Abstract

The recent paper of J. Harward on the seventh and eighth Platonic Epistles deserves an answer. He suggests that Plato's statement at the beginning of the seventh Epistle, that he had received a communication from the friends of Dion, is a literary fiction. Supposing then that this suggestion is correct, he maintains the view that Plato, having no knowledge of the death of Dion's son before his father's assassination in 354 B.C., refers to him as Hipparinus without qualification in the seventh Epistle , and as Dion's son, giving no name, in the eighth Epistle