Lysis

Ah well, I said, Hippothales, what an altogether noble and gallant love you have discovered there! Now please go on and give me a performance like those that you give your friends here, so that I may know whether you understand what a lover ought to say of his favorite to his face or to others. Do you attach any weight, Socrates, he asked, to anything you have heard this fellow say? Tell me, I said; do you deny being in love with the person he mentions? Not I, he replied; but I do deny that I make poems and compositions on my favorite. He is in a bad way, said Ctesippus; why, he raves like a madman! Then I remarked: Hippothales, I do not want to hear your verses, or any ode that you may have indited to the youth; I only ask for their purport, that I may know your manner of dealing with your favorite. I expect this fellow will tell you, he replied: he has an accurate knowledge and recollection of them, if there is any truth in what he says of my having dinned them so constantly in his ears. Quite so, on my soul, said Ctesippus; and a ridiculous story it is too, Socrates. To be a lover, and to be singularly intent on one’s boy, yet to have nothing particular to tell him that a mere boy could not say, is surely ridiculous: but he only writes and relates things that the whole city sings of, recalling Democrates and the boy’s grandfather Lysis and all his ancestors, with their wealth and the horses they kept, and their victories at Delphi, the Isthmus, and Nemea, [*](The Pythian Games were held at Delphi, the Isthmian near Corinth, and the Nemean at Nemea, between Corinth and Argos.) with chariot-teams and coursers, and, in addition, even hoarier antiquities than these. Only two days ago he was recounting to us in some poem of his the entertainment of Hercules,—how on account of his kinship with Hercules their forefather welcomed the hero, being himself the offspring of Zeus and of the daughter of their deme’s founder; such old wives’ tales, and many more of the sort, Socrates,—these are the things he tells and trolls, while compelling us to be his audience. When I heard this I said: Oh, you ridiculous Hippothales, do you compose and chant a triumph song on yourself, before you have won your victory? It is not on myself, Socrates, he replied, that I either compose or chant it. You think not, I said. Then what is the truth of it? he asked. Most certainly, I replied, it is you to whom these songs refer.