The Last of the Wine Read Online Free PDF Page A

would say there would be less noise in Sparta. But he said, “Have you been listening? I’ll tell you an odd thing. Those who blame the Corinthians or the oligarchs all say it stands to reason, or that everything points to it. But those who blame Alkibiades all say that someone told them in the street.”—“So they do. Then perhaps there is something in it?”—“Yes; unless someone is putting it about.” He had an open face and quiet manners; you had to know him well to learn he had a head on his shoulders. He stood looking about the colonnade, then laughed to himself. “By the way, if you want to study with a Sophist when you leave, now’s the time to choose one.”
    One could not blame him for laughing. I had forgotten, till he reminded me, that the Sophists were there. On any other day, each would have stood forth among his pupils like a flower among bees; now, seated on the benches or pacing the colonnade, they were questioning like the rest anyone who professed to know something; some with more seemliness than those around them, some not. Zenon was expressing fiercely his democratic opinions; Hippias, who was accustomed to treat his young men much as if they were still at school, had let them start a quarrel among themselves and was red in the face from calling them to order; Dionysodoros and his brother, cheapjack Sophists who would teach anything from virtue to rope-dancing at cut rates, were screaming like market-women, denouncing Alkibiades, and flying in a rage when people laughed, for he was well known to have taken them on together and refuted them both in half a dozen responses. Only Gorgias, with his long white beard and golden voice, though a Sicilian himself, looked as calm as Saturn; he sat with his hands folded in his lap, surrounded by grave young men whose grace of posture announced their breeding; when a word or two came over, you could hear that they were wholly engaged with philosophy.
    “My father told me,” Xenophon said, “that I could choose between Hippias and Gorgias. It had better be Gorgias, I think.” I looked round the palaestra and said, “They are not all here yet.”
    I had not confided my own ambitions to him. He shared my father’s view that philosophers should dress and behave in a respectable way, suited to their calling. But Midas had found me out. He took his work seriously; and my father had ordered him, besides repelling suitors, to keep me away from all Sophists and rhetoricians. I was too young, my father said, to get anything solid from philosophy, which would only teach me to quibble with my elders and be wise in my own conceit.
    Just then the trainer bawled out that we were there to wrestle, not to gabble like girls at a wedding, and that we should be sorry if he had to speak again. While we were all scrambling to find partners, I heard a loud commotion at the end of the colonnade. In the midst was a voice I knew. Why I did not stay where I was, I hardly know. A boy, like a dog, feels happier with the pack behind him. When his gods are mocked, down go his ears and tail. Yet I had to run to that end of the palaestra, pretending to look for a partner and avoiding anyone who was free.
    Sokrates was arguing at the top of his voice with a big man who was trying to shout him down. As I got there he was saying, “Very well, so you respect the gods of the City. And the laws too?”—“How not?” shouted the man. “Ask your friend Alkibiades that, not me.”—“The law of evidence, for instance?” The man shouted out, “Don’t you try to confuse the issue.” At this the bystanders exclaimed, “No, no, that’s fair, you ought to answer that.”—“Very well, any law you like, and there ought to be one against people like you.”—“Good. Then if what you’ve been telling us seems to you to be evidence, why don’t you take it to the archons? If it’s worth anything, they would even pay you. You trust the laws; do you trust the evidence? Well, speak