8
To be sure; I should not be treating you fairly if I did not tell you, since you are my sister. Most of them have been helped not a little by philosophy: for if it goes no further, at least regard for their cloth makes them more circumspect in sinning. However, you will come upon a few rascals among them—I must tell the truth, I suppose—and some who are partly wise and partly foolish. You see, when Wisdom took them in hand and dyed them over, all those who thoroughly absorbed the dye were made entirely serviceable, without any intermixture of other hues, and they are quite ready to receive you; while those who because of their ingrained filth were not deeply penetrated by the colouring matter of the dyestuff are better than the rest, to be sure, but unfinished products, half-white, blemished, and spotted like the pard. And there are some who have only touched the kettle on the outside with a finger-tip and smeared on some of the soot, yet think that they too are well enough dyed over. You, however, will of course pass your time with the best of them.
9
But in the course of our talk we are already drawing near to Attica, so let us leave Sunium on our right, and now let us glide down to the Acropolis. Now that we have alighted, you sit down here on the Areopagus somewhere, facing the Pnyx, and wait until I give out the proclamation from Zeus. If I climb the Acropolis it will be easier for me to summon everybody from that point of vantage for the voice.
9
Don’t go, Hermes, until you have told me who comes here, the person with the horns and the shepherd’s pipe and the hairy legs.
