I will, if you like, suggest another, less troublesome way, without this slaughter of victims or sacrifice to anybody or calling in one of these expensive priests: put some tablets into a pitcher with the name of each of the philosophers on them, and tell a boy—a young lad with both parents living—to go to the pitcher and pick out whichever tablet he first touches with his hand; then all you have to do is to study the philosophy of the one whose lot he has picked.

This is mere burlesque and not like you. Now you tell me: have you ever bought wine yourself?

Of course, many a time.

Then did you go round all the wine-merchants of the city in turn, tasting and comparing and judging the wines?

Not at all.

I think that you must take away the first wine you come to that is good and satisfactory.

Certainly.

Could you have said from that brief tasting what was the quality of the whole?

Yes.

If you had approached the wine-merchants and said: “I wish to buy half a pint of wine; each of you give me, please, the whole jar to drink, so that when I have drained it all I may learn who has the better wine and who is to receive my custom”—if you had said this, do you not think that they would have laughed at you, and if you troubled them further, you might have had a jug of water poured on you?

I do think so, and I should deserve it.

Apply the same consideration to philosophy. Why drain a butt when the tasting of a little can indicate the quality of the whole?

How slippery you are, Hermotimus! And how you glide through my fingers! But you have helped us: you thought you had got away, but you have fallen into the same net.

What do you mean?

You take an object which is quite self-evident and which is known to everyone, wine, and you compare to it things that are unlike and the object of universal dispute, they are so uncertain. I certainly cannot say how in your view philosophy and wine are comparable, except perhaps at this one point that philosophers sell their lessons as wine-merchants their wines—most of them adulterating and cheating and giving false measure. Now let us examine your logic. You say that all the wine in a butt is the same, the whole measure; that is certainly not unreasonable. Now if you care to draw ever so little of it and take a taste, you say you would know at once the quality of the whole butt; this too follows and I would not deny it. Look at what comes next: do philosophy and these who, like your teacher, study philosophy say the same things to you on the same topics every day, or different things on different days? It is quite clear, my friend, that there are many different topics; you would not have stayed with him twenty years like an Odysseus in your wanderings and journeying, if he had said the same things all the time, but you would have been satisfied with one hearing.

Of course.

Then how could you have known the whole from just the first taste? There were not the same, but always new things being said on new subjects, unlike wine, which is always the same. So, my friend, unless you drink the whole butt, your tipsiness has been to no purpose; god seems to me to have hidden the good of philosophy right down at the bottom beneath the very lees. You will have to drain it all to the end or you will never find that divine drink for which I think you have long thirsted. But you imagine it to be such that, if you were but to taste and draw just a drop, you would at once become all-wise, as, they say, the prophetess at Delphi becomes inspired as soon as she drinks of the sacred spring and gives her answers to those who consult the oracle. But it seems it is not so: you had drunk over half the butt, and you said that you were still at the beginning.

Perhaps philosophy is more like this: still keep your butt and your dealer, but no wine; rather take an assortment of cereals—wheat on top, then beans, then barley, and, beneath the barley, lentils, then chickpeas, and other kinds of seeds as well. You come in wishing to buy some of the cereals. He has taken out a pinch of the wheat from where the wheat was and has given you a sample in your hand to examine. Now could you say by looking at that sample whether the peas were pure, the lentils tender, and the beans not completely empty?

Not at all.

Then neither could you learn the nature of all philosophy from the first thing someone says. For it is not really one substance like the wine to which you compare it, claiming that it is like the sample. No, we have seen that there is variation in it, for which a cursory examination will not do. If you buy bad wine you risk a couple of pence, but to rot in the common herd oneself, as you said in the beginning, is very serious. Besides, to insist on drinking the whole butt in order to buy half a pint is to cause loss to the wine-merchant with your unbelieving tasting. But in philosophy there would be no such loss. No, however much you drink, the butt is just as full and the wine-merchant will not suffer loss. For, in the words of the proverb, the more you draw the fuller it becomes. The case is the reverse of the butt of the Danaïdes that would not hold what was put into it but let it run away at once. Take some away from philosophy, however, and what is left increases.

But I want to tell you another, similar thing, about sampling philosophy, and do not think that I am being blasphemous about it if I say that it is like a deadly poison—hemlock, for example, or aconite, or some other such. Not even they, deadly though they are, will kill, if you scrape off a tiny piece with the tip of your nail and taste that. No, if the quantity, method of consumption, and mixture are wrong, you can take it and not die. You claimed, however, that the tiniest piece was quite enough to give you a complete knowledge of what the whole was like.