us; and they speak coldly of the insipid
and cold dialectician.

You are abusive, Ctesippus, said Dionysodorus, you are abusive!

Indeed, I am not, Dionysodorus, he replied; for I love you and am giving
you friendly advice, and, if I could, would persuade you not like a boor
to say in my presence that I desire my beloved, whom I value above all
men, to perish.

I saw that they were getting exasperated with one another, so I made
a joke with him and said: O Ctesippus, I think that we must allow the
strangers to use language in their own way, and not quarrel with them
about words, but be thankful for what they give us. If they know how to
destroy men in such a way as to make good and sensible men out of bad
and foolish ones--whether this is a discovery of their own, or whether
they have learned from some one else this new sort of death and
destruction which enables them to get rid of a bad man and turn him into
a good one--if they know this (and they do know this--at any rate
they said just now that this was the secret of their newly-discovered
art)--let them, in their phraseology, destroy the youth and make him
wise, and all of us with him. But if you young men do not like to trust
yourselves with them, then fiat experimentum in corpore senis; I will be
the Carian on whom they shall operate. And here I offer my old person to
Dionysodorus; he may put me into the pot, like Medea the Colchian, kill
me, boil me, if he will only make me good.

Ctesippus said: And I, Socrates, am ready to commit myself to the
strangers; they may skin me alive, if they please (and I am pretty well
skinned by them already), if only my skin is made at last, not like that
of Marsyas, into a leathern bottle, but into a piece of virtue. And here
is Dionysodorus fancying that I am angry with him, when really I am not
angry at all; I do but contradict him when I think that he is speaking
improperly to me: and you must not confound abuse and contradiction, O
illustrious Dionysodorus; for they are quite different things.

Contradiction! said Dionysodorus; why, there never was such a thing.

Certainly there is, he replied; there can be no question of that. Do
you, Dionysodorus, maintain that there is not?

You will never prove to me, he said, that you have heard any one
contradicting any one else.

Indeed, said Ctesippus; then now you may hear me contradicting
Dionysodorus.

Are you prepared to make that good?

Certainly, he said.

Well, ha