Book 2
5.35
To one who said, You are condemned by the Athenians to die, he made answer, So are they, by nature. But some ascribe this to Anaxagoras. When his wife said, You suffer unjustly, he retorted, Why, would you have me suffer justly? He had a dream that some one said to himHom. Il. ix. 363.: On the third day thou shalt come to the fertile fields of Phthia; and he told Aeschines, On the third day I shall die.The proposal that Socrates should escape from prison was attributed to Aeschines as well as to Crito (see below, 60). The Homeric citation occurs in Plato’s Crito, 44 b. When he was about to drink the hemlock, Apollodorus offered him a beautiful garment to die in: What, said he, is my own good enough to live in but not to die in? When he was told that So-and-so spoke ill of him, he replied, True, for he has never learnt to speak well.
5.36
When Antisthenes turned his cloak so that the tear in it came into view, I see, said he, your vanity through your cloak. To one who said, Don’t you find so-and-so very offensive? his reply was, No, for it takes two to make a quarrel. We ought not to object, he used to say, to be subjects for the Comic poets, for if they satirize our faults they will do us good, and if not they do not touch us. When Xanthippe first scolded him and then drenched him with water, his rejoinder was, Did I not say that Xanthippe’s thunder would end in rain? When Alcibiades declared that the scolding of Xanthippe was intolerable, Nay, I have got used to it, said he, as to the continued rattle of a windlass. And you do not mind the cackle of geese.
