I found, as you might expect after so long, some new faces about him, and one half-familiar one that puzzled me at first. It belonged to a young man of, I thought, about my age, broad and strong-looking, with intent deep-set eyes in a powerful face. I was sure he was strange to me, yet something stirred my memory; I wondered if I could have met some kinsman who resembled him. As soon as he saw me looking, he smiled at me; I returned it, but still could not place him. In stillness he had a somewhat chilling dignity; his smile however was modest, almost shy. He did not often intervene in the debate, but whenever he did, he changed the course of it; and I was struck with Sokrates’ manner at such times. Not that he seemed to make much of the young man, nor treated him with that tenderness he used to show Phaedo; but he seemed to grow more than ever himself. Perhaps it was because he found his thought so quickly followed; they had to go back sometimes to let others catch up with them. While I was still puzzling my memory, he said, “Yes, I know, Plato; but if you always take the steps in threes, one day you will miss a cracked one.”
As soon as Sokrates had gone, he strode over and grasped my hand, asking how I was and if Lysis was with me. “I’ve scarcely seen you, Plato,” I said, “since the Games. But I can see I ought to say Aristokles now.”—“None of my friends do. If you were not still one, Alexias, I should be very sorry.”
We walked off together talking. The old-time formality which had sat on him oddly as a boy, now fitted him like good armour. I use the comparison purposely; he is a man, I think, easily wounded, but very unwilling to have it known. People meeting him first in manhood seldom suspect it, for he is very well able now to give blow for blow. You would have taken him for at least as old as I; I had seen that most of the young men about Sokrates were afraid of him.
I asked if he was still wrestling. He said, “No, except for a friendly bout. The Isthmus cured me of that ambition. One exercises to be a whole man, not a creature bred like a plough-ox to do one thing.” He had grown much taller, and this with the change of exercise had greatly improved him; he was big, but not out of balance for his build. It was one reason for my not having known him. “In any case,” he said, “the Twins claim one now oftener than the palaestra.” On his arm was a spear-thrust hardly healed; since Euboea fell, the raids had got worse again.
I did not ask him how he came to Sokrates: it seemed as silly as asking an eagle how it came to fly. It was he who opened the matter to me. “At Corinth,” he said, “you listened so kindly to my youthful nonsense, that I probably told you I had notions of myself as a poet, and was writing a tragedy.”—“Yes, of course; upon Hippolytos. Did you finish it?”—“Indeed I did, and revised it again last year. I showed it to my uncle, who has often been generous in putting his good judgement at my service; he approved of it, and other friends were kind, so on their advice I decided to enter it for the Dionysia. I was so zealous about it that I got there before the bureau was opened for competitors, and stood waiting in the portico of the theatre, with my roll in my hand. Sokrates was standing there too; not in impatience, as I was, but lost in thought. I had heard of him from my uncle, who saw him often at one time, but parted company with him, I understand, upon a point of philosophy. I am speaking of course of my uncle Kritias.”
Recollecting myself, I said, “Of course. But what about Sokrates?”
“Seeing him there, oblivious of my presence, I took the occasion to look at him. What he was meditating on, I have never asked him. But as I gazed on his face, a strange, indeed a painful quickening seized me, like a child before the birth-cry. While I was still trying to understand myself, he came out of his meditation, and looked straight at me. He walked over, and asked me if I was entering a tragedy, and what the subject was. Then he asked me to read him some. You may be sure I obliged him very willingly. At the end I paused for praise, which I had not so far been disappointed in; and, indeed, he praised it highly. Then he asked me the meaning of a simile. I had thought it clear to any lettered person, for one does not write for fools; but as I began to explain, I became aware all at once that I had meant very little by it, and the little was not very true. He asked, in the gentlest way, to hear some more; this time he said he was in full agreement, and told me why. But much more than his irony, his praise revealed me to myself; he had seen in the passage something so much beyond my own conception, that the whole work, thus regarded, fell to pieces in my hands. I had not the shamelessness to accept his praise. I told him he had opened my eyes; that I could not be satisfied with the work as it was, but should take it home and re-write it. We had now gone down from the portico and were walking together, and had come to the central meaning round which the play was framed: the dealing, I mean, of Theseus and Hippolytos with the gods, and the gods with one another. All morning we talked, and at the time of the noonday meal I went home. In the afternoon I read my tragedy again, and my other verse. Some of the lines were not unhappy, and the choruses did not limp in the foot. What would you say, Alexias, of an embroidered mantle made to clothe a god, whose image was still unshaped in the marble, scarcely the drill-holes made? I saw that to take pleasure in this stuff was to load my soul with chains, when wings had been offered me. So I called for a brazier, and burned it all.” Whatever it was I said to him, he did not seem put out by it; so I suppose it was without offence. There met and wrestled in me love and envy of an excellence beyond my reach. For a moment, I think, I was a child at the music-class again, and jealous as a child. But presently I remembered some of the lessons Sokrates had taught me, and that I was a man. So I asked Plato if he remembered any of his burned play.
I saw him hesitate. He was a poet after all, and not much above twenty. At last he said, “Well, there was one passage he seemed not to think unsound. You must suppose Hippolytos has just died; the young men’s chorus invokes Aphrodite, the author of his fate.”
He repeated it. I was long silent, my soul freed of its folly, humble before the Immortals. At last, afraid I had seemed uncivil, I spoke, but could only say, “You burned this, and you kept no copy?”
“When one offers to the gods, one brings a whole beast to the altar. If it was an image of what is not, then it was false and ought to be destroyed; and if of what is, then a little fire will not destroy it. It is nearly noon; won’t you come home and eat with me?”
I was about to accept, when just as in old days the trumpet-call shuddered across the City. “They are getting insolent,” he said. “Forgive me, Alexias; I shall look forward to it another day.” He went off to arm himself, but not without pausing to say that the troops in Ionia had long taken the brunt of the war. His manners were always good, and I suppose he knew I had no horse now.
I had other friends to see about the City. Phaedo, when I called on him, ran up and embraced me. I was glad of this not for my sake alone. Ever since he left Gurgos’, I had never known him touch anyone of his own accord; I inferred some later happiness to have been his physician. But his chief love, I found, was still philosophy. It was evident his mind had increased in power and keenness; and, after a little talk, I learned that its whetstone had been Plato. Antagonism of ideas, mixed with respect, had drawn these two together. Perhaps in the real substance of their souls, they were not so very unlike. The higher the dream betrayed, the deeper the bitterness; if the man survives, he will be on guard against dreams as a shepherd watches for wolves. Phaedo said, “He tells me that if I don’t take care, I shall spend my life clearing the ground, and never come to build. I say, of course, that he’s one to start building before the foundations have settled. He’s certainly nimble at meeting an objection; still, I think he’ll admit to you that I’ve cracked his logic here and there.”