ot have escaped until you had come to an
understanding about the sum to be paid for your release. Well, you ask,
and how will Protagoras reinforce his position? Shall I answer for him?

THEAETETUS: By all means.

SOCRATES: He will repeat all those things which we have been urging on
his behalf, and then he will close with us in disdain, and say:--The
worthy Socrates asked a little boy, whether the same man could remember
and not know the same thing, and the boy said No, because he was
frightened, and could not see what was coming, and then Socrates made
fun of poor me. The truth is, O slatternly Socrates, that when you ask
questions about any assertion of mine, and the person asked is found
tripping, if he has answered as I should have answered, then I am
refuted, but if he answers something else, then he is refuted and not
I. For do you really suppose that any one would admit the memory which a
man has of an impression which has passed away to be the same with that
which he experienced at the time? Assuredly not. Or would he hesitate to
acknowledge that the same man may know and not know the same thing? Or,
if he is afraid of making this admission, would he ever grant that one
who has become unlike is the same as before he became unlike? Or would
he admit that a man is one at all, and not rather many and infinite as
the changes which take place in him? I speak by the card in order to
avoid entanglements of words. But, O my good sir, he will say, come to
the argument in a more generous spirit; and either show, if you can,
that our sensations are not relative and individual, or, if you admit
them to be so, prove that this does not involve the consequence that the
appearance becomes, or, if you will have the word, is, to the individual
only. As to your talk about pigs and baboons, you are yourself behaving
like a pig, and you teach your hearers to make sport of my writings in
the same ignorant manner; but this is not to your credit. For I declare
that the truth is as I have written, and that each of us is a measure
of existence and of non-existence. Yet one man may be a thousand times
better than another in proportion as different things are and appear
to him. And I am far from saying that wisdom and the wise man have no
existence; but I say that the wise man is he who makes the evils which
appear and are to a man, into goods which are and appear to him. And
I would beg you not to press my words in the letter, but to take