The question, how much in these wonderful dialogues is Socratic and how much Platonic, can never be fully answered. From the sober, pious, prosaic-minded Xenophon we have a sketch of Socrates’ life, and a report of numerous conversations. The sketch is apparently truthful, and evidently most inadequate. Neither the love nor the hate inspired by that unique life can be sufficiently explained from the Xenophontic “Memorabilia.” Plato’s “Apology,” though a masterpiece of self-concealing art, contains nothing which Socrates could not or may not have said before his judges: and we have every reason to believe that Plato was actually present during the trial. On the other hand, the equally famous and vivid “Phædo” describes the sage’s last day, surrounded in the prison by his faithful disciples, and assuring them of the soul’s immortality: but in this case Plato’s own absence through illness is noted in the text itself. The argument in the “Phædo” shows wide philosophic thought and study, and includes largely doctrines which are generally believed to be Plato’s own. But at any rate such a dialogue as the “Timæus” can contain little that is truly Socratic. The master himself utterly condemned the childish guesses of his age at astronomical truths and physical science generally, and constantly advised whole-hearted devotion to the practical problems of man’s soul and moral nature. Yet in the “Timæus,” as in the grand myth which closes the “Republic,” there is an elaborate hypothesis as to the form and significance of the universe, with an attempt to explain from it the whole nature and destiny of man.
The general fact, then, is clear, that Plato, surviving his master some fifty years, lived his own life of unresting mental activity and wondrous growth, yet always retained in writing the conversational form of his own personal teaching: and, almost to the end, retained also that most picturesque central figure in all discussions: thus proclaiming his obligation, for all he had acquired, to the original inspiration of Socrates. So Dante’s Beatrice, a chief saint in heaven, has the features, the name, even the nature, of the child and maid so well beloved at nine and at twenty. Such loyalty does not lessen the claim of either poet or philosopher to originality and to direct inspiration from the highest sources.
