constantly in the Middle Ages, where pure criticism is still almost unknown.
[29]. See Egger (p. 73), who as usual makes a little too much of it. The original may be found in Athenæus (at the opening of Bk. vi. 222 a: vol. i. p. 485, ed. Dindorf), where it is followed by a burlesque encomium on tragedy from the comic poet Timocles, or in Meineke, ed. cit., p. 397.
[30]. As the Greek is not in some editions of Meineke’s Fragments, and is not given by Egger at all, while his translation is very loose, it will be best to quote it in full from the former’s edition of Stobæus' Florilegium, ii. 352:—