ABSTRACT
THE dialogues which we have still to consider all reveal themselves, by steady approximation to the style characteristic of the Laws, as belonging to the latest period of Plato's activity as a writer. In particular they all agree linguistically in the adoption of a number of the stylistic graces of Isocrates, particularly the artificial avoidance of hiatus, a thing quite new in the prose of Plato. They also agree, as regards their form, in two important respects. All of them are formal expositions of doctrine by a leading character speaking with authority; the part of the other speakers is merely to assent, and there is no longer any thoroughly dramatic eliciting of truth from the clash of mind with mind; in every case, except that of the Philebus where there is a good reason for the exception, Socrates is allowed to fall into the background, and in the Laws he is absent. To account for so marked a change in manner even from the Theaetetus and Parmenides, it seems necessary to suppose a reasonably long interval of interruption in Plato's literary activity, and if, as we have seen reason to think, the Theaetetus was composed just before Plato's visit to Syracuse in the year 367, we can account for the interruption by the known facts of his life. From 367 down to at least 361–360, the year of Plato's second and longer sojourn with Dionysius II and his final resolution to take no further direct part in the affairs of Syracuse, he must have been too fully occupied in other ways to have much time for composition. We must probably, therefore, think of this whole group of latest dialogues as written in the thirteen last years of Plato's life, 360–348/7. Since the Sophistes and Politicus attach themselves outwardly to the Theaetetus, and the former, in fact, contains the critical examination of Eleatic principles which that dialogue had half promised, it is reasonable to hold, as most recent critics do, that the Sophistes opens the series. The curious state of the text of the Laws—it is not permissible to account for it by the arbitrary assumption that our MSS. are less trustworthy for the Laws than for other works—seems to show that the work had never received the author's final revision. Thus Plato's activity as a writer has no assignable terminus ad quem earlier than his death. Beyond this, we have no special evidence by which to date the composition of the individual dialogues. The main thing which is clear about the whole group is that Plato felt that the logical, cosmological, and juristic matter with which they deal could not be handled by Socrates without a gross violation of historical truth; hence the selection of other characters to play the principal part, except in the Philebus, which deals with the same ethical problems we have already met in the Gorgias and Republic as the “speciality” of Socrates. 1
