IT was not until after the exercise of long and complex consideration, that the final resolution was taken of following the example of two great masters in the art of criticism, and striking the Hipparchus out of the list of dialogues belonging to Plato; for the object which an intelligent reader can discover in the dialogue, is Platonic enough. This is, to treat the love of the good, as love of gain, or as self-interest, a notion very closely connected with those well-known propositions that there is nothing useful but the good, and that when men embrace the bad they do so only in error. Hence it might be very easy to believe that it was Plato’s purpose to start also from this idea appertaining to common life as he did from that of discretion and courage, and thus to penetrate to the central point of his philosophy. As it is also the case that this notion is very well calculated to be projected into that higher and genuinely ethical theory relating to the love of the good. This favourable view of the dialogue appears to be still more corroborated by a passage almost at the end, pretty clearly alluding to a further extension of the principles and views brought forward in what has preceded. Accordingly it might be thought that this dialogue, like the former, is constructed upon a design of Plato; in such a manner however that only a small part of it was executed, which might at the most have borne the same relation to the whole as conceived by Plato, as in the Lysis the preliminary dialogue does to the rest. An example the more applicable in the present case, because it is just from the kind of discussion the idea of the good there receives, that the transition to an extension of it like that in the Hipparchus may very easily be conceived. Except indeed that what is there hinted of the idea of the useful proclaims itself to be far more Platonic than what we have here in the Hipparchus. The dialogue would then be a small fragment of which the commencement is wanting, and whose present conclusion must have been added by a very unskilful hand. For no intelligent reader will be able to discover in any thought of Plato’s, however cursorily expressed, any ground for believing him capable of annexing such a termination, nor would any one with even the slightest insight into the plan of the dialogue think of concluding or interrupting it thus. And quite as little is it Plato’s custom to break in with such a beginning; for even the Menon, notwithstanding that he there begins with the main question, is not without its introduction. Meanwhile, even though we would ascribe the beginning and the end of the dialogue to a strange hand, whose mutilation and mischief it may not be very easy to repair, the dialogue itself, we shall find, receives but too little assistance from this favourable view. For, firstly, that connection with other Platonic ideas, which is to save the piece, is never even in the slightest degree forthcoming, and the supposition of the existence of a higher ethical object, or a genuine dialectic treatment, has no foundation in anything but good-nature; since there is no dialogue of Plato, take it where you will, such that, if a portion co-extensive with the Hipparchus were selected or compiled out of it, the main branch to which that portion belongs might not be recognised by any one from infallible tokens. On the contrary, the Hipparchus as we have it, is connected with no other dialogue of Plato whatever, and is so far from being unworthy of its insignificant and unplatonic ending, that the unfavourable prejudice which the two extremities at once excite against it never meets with anything effectually calculated to remove it. For the dialectics which it exhibits are a tedious and lame performance, always revolving upon the same point on which it was fixed at the commencement, without making a single step in advance. And even supposing the plan of the dialogue to have been designed with far more enlarged views, who could think of ascribing to Plato that digression about the Pisistratidæ, with which so much that is not to the purpose is mixed up, and which could not have contributed even in the slightest degree to any conceivable object whatever of the whole, so that it might rather be looked upon as a specimen of antiquarian knowledge produced by some sophist who wished to display his erudition. But above all the Hipparchus is denounced by the total absence of that which in the general preface, with the assent it is hoped of every reader, was mentioned as a test of Platonic dialogues, I mean, the individualizing of the persons who are interlocutors with Socrates. For there is not a single trace to be found here, whether internal or external, which might indicate more accurately anything about the interlocutor. Nay even the most external condition, the mention of his name, is not satisfied by a single notice of it throughout the dialogue; so that the prefix of a name to his conversation seems to be only the addition of some old copyist or perhaps grammarian, who was surprised by this unusual circumstance, while the title of the dialogue seems only to have come from that digression about the Pisistratidæ. Thus much at least may be easily shown, that if Plato composed the dialogue, this man was not called Hipparchus with his consent. For how in such a case would Socrates even at the very first mention of the Pisistratid have abstained from noticing the similarity of his name to that of the interlocutor? Certainly on no supposition whatever. But the introduction of a quite indefinite and anonymous person is not only completely at variance with the nature of the Platonic dialogue, but here in particular it would have been very easy for him to select extremely appropriate characters out of those already used by him on other occasions. So that, every thing duly considered, not even a plan of Plato’s can have been in existence according to which some other writer has worked; for the plan must have contained the first outline, upon which the suitability of the person for the dialogue rested. On the other hand, the marks of an imitator, and a very poor one too, will be pointed out frequently enough in particular instances by the notes, in order to confirm the sentence of rejection from this side also, although even here only some points are indicated while the rest is left to the private observation of the philological reader. The notion from which the dialogue starts could not well be rendered otherwise than by gewinnsucht (avarice,) although in common life this word does not bear so bad a signification as the Greek one. For the essential characteristic of eagerly seeking to gain in trifles is more strongly implied in that word than in any other, and moreover the opposition to the ethical notion of love for the good cannot strike the ear too strongly as far as the purpose of the dialogue is concerned.
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