[359c]

Plato to Archytas of Tarentum wishes well-doing.

We have been wonderfully pleased at receiving the treatises which have come from you and felt [359d] the utmost possible admiration for their author; indeed we judged the man to be worthy of those ancient ancestors of his. For in truth these men are said to be Myrians; and they were amongst those Trojans who emigrated in the reign of Laomedon1—valiant men, as the traditional story declares. As to those treatises of mine about which you wrote, they are not as yet completed, but I have sent them to you just in the state in which they happen to be; as concerns their [359e] preservation2 we are both in accord, so that there is no need to give directions. (Denied to be Plato's.)

1 Father of Priam, king of Troy. Nothing is told us elsewhere of this Trojan colony in Italy; so we may regard it as an invention of the writer.

2 Cf. Plat. L. 2.314a, Plat. L. 13.363e.