PLATO. 61 



and garden, adjoining to the groves and grounds which had been 

 bequeathed by Academus or Ecademus to the public, and indeed as it Athens, 

 seems within one common enclosure ; and here he opened a public school 

 for disputation and instruction in philosophy, where he was attended 

 during the remainder of his life by a large concourse of auditors. As His Dia- 

 the earliest productions of Plato after his return from his travels, we ogues 

 should be disposed to mark * The Euthydemus,' * Gorgias,' ' Cratylus/ 

 Io/ ' Thesetetus/ ' The Sophist/ and ' The Parmenides.' ' The 

 Euthydemus ' and ' Gorgias ' may be considered as satirical dramas 

 upon the fashionable sophists and declaimers of the day. In the first 

 of these dialogues the folly of verbal wranglings is admirably exposed, 

 by introducing Socrates as fighting these retailers of subtilty with 

 their own weapons. Absurdities are heaped on absurdities, until the 

 conceited champion of sounds is reduced to a proper sense of his own 

 insignificancy, and that of his art. In ' The Gorgias,' the same method 

 is pursued, to show the vanity of that art which was taught for 

 rhetoric in the days of Plato. The inutility of words and set phrases, 

 and balanced sentences, without sterling sense and real knowledge, is 

 shown in the amplest manner. Sentences of the fairest structure, with 

 all the changes of cadencies that can be wrung upon them, and 

 crowded with galaxies of imagery, are sifted and subverted by a few 

 plain and direct remarks ; and a homely logic soon strips off the 

 splendid trappings of declamation ; and exposes all the beautiful turns 

 and elegant contrasts of words, as mere jugglers' tricks, which mislead 

 the understanding by tickling the senses. 



The antipathy of Plato to the substitution of sound for sense, and 

 to the artificial mechanism of rhetoric, is well known to have been 

 inveterate. The style of Lysias seems to have been the object of his 

 particular aversion : he parodied it in his ' Phaedrus/ and in * The 

 Gorgias;' and it has been conjectured, with great plausibility, that 

 he pursued the same end covertly in * The Menexenus.' 



' The Cratylus ' is another dialogue, written in exposure tmd confu- 

 tation of the sophists ; but the solemn banter and grave irony used 

 throughout this dialogue in the part of Socrates, have given rise to 

 much misapprehension amongst critics and commentators. The 

 dialogue is throughout refutative of those wranglers, who, as they 

 addicted themselves only to the study of words, had propagated with 

 some complacency a theory of philosophical etymology, and were 

 pleased to think that no names whatever were of arbitrary imposition, 

 but that every word had a sort of mystical propriety. Socrates com- Ridicules the 

 bats this doctrine by adopting it, and by producing the most absurd Jj logies 

 etymons which had been then promulgated. He proceeds, too, in an Sophists, 

 indirect attack on the vulgar mythology, by showing the suitableness 

 of the names of the heathen gods and goddesses to the actions generally 

 imputed to them. He intersperses hyperbolical eulogies on the 

 sophists, with which his hearers are represented to be gratified, as 

 indeed they were rather repetitions of, than parodies upon, the pre- 



