14
Very well; neither will any but a lunatic buy you.
14
I bid each of you go to the devil from his youth up, whether he purchase or purchase not.
14
His affliction is not much removed from melancholia. For my part, I am not going to buy either of them.
14
These two are left on our hands.
14
Put up another!
15
That Athenian there, the chatterbox?
15
By all means.
15
Come here, you! We offer a good, sensible life. Who buys the most holy?
15
Tell me, just what do you happen to know?
15
I am a lover and wise in the science of love.
15
Then how in the world could I buy you? For what I want is a tutor for my pretty boy.
15
Well, who could be a better man than I to associate with the fair? It is beautiful souls that I love, not bodies.
16
Indeed, I swear it to you by the dog and the plane-tree.
16
Heavens, what strange gods!
16
What's that you say? Don't you think the dog is a god? Perhaps you have not noticed how great Anoubis is in Egypt, and Seirios in the heavens, and Kerberos among the dead.
17
You are right, it was my mistake. But what is your manner of life?
17
I live by myself in a sort of state that I fashioned with a foreign form of government, and I enact my own laws.
17
I should like to hear one of your principles.
17
Well, this is the most important: my decision about women. No woman is assigned to one man alone, but to every one who wishes her in marriage. Have you, then, abrogated the laws about marriage?
17
What!
17
Dear me, yes, and all such petty formalities. Beauty shall be the reward of the bravest-those who have accomplished some brilliant feat of daring.
18
A fine reward! And what is the substance of your philosophy?
18
The ideas and the types of existing things; for, indeed, everything that you see-the earth and all upon it, the sky, the sea-all these things have invisible images outside the universe.
18
Where are they?
18
Nowhere; for if they were anywhere they could not be.
18
I don't see these types you speak of.
18
Naturally; for your soul's eye is blind. But I see the images of all things: an invisible you, another me, and everything double.
