Athens is hardly mentioned.

The author of the Menexenus, whether Plato or not, is evidently
intending to ridicule the practice, and at the same time to show that he
can beat the rhetoricians in their own line, as in the Phaedrus he may
be supposed to offer an example of what Lysias might have said, and of
how much better he might have written in his own style. The orators had
recourse to their favourite loci communes, one of which, as we find in
Lysias, was the shortness of the time allowed them for preparation. But
Socrates points out that they had them always ready for delivery, and
that there was no difficulty in improvising any number of such orations.
To praise the Athenians among the Athenians was easy,--to praise them
among the Lacedaemonians would have been a much more difficult task.
Socrates himself has turned rhetorician, having learned of a woman,
Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles; and any one whose teachers had been
far inferior to his own--say, one who had learned from Antiphon
the Rhamnusian--would be quite equal to the task of praising men to
themselves. When we remember that Antiphon is described by Thucydides as
the best pleader of his day, the satire on him and on the whole tribe of
rhetoricians is transparent.

The ironical assumption of Socrates, that he must be a good orator
because he had learnt of Aspasia, is not coarse, as Schleiermacher
supposes, but is rather to be regarded as fanciful. Nor can we say that
the offer of Socrates to dance naked out of love for Menexenus, is any
more un-Platonic than the threat of physical force which Phaedrus uses
towards Socrates. Nor is there any real vulgarity in the fear which
Socrates expresses that he will get a beating from his mistress,
Aspasia: this is the natural exaggeration of what might be expected from
an imperious woman. Socrates is not to be taken seriously in all that
he says, and Plato, both in the Symposium and elsewhere, is not slow to
admit a sort of Aristophanic humour. How a great original genius like
Plato might or might not have written, what was his conception of
humour, or what limits he would have prescribed to himself, if any,
in drawing the picture of the Silenus Socrates, are problems which no
critical instinct can determine.

On the other hand, the dialogue has several Platonic traits, whether
original or imitated may be uncertain. Socrates, when he departs from
his character of a 'know nothing' and delivers a speech, generall