SPEUSIPPUs. Nay talk rationally. CALLIDEMUS. Rationally! You audacious young sophist! I will talk rationally. Do you know that I am your father? What quibble can you make upon that? SPEUSIPPUS. Do I know that you are my father? Let us take the question to pieces, as Melesigenes would say. First then, we must inquire what is knowledge? Secondly, what is a father? Now, knowledge, as Socrates said the other day to Theætetus CALLIDEMUS. * Socrates! what! the ragged flat-nosed old dotard, who walks about all day barefoot, and filches cloaks, and dissects gnats, and shoes † fleas with wax? SPEUSIPPUs. All fiction! All trumped up by Aristophanes! CALLIDEMUS. By Pallas, if he is in the habit of putting shoes on his fleas, he is kinder to them than to himself. But listen to me, boy; if you go on in this way, you will be ruined. There is an argument for you. Go to your Socrates and your Melesigenes, and tell them to refute that. Ruined! Do you hear? Ruined! SPEUSIPPUS. CALLIDEMUS. Ay, by Jupiter! Is such a show as you make to be supported on nothing? During all the last war, I made not an obol from my farm; the Peloponnesian locusts came almost as regularly as the Pleiades ;-corn burnt ;-olives stripped; fruit trees cut down ;-wells stopped up;-and, just when peace came, and I hoped that all would turn out well, you must begin to spend as if you had all the mines of Thasus at command. SPEUSIPPUs. Now, by Neptune, who delights in horses CALLIDEMUS. If Neptune delights in horses, he does not resemble me. You must ride at the Panathenæa on a horse fit for the great * See Plato's Theætetus. See Aristophanes Nubes, 150. king: four acres of my best vines went for that folly. You must retrench, or you will have nothing to eat. Does not Anaxagoras mention, among his other discoveries, that when a man has nothing to eat he dies? SPEUSIPPUS. You are deceived. My friends CALLIDEMUS. Oh, yes! your friends will notice you, doubtless, when you are squeezing through the crowd, on a winter's day, to warm yourself at the fire of the baths; or when you are fighting with beggars and beggars' dogs for the scraps of a sacrifice;or when you are glad to earn three wretched obols * by listening all day to lying speeches and crying children. SPEUSIPPUs. There are other means of support. CALLIDEMUS. What! I suppose you will wander from house to house, like that wretched buffoon Philippus †, and beg every body who has asked a supper-party to be so kind as to feed you and laugh at you; or you will turn sycophant; you will get a bunch of grapes, or a pair of shoes, now and then, by frightening some rich coward with a mock-prosecution. Well! that is a task for which your studies under the sophists may have fitted you. SPEUSIPPUS.. You are wide of the mark. CALLIDEMUS. Then what, in the name of Juno, is your scheme? Do you intend to join Orestes‡, and rob on the highway? Take care; beware of the eleven §; beware of the hemlock. It may be very pleasant to live at other people's expense; but not very pleasant, I should think, to hear the pestle give its last bang against the mortar, when the cold dose is ready. Pah! SPE USIPPUS. Hemlock! Orestes! folly!-I aim at nobler objects. What say you to politics,-the general assembly? CALLIDEMUS. You an orator!-oh no! no! Cleon was worth twenty such Xenophon. Convivium. The stipend of an Athenian juryman. in several other passages, The police officers of Athens. fools as you. You have succeeded, I grant, to his impudence, for which, if there be justice in Tartarus, he is now soaking up to the eyes in his own tan-pickle. But the Paphlagonian had parts. SPEUSIPPUs. And you mean to imply CALLIDEMUS. Not I. You are a Pericles in embryo, doubtless. Well, and when are you to make your first speech? oh Pallas! SPEUSIPPUS. I thought of speaking, the other day, on the Sicilian expedition; but Nicias* got up before me. CALLIDEMUS. Nicias, poor honest man, might just as well have sate still; his speaking did but little good. The loss of your oration is, doubtless, an irreparable public calamity. SPEUSIPPUs. Why, not so; I intend to introduce it at the next assembly; it will suit any subject. CALLIDEMUS. That is to say, it will suit none. But pray, if it be not too presumptuous a request, indulge me with a specimen. SPEUSIPPUs. Well; suppose the agora crowded ;-an important subject under discussion;—an ambassador from Argos, or from the great king; the tributes from the islands;-an impeachment;-in short, any thing you please. The crier makes proclamation." Any citizen above fifty years old may speakany citizen not disqualified may speak." Then I rise: a great murmur of curiosity while I am mounting the stand. CALLIDEMUS. Of curiosity! yes, and of something else too. You will infallibly be dragged down by main force, like poor Glaucon + last year. SPEUSIPPUS. Never fear. I shall begin in this style: "When I consider, Athenians, the importance of our city; -when I consider the extent of its power, the wisdom of its laws, the elegance of its decorations ;-when I consider by what names and by what exploits its annals are adorned;~ when I think on Harmodius and Aristogiton, on Themistocles * See Thucydides, VI. S. + See Xenophon Memorabilia, III. and Miltiades, on Cimon and Pericles ;-when I contemplate our pre-eminence in arts and letters;-when I observe so many flourishing states and islands compelled to own the dominion, and purchase the protection, of the City of the Violet Crown* CALLIDEMUS. I shall choke with rage. Oh, all ye gods and goddesses, what sacrilege, what perjury have I ever committed, that I should be singled out from among all the citizens of Athens to be the father of this fool? SPEUSIPPUs. What now? By Bacchus, old man, I would not advise you to give way to such fits of passion in the streets. If Aristophanes were to see you, you would infallibly be in a comedy next spring. CALLIDEMUS. You have more reason to fear Aristophanes than any fool living. Oh, that he could but hear you trying to imitate the slang of Straton† and the lisp of Alcibiades! You would be an inexhaustible subject. You would console him for the loss of Cleon. SPEUSIPPUS. No, no. I may perhaps figure at the dramatic representations before long; but in a very different way. Oh Hercules! Oh Bacchus! This is too much. Here is an universal genius; sophist,-orator,-poet. To what a three-headed monster have I given birth! a perfect Cerberus of intellect! And pray what may your piece be about? Or will your tragedy, like your speech, serve equally for any subject? SPEUSIPPUS. I thought of several plots;-Edipus,-Eteocles and Polynices, the war of Troy,-the murder of Agamemnon. *A favourite epithet of Athens. See Aristophanes Acharn. 637. at See Aristophanes Equites, 1375. See Aristophanes Vespa. 44. CALLIDEMUS. And what have you chosen? SPEUSIPPUS. You know there is a law which permits any modern poet to retouch a play of Eschylus, and bring it forward as his own composition. And as there is an absurd prejudice, among the vulgar, in favour of his extravagant pieces, I have selected one of them, and altered it. Which of them? CALLIDEMUS. SPEUSIPPUS. Oh! that mass of barbarous absurdities, the Prometheus. But I have framed it anew upon the model of Euripides. By Bacchus, I shall make Sophocles and Agathon look about them. You would not know the play again. CALLIDEMUS. By Jupiter, I believe not. SPEUSIPPUS. I have omitted the whole of the absurd dialogue between Vulcan and Strength, at the beginning. CALLIDEMUS. That may be, on the whole, an improvement. The play will open then with that grand soliloquy of Prometheus, when he is chained to the rock. "Oh! ye eternal heavens! Ye rushing winds! Ye fountains of great streams! Ye ocean waves, Well, I allow that will be striking; I did not think you capable of that idea. Why do you laugh? SPEUSIPPUS. Do you seriously suppose that one who has studied the plays of that great man, Euripides, would ever begin a tragedy in such a ranting style? CALLIDEMUS. What, does not your play open with the speech of Prometheus? No doubt. SPEUSIPPUS. * See Eschylus Prometheus, 88. |