Pericles's Funeral Oration

Reputation, noteworthiness, celebratable-ness.

You get a notion of what doxa means to Greek politics when you read Pericles' Funeral Oration.

So the notion of art, of artes liberales is whatever fits you to contribute to and participate in the gloria, and that for a pagan is considered to be the temporal human good, the good achievable by human action in this lifetime.

So next slide.

These considerations lead us to adopt the following criteria of genuineness.

1. that is most certainly plato's which aristotle attributes to him by name which two is of considerable length of three great excellence and also for in harmony with the general spirit of the platonic writings but the testimony of aristotle cannot always be distinguished from that of a latter age see above and and has various degrees of importance, those writings which he cites without mentioning Plato, under their own names, e.g. the Hippias, the Funeral Oration, the Phaedo, etc., have an inferior degree of evidence in their favour.

They may have been supposed by him to be the writings of another, although in the case of really great works, e.g. the Phaedo, this is not credible.

those again which are quoted but not named are still more defective in their external credentials there may be also a possibility that aristotle was mistaken or may have confused the master and his scholars in the case of a short writing but this is inconceivable about a more important work e g the laws especially when we remember that he was living at Athens and a frequenter of the groves of the Academy during the last twenty years of Plato's life.

Nor must we forget that in all his numerous citations from the Platonic writings, he never attributes any passage found in the extant dialogues to anyone but Plato.

And lastly, we may remark that one or two great writings, such as the Parmenides and the Politicus, which are wholly devoid of aristotelian one credentials may be fairly attributed to plato on the ground of two length three excellence and four accordance with the general spirit of his writings indeed the greater part of the evidence for the genuineness of ancient greek authors may be summed up under two heads only one excellence and two uniformity of tradition a kind of evidence which though in many cases sufficient is of inferior value proceeding upon these principles we appear to arrive at the conclusion that nineteen twentieths of all the writings which have ever been ascribed to plato are undoubtedly genuine there is another portion of them including the epistles the eponymous the dialogues rejected by the ancients themselves namely the axiochus de justo de virtut demodocus sisyphus eryxias which on grounds both of internal and external evidence we are able with equal certainty to reject but there still remains a small portion of which we are unable to affirm either that they are genuine or spurious they may have been written in youth or possibly like the works of some painters may be partly or wholly the compositions of pupils or they may have been the writings of some contemporary transferred by accident to the more celebrated name of plato or of some platonist in the next generation who aspired to imitate his master not that on grounds either of language or philosophy we should lightly reject them some difference of style or inferiority of execution or inconsistency of thought can hardly be considered decisive of their spurious character for who always does justice to himself or who writes with equal care at all times certainly not plato who exhibits the greatest differences in dramatic power in the formation of sentences and in the use of words if his earlier writings are compared with his later ones say the protagoras or phaedrus with the laws or who can be expected to think in the same manner during a period of authorship extending over above fifty years, in an age of great intellectual activity, as well as of political and literary transition, certainly not Plato, whose earlier writings are separated from his later ones by as wide an interval of philosophical speculation as that which separates his later writings from Aristotle.

The dialogues which have been translated in the first appendix, and which appear to have the next claim to genuineness among the Platonic writings, are the Lesser Hippias, the Menexenus or Funeral Oration, the First Alcibiades.

Of these, the Lesser Hippias and the Funeral Oration are cited by Aristotle, the first in the Metaphysics, the latter in the Rhetoric.

But the testimony of Aristotle cannot always be distinguished from that of a latter age, parentheses, see above, end of parentheses, and has various degrees of importance.

Those writings which he cites without mentioning Plato under their own names, e.g., the Hippias, the Funeral Oration, the Phaedo, etc., have an inferior degree of evidence in their favor.

They may have been supposed by him to be the writings of another, although in the case of really great works, e.g., the Phaedo, this is not credible.

Those, again, which are quoted but not named are still more defective in their external credentials.

If his earlier writings are compared with his later ones, say the Protagoras or Phaedrus with the Laws, or who can be expected to think in the same manner during a period of authorship extending over above fifty years, in an age of great intellectual activity, as well as of political and literary transition.

Certainly not Plato, whose earlier writings are separated from his later ones by as wide an interval of philosophical speculation as that which separates his later writings from Aristotle.

The dialogues which have been translated in the first appendix, and which appear to have the next claim to genuineness among the Platonic writings, are the Lesser Hippias, the Menexenus or Funeral Oration, the First Alcibiades.

Of these, the Lesser Hippias and the Funeral Oration are cited by Aristotle, the first in the Metaphysics, the latter in the Rhetoric.