“Then he was a father, and not a father? But, come, are you the same thing as a stone?”
“I fear,” replied Socrates, “I shall appear to be no better in your hands, though I do not discover the identity.”
“Well, being other than a stone, you are not a stone; being other than gold, you are not gold. And must not the same thing happen to Charidemos? Being something else than a father, he is not a father.”
“So it seems,” replied the philosopher.
“And what is true of Charidemos,” replied the younger sophist, “must be true of Sophroniscos. Being other than a father, he is not a father: from which, my good friend, it follows that you never had any father at all![[835]]”
Socrates being thus placed on a level with the first man, his friend Ctesippos took up the ball, and sent it with so much force into the face of the sophists, that it somewhat startled them.
“Come, then,” said he, “is not your own father in precisely the same circumstances? Is he not different from my father?”
“Not at all,” answered Euthydemos.
“What, then, he is the same?”
“Exactly.”