If "Clitophon" is indeed spurious, then who would have written this dialogue? Slings had originally noted that due to the similarity of writing to that of Plato's, it must have been written by a student of Plato. Schleiermacher believed it to have been written by a contemporary school of rhetoric, which wrote this dialogue as an attack against Socrates. It is difficult to attribute a work so similar in style to Plato's to another person. Slings in his later work admittedly changed his thesis on the authorship and claimed that it is easier to accept as a work of Plato than to postulate an anonymous author similar to Plato's skill.