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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: full of promise. Now it is argued that this must have been written in the
youth of Isocrates, when the promise was not yet fulfilled. And thus we
should have to assign the Dialogue to a year not later than 406, when
Isocrates was thirty and Plato twenty-three years of age, and while
Socrates himself was still alive.
Those who argue in this way seem not to reflect how easily Plato can
'invent Egyptians or anything else,' and how careless he is of historical
truth or probability. Who would suspect that the wise Critias, the
virtuous Charmides, had ended their lives among the thirty tyrants? Who
would imagine that Lysias, who is here assailed by Socrates, is the son of
his old friend Cephalus? Or that Isocrates himself is the enemy of Plato
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