spoken it like Plato; and Quintilian—no mean critic—declared that his language soared so far at times above the ordinary prose, that it seemed as if the writer was inspired by the Delphic Oracle. But these very sentences which seem to us to flow so easily, and which we think must have been written currente calamo, were really elaborate in their simplicity; and the anecdote of thirteen different versions of the opening sentence in the "Republic" having been found in the author's handwriting is probably based upon fact.
Up to the age of eighty-one, Plato continued his literary work—"combing, and curling, and weaving, and unweaving his writings after a variety of fashions;"[1] and death, so Cicero tells us, came upon him as he was seated at his desk, pen in hand. He was buried among the olive-trees in his own garden; and his disciples celebrated a yearly festival in his memory.
As might be expected, such a man did not escape satire and detraction even in his own day. To say that he was ridiculed by the comic poets, is merely to say that he paid the penalty common to all eminence at Athens; but he was accused of vanity, plagiarism, and what not, by writers such as Antisthenes and Aristoxenus, whose philosophy might have taught
- ↑ Dionysius of Halicarnassus, quoted in Sewell's Dialogues of Plato, p. 55.
especially the concluding lines; . . . "and withal there must be a sense of felicity about it, declaring it to be the product of a happy moment, so that you feel it will not happen again to that man who writes the sentence, nor to any other of the sons of men, to say the like thing so choicely, tersely, mellifluously, and completely."—Realmah, i. 175.
