masters,' like St. Paul again; or the description of the 'heavenly
originals'...

The chief criteria for determining the date of the Dialogue are (1) the
ages of Lysias and Isocrates; (2) the character of the work.

Lysias was born in the year 458; Isocrates in the year 436, about seven
years before the birth of Plato. The first of the two great rhetoricians
is described as in the zenith of his fame; the second is still young and
full of promise. Now it is argued that this must have been written in the
youth of Isocrates, when the promise was not yet fulfilled. And thus we
should have to assign the Dialogue to a year not later than 406, when
Isocrates was thirty and Plato twenty-three years of age, and while
Socrates himself was still alive.

Those who argue in this way seem not to reflect how easily Plato can
'invent Egyptians or anything else,' and how careless he is of historical
truth or probability. Who would suspect that the wise Critias, the
virtuous Charmides, had ended their lives among the thirty tyrants? Who
would imagine that Lysias, who is here assailed by Socrates, is the son of
his old friend Cephalus? Or that Isocrates himself is the enemy of Plato
and his school? No arguments can be drawn from the appropriateness or
inappropriateness of the characters of Plato. (Else, perhaps, it might be
further argued that, judging from their extant remains, insipid rhetoric is
far more characteristic of Isocrates than of Lysias.) But Plato makes use
of names which have often hardly any connection with the historical
characters to whom they belong. In this instance the comparative favour
shown to Isocrates may possibly be accounted for by the circumstance of his
belonging to the aristocratical, as Lysias to the democratical party.