whether they have learned from some one else this new sort of death
and destruction which enables them to get rid of a bad man and turn
him into a good one-if they know this (and they do know this-at any
rate they said just now that this was the secret of their
newly-discovered art)-let them, in their phraseology, destroy the
youth and make him wise, and all of us with him. But if you young men
do not like to trust yourselves with them, then fiat experimentum in
corpore senis; I will be the Carian on whom they shall operate. And
here I offer my old person to Dionysodorus; he may put me into the
pot, like Medea the Colchian, kill me, boil me, if he will only make
me good.
Ctesippus said: And I, Socrates, am ready to commit myself to the
strangers; they may skin me alive, if they please (and I am pretty
well skinned by them already), if only my skin is made at last, not
like that of Marsyas, into a leathern bottle, but into a piece of
virtue. And here is Dionysodorus fancying that I am angry with him,
when really I am not angry at all; I do but contradict him when I
think that he is speaking improperly to me: and you must not confound
abuse and contradiction, O illustrious Dionysodorus; for they are
quite different things.
Contradiction! said Dionysodorus; why, there never was such a thing.
Certainly there is, he replied; there can be no question of that. Do
you, Dionysodorus, maintain that there is not?
You will never prove to me, he said, that you have heard any one
contradicting any one else.
Indeed, said Ctesippus; then now you may hear me contradicting
Dionysodorus.
Are you prepared to make that good?
Certainly, he said.
Well, have not all things words expressive of them?
Yes.
Of their existence or of their non-existence?
Of their existence.
Yes, Ctesippus, and we just now proved, as you may remember, that no
man could affirm a negative; for no one could affirm that which is
not.
And what does that signify? said Ctesippus; you and I may contradict
all the same for that.
But can we contradict one another, said Dionysodorus, when both of us
are describing the same thing? Then we must surely be speaking the
same thing?
He assented.
Or when neither of us is speaking of the same thing? For then neither
of us says a word about the thing at all?
He granted that proposition also.
But when I describe something and you describe another thing, or I say
something and you say nothing-is there any contradiction? How can he
who speaks contradict him who speaks not?
Here Ctesippus was silent; and I in my astonishment said: What do you
mean, Dionysodorus? I have often heard, and have been amazed to hear,
this thesis of yours, which is maintained and employed by the
disciples of Protagoras, and others before them, and which to me
appears to be quite wonderful, and suicidal as well as destructive,
and I think that I am most likely to hear the truth about it from you.
The dictum is that there is no such thing as falsehood; a man must
either say what is true or say nothing. Is not that your position?
He assented.
But if he cannot speak falsely, may he not think falsely?
No, he cannot, he said.
Then there is no such thing as false opinion?
No, he said.
Then there is no such thing as ignorance, or men who are ignorant; for
is not ignorance, if there be such a thing, a mistake of fact?
Certainly, he said.