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 reasonable fortitude of a man who foresees coming evil and can calculate the consequences of his acts, and is very different from the fearless courage of a child, or the insensate fury of a wild beast. But then the man who has this knowledge of good and evil, implied in the possession of real courage, must have also temperance and justice, and in fact all the virtues; and this would contradict the starting-point of their discussion, in which they agreed that courage was only a part of virtue.

"No," Socrates concludes; "we shall have to leave off where we began, and courage must still be to us an unknown quantity. We must go to school again ourselves, and make the education of these boys our own education."

The introduction to the is another specimen of that dramatic description in which Plato excelled. "Yesterday evening," says Socrates, "I came back from the camp at Potidæa; and having been a good while away, I thought I would go and look in at my old haunts. So I went into the Palæstra of Taureas, and there I found a number of persons, most of whom I knew, though not all. My visit was unexpected, and as soon as they saw me coming in they hailed me at once from all sides; and Chærephon (who is a kind of lunatic, you know) jumped up and rushed to me, seizing my hand and exclaiming, "How did you escape, Socrates?" (I must explain that a battle had taken place at Potidæa not long before we left, the news of which had only just reached Athens.)