1 Cf. Introduction p. xii. and note d. Plato seems to overlook the fact that the search was virtually completed in the fourth book.
2 οὐδέν: idiomatic, like the English of the translation. Cf. Charmides 164 A, Gorgias 498 A, 515 E. The emphatic statement that follows of the value of ideals as ideals is Plato's warning hint that he does not expect the literal realization of his Utopia, though it would be disillusionizing to say so too explicitly. Cf. introduction p. xxxi-xxxii, and my paper on Plato's Laws, Class. Phil. ix. (1914) pp. 351 and 353. This is one of the chief ideas that Cicero derived from Plato. He applies it to his picture of the ideal orator, and the mistaken ingenuity of modern scholarship has deduced from this and attributed to the maleficent influence of Plato the post-Renaissancee and eighteenth-century doctrine of fixed literary kinds. Cf. my note in the New York Nation, vol. ciii. p. 238, Sept. 7, 1916.
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