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 Sophists, gives an example of his own method, and by a series of easy questions elicits from Cleinias the admission that wisdom is the only good, that ignorance is evil, and that to become wise is at present his heart's desire.

Then Euthydemus begins again. "So you want Cleinias to become wise, and he is not wise yet?" Socrates admits this. "Then you want the boy to be no longer what he is—that is, you want him to be done away with? A nice set of friends you must all be!"

Socrates is amazed at this retort; and Ctesippus, who is a warm friend of Cleinias, is most indignant, and calls the Sophists a pair of liars in plain language. To this Euthydemus replies that there is no such thing as a lie, and that contradiction is impossible. The dispute is growing warm, when Socrates interposes. There is no use, he says, in quarrelling about words; if by "doing away with him" the strangers mean that they will make a new man out of Cleinias, by all means let them destroy the youth, and make him wise, and all of us with him.

But if you young men do not like to trust yourselves with them, then, fiat experimentum in corpore senis; here I offer my old person to Dionysodorus: he may put me into the pot, like Medea the Colchian, kill me, pickle me, eat me, if he will only make me good, Ctesippus said: "And I, Socrates, am ready to commit myself to the strangers; they may skin me alive, if they please (and I am pretty well skinned by them already), if only my skin is made at last, not like that of Marsyas, into a leathern bottle, but into a piece of virtue. And here is Dionysodorus fancying that I am angry with him, when I am