pply to him in which the poet blamed his
enemy:--

'...Full many a thing he knew; But knew them all badly.' (A fragment
from the pseudo-Homeric poem, 'Margites.')

ALCIBIADES: How in the world, Socrates, do the words of the poet apply
to him? They seem to me to have no bearing on the point whatever.

SOCRATES: Quite the contrary, my sweet friend: only the poet is talking
in riddles after the fashion of his tribe. For all poetry has by nature
an enigmatical character, and it is by no means everybody who can
interpret it. And if, moreover, the spirit of poetry happen to seize on
a man who is of a begrudging temper and does not care to manifest his
wisdom but keeps it to himself as far as he can, it does indeed require
an almost superhuman wisdom to discover what the poet would be at. You
surely do not suppose that Homer, the wisest and most divine of poets,
was unaware of the impossibility of knowing a thing badly: for it was
no less a person than he who said of Margites that 'he knew many
things, but knew them all badly.' The solution of the riddle is this, I
imagine:--By 'badly' Homer meant 'bad' and 'knew' stands for 'to know.'
Put the words together;--the metre will suffer, but the poet's meaning
is clear;--'Margites knew all these things, but it was bad for him
to know them.' And, obviously, if it was bad for him to know so many
things, he must have been a good-for-nothing, unless the argument has
played us false.

ALCIBIADES: But I do not think that it has, Socrates: at least, if the
argument is fallacious, it would be difficult for me to find another
which I could trust.

SOCRATES: And you are right in thinking so.

ALCIBIADES: Well, that is my opinion.

SOCRATES: But tell me, by Heaven:--you must see now the nature and
greatness of the difficulty in which you, like others, have your part.
For you change about in all directions, and never come to rest anywhere:
what you once most strongly inclined to suppose, you put aside again and
quite alter your mind. If the God to whose shrine you are going should
appear at this moment, and ask before you made your prayer, 'Whether you
would desire to have one of the things which we mentioned at first, or
whether he should leave you to make your own request:'--what in
either case, think you, would be the best way to take advantage of the
opportunity?

ALCIBIADES: Indeed, Socrates, I could not answer you without
consideration. It seems to me to be a wild thing (The Ho