same motive, whether serious or only literary. Nor is there an example in
Greek antiquity of a series of Epistles, continuous and yet coinciding with
a succession of events extending over a great number of years.

The external probability therefore against them is enormous, and the
internal probability is not less: for they are trivial and unmeaning,
devoid of delicacy and subtlety, wanting in a single fine expression. And
even if this be matter of dispute, there can be no dispute that there are
found in them many plagiarisms, inappropriately borrowed, which is a common
note of forgery. They imitate Plato, who never imitates either himself or
any one else; reminiscences of the Republic and the Laws are continually
recurring in them; they are too like him and also too unlike him, to be
genuine (see especially Karsten, Commentio Critica de Platonis quae
feruntur Epistolis). They are full of egotism, self-assertion,
affectation, faults which of all writers Plato was most careful to avoid,
and into which he was least likely to fall. They abound in obscurities,
irrelevancies, solecisms, pleonasms, inconsistencies, awkwardnesses of
construction, wrong uses of words. They also contain historical blunders,
such as the statement respecting Hipparinus and Nysaeus, the nephews of
Dion, who are said to 'have been well inclined to philosophy, and well able
to dispose the mind of their brother Dionysius in the same course,' at a
time when they could not have been more than six or seven years of age--
also foolish allusions, such as the comparison of the Athenian empire to
the empire of Darius, which show a spirit very different from that of
Plato; and mistakes of fact, as e.g. about the Thirty Tyrants, whom the
writer of the letters seems to have confused with certain inferior
magistrates, making them in all fifty-one. These palpable errors and
absurdities are absolutely irreconcileable with their genuineness. And as
they appear to have a common parentage, the more they are studied, the more
they will be found to furnish evidence against themselves. The Seventh,