The Last of the Wine Read Online Free PDF Page B

I have told you? Especially today.”—“Why today?” I said.—“Have you forgotten that he taught Alkibiades?”—“Well, what of it?”—“Sokrates has always refused to be initiated into the holy Mysteries; so who else, do you suppose, taught Alkibiades to mock at them?”—“Mock at them?” I said. “Does he?”—“You have heard what all the citizens are saying.” It was the first I had heard of it; but I knew that slaves tell things to one another. “Well, if he does, it’s absurd to blame Sokrates for it. I’ve not seen Alkibiades go near him for years, or speak to him beyond a greeting in the street.”—“A teacher has to answer for his pupil. If Alkibiades left Sokrates justly, then Sokrates gave him cause and is to blame; or if unjustly, then Sokrates did not teach him justice, so how can he claim to make his pupils better?”
    I suppose he had picked up this argument from someone like Dionysodoros. Though still untrained in logic I could smell a fallacy. “If Alkibiades broke the Herms, everyone agrees it’s the worst thing he has done. So when he was with Sokrates he must have been better than he is now, mustn’t he? You don’t even know yet if he did it at all. And,” I said, becoming angry again, “as for Lysis, he only wanted out of kindness to put me at ease.” Midas sucked in his cheeks. “Certainly. Why should anyone doubt it? However, we know your father’s orders.”
    I could think of no answer to this, so I said, “Father told you I wasn’t to hear the Sophists: Sokrates is a philosopher.”—“Any Sophist,” said Midas sniffing, “is a philosopher to his friends.”
    I walked on in silence, thinking, “Why do I argue with a man who thinks whatever will earn him his freedom in two years? He can think what he likes then. It seems I can be more just than Midas, not because I am good, but because I am free.” He walked a foot behind my elbow, carrying my tablets and lyre. I thought, “When he is free he will grow his beard and look, I should think, rather like Hippias. And if he chooses, he can strip for exercise then, with other free men; but he is getting old for that, and might not care to show his body, soft and white as it must be.” I had not seen him naked in all these years; he might as well have been a woman. Even when he was free he would still be no more than a metic, an immigrant, never a citizen.
    Once long before, I had asked my father why Zeus made some men to be Hellenes living in cities with laws, some barbarians under tyrants, and others slaves. He said, “You might as well ask, my dear boy, why he made some beasts lions, some horses, and other swine. Zeus the All-Knowing has placed all sorts of men in a state comformable with their natures; we cannot suppose anything else. Don’t forget, however, that a bad horse is worse than a good ass. And wait till you are older before you question the purposes of the gods.”
    He met me in the courtyard when I got home, with a myrtle wreath on his head. He had got together what was needed for the purification of the house, water from the Nine Springs, frankincense and the rest, and was waiting for me to serve at the rites with him. It was a long time since we had needed to perform them, and then it was only because a slave had died. I bound the myrtle round my head and helped him with the lustrations, and when the incense was burning on the household altar, made the responses to the prayers. I was glad to finish, for I was hungry, and the smell from inside told me that my mother had cooked something good.
    I ought to write my stepmother for clearness’ sake; but I not only called her Mother, but so thought of her, having known no other. Her coming had, as I have explained, saved me from much misery; so it seemed that such and not otherwise a mother ought to be. It made no difference in my mind that she was only about eight years older than I was, my father having married her when she was not quite sixteen. I