All this I related to Lysis, who was much tickled, and said he had thought he could safely send me among schoolboys without a rival trying to cut him out. But when I told him the name of the boy’s father, he frowned and said, “Well, in the matter of birth you could scarcely go higher. His father is descended from King Kodros and his mother from Solon; the divine seed of Poseidon on either hand. Indeed, if Attica were still a kingdom, I think his elder brother might be the heir. But his family thinks of its past too often for the City’s good; in fact they’re a nest of oligarchs, and this boy must be a nephew of our accomplished Kritias, who I daresay instructs him already in speech-making and the political arts. Ah, well, he can wrestle at least.”
We said no more, for Kritias had become harder than usual to stomach. A young lad called Euthydemos had lately attached himself to Sokrates. He was only about sixteen, but of an aspiring mind, and prone to the absurdities it often runs into at that age; full of the things he meant to do, with no idea of how to set about them. I doubt if I could have had patience with him myself; but Sokrates had divined that under all his nonsense the lad was really in love with excellence, and took endless trouble with him, teasing him out of his pomposities, drawing him forth when he was shy, and putting something solid in the place of his airy notions. By the time I met him he was beginning to show some quality; but that was of no concern to Kritias.
As he valued excellence less and less, he began to lose his skill in assuming it. This time he had scarcely stayed to go through any decent ceremony, or pretence of honourable attachment, before making his demands; and his crudeness had clearly shocked the lad, who, as I have said, was shy. Having made a bad start with him, Kritias was now resorting by turns to flattery, a disgusting importunity, and—what was much more dangerous to this kind of youth—the promise of distinguished introductions. I had the whole story from Phaedo, who loathed Kritias more than anyone, for reasons it had always seemed better not to ask.
After Phaedo was free, he did not let Kritias drive him away from Sokrates. He stayed; but he used to stand looking as if his face were something he had dressed in. Dionysos wears such a pleasant mask in the play where he sends out King Pentheus to be torn by maenads. I said, “Sokrates ought to be told. I can see why no one has done it. It is bound to hurt him that someone who has been about him so long can turn out like this. But it’s better than his being deceived.”—“Yes,” said Phaedo. “I thought so too.”—“You told him? What did he say?”—“He said he had spoken to Kritias already. He asked him, it seems, why he chose to come like a beggar before one in whose eyes he wished to seem precious; and a beggar not for something noble, but for something base.”
It amazed me after this that Kritias could so much as look at Euthydemos in Sokrates’ presence. And, in fact, he seldom did. But having suffered myself, I did not take long to perceive what was going on. The boy’s father had confidence in Sokrates, and used to send him without a tutor; and he was ashamed to say anything, as I had been before. It happened, soon after this, that the chance of war had released more of our circle than usual. Xenophon had just got back with his troop, looking as if he had been years in the field. Some of them had been cut off not long before and the Second killed; Xenophon had taken over, and done so well that the Hipparch had confirmed him in the rank. He must have been the youngest Second in the Guard. Phaedo was there. Agathon (who had been in action somewhere with the hoplites, and arrived drenched in scent to take off, he said, the smell of the camp) had come with Pausanias; Lysis with me; and Kritias had followed Euthydemos, At the time I am speaking of, Sokrates was talking to Xenophon about his promotion; but in the midst of it Euthydemos, whom Kritias had edged up to, flinched aside. And Sokrates broke off what he was saying, in the middle of a word.
There was an extraordinary pause, made up of suspense on the part of those who knew the cause, and surprise among the rest. I saw Phaedo’s mask dissolve and his face appear through it, with slightly parted lips. Euthydemos, poor lad, who I suppose had long dreaded something like this, looked ready to die of shame; but we all had something else to attend to. An empty space had opened through the company, along which Sokrates and Kritias were staring at one another. I had often seen Sokrates pretend to be angry: he looked very droll, half comic and half terrifying. I had never seen him really angry before, and it was nothing to laugh at. Yet for all the force of mind in it, there was something too of a stocky old stone-mason cursing in the yard. If he had picked up a mallet and hurled it at Kritias’ head, I should not have been surprised until later. But he said, “Have you got swine-fever or what, Kritias, that you come scraping yourself on Euthydemos like a pig on a stone?”
The silence that followed you may imagine, seeing that Sokrates had never rebuked the very youngest of us before others. Kritias was by a long way the eldest man there, the most influential, the richest and best born. If Zeus himself had thundered, and blasted him at our feet, I don’t think we young men would have gazed on his body with more solemn awe than now we did upon his face.
He had grown yellow about the mouth, and looked suddenly thinner; but it was his eyes that held me. He was sick with rage; yet he was using it, as an instrument of his will. I said to myself, “He is trying to put Sokrates in fear.” The man in me was shocked and the boy stood gaping, as if at a house afire.
I looked at Sokrates. His face was still red with anger but his anger had died. He stood like rock, and I felt a creeping in my hair. It was not what fear gives one, and I did not understand it for a long time afterwards, till one day I felt it in the theatre; there too it was a case of a brave man standing up to the logic of fate.
Someone, I think, felt this more keenly than I did, for suddenly Agathon gave a little cracked laugh, and clapped his hand over his mouth. Kritias’ eyes opened out and narrowed again; then he turned on his heel, and walked away.
“Tell me, Xenophon, now you are an officer yourself …” I think Sokrates alone of all the company remembered what we had been talking about before; even Xenophon stammered a little before he picked up the thread. But he steadied at once, and went on with the conversation as coolly as if it had been a march through enemy country, till the rest were ready to join in.
Afterwards Lysis and I walked off rather silently. At last I said, “Lysis, Kritias would have killed him if he could. I saw his eyes.”—“It wasn’t pleasant,” he said. It was a way of his to talk things down when they disturbed him. “However, keep it in proportion; this is a civilised City. Sokrates takes no part in politics and doesn’t teach for fees. That’s as far as Kritias’ writ runs. I call it a good riddance.”
I had just got in that evening, and was going to change, when Phaedo called, a thing he had never done unasked before. He stood in the courtyard and said, “Come walking with me.” I was going to ask him in to supper; then I looked again, and went out beside him into the evening. He led me very fast to the Pnyx, and climbed it. No one was about on the hill, but a few lovers, and children playing. We sat on the slab of the public rostrum, and looked across to the High City. The columns looked black against a thin green sky, and the lamps shone yellow in the shrines. There was a smell of dew on dust and on crushed leaves; the bats came out, and the grasshoppers. Phaedo, who had gone up the hill like a leopard on a leash, sat chin on hand. He would be old, I thought, before he would be pitied when he suffered as other men are pitied. One seemed to be looking at such a masterpiece as is only carved in the after calm. At last I said, “Beasts must bleed in silence; but the gods gave men speech.”