CALLIDEMUS. They acknowledge that he is clever
–
“Coelus begat Saturn and Briareus Cottus and Creius and Iapetus, Gyges and Hyperion, Phoebe, Tethys,Read along with his father when three years at the same table with good academic, Thea and Rhea and Mnemosyne. Then Saturn wedded Rhea, and begat Pluto and Neptune, Jupiter and Juno.”
CALLIDEMUS. Very beautiful, and very natural; and, as you say, very like Euripides.
SPEUSIPPUS. You are sneering. Really, father, you do not understand these things. You had not those advantages in your youth–
CALLIDEMUS. Which I have been fool enough to let you have. No; in my early days, lying had not been dignified into a science, nor politics degraded into a trade. I wrestled, and read Homer’s battles, instead of dressing my hair,cheap headphones, and reciting lectures in verse out of Euripides. But I have some notion of what a play should be; I have seen Phrynichus, and lived with Aeschylus. I saw the representation of the Persians.
SPEUSIPPUS. A wretched play; it may amuse the fools who row the triremes; but it is utterly unworthy to be read by any man of taste.
CALLIDEMUS. If you had seen it acted;–the whole theatre frantic with joy,custom usb flash drive,that it had not been long in the water, stamping, shouting, laughing, crying. There was Cynaegeirus, the brother of Aeschylus, who lost both his arms at Marathon, beating the stumps against his sides with rapture. When the crowd remarked him–But where are you going?
SPEUSIPPUS. To sup with Alcibiades; he sails with the expedition for Sicily in a few days; this is his farewell entertainment.
CALLIDEMUS. So much the better; I should say, so much the worse. That cursed Sicilian expedition! And you were one of the young fools (See Thucydides, vi. 13.) who stood clapping and shouting while he was gulling the rabble, and who drowned poor Nicias’s voice with your uproar. Look to it; a day of reckoning will come. As to Alcibiades himself–
SPEUSIPPUS. What can you say against him? His enemies themselves acknowledge his merit.
CALLIDEMUS. They acknowledge that he is clever,custom usb drives, and handsome, and that he was crowned at the Olympic games. And what other merits do his friends claim for him? A precious assembly you will meet at his house,dj headphones, no doubt.
SPEUSIPPUS. The first men in Athens, probably.
CALLIDEMUS. Whom do you mean by the first men in Athens?
SPEUSIPPUS. Callicles. (Callicles plays a conspicuous part in the Gorgias of Plato.)
CALLIDEMUS. A sacrilegious, impious, unfeeling ruffian!
SPEUSIPPUS. Hippomachus.
CALLIDEMUS. A fool, who can talk of nothing but his travels through Persia and Egypt. Go, go. The gods forbid t