The orators had recourse to their
favourite loci communes, one of which, as we find in Lysias, was the
shortness of the time allowed them for preparation. But Socrates points
out that they had them always ready for delivery, and that there was no
difficulty in improvising any number of such orations. To praise the
Athenians among the Athenians was easy,--to praise them among the
Lacedaemonians would have been a much more difficult task. Socrates
himself has turned rhetorician, having learned of a woman, Aspasia, the
mistress of Pericles; and any one whose teachers had been far inferior to
his own--say, one who had learned from Antiphon the Rhamnusian--would be
quite equal to the task of praising men to themselves. When we remember
that Antiphon is described by Thucydides as the best pleader of his day,
the satire on him and on the whole tribe of rhetoricians is transparent.
The ironical assumption of Socrates, that he must be a good orator because
he had learnt of Aspasia, is not coarse, as Schleiermacher supposes, but is
rather to be regarded as fanciful. Nor can we say that the offer of
Socrates to dance naked out of love for Menexenus, is any more un-Platonic
than the threat of physical force which Phaedrus uses towards Socrates.
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