MENEXENUS
by
Plato (see Appendix I above)
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
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.
Such discourses, if we may form a judgment from the three which are extant
(for the so-called Funeral Oration of Demosthenes is a bad and spurious
imitation of Thucydides and Lysias), conformed to a regular type.
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