Note 92 — Chapter XXVI · PHÆDRUS — SYMPOSION.

Cicero, De Oratore, iii. 35, 141; Orator. 19, 62; Numenius, ap. Euseb. Præp. Evang. xiv. 6, 9. See Stahr, Aristotelia, i. p. 63 seq., ii. p. 44 seq.

Schroeder’s Quæstiones Isocrateæ (Utrecht, 1859), and Spengel’s work, Isokrates und Plato, are instructive in regard to these two contemporary luminaries of the intellectual world at Athens. But, unfortunately, we can make out few ascertainable facts. When I read the Oration De Permut., Or. xv. (composed by Isokrates about fifteen years before his own death, and about five years before the death of Plato, near 353 B.C.), I am impressed with the belief that many of his complaints about unfriendly and bitter criticism refer to the Platonic School of that day, Aristotle being one of its members. See sections 48-90-276, and seq. He certainly means the Sokratic men, and Plato as the most celebrated of them, when he talks of οἱ περὶ τὰς ἐρωτήσεις καὶ ἀποκρίσεις, οὓς ἀντιλογικοὺς καλοῦσιν — οἱ περὶ τὰς ἔριδας σπουδάζοντες — those who are powerful in contentious dialectic, and at the same time cultivate geometry and astronomy, which others call ἀδολεσχία and μικρολογία (280) — those who exhorted hearers to virtue about which others knew nothing, and about which they themselves were in dispute. When he complains of the περιττολόγιαι of the ancient Sophists, Empedokles, Ion, Parmenides, Melissus, &c., we cannot but suppose that he had in his mind the Timæus of Plato also, though he avoids mention of the name.