PYTHAGORAS TO PLATO There is indeed a tradition that the Laws was unWnished at Plato’s death (D.L 37) On this basis nineteenth-century scholars sought to establish a grouping of the dialogues, beginning from the Wnal stage of Plato’s life They studied the frequency in diVerent dialogues of diVerent features of style, such as the use of technical terms, preferences between synonymous idioms, the avoidance of hiatus, and the adoption of particular speech rhythms On the basis of these stylometric studies, which by the end of the nineteenth century had covered some 500 diVerent linguistic criteria, a consensus emerged that a group of dialogues stood out by its similarity to the Laws All scholars agreed on including in the group the dialogues Critias, Philebus, Sophist, Statesman, and Timaeus, and all agreed that the group represented the latest stage of Plato’s writing career There was no similar consensus about ordering within the group: but it is notable that the group includes all the dialogues in which Socrates’ role is at a minimum Only in the Philebus is he a prominent character In Laws he does not appear at all, and in the Timaeus, Critias, Sophist, and Politicus he has only a walk-on part while the lead role is given to another: in the Wrst two to the protagonist named in the dialogue’s title, and in the latter two to a stranger from Parmenides’ town of Elea It seemed reasonable, therefore, to regard the dialogues of this group as expressing the views of the mature Plato rather than those of his long-dead teacher In dividing the earlier dialogues into groups, scholars could once again follow a clue given by Aristotle In Metaph L 1078b27–32 he sets out the prehistory of Plato’s Theory of Ideas, and assigns the following role to Socrates: ‘Two things may fairly be attributed to Socrates: inductive arguments and general deWnitions; both are starting points of scientiWc knowledge But he did not regard the universal or the deWnitions as separate entities, but [the Platonists] did, and called them Ideas of things.’ Expositions of the Theory of Ideas are placed in the mouth of Socrates in several important dialogues, notably Phaedo, Republic, and Symposium In these dialogues Socrates appears not as an inquiring questioner, but as a teacher in full possession of a system of philosophy By stylometric criteria these dialogues are closer than other dialogues to the late group already described It is reasonable, therefore, to treat them as a middle group in the corpus, and to regard them as representing Plato’s own philosophy rather than Socrates’ 39