BOOK III. XXIII. 20-23
a man who has listened to reason, who has read the accounts of Socrates as coming from Socrates, not as though they were from Lysias, or Isocrates! "'I have often wondered by what arguments ever'—no, but 'by what argument ever'—this form is smoother than the other!"[1] You have been reading this literature just as you would music-hall songs, haven't you? Because, if you had read them in the right way, you would not have lingered on these points, but this is the sort of thing rather that would have caught your eye: "Anytus and Meletus can kill me, but they cannot hurt me";[2] and: "I have always been the kind of man to pay attention to none of my own affairs, but only to the argument which strikes me as best upon reflection."[3] And for that reason who ever heard Socrates saying, "I know something and teach it"? But he used to send one person here and another there.[4] Therefore men used to go to him to have him introduce them to philosophers,[5] and he used to take them around and introduce them. But no, your idea of him, no doubt, is that, as he was taking them along, he used to say, "Come around to-day and hear me deliver a discourse in the house of Quadratus"![6]
Why should I listen to you? Do you want to exhibit to me the clever way in which you put words together? You do compose them cleverly, man; and what good is it to you? "But praise me."
- ↑ The rhetors must have disputed whether the opening words of Xenophon's Memorabilia might not have been improved upon by using the singular λόγῳ instead of the plural λόγοις.
- ↑ Plato, Apol. 30 C.
- ↑ Slightly modified from Plato, Crito, 46 B.
- ↑ i.e. to different authorities on special subjects.
- ↑ Actual instances of such introductions are recorded in the Protagoras, 310 E, and the Theaetetus, 151 B. Compare also Maximus Tyrius, 38, 4, b. The personal relations between Socrates and the Sophists in general were clearly not strained.
- ↑ The practice of letting a popular or distinguished scholar lecture in one's house was particularly common in Greek and Roman times. Several distinguished persons by the name of Quadratus were contemporaries of Epictetus (Prosopographia Imperii Romani, Vol. III, nos. 600 ff.), but it is not certain that any one of them is meant, because they resided regularly at Rome, and this discourse was held at Nicopolis.
