for his sheepishness; and when others are being praised and glorified,
in the simplicity of his heart he cannot help going into fits of
laughter, so that he seems to be a downright idiot. When he hears a
tyrant or king eulogized, he fancies that he is listening to the
praises of some keeper of cattle--a swineherd, or shepherd, or perhaps a
cowherd, who is congratulated on the quantity of milk which he squeezes
from them; and he remarks that the creature whom they tend, and out of
whom they squeeze the wealth, is of a less tractable and more insidious
nature. Then, again, he observes that the great man is of necessity as
ill-mannered and uneducated as any shepherd--for he has no leisure,
and he is surrounded by a wall, which is his mountain-pen. Hearing
of enormous landed proprietors of ten thousand acres and more, our
philosopher deems this to be a trifle, because he has been accustomed to
think of the whole earth; and when they sing the praises of family, and
say that some one is a gentleman because he can show seven generations
of wealthy ancestors, he thinks that their sentiments only betray a
dull and narrow vision in those who utter them, and who are not educated
enough to look at the whole, nor to consider that every man has had
thousands and ten thousands of progenitors, and among them have been
rich and poor, kings and slaves, Hellenes and barbarians, innumerable.
And when people pride themselves on having a pedigree of twenty-five
ancestors, which goes back to Heracles, the son of Amphitryon, he cannot
understand their poverty of ideas. Why are they unable to calculate that
Amphitryon had a twenty-fifth ancestor, who might have been anybody,
and was such as fortune made him, and he had a fiftieth, and so on? He
amuses himself with the notion that they cannot count, and thinks that a
little arithmetic would have got rid of their senseless vanity. Now, in
all these cases our philosopher is derided by the vulgar, partly because
he is thought to despise them, and also because he is ignorant of what
is before him, and always at a loss.

THEODORUS: That is very true, Socrates.

SOCRATES: But, O my friend, when he draws the other into upper air,
and gets him out of his pleas and rejoinders into the contemplation of
justice and injustice in their own nature and in their difference from
one another and from all other things; or from the commonplaces about
the happiness of a king or of a rich man to the consideration o