(January 1824)
A DRAMA
I.
SCENE--A Street in Athens.
Enter CALLIDEMUS and SPEUSIPPUS;
CALLIDEMUS. So, you young reprobate! You must be a man of wit, forsooth, and a man of quality! You must spend as if you were as rich as Nicias, and prate as if you were as wise as Pericles! You must dangle after sophists and pretty women! And I must pay for all! I must sup on thyme and onions, while you are swallowing thrushes and hares! I must drink water, that you may play the cottabus (This game consisted in projecting wine out of cups; it was a diversion extremely fashionable at Athenian entertainments.) with Chian wine! I must wander about as ragged as Pauson (Pauson was an Athenian painter, whose name was synonymous with beggary. See Aristophanes; Plutus, 602. From his poverty, I am inclined to suppose that he painted historical pictures.), that you may be as fine as Alcibiades! I must lie on bare boards, with a stone (See Aristophanes; Plutus, 542.) for my pillow, and a rotten mat for my coverlid, by the light of a wretched winking lamp, while you are marching in state, with as many torches as one sees at the feast of Ceres, to thunder with your hatchet (See Theocritus; Idyll ii. 128.) at the doors of half the Ionian ladies in Peiraeus. (This was the most disreputable part of Athens. See Aristophanes: Pax, 165.)SPEUSIPPUS. Why, thou unreasonable old man! Thou most shameless of fathers!- -CALLIDEMUS. Ungrateful wretch; dare you talk so? Are you not afraid of the thunders of Jupiter?
SPEUSIPPUS. Jupiter thunder! nonsense! Anaxagoras says, that thunder is only an explosion produced by--CALLIDEMUS. He does! Would that it had fallen on his head for his pains!
SPEUSIPPUS. Nay:talk rationally.
CALLIDEMUS. Rationally! You audacious young sophist! I will talk rationally. Do you know that I am your father? What quibble can you make upon that?
SPEUSIPPUS. Do I know that you are my father? Let us take the question to pieces, as Melesigenes would say. First, then, we must inquire what is knowledge? Secondly, what is a father? Now, knowledge, as Socrates said the other day to Theaetetus (See Plato's Theaetetus.)--CALLIDEMUS. Socrates! what! the ragged flat-nosed old dotard, who walks about all day barefoot, and filches cloaks, and dissects gnats, and shoes (See Aristophanes; Nubes, 150.) fleas with wax?
SPEUSIPPUS. All fiction!All trumped up by Aristophanes!
CALLIDEMUS. By Pallas, if he is in the habit of putting shoes on his fleas, he is kinder to them than to himself. But listen to me, boy; if you go on in this way, you will be ruined. There is an argument for you. Go to your Socrates and your Melesigenes, and tell them to refute that. Ruined!Do you hear?
SPEUSIPPUS. Ruined!
CALLIDEMUS. Ay, by Jupiter! Is such a show as you make to be supported on nothing? During all the last war, I made not an obol from my farm; the Peloponnesian locusts came almost as regularly as the Pleiades;--corn burnt;--olives stripped;--fruit trees cut down;-- wells stopped up;--and, just when peace came, and I hoped that all would turn out well, you must begin to spend as if you had all the mines of Thasus at command.
SPEUSIPPUS. Now, by Neptune, who delights in horses--CALLIDEMUS. If Neptune delights in horses, he does not resemble me. You must ride at the Panathenaea on a horse fit for the great king: four acres of my best vines went for that folly. You must retrench, or youwill have nothing to eat.Does not Anaxagoras mention, among his other discoveries, that when a man has nothing to eat he dies?
SPEUSIPPUS. You are deceived.My friends--CALLIDEMUS. Oh, yes! your friends will notice you, doubtless, when you are squeezing through the crowd, on a winter's day, to warm yourself at the fire of the baths;--or when you are fighting with beggars and beggars' dogs for the scraps of a sacrifice;--or when you are glad to earn three wretched obols (The stipend of an Athenian juryman.) by listening all day to lying speeches and crying children.
SPEUSIPPUS. There are other means of support.
CALLIDEMUS. What! I suppose you will wander from house to house, like that wretched buffoon Philippus (Xenophon; Convivium.), and beg everybody who has asked a supper-party to be so kind as to feed you and laugh at you; or you will turn sycophant; you will get a bunch of grapes, or a pair of shoes, now and then, by frightening some rich coward with a mock prosecution. Well! that is a task for which your studies under the sophists may have fitted you.
SPEUSIPPUS. You are wide of the mark.
CALLIDEMUS. Then what, in the name of Juno, is your scheme? Do you intend to join Orestes (A celebrated highwayman of Attica. See Aristophanes; Aves, 711; and in several other passages.), and rob on the highway? Take care; beware of the eleven (The police officers of Athens.); beware of the hemlock. It may be very pleasant to live at other people's expense; but not very pleasant, I should think, to hear the pestle give its last bang against the mortar, when the cold dose is ready.Pah!--SPEUSIPPUS. Hemlock? Orestes! folly!--I aim at nobler objects. What say you to politics,--the general assembly?
CALLIDEMUS. You an orator!--oh no! no! Cleon was worth twenty such fools as you. You have succeeded, I grant, to his impudence, for which, if there be justice in Tartarus, he is now soaking up to the eyes in his own tanpickle. But the Paphlagonian had parts.
SPEUSIPPUS. And you mean to imply--
CALLIDEMUS. Not I. You are a Pericles in embryo, doubtless. Well: and when are you to make your first speech? O Pallas!
SPEUSIPPUS. I thought of speaking, the other day, on the Sicilian expedition; but Nicias (See Thucydides, vi. 8.) got up before me.
CALLIDEMUS. Nicias, poor honest man, might just as well have sate still; his speaking did but little good. The loss of your oration is, doubtless, an irreparable public calamity.
SPEUSIPPUS. Why, not so; I intend to introduce it at the next assembly; it will suit any subject.
