After them, the Sophist tribe somehow or other fastened themselves to my skirts. They were neither profoundly interested in my teaching nor
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altogether at variance, but like the Hippocentaur breed, something composite and mixed, astray in the interspace between quackery and philosophy, neither completely addicted to ignorance nor yet able to keep me envisioned with an intent gaze; being purblind, as it were, through their dim-sightedness they merely glimpsed at times an indistinct, dim presentment or shadow of me, yet thought they had discerned everything with accuracy. So there flared up among them that useless and superfluous “wisdom” of theirs, in their own opinion invincible—those clever, baffling, absurd replies and perplexing, mazy queries.
Then, on being checked and shown up by my comrades, they were indignant and combined against them, at length bringing them before courts and handing them over to drink the hemlock. I ought perhaps at that time to have fled incontinently, no longer putting up with their company; but Antisthenes and Diogenes, and presently Crates and Menippus, ou know,[*](“This” Menippus, not because Lucian thinks of him as attendin Fhilpeop. y in her return to Heaven, or still less because he is carelessly adapting something by Menippus in which that was the case (Helm), but simply because when Lucian wrote these words Menippus enjoyed among the reading public a high degree of popularity, to which by this time Lucian himself had contributed significantly: ) persuaded me to mete them out an additional modicum of delay. O that I had not done so! for I should not have undergone such sufferings later.
ZEUS You have not yet told me what wrongs have been done you, Philosophy; you merely vent your indignation.
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PHILOSOPHY But do listen, Zeus, and hear how great they are. There is an abominable class of men, for the most part slaves and hirelings, who had nothing to do with me in childhood for lack of leisure, since they were performing the work of slaves or hirelings or learning such trades as you would expect their like to learn—cobbling, building, busying themselves with fuller’s tubs, or carding wool to make it easy for the women to work, easy to wind, and easy to draw off when they twist a yarn or spin a thread. Well, while they were following such occupations in youth, they did not even know my name. But when they began to be reckoned as adults and noticed how much respect my companions have from the multitude and how men tolerate their plain-speaking, delight in their ministrations, hearken to their advice, and cower under their censure, they considered all this to be a suzerainty of no mean order.