Menexenus | Page 6

The three
dialogues which we have offered in the Appendix to the criticism of the
reader may be partly spurious and partly genuine; they may be
altogether spurious;--that is an alternative which must be frankly
admitted. Nor can we maintain of some other dialogues, such as the
Parmenides, and the Sophist, and Politicus, that no considerable
objection can be urged against them, though greatly overbalanced by
the weight (chiefly) of internal evidence in their favour. Nor, on the
other hand, can we exclude a bare possibility that some dialogues
which are usually rejected, such as the Greater Hippias and the
Cleitophon, may be genuine. The nature and object of these
semi-Platonic writings require more careful study and more comparison
of them with one another, and with forged writings in general, than
they have yet received, before we can finally decide on their character.
We do not consider them all as genuine until they can be proved to be
spurious, as is often maintained and still more often implied in this and
similar discussions; but should say of some of them, that their
genuineness is neither proven nor disproven until further evidence
about them can be adduced. And we are as confident that the Epistles
are spurious, as that the Republic, the Timaeus, and the Laws are

genuine.
On the whole, not a twentieth part of the writings which pass under the
name of Plato, if we exclude the works rejected by the ancients
themselves and two or three other plausible inventions, can be fairly
doubted by those who are willing to allow that a considerable change
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
by
Plato (see Appendix I above)
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
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 Athens is hardly mentioned.
The author of the Menexenus, whether Plato or not, is evidently
intending to ridicule the practice, and at the same time to show that he
can beat the rhetoricians in their own line, as in the Phaedrus he may be
supposed to offer an example of what Lysias might have said, and of
how much better he might have written in his own style. The orators
had recourse to their favourite loci communes, one of which, as we find
in Lysias, was the shortness of the time allowed them for preparation.
But Socrates points out that they had them always ready for delivery,
and that there was no difficulty in improvising any number