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.