|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: afford grounds for assigning a later date. (Compare Tim., Soph., Laws.)
Add to this that the picture of Socrates, though in some lesser
particulars,--e.g. his going without sandals, his habit of remaining within
the walls, his emphatic declaration that his study is human nature,--an
exact resemblance, is in the main the Platonic and not the real Socrates.
Can we suppose 'the young man to have told such lies' about his master
while he was still alive? Moreover, when two Dialogues are so closely
connected as the Phaedrus and Symposium, there is great improbability in
supposing that one of them was written at least twenty years after the
other. The conclusion seems to be, that the Dialogue was written at some
comparatively late but unknown period of Plato's life, after he had
|
