Lysis

the Isthmus and Nemea with four-horse chariots and racehorses,¹ these he makes verses of and recites, and on top of these, things more Cronian still than these.² For just the other day he was going through for us, in some poem, the entertaining of Heracles: how, because of their relationship to Heracles, their ancestor 205d received Heracles as his guest, being himself born of Zeus and of the daughter of the deme’s founder,³ just what the old women sing, and a great deal else of the kind, Socrates. That is what this fellow forces us to listen to as well, reciting it and singing it.”

And when I heard this I said, “You ridiculous Hippothales! Before you have won, are you making verses and singing a song of praise about yourself?”

“But it isn’t about myself, Socrates,” he said, “that I make verses or sing.”

“You don’t think so,” I said.

“How is it, then?” he said.

205e“Above everyone,” I said, “these songs bear on you. For if you catch your darling, being the boy he is, what you have said and sung will be an ornament to you, and really songs of praise, as for a winner, for having gained such a darling. But if he gets away from you, the greater the songs of praise you have spoken about your darling, the greater the fine and good things you will seem 206a ridiculous for having been robbed of. So whoever is wise in matters of love, my friend,⁴ does not praise his beloved before he has caught him, fearing how the future will turn out. Besides, the beautiful ones, when someone praises them and builds them up, are filled with pride and boastfulness. Don’t you think so?”

“I do,” he said.

“And the more boastful they are, the harder they become to catch?”

“Likely enough.”

“Then what sort of hunter do you think a man would be if he scared off the game as he hunted, and made his quarry harder to catch?”