1. The constant appeal to the authority of Homer, whom, with grave irony,
Plato, after the manner of his age, summons as a witness about ethics and
psychology, as well as about diet and medicine; attempting to distinguish
the better lesson from the worse, sometimes altering the text from design;
more than once quoting or alluding to Homer inaccurately, after the manner
of the early logographers turning the Iliad into prose, and delighting to
draw far-fetched inferences from his words, or to make ludicrous
applications of them. He does not, like Heracleitus, get into a rage with
Homer and Archilochus (Heracl.), but uses their words and expressions as
vehicles of a higher truth; not on a system like Theagenes of Rhegium or
Metrodorus, or in later times the Stoics, but as fancy may dictate. And
the conclusions drawn from them are sound, although the premises are
fictitious. These fanciful appeals to Homer add a charm to Plato's style,
and at the same time they have the effect of a satire on the follies of
Homeric interpretation. To us (and probably to himself), although they
take the form of arguments, they are really figures of speech. They may be
compared with modern citations from Scripture, which have often a great
rhetorical power even when the original meaning of the words is entirely
lost sight of. The real, like the Platonic Socrates, as we gather from the
Memorabilia of Xenophon, was fond of making similar adaptations. Great in
all ages and countries, in religion as well as in law and literature, has
been the art of interpretation.

2. 'The style is to conform to the subject and the metre to the style.'
Notwithstanding the fascination which the word 'classical' exercises over
us, we can hardly maintain that this rule is observed in all the Greek
poetry which has come down to us. We cannot deny that the thought often
exceeds the power of lucid expression in Aeschylus and Pindar; or that
rhetoric gets the better of the thought in the Sophist-poet Euripides.