authenticity of the letter, were it not for the fact that it claims that this Socrates cannot travel on account of having been enervated by a case of strangury. Twelfth Letter Like the Ninth Letter, the Twelfth Letter is purportedly addressed to Archytas. It thanks him for sending Plato some treatises, which it then goes on to praise effusively, declaring its author worthy of his ancestors and including in their number Myrians, colonists from Troy during the reign of Laomedon. It then promises to send to Archytas some of Plato's unfinished treatises. Diogenes Laërtius preserves this letter in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, as well as a letter from Archytas which presumably occasioned the Twelfth Letter; This letter points to the treatises having been those of Ocellos of Lucania, a Pythagorean. Because the writings which are attributes to Ocellos are forgeries from the First Century BC, the Twelfth Letter is probably also a forgery, and by the same forger, intended to stamp the treatises with Plato's authority. There is no other mention of a Trojan colony in Italy from the reign of Laomedon, let alone of Lucania or the Lucani having been descended from the otherwise unknown "Myrians." R. G. Bury also notes that the Twelfth Letter, along with the Ninth, spell Archytas with an α, whereas Plato spells it in more authoritative epistles with an η (Αρχύτης). Of all the Epistles, it is the only one that is followed by an explicit denial of its authenticity in the manuscripts. In the Stephanus pagination, it spans 359c–e of Vol. III. Thirteenth Letter The Thirteenth Letter is addressed to Dionysius II of Syracuse, and appears to be private in character. The portrait of Plato offered here is in sharp contrast to that the disinterested and somewhat aloof philosopher of the Seventh Letter, leading Bury to doubt its authenticity. Notes References Boas, George. (1949) "Fact and Legend in the Biography of Plato", The Philosophical Review 57 (5): 439–457. Bury, R. G. (1929; reprinted 1942) Editor and Translator of Plato's Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles, Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moore-Blunt, Jennifer (1985) Platonis Epistulae. Teubner. Post, L. A. (1925) Thirteen Epistles of Plato. Oxford. Further reading Caskey, Elizabeth Gwyn (1974), "Again - Plato's Seventh Letter," Classical Philology 69(3): 220–27. External links Epistles translated by George Burges Free public domain audiobook version of the Epistles . Collection includes