If you turn to the other road, you will find many people, and among them a wholly clever and wholly handsome gentleman with a mincing gait, a thin neck, a languishing eye, and a honeyed voice, who distils perfume, scratches his head with the tip of his finger,

Cf. Plutarch, Pompey, 48 fin.

and carefully dresses his hair, which is scanty now, but curly and raven-black—an utter] delicate Sardanapalus, a Cinyras, a very Agathon (that charming writer of tragedies, don’t you know?). I am thus explicit that you may recognize him by these tokens, and may not overlook a creature so marvellous, and so dear to Aphrodite and the Graces. But what am I talking about? Even if you had your eyes shut, and he should come and speak to you, unsealing those Hymettus lips and releasing upon the air those wonted intonations, you would discover that he is not like us “who eat the fruit of the glebe,”

Iliad6, 142.

but some unfamiliar spirit, nurtured on dew or on ambrosia.

If, then, you go to him and put yourself in his hands, you will at once, without effort, become an orator, the observed of all, and, as he himself calls it, king of the platform, driving the horses of eloquence four-in-hand. For on taking you in charge, he will teach you first of all—but let him address you himself.

It would be comical for me to do the talking on behalf of such an accomplished speaker, as I should be poorly cast, it may very well be, for parts of that nature and importance; I might fall down and so put out of countenance the hero whom I impersonated.

He would address you, then, somewhat in this fashion, tossing back what hair is still left him, faintly smiling in that sweet and tender way which is his wont, and rivalling Thais herself of comic fame, or Malthace, or Glycera, in the seductiveness of his tone, since masculinity is boorish and not in keeping with a delicate and charming platform-hero —