Then, smiling sweetly, “Dear boy,” said he, “were I such as you fancy, how should I be here now, discoursing with you concerning truth, instead of conning my speech for the Pnyx, like Alcibiades, that I may become a demagogue, deceiving the mob with flattery, and win for myself houses, and lands, and gold, and slave-girls, and fame, and power, even to a tyranny itself? For in this way I might have made my tongue a profitable member of my body; but now, being hurried up and down in barren places, like one mad of love, from my longing after fair youths, I waste my speech on them; receiving, as is the wont of true lovers, only curses and ingratitude from their arrogance. But tell me, thou proud Adonis—This spirit of truth in thee, which thou thoughtest, and rightly, thy most noble possession—did it desire truth, or not?”
P. “But, Socrates, I told you that very thing, and said that it was a longing after truth, which I could not restrain or disobey.”
S. “Tell me now, does one long for that which one possesses, or for that which one does not possess?”
P. “For that which one does not possess.”
S. “And is one in love with that which is oneself, or with that which is not?”
P. “With that which is not oneself, thou mocker. We are not all, surely, like Narcissus?”
S. “No, by the dog! not quite all. But see now: it appears that when any one is in love with a thing, and longs for it, as thou didst for truth, it must be something which is not himself, and which he does not possess?”
P. “True.”
S. “You, then, while you were loving facts as they are, and longing to see them as they are, yet did not possess that which you longed for?”
P. “True, indeed; else why should I have been driven forth by the anger of the gods, like Bellerophon, to pace the Aleian plain, eating my own soul, if I had possessed that for which I longed?”