Lysis

206b“A paltry one, obviously.”

“And to make wild with words and songs, instead of charming, is a great want of the Muses. Isn’t that so?”¹

“It seems so to me.”

“Then look to it, Hippothales, that you don’t make yourself liable to all these charges through your poetry. And yet I don’t think you would be willing to agree that a man who harms himself by his poetry is ever a good poet, being harmful to himself.”²

“No, by Zeus,” he said; “for that would be a great want of sense. But 206c that is exactly why I am consulting you, Socrates; and if you have anything else, advise me what talk one could hold, or what one could do, to become a friend to one’s darling.”

“It isn’t easy to say,” I said. “But if you would be willing to get him to come and talk with me, perhaps I could show you what you ought to talk to him about instead of what these people say you recite and sing.”

“There’s nothing hard about it,” he said. “For if you go in with Ctesippus here and sit down and talk, I think he’ll come up to you himself; for he is exceptionally fond of hearing talk, Socrates, 206d and besides, since they are celebrating the Hermaea, the young men and the boys are mixed together in the same place.³ So he’ll come up to you. If not, he is well acquainted with Ctesippus through this fellow’s cousin Menexenus;⁴ for he is in fact Menexenus’ closest companion of all. So let this fellow call him, if after all he doesn’t come up of his own accord.”

“That’s what we must do,” I said. And with that I took 206e Ctesippus and went over to the wrestling-school; the others came after us.

Going in, we found that the boys had sacrificed there and that the business of the offerings was pretty much done already,