But that Plato was ill-natured to everybody is plain from what he says in his dialogue entitled Ion; in which first of all he abuses all the poets, and then all those who have been promoted to the highest dignities by the people, such as Phanosthenes of Andros, and Apollodorus of Cyzicus, and also Heraclides of Clazomenæ. And in his Menon he abuses those who have been the greatest men among the Athenians—Aristides and Themistocles; and he extols Meno, who betrayed the Greeks. But in his Euthydemus he attacks this same Meno and his brother Dionysiodorus, and calls them men slow to learn any good thing, and contentious people, reproaching them with their flight from Chios, which was their native place, from which they went and settled in Thurii. And, in his essay on Manly Courage, he attacks Melesias, the son of that Thucydides who headed the opposite party to Pericles, and Lysimachus, the son of Aristides the Just, saying that they both fell far short of their fathers' virtues. And as to what he said about Alcibiades, in his Banquet, that is not fit to be produced to light; nor is what he says in the first of the Dialogues which go by his name. For the second Alcibiades is said by some people to be the work of Xenophon; as also the Halcyon is said to be the work of Leon the Academician, as Nicias of Nicæa says. Now, the things which he has said against Alcibiades I will pass over; but I cannot forbear to mention his calling the Athenian people a random judge, guided only by outward appearance. And he praises the Lacedæmonians, and extols also the Persians, who are the enemies of all the Greeks. And he calls Cleinias the brother of Alcibiades a madman; and the sons of Pericles he makes out to be fools; and Meidias he calls a man fit for nothing but killing quails; and of the people of the Athenians he says, that it wears a fair mask, but that one ought to strip the mask off, and look at it then; for he says that it will then be seen that it is only clothed with a specious appearance of a beauty which is not genuine.
Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists. Or Banquet Of The Learned Of Athenaeus. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1854.
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