“My lord,” answered Medon with a courtly bow, “I have told him the history of the last five years, and have taken him to see Syracuse. That is not the way to slander you.”
“Good,” said Dionysius, “I shall have you a courtier yet.”
He then turned to the Athenian, asked him a few questions, all with the nicest tact, about his movements, and finally named a time when he should be at leisure to have some real conversation with him.
“Believe me,” he said, “I honor the Athenians more than any other people in Greece; a strange thing you may think for a Syracusan to say, but it is true.”
Certainly when Callias presented himself at the appointed time, everything that his royal host had said seemed to bear out this assurance. “After to-day,” he said, “politics shall be banished from our talk. Don’t suppose for a moment that if I had been a citizen of Athens, I should have attempted, that I should even have wished, to be what I am here. But Syracuse is not capable of being what Athens is. Even you find liberty a little hard to manage sometimes. Here it is a farce, only a very bloody farce. Listen to what happened to my father-in-law, Hermocrates. There never was an abler man in the country. If it had not been for him, I verily believe that you would have conquered us. He saved the city; and then, a little time afterwards, because he did not do what ten years before no one would have dreamt of doing, that is, conquer you Athenians in a sea-fight, they banished him. Can you imagine such ingratitude, such folly? Well; he was not disposed to put up with it; he saw what I see, that the Syracusans are not fit to govern themselves, and if it had not been for an accident, perhaps I ought rather to say his own reckless courage, he would have been in my place now.[65] What he intended to do I have done. I saved Syracuse as he saved her from Athens; and I dare say that in a year or two my grateful countrymen would have banished me as they banished him. Only I have been beforehand with them. So much for politics; now let us talk of something more pleasant and more profitable.
“Tell me now, do you know one Socrates in your city, a very wise man they tell me?”
“Yes, I know him well.”
“And he is wise?”
“Yes, indeed; there is no one like him; and so the god thought, for the Pythia declared him to be the wisest of men.”
“I should dearly like to see him. Do you think it likely that he would come here, if I were to invite him? I would make it worth his while.”