About Socrates The paper which I have the honour of of the

laying

before my

Academy to-day is of the nature of an experiment which can make no claim to represent the results of extraordinaryresearch or profound speculation,but is,all the same, in my own opinion well worth the making. Its immediate interest is, no doubt, for the specialstudent of the historyof philosophicthought, but it should also prove in some degree attractive to every one who has a genuine interest in great literature,inasmuch as it aims at throwing some lighton the literarymethods of a great philosopher who was at the same time one of the world's greatest literaryand dramatic artists. The question of the relation of the Socrates who figuresas the protagonist in all the most widely known of Plato's prose dramas to the Socrates who was a prominent figurein the
Athens of the last half of the fifth

colleagues a simple experiment,

century

B.C.,

is,of

course,

albusteo-ly

thought on the fmeundta-l issues of science,ethics,and religion. It is also a questionof interest to the student of the historyof literaryforms. Even if we are indifferent to the whole history of the actual development of scientific thought, we can hardly as students of literature be equally indifferent to the general problem suggested by the sudden anpcpearin the earlyyears of the fourth century of a wholly new type of prose composition,the ^(OKpariKosXoyos or
critical for the historian of Hellenic
'

discourse of Socrates *.

About the fact of the emergence of this type of composition justat this particulardate there can be no conceivable doubt. Aristotle comments on the fact that the ' Socratic discourse is a distinct
'

literaryform,
versified Greek
'
'

in the Poetics 1447 b 2, where he associates it with the

mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and complains that the language possesses no genericname for the type, inasmuch as the word mime implies the use of verse, and is thus only appriparot-e to one speciesof a form for which prose is,as a matter of fact,
' '

suitable a medium as verse. What Aristotle took to be the dtins-ctive characteristics of this literaryform is clear from the two
as

placethe recognitionof community of form between the mime and the Socratic discourse implies that, in Aristotle's opinion,the Socratic discourse by its realism'. For, as we know from the ancient notices
remarks he makes about it. In the first
' ' ' ' *

the
'

'

is dtins-guished

of the 'mimes' and

can see

for ourselves from Theocritus' brilliant