|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: they will be found to furnish evidence against themselves. The Seventh,
which is thought to be the most important of these Epistles, has affinities
with the Third and the Eighth, and is quite as impossible and inconsistent
as the rest. It is therefore involved in the same condemnation.--The final
conclusion is that neither the Seventh nor any other of them, when
carefully analyzed, can be imagined to have proceeded from the hand or mind
of Plato. The other testimonies to the voyages of Plato to Sicily and the
court of Dionysius are all of them later by several centuries than the
events to which they refer. No extant writer mentions them older than
Cicero and Cornelius Nepos. It does not seem impossible that so attractive
a theme as the meeting of a philosopher and a tyrant, once imagined by the
|
