in which they are clothed, and the statements already quoted, Phæd. 114 D, Gorg. 523 A, seem expressly intended to guard. See the observations of Zeller on this subject, Phil. der Griechen, II. 266, and Brandis, Handbuch, II. 442, foll.: also Prof. Thompson's note in Butler's Hist. Phil. II. 246, whose interpretation of Plato's meaning appears to coincide exactly with my own.

On the foundation of the universal belief in a future state, the proofs of it, and the arguments derivable from it, see Cicero, Tusc. Quæst. I. 12-15.

OF the DRAMATIS PERSONÆ,

GORGIAS is a pompous and dignified but courteous old gentleman of about 75 or 80-as to the exact date of his birth the authorities vary; Clinton, Fast. Hell., sub annis 427 and 459, inclines to the year 485 B.C.; Foss, De Gorgia Leontino, and others place it five years later-with a great deal of simple and harmless vanity, fully alive to the splendour of his own reputation and the extent of his acquirements, of which he reminds us ever and anon in the course of conversation, but at the same time with a most gracious condescension for the ignorance and infirmities of his inferiors-that is, of all the rest of the world. He is treated with great respect by Socrates in consideration of his venerable age and distinction, and after a short conversation, in which he defends his art by the ordinary arguments and finally contradicts himself, is allowed to sink into a dignified repose, from which he only emerges for an instant whenever a dignus vindice nodus calls for the interposition of such a godlike personage. On the hypothesis which fixes the scenic date of the dialogue in the year 405 B. C. he is now staying at Athens on a second visit.

POLUS is his disciple and famulus, young hot and impetuous, véos kai džús, forward and conceited to the very verge of presumption-extremely like Thrasymachus in the Republic, whose general views of life and conduct coincide pretty nearly with his own-and quite unable to understand a distinction or see a difficulty. He has caught all the graces and affectations of his master's new prose style, and has all Gorgias' ostentation without his courtesy and moderation in expressing himself. And so he plays his part1.

1 Of Polus' intellectual character and opinions something more has been said in the Introduction, pp. xxxvi. and xl, foll.

CHÆREPHON is the familiar and constant attendant of Socrates, whose pale face and slovenly exterior are so well known to us from Aristophanes' Clouds, where his manners habits and pursuits are caricatured for the amusement of the Athenian play-goers. His part in this dialogue is confined to a very few short sentences. In the Charmides, the only other of Plato's dialogues in which he is introduced, he is treated in the same way, and is little more than a wov πρόσωπον. All that we learn of him from that work is that he was of an eager and enthusiastic temper, which procures for him the epithet of μανικός.

The character of CALLICLES is much more fully exhibited to us, and is therefore of a more composite order than any of the preceding. He is a man of good family and position in Athenian society, which entitles him to look down with a very lofty scorn upon all professional people and mechanical occupations; see p. 512 c. He seems to be a young man from the half patronising politeness and affectionately derisive tone with which Socrates occasionally addresses him. His temper is ambitious; he regards honour and distinction and power as the highest good; thinks that a man's own advancement is the true object of life, and that this is to be sought at his country's expense by ingratiating himself with the governing mob and thus obtaining office and authority. As a means of attaining this end he vaunts the new art of Rhetoric, the artificer of persuasion, as the only study worthy of a man of sense; philosophy, the rival pursuit recommended by Socrates, he deems only fit for a child, as a training and preparation for the more serious business of public life. He is much clearer-headed and sharper-witted than the juvenile and half-educated Polus, though eventually he has to succumb to the irresistible cogency of the Socratic dialectics. He dislikes contradiction and defeat, and is apt to turn sulky and stubborn, as well as to have recourse to underhand subterfuges, (so Bonitz, op. cit. p. 267) when shown to be in the wrong, and always displays a good deal

of petulance and a bold freedom sometimes almost amounting to effrontery. Finally he has imbibed either from his master Gorgias, or rather perhaps (for we have no evidence for the former supposition) from the Athenian freethinkers of the day1—see Rep. II. 358 E. foll., where the exposition of these doctrines is prefaced with a paol,—the ethical theory that might is the only right, that a man's own interest and advantage is the only true end and rule of life, to which he gives expression in its most undisguised and offensive form and in the most uncompromising terms.

Lastly, SOCRATES is—the Platonic Socrates; perhaps the completest and most highly finished portrait in the entire range of dramatic literature of one of the most extraordinary men, hero, saint (saint after the fashion of the fifth century before Christ), philosopher, that ever dignified human nature and puzzled his contemporaries; and no where more graphically and skilfully represented than in this dialogue with all his odd peculiarities, his humour, his never-failing good-temper, his mock humility, his pretence of ignorance, his scrupulous politeness and affected deference for those whom he is all the while turning into ridicule, his irony' in a word—a term which as Aristotle hints took its special sense from these very peculiarities in Socrates' ordinary mannerlastly with his real heroism, his unyielding firmness and strength of resolution, and above all that gigantic intellectual power which enabled him as Xenophon says, (Memor. I. 2. 14) "to do just what he pleased with any body in argument."

This is not the place to enter into any details about the person manners and character of Socrates, which have been so often and so ably described by others, by none more ably

1 The word paol in the Republic is perfectly indefinite and we are not told whether it was any particular class of persons that held and propagated these doctrines; but all the evidence we have upon the subject induces me to believe that they were originated by one of the Sophists, the Freethinkers of the day in religion and morals, Protagoras or Thrasymachus or others, one of whom actually states the theory as I have endeavoured to show, whilst it agrees perfectly with the known opinions of Protagoras and others of the early Sophists.

than by Mr Grote, Hist. of Greece, Vol. VIII. 68, and I will therefore only add one single observation; what must be thought of the genius of the writer who could place such a character in all its strength so fully and vividly before us that the Socrates of two thousand years ago is to us as one whom we have seen and heard and conversed with? who has presented the scenes in which he always plays the principal part with such perfect liveliness and fidelity that we seem ourselves to be looking on and listening to the argument as it turns and winds through its devious course, and find it hard to believe that such a drama as the Phædo, or the Symposium, or the Phædrus, or the Gorgias, is after all nothing but a fiction, and a 'Philosophical Dialogue'?