Memorabilia

What do you think will happen to you through kissing a pretty face? Won’t you lose your liberty in a trice and become a slave, begin spending large sums on harmful pleasures, have no time to give to anything fit for a gentleman, be forced to concern yourself with things that no madman even would care about?

Heracles! what alarming power in a kiss! cried Xenophon.What? Does that surprise you? continued Socrates. Don’t you know that the scorpion, though smaller than a farthing, if it but fasten on the tongue, inflicts excruciating and maddening pain?Yes, to be sure; for the scorpion injects something by its bite.

And do you think, you foolish fellow, that the fair inject nothing when they kiss, just because you don’t see it? Don’t you know that this creature called fair and young is more dangerous than the scorpion, seeing that it need not even come in contact, like the insect, but at any distance can inject a maddening poison into anyone who only looks at it?Maybe, too, the loves are called archers for this reason, that the fair can wound even at a distance.Nay, I advise you, Xenophon, as soon as you see a pretty face to take to your heels and fly: and you, Critobulus, I advise to spend a year abroad. It will certainly take you at least as long as that to recover from the bite.

Thus in the matter of carnal appetite, he held that those whose passions were not under complete control should limit themselves to such indulgence as the soul would reject unless the need of the body were pressing, and such as would do no harm when the need was there. As for his own conduct in this matter, it was evident that he had trained himself to avoid the fairest and most attractive more easily than others avoid the ugliest and most repulsive.

Concerning eating and drinking then and carnal indulgence such were his views, and he thought that a due portion of pleasure would be no more lacking to him than to those who give themselves much to these, and that much less trouble would fall to his lot.

If any hold the opinion expressed in some written and spoken criticisms of Socrates that are based on inference, and think, that though he was consummate in exhorting men to virtue, he was an incompetent guide to it, let them consider not only the searching cross-examination with which he chastised those who thought themselves omniscient,[*](Sophists.) but his daily talks with his familiar friends, and then judge whether he was capable of improving his companions.

I will first state what I once heard him say about the godhead in conversation with Aristodemus the dwarf, as he was called. On learning that he was not known to sacrifice or pray or use divination, and actually made a mock of those who did so, he said: Tell me, Aristodemus, do you admire any human beings for wisdom?I do, he answered.

Tell us their names.In epic poetry Homer comes first, in my opinion; in dithyramb, Melanippides; in tragedy, Sophocles; in sculpture, Polycleitus; in painting, Zeuxis.

Which, think you, deserve the greater admiration, the creators of phantoms without sense and motion, or the creators of living, intelligent, and active beings?Oh, of living beings, by far, provided only they are created by design and not mere chance.Suppose that it is impossible to guess the purpose of one creature’s existence, and obvious that another’s serves a useful end, which, in your judgment, is the work of chance, and which of design?Presumably the creature that serves some useful end is the work of design.

Do you not think then that he who created man from the beginning had some useful end in view when he endowed him with his several senses, giving eyes to see visible objects, ears to hear sounds? Would odours again be of any use to us had we not been endowed with nostrils? What perception should we have of sweet and bitter and all things pleasant to the palate had we no tongue in our mouth to discriminate between them?

Besides these, are there not other contrivances that look like the results of forethought? Thus the eyeballs, being weak, are set behind eyelids, that open like doors when we want to see, and close when we sleep: on the lids grow lashes through which the very winds filter harmlessly: above the eyes is a coping of brows that lets no drop of sweat from the head hurt them. The ears catch all sounds, but are never choked with them. Again, the incisors of all creatures are adapted for cutting, the molars for receiving food from them and grinding it. And again, the mouth, through which the food they want goes in, is set near the eyes and nostrils; but since what goes out is unpleasant, the ducts through which it passes are turned away and removed as far as possible from the organs of sense. With such signs of forethought in these arrangements, can you doubt whether they are the works of chance or design?No, of course not.

When I regard them in this light they do look very like the handiwork of a wise and loving creator.What of the natural desire to beget children, the mother’s desire to rear her babe, the child’s strong will to live and strong fear of death?Undoubtedly these, too, look like the contrivances of one who deliberately willed the existence of living creatures.

Do you think you have any wisdom yourself?Oh! Ask me a question and judge from my answer.And do you suppose that wisdom is nowhere else to be found, although you know that you have a mere speck of all the earth in your body and a mere drop of all the water, and that of all the other mighty elements you received, I suppose, just a scrap towards the fashioning of your body? But as for mind, which alone, it seems, is without mass, do you think that you snapped it up by a lucky accident, and that the orderly ranks of all these huge masses, infinite in number, are due, forsooth, to a sort of absurdity?

Yes; for I don’t see the master hand, whereas I see the makers of things in this world.Neither do you see your own soul,[*](Cyropaedia VIII. Vii. 17.) which has the mastery of the body; so that, as far as that goes, you may say that you do nothing by design, but everything by chance.Here Aristodemus exclaimed:

Really, Socrates, I don’t despise the godhead. But I think it is too great to need my service.Then the greater the power that deigns to serve you, the more honour it demands of you.