Symposium

“So I, having heard this and said it, and having loosed, as it were, arrows, thought he was wounded; and indeed I got up, and without even letting him say anything more, I put my own cloak round him — for it was winter — and lying down under this man’s worn cloak here, with my arms thrown round this man, 219c daimonic in truth and marvellous, I lay there the whole night. And about this too, again, Socrates, you will not say that I lie. But when I had done this, he so far prevailed over my youth, and despised it and laughed at it and treated it with insolence — and in that, at least, I thought I was something,¹ gentlemen of the jury; for you are the jury on Socrates’ haughtiness — for know well, by the gods, by the goddesses, that when I 219d got up I had slept with Socrates nothing more out of the ordinary than if I had been sleeping with my father or an elder brother.

“After this, then, what mind do you think I had, believing that I had been dishonoured, but admiring this man’s nature and temperance and courage, having met with a person such as I would never have thought I should meet for intelligence and for endurance? So I neither had any way at all to be angry and be deprived of being with him, nor 219e had I resource for how I might win him over. For I knew well that by money, at any rate, he was proof against wounds at every point, far more than Ajax was by iron,² and in that by which alone I thought he would be caught, he had got clean away from me. So I was at a loss, and, enslaved by this person as no one was by anyone else, I went about. For all this had already happened to me; and after it came the campaign to Potidaea, which we shared, and we messed together there.³ First, then, in toils he surpassed not only me but all the others as well — whenever, cut off somewhere, as happens on campaign, we were compelled