Page:The Deipnosophists (Volume 2).djvu/392

 ridiculed Aristippus when he went to visit Dionysius, though he himself had three times sailed to Sicily,—once for the purpose of investigating the torrents of lava which flow from Mount Ætna, when he lived with the elder Dionysius, and was in danger from his displeasure; and twice he went to visit the younger Dionysius."

And again, though Æschines was a poor man, and had but one pupil, Xenocrates, he seduced him from him; and he was also detected in instigating the commencement of a prosecution against Phædo, which, if successful, would have reduced him to slavery; and altogether he displayed the feelings of a stepmother towards all the pupils of Socrates. On which account, Socrates, making a not very unreasonable conjecture respecting him, said in the presence of several persons that he had had a dream, in which he thought he had seen the following vision. "For I thought," said he, "that Plato had become a crow, and leaped on my head, and began to scratch my bald place, and to take a firm hold, and so to look about him. I think, therefore," said he, "that you, O Plato, will say a good many things which are false about my head." And Plato, besides his ill-nature, was very ambitious and vainglorious; and he said, "My last tunic, my desire of glory, I lay aside in death itself—in my will, and in my funeral procession, and in my burial;" as Dioscorides relates in his Memorabilia. And as for his desire of founding cities and making laws, who will not say that these are very ambitious feelings? And this is plain from what he says in the Timæus—"I have the same feelings towards my constitution that a painter would have towards his works; for as he would wish to see them possessed of the power of motion and action, so too do I wish to see the citizens whom I here describe."

117. But concerning the things which he has said in his Dialogues, what can any one say? For the doctrine respecting the soul, which he makes out to be immortal, even after it is separated from the body, and after the dissolution of this latter, was first mentioned by Homer; for he has said, that the soul of Patroclus—

Fled to the shades below, Lamenting its untimely fate, and leaving Its vigour and its youth.

If, then, any one were to say that this is also the argument of