Plato : 7th EPISTLE Translated by J. Harward - 45 Pages - Greek fonts Search Plato's works / Plato Anthology / The Greek Word Library = Note by Elpenor

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Page 31

Anyone who has followed this discourse and digression will know well that, if Dionysios or anyone else, great or small, has written a treatise on the highest matters and the first principles of things, he has, so I say, neither heard nor learnt any sound teaching about the subject of his treatise; otherwise, he would have had the same reverence for it, which I have, and would have shrunk from putting it forth into a world of discord and uncomeliness. For he wrote it, not as an aid to memory - since there is no risk of forgetting it, if a man's soul has once laid hold of it; for it is expressed in the shortest of statements - but if he wrote it at all, it was from a mean craving for honour, either putting it forth as his own invention, or to figure as a man possessed of culture, of which he was not worthy, if his heart was set on the credit of possessing it. If then Dionysios gained this culture from the one lesson which he had from me, we may perhaps grant him the possession of it, though how he acquired it - God wot, as the Theban says; for I gave him the teaching, which I have described, on that one occasion and never again.

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