Menexenus

By Jowett, Benjamin

Book Id: WPLBN0000651621
Format Type: PDF eBook
File Size: 128.64 KB.
Reproduction Date: 2005

Title:	Menexenus
Author:	Jowett, Benjamin
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Fiction, Literature, Literature & drama
Collections:	Penn State University's Electronic Classics Series Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	Penn State University's Electronic Classics


Citation APA MLA Chicago Jowett, B. (n.d.). Menexenus. Retrieved from http://gutenberg.cc/

Excerpt
Introduction: The Menexenus has more the character of a rhetorical exercise than any other of the Platonic works. The writer seems to have wished to emulate Thucydides, and the far slighter work of Lysias. In his rivalry with the latter, to whom in the Phaedrus Plato shows a strong antipathy, he is entirely successful, but he is not equal to Thucydides. The Menexenus, though not without real Hellenic interest, falls very far short of the rugged grandeur and political insight of the great historian. The fiction of the speech having been invented by Aspasia is well sustained, and is in the manner of Plato, notwithstanding the anachronism which puts into her mouth an allusion to the peace of Antalcidas, an event occurring forty years after the date of the supposed oration. But Plato, like Shakespeare, is careless of such anachronisms, which are not supposed to strike the mind of the reader. The effect produced by these grandiloquent orations on Socrates, who does not recover after having heard one of them for three days and more, is truly Platonic.