6). As master of the possibilities of both force and persuasion, the political art overcomes rhetoric's pretension to be the art of ruling cities, and at the same justifies its claim to rule rhetoric in cities. Lane is thus led to stress the role of temporality throughout the ‘Statesman’. In particular, Lane stresses the sense in which the repeated failures of method in explication force a gradual evolution, in dialogic time, of the method itself. (…) Though an important step forward for our understanding of the dialogue, the book does have its failings. Lane's account of the ‘Sophist’ is inadequate to the argument that depends on it, as is her account of sophistry itself. Most seriously, the method of the ‘Statesman’ poses problems in the philosophy of language that require more elaborate treatment than she adopts. (…) A ‘linguistic’ method would seem to presume that ‘names’ as used prior to investigation do have some use in that investigation. Lane, however, pushes division and example very far in the direction of modern empiricism, in which names are not interrogated but categorically doubted. (…) All in all this is a fine book. Though it does not completely lay out the picture of pre-Aristotelian rhetoric on which it depends, this lacuna serves more to stimulate further investigation than to call into question Lane's own argument.’ (MICHAEL S. KOCHIN in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 1998.07.17). From the library of Prof. Carl Deroux.