tirely unacquainted with them?

ANYTUS: And I have no wish to be acquainted.

SOCRATES: Then, my dear friend, how can you know whether a thing is good
or bad of which you are wholly ignorant?

ANYTUS: Quite well; I am sure that I know what manner of men these are,
whether I am acquainted with them or not.

SOCRATES: You must be a diviner, Anytus, for I really cannot make out,
judging from your own words, how, if you are not acquainted with them,
you know about them. But I am not enquiring of you who are the teachers
who will corrupt Meno (let them be, if you please, the Sophists); I only
ask you to tell him who there is in this great city who will teach him
how to become eminent in the virtues which I was just now describing. He
is the friend of your family, and you will oblige him.

ANYTUS: Why do you not tell him yourself?

SOCRATES: I have told him whom I supposed to be the teachers of these
things; but I learn from you that I am utterly at fault, and I dare say
that you are right. And now I wish that you, on your part, would tell me
to whom among the Athenians he should go. Whom would you name?

ANYTUS: Why single out individuals? Any Athenian gentleman, taken at
random, if he will mind him, will do far more good to him than the
Sophists.

SOCRATES: And did those gentlemen grow of themselves; and without having
been taught by any one, were they nevertheless able to teach others that
which they had never learned themselves?

ANYTUS: I imagine that they learned of the previous generation of
gentlemen. Have there not been many good men in this city?

SOCRATES: Yes, certainly, Anytus; and many good statesmen also there
always have been and there are still, in the city of Athens. But
the question is whether they were also good teachers of their own
virtue;--not whether there are, or have been, good men in this part of
the world, but whether virtue can be taught, is the question which we
have been discussing. Now, do we mean to say that the good men of our
own and of other times knew how to impart to others that virtue
which they had themselves; or is virtue a thing incapable of being
communicated or imparted by one man to another? That is the question
which I and Meno have been arguing. Look at the matter in your own way:
Would you not admit that Themistocles was a good man?

ANYTUS: Certainly; no man better.

SOCRATES: And must not he then have been a good teacher, if any man ever
was a good teacher, of hi