INTRODUCTION

intention throws light on the emphasis laid on the veracity of the narrative—to which attention has been drawn above—and gives it a more definite motive. It is as if the author means us to read into his preface something to this effect:

"Socrates has been misrepresented: it is my task to clear his reputation by putting the facts in their true light."

If this is a correct reading of the hints given, what is the distorted account which Plato thus discredits, and who is its author? Unfortunately, this must remain a matter of conjecture. The most obvious suggestion is that the author in question is Xenophon, and the account alluded to is his Symposium. But Xenophon's Symposium is most probably a later work than Plato's; and it is a further objection that the persons represented by Xenophon as present at the banquet are not—with the exception of Socrates—the persons mentioned by Glaucon.

We are obliged, therefore, to look further afield for the author whose identity is thus shrouded. The best suggestion I can offer is that Polycrates the rhetor is the writer intended. In favor of this we may adduce the fact that Polycrates is the "accuser" original: ὁ κατήγορος. whose calumnies Xenophon aims at refuting in his Memorabilia. It is by no means improbable a priori original: à priori (from theory or general principle). that Polycrates in his attacks on Socrates described, among other incidents, a banqueting scene in which Socrates and Alcibiades were pictured in an odious light. If we take the Banquet of Xenophon to be a genuine work, the very fact that Xenophon thought it necessary to supplement his Memorabilia with such a work might be construed as showing that the author of the slanders he is at such pains to refute had already libeled Socrates in connection with a similar scene.