A FEW words again will suffice to gain assent to the rejection of the Minos as well as the Hipparchus. First, as to the reason for assigning this as its proper place, every reader must see the remarkable similarity between it, and the Hipparchus, which is so great that they seem both of them to have been turned out of the same mould. The beginning breaks in just as violently, and the end breaks off just as weakly and inappropriately, after a new investigation had apparently but just begun. So that even with regard to this sorry performance some persons have quieted themselves with the supposition, that all that is wanting to it is that it should be complete; as if such a design could ever be worked out to any good. Like the Hipparchus, again, the Minos is ornamentally disfigured in the middle by a discussion, not tending at all to advance the main subject, upon a personage of antiquity. And, what is more, this very discussion has equally given the dialogue its name, while the interlocutor is not only divested of all character and circumstance, but also nameless, and can the less be called Minos, as he no where gives even a hint that betrays him to be a stranger, and Minos was never an Athenian name. And further, whoever looks to the tenor and course of the dialogue, will recognize it as unplatonic. Nothing is ever gained by all the abundance of examples, nor anything more accurately defined by comparison with a similar idea; on the contrary, they pass with the most unsocratic carelessness from one idea to another; as from that of certainty to that of opinion, and every thing once said, however useful or tending towards a decision of the question, is always heedlessly abandoned. So that as regards the lame progress of the investigation, the Minos does indeed resemble the Hipparchus, but is far worse; this circumstance, however, excites no presumption against the supposition of an identity of composer, but is sufficiently explained by the nature of the subject. For the purpose of the dialogue generally cannot have been the investigation of an idea, but this is all show and pretence, adopted however, because no Socratic dialogue can exist without it, the main object being only a poor justification of Socrates’ prejudice in favour of Crete. But this Minos has in itself a still further and more peculiar mark of spuriousness, in the pre-eminent awkwardness of the language. Instead of either seriously using the words connected with the principal word, by derivation and sound, or playing with them without injury to the investigation, and without sophistical trick, the author, like a clumsy workman, miserably entangles himself between these two processes. Again, the name of the kingly art is put abruptly and without any referential notice as a thing conceded, for the art of statemanship, and that of the kingly man for statesman. This is brought in here out of the later Platonic dialogues, out of which however the composer, whose imitation of Plato is always harping upon the most frequented places, was incapable of drawing anything more profound. But it is unnecessary to add more upon a subject clear as day to any one who will see.
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