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. They
began with Gods and ancestors, and the legendary history of Athens, to
which succeeded an almost equally fictitious account of later times. The
Persian war usually formed the centre of the narrative; in the age of
Isocrates and Demosthenes the Athenians were still living on the glories of
Marathon and Salamis. The Menexenus veils in panegyric the weak places of
Athenian history. The war of Athens and Boeotia is a war of liberation;
the Athenians gave back the Spartans taken at Sphacteria out of kindness--
indeed, the only fault of the city was too great kindness to their enemies,
who were more honoured than the friends of others (compare Thucyd., which
seems to contain the germ of the idea); we democrats are the aristocracy of
virtue, and the like. These are the platitudes and falsehoods in which
history is disguised. The taking of Athens is hardly mentioned.

The author of the Menexenus, whether Plato or not, is evidently intending
to ridicule the practice, and at the same time to show that he can beat the