Steinhart and others who disallow the authenticity of the Second Alkibiadês insist much (p. 518) upon the enormity of the chronological blunder, whereby Sokrates and Alkibiadês are introduced as talking about the death of Archelaus king of Macedonia, who was killed in 399 B.C., in the same year as Sokrates, and four years after Alkibiades. Such an anachronism (Steinhart urges) Plato could never allow himself to commit. But when we read the Symposion, we find Aristophanes in a company of which Sokrates, Alkibiades, and Agathon form a part, alluding to the [Greek: dioi/kisis] of Mantineia, which took place in 386 B.C. No one has ever made this glaring anachronism a ground for disallowing the Symposion. Steinhart says that the style of the Second Alkibiadês copies Plato too closely (die ängstlich platonisirende Sprache des Dialogs, p. 515), yet he agrees with Stallbaum that in several places it departs too widely from Plato.] [Side-note: The two dialogues may probably be among Plato's earlier compositions.] I agree with Schleiermacher and the other recent critics in considering the First and Second Alkibiadês to be inferior in merit to Plato's best dialogues; and I contend that their own premisses justify no more. They may probably be among his earlier productions, though I do not believe that the First Alkibiadês was composed during the lifetime of Sokrates, as Socher, Steinhart, and Stallbaum endeavour to show.[45] I have already given my reasons, in a previous chapter, for believing that Plato composed no dialogues at all during the lifetime of Sokrates; still less in that of Alkibiadês, who died four years earlier. There is certainly nothing in either Alkibiadês I. or II. to shake this belief. [Footnote 45: Stallbaum refers the composition of Alkib. i. to a time not long before the accusation of Sokrates, when the enemies of Sokrates were calumniating him in consequence of his past intimacy with Alkibiades (who had before that time been killed in 404 B.C.) and when Plato was anxious to defend his master (Prolegg. p. 186). Socher and Steinhart (p. 210) remark that such writings would do little good to Sokrates under his accusation. They place the composition of the dialogue earlier, in 406 B.C. (Steinhart, p. 151-152), and they consider it the first exercise of Plato in the strict dialectic method. Both Steinhart and Hermann (Gesch. Plat. Phil. p. 440) think that the dialogue has not only a speculative but a political purpose; to warn and amend Alkibiades, and to prevent him from surrendering himself blindly to the democracy.