titles of Plato’s dialogues,—for instance ‘Nerinthus’ ‘Gryllus; or, On Rhetoric,’ ‘Sophist,’ ‘Menexenus,’ ‘Symposium,’ ‘The Lover,’ ‘Alexander; or, On Colonies,’ &c. And the natural supposition is that these books, or some of them, were none other than these early dialogues which Aristotle composed during his first residence in Athens. Strabo says distinctly that when, by the bequest of Theophrastus, the Aristotelian MSS were taken away, the Peripatetic school had none of his works left except a few of the more popular ones. His dialogues had been published, and were available, and no doubt copies of them formed the nucleus of the books professing to be his in the Alexandrian Library. Others of the collection may have been excerpts from his greater works which had been made by his scholars, and were so kept before the world when the entire works themselves were hidden in Asia Minor. Many others were probably monographs and papers by members of the Peripatetic school, drawn up in Aristotle’s manner, perhaps containing his ideas, and from a sort of reverential feeling attributed to him and inscribed with his name. The residue must have been forgeries pure and simple: imitations of his dialogues, and of such parts of his treatises as were known. All the books in the Alexandrian list, though they were numerous, appear to have been short, treating generally of isolated questions, and quite unlike the long methodical setting forth of entire sciences, such as we find in the writings of Aristotle that have came down to us.
The “fate of Aristotle’s works” is a romantic episode
