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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: pedantic reasoning of the rhetoricians newly imported from Sicily, which
had ceased to be awakened in them by really great works, such as the odes
of Anacreon or Sappho or the orations of Pericles. That the first speech
was really written by Lysias is improbable. Like the poem of Solon, or the
story of Thamus and Theuth, or the funeral oration of Aspasia (if genuine),
or the pretence of Socrates in the Cratylus that his knowledge of philology
is derived from Euthyphro, the invention is really due to the imagination
of Plato, and may be compared to the parodies of the Sophists in the
Protagoras. Numerous fictions of this sort occur in the Dialogues, and the
gravity of Plato has sometimes imposed upon his commentators. The
introduction of a considerable writing of another would seem not to be in
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