99

the year 371BC It has been thought that this dialogue must have been written while Lysias was alive and since it cannont have been written before 380BC and Lysias died 378BC this would fix its date within about a year. But every argument to show that is must have been written while Lysius was living would equally go to show that it could not have been written while he was a very old man. Now he was eighty when he died. The dialogue represents him as a teacher of rhetoric and a casual visitor in Athens. But since Aegospatnos 405BC. Lysias had been a resident in Athens and he was only a teacher of rhetoric in his earlier life. If the oration attribute to him in this dialogue was really by him and believe it was only a soul of parody upon his style it belongs to that class of orations which Lysius wrote in his youth. It seem to me infinitely more probably stylometry being put aside that it was written after the death of Lysias. But I do not think it possible that the stylometic inference would be so much as eight years