intelligible to an English audience-but the expressions "Force should be right" and "Appetite an universal wolf" (Compare Republic VIII, 565-6, and III, 416, where the tyrant is spoken of as a wolf) strongly suggest that the idea might have been present in his mind and colored his language.

The lines about justice, too, have a Platonic sound. It is in the pursuit of the idea of justice that the Socratic discussion is carried on. Thrasymachus defines it as "the interest of the stronger" ("Force should be right"), and exalts the tyrant, who is the embodiment of injustice and wrong, as the happiest of men. The expression "right and wrong, between whose endless jar justice resides" suggests the tentative definition proposed by Glaucus, that justice is "a mean or compromise" between the absolute good and the absolute bad, a middle point "tolerated not as a good but as the lesser evil."20 I would not press this point, however, since Shakespeare's phrase is obscure and may mean simply that justice is a buffer or arbiter between the contending forces of right and wrong.

To the general question of the likelihood of Shakespeare's having read The Dialogues I have nothing to add to the considerable body of material which already exists on this point. No English translation is known to have existed in his time, but the complete text was accessible in Latin and Italian, and a French version of The Republic had appeared not long before the date of Troilus and Cressida.21 It is interesting to note that the closest parallel between Plato and Shakespeare ever brought forward occurs elsewhere in this very play.22 Even this has not passed unchallenged but neither has it been entirely discredited. It is in Troilus, too, that an opinion of Aristotle is put into the mouth of Hector. May it not be that in this Greek play Shakespeare saw fit to introduce an atmosphere, a touch at least, of Greek philosophy and dipped into Plato as well as Homer by way of preparation for his task? The touch of Platonism is there, at any rate, both in Ulysses' address to the chieftains and later in his dia20 Republic II, 359.

21 Le Roy's version, 1600. This translation is inaccessible to me. It is discussed with reference to Shakespeare and quoted from by Thomas Tyler, "Hamlet and Plato's Republic" (Academy, Vol. LIII; June 25, 1898). Tyler's argument for borrowings from The Republic in Hamlet is interesting but inconclusive.

22 Troilus and Cressida III, iii, 94-111. For the vexed question as to whether this passage is based directly on the corresponding one in Plato's First Alcibiades or on an echo of Plato in Davies' Nosce leipsum or on some other derivative source see R. G. White, Studies in Shakespeare (Boston, 1886), Glossaries and Lexicons, p. 299; Churton Collins, Studies in Shakespeare, p. 33; J. M. Robertson, Montaigne and Shakespeare, pp. 97-104; Emil Wolff, Francis Bacon und seiné Quellen, pp. 100-102. When all has been said against the Platonic parallel it is difficult to shake off the notion that the "strange fellow" is Socrates.

logue with Achilles. The specific lines in the latter passage which have been held to be derived from the First Alcibiades may or may not be closer to Davies than to Plato, but the whole conversation has much the air of a detached philosophic discussion in the shades of Academe. And in the speech on degree Ulysses plays the part not merely of the shrewd and subtle councillor but of the political thinker who bases his rule of action, in the ancient philosophical fashion, on the nature of the universe, the constitution of society, and the fundamental laws of human nature. JAMES HOLLY HANFORD.

The University of North Carolina.