You are abusive, Ctesippus, said Dionysodorus, you are abusive!
Indeed, I am not, Dionysodorus, he replied; for I love you and am giving
you friendly advice, and, if I could, would persuade you not like a boor to
say in my presence that I desire my beloved, whom I value above all men, to
perish.
I saw that they were getting exasperated with one another, so I made a joke
with him and said: O Ctesippus, I think that we must allow the strangers
to use language in their own way, and not quarrel with them about words,
but be thankful for what they give us. If they know how to destroy men in
such a way as to make good and sensible men out of bad and foolish ones--
whether this is a discovery of their own, or 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.
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