Elenchus
Socrates was married, you know, and his wife, Xanthippe, was a shrew.
Perhaps that’s why he liked to sit in the cobbler’s shop and talk with young aristocrats about the meaning of words.
‘The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.’
How many a man has said that, in the course of history, to his family, his lovers, his friends?
No wonder you had to get your own back, toying with the feeble minds of arrogant boys, who were not the sons of masons, but of millionaires. Crito, Meno – what were they but foils, the mirror of your unspoken dreams.
Make a virtue of necessity, and so rob from it its force. How Spartan of you, oh most patriotic of Athenians…