Statesman

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.