We have little information from external sources about the order in which Plato composed his dialogues. In the mid-nineteenth century, scholars began to study stylistic affinities among certain groups of dialogues, conjecturing that stylistically similar works were composed during the same period of Plato’s life. A consensus among scholars working independently of each other emerged, according to which the Sophist, Politicus, Philebus, Timaeus, Critias, and Laws were placed in a discrete chronological group – thought to be late, in part because we have external evidence that Laws is a late work. In recent decades, computer analysis has aided the investigation of Plato’s word choice and style. These studies can also address long-standing doubts about the authenticity of some works attributed to Plato, including his Letters. Using a variety of techniques, the Republic, Parmenides, Phaedrus, and Theaetetus can also be put into a chronological group that comes before the late dialogues but after the other dialogues. Some scholars have sought to use stylometric measures to sort the earlier dialogues, but there is not much basis for any such arrangement.

In this chapter, I address the question of the relationship between the styles of the non-classicising sophistic prose of the imperial era and the so-called ‘Asianist’ oratory of the Hellenistic period; I also assess the connection of both to the style of Gorgias, with whom they have often been linked. I base my study on a comparison of a limited selection of texts: five of the longest excerpts quoted in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, Gorgias’ Helen and Epitaphios Logos, the fragments of Hegesias of Magnesia (3rd c. BCE), and three late Hellenistic inscriptions. I conclude that, although the passages of Hellenistic and imperial ‘sophists’ undeniably share a broad stylistic similarity that sets them apart from ‘classical’ or ‘classicising’ oratory like that of Lysias, Demosthenes or Dio of Prusa, the differences between them, especially regarding their relation to Gorgianic prose and their preferences for rhythmical clausulae, are more significant.