INTRODUCTION
TO
THE DIALOGUE ON VIRTUE.
Of this dialogue, which contains little more than two portions of the Meno, the authorship is attributed to Æschines by Suidas, whom Fischer has followed; but by Boeckh to Simon, the shoemaker, in consequence of his remarking that the follower of Socrates had written two treatises respectively on Justice and Virtue, both of which are found amongst the titles of the spurious dialogues. It is however difficult to believe that any person, who was contemporary with Plato, would condescend to pilfer from a fellow-writer; unless it be said that Simon has given the dialogue as it really took place, with the view of showing that nearly all of what Plato put into the mouth of Socrates was the produce of the writer's own fertile imagination.
Be however the author who he may, it is a curious fact, that the dialogue contains allusions to circumstances not mentioned by Plato, but which could hardly have been known except to a contemporary, as I have remarked in §7, n.6—6.
No less curious is another fact, that amongst the confessedly spurious dialogues of Plato, mentioned by Diogenes Laertius in iii.62, there is one under the title of Μίδων ῆ Ἱπποστρόφος. But as the Vienna MS. reads there Ἱπποτρόφος, and the Vatican MS. of Plato, marked Ω by Bekker, gives the word Ἱπποτρόφος, as the name of the person conversing with Socrates, and as "Hippotrophus" is found as one of the Interlocutors in the Latin version of this dialogue made by Cincius Romanus, preserved amongst the additional MSS. No. 11,760, in the British Museum, it is fair to infer that the
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