Note 39 — Chapter XXII · MENON.

Sokrates here calls this problem an ἐριστικὸς λόγος. Stallbaum (in his Prolegom. to the Menon, p. 14) describes it as a “quæstiunculam, haud dubie e sophistarum disciplinâ arreptam”. If the Sophists were the first to raise this question, I think that by doing so they rendered service to the interests of philosophy. The question is among the first which ought to be thoroughly debated and sifted, if we are to have a body of “reasoned truth“ called philosophy.

I dissent from the opinion of Stallbaum (p. 20), though it is adopted both by Socher (Ueber Platon, p. 185) and by Steinhart (Einleitung zum Menon, p. 123), that the Menon was composed by Plato during the lifetime of Sokrates. Schleiermacher (Einleitung zum Gorgias, p. 22; Einleitung zum Menon, pp. 329-330), Ueberweg (Aechth. Plat. Schr. p. 226), and K. F. Hermann, on the other hand, regard the Menon as composed after the death of Sokrates, and on this point I agree with them, though whether it was composed not long after that event (as K. F. Hermann thinks) or thirteen years after it (as Schleiermacher thinks), I see no sufficient grounds for deciding. I incline to the belief that its composition is considerably later than Hermann supposes; the mention of the Theban Ismenias is one among the reasons rendering such later origin probable. Plato probably borrowed from the Xenophontic Anabasis the name, country, and social position of Menon, who may have received teaching from Gorgias, as we know that Proxenus did, Xen. Anab. ii. 6, 16. The reader can compare the Einleitung of Schleiermacher (in which he professes to prove that the Menon is a corollary to the Theætêtus and Gorgias, and an immediate antecedent to the Euthydêmus, — that it solves the riddle of the Protagoras — and that it presupposes and refers back to the Phædrus) with the Einleitung of Steinhart (p. 120 seq.), who contests all these propositions, saying that the Menon is decidedly later than the Euthydêmus, and decidedly earlier than the Theætêtus, Gorgias, and Phædrus; with the opinions of Stallbaum and Hermann, who recognise an order different from that either of Steinhart or Schleiermacher; and with that of Ast, who rejects the Menon altogether as unworthy of Plato. Every one of these dissentient critics has something to say for his opinion, while none of them (in my judgment) can make out anything like a conclusive case. The mistake consists in assuming that there must have been a peremptory order and intentional interdependence among the Platonic Dialogues, and next in trying to show by internal evidence what that order was.