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🫣🙃😏 Hypocritique 🫣🙃😏

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I, Işık Barış Fidaner, present here a reconstructed text that has long been hiding in plain sight, behind Plato’s careful cuts and rearrangements. According to this version, Socrates was not executed merely for abstract charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, but for his notorious devotion to a prostitute named Sophia, whose youth he envied and idealized in his old age. Unable to admit this attachment, Socrates wrapped his situation in an ever-thickening cocoon of “philo-Sophia”: oracles, immortal souls, and consoling myths about death. Plato, deeply embarrassed, removed Sophia from the canonical dialogues, but in doing so left seams and gaps. From those seams we can now piece together the suppressed dialogue you are about to read.

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Plato:

When I was a young man, I saw my master Socrates die. The city said he was corrupting the youth, and this was true in a way, though not as they thought. For he spent long days in the company of a woman whom the many called a whore, Sophia, praising her not only for her beauty but for a certain quickness of mind. The youths followed him, and he followed her. The Athenians were outraged that wisdom should seem to dwell in so lowly a place, and they said that his philosophy was only a mask for old man’s jealousy of youth.

After his death, shame and reverence struggled in me. I cut out Sophia from the dialogues I offered to the city, yet I could not bear to erase her entirely from my memory. So I wrote this secret dialogue, gathering the words of Socrates where his denial of her turned into talk of death, of oracles, and of the soul.

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Socrates, at his trial (from the Apology)

Friends, who would have acquitted me, I would like also to talk with you about the thing which has come to pass, while the magistrates are busy, and before I go to the place at which I must die. Stay then a little, for we may as well talk with one another while there is time. You are my friends, and I should like to show you the meaning of this event which has happened to me.

And I see, men of Athens, how some of you look at me, and at Plato here, as if to say that all this would never have befallen me, had I in my old age ceased to praise before the young that woman Sophia, whom the many call by a name of reproach. For you think that when I say she is beautiful and has a quick and questioning mind, I am bewitched by her body, and that through her I have corrupted the youths. You would have me now confess that she is but a common girl of the street, and so be quit of your anger. But, my friends, I am ashamed rather to wrong that part of the soul which still honours whatever in a human being, even one so despised, seems to love inquiry more than gold. If I were to say now that there was nothing fine or free in her, I should not be accusing Sophia, but philosophy, which bears her name and which I have spent my life in serving.

O my judges—for you I may truly call judges—I should like to tell you of a wonderful circumstance. Hitherto the divine faculty of which the internal oracle is the source has constantly been in the habit of opposing me even about trifles, if I was going to make a slip or error in any matter; and now as you see there has come upon me that which may be thought, and is generally believed to be, the last and worst evil. But the oracle made no sign of opposition, either when I was leaving my house in the morning, or when I was on my way to the court, or while I was speaking, at anything which I was going to say; and yet I have often been stopped in the middle of a speech, but now in nothing I either said or did touching the matter in hand has the oracle opposed me. What do I take to be the explanation of this silence? I will tell you. It is an intimation that what has happened to me is a good, and that those of us who think that death is an evil are in error. For the customary sign would surely have opposed me had I been going to evil and not to good.

Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things—either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.

You are troubled, I know, not only on my own account, but lest the young men who delighted to hear me question Sophia in the workshops and in the palaestra may say that I was put to death for the love of a woman, and not for the love of wisdom. But consider, my friends, whether this be not a childish fear. If death be truly an evil, then it is better for me to live on and keep silence about such women, and to call none of them fair or free again; yet the god who checks me in lesser matters checked me not here. It seems then that we must learn from death itself whether what we loved in Sophia was of the body or of the soul.

Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?

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Plato:

After these words he was condemned. But the Athenians did not yet have their fill of gossip. In the prison, we begged him to flee, to save at least his name from being joined to Sophia’s. He answered us in the dialogue which bears Crito’s name, though I hid her presence there.

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In the prison (from the Crito)

SOCRATES: Very well, Crito; if such is the will of God, I am willing; but my belief is that there will be a delay of a day.

CRITO: Why do you think so?

SOCRATES: I will tell you. I am to die on the day after the arrival of the ship?

CRITO: Yes; that is what the authorities say.

SOCRATES: But I do not think that the ship will be here until to-morrow; this I infer from a vision which I had last night, or rather only just now, when you fortunately allowed me to sleep.

CRITO: And what was the nature of the vision?

SOCRATES: There appeared to me the likeness of a woman, fair and comely, clothed in bright raiment, who called to me and said: O Socrates,

‘The third day hence to fertile Phthia shalt thou go.’

CRITO: What a singular dream, Socrates!

SOCRATES: There can be no doubt about the meaning, Crito, I think.

CRITO: Yes; the meaning is only too clear. But, oh! my beloved Socrates, let me entreat you once more to take my advice and escape. For if you die I shall not only lose a friend who can never be replaced, but there is another evil: people who do not know you and me will believe that I might have saved you if I had been willing to give money, but that I did not care. Now, can there be a worse disgrace than this–that I should be thought to value money more than the life of a friend? For the many will not be persuaded that I wanted you to escape, and that you refused.

And besides this, Socrates, they say everywhere in the city that you are dying for the sake of a harlot, that you preferred to be thought faithful to Sophia rather than obedient to the laws, and that you have filled the youths with shameful desires under the name of philosophy. Plato himself is vexed, and begged me but now to tell you that if only you would openly deny her and say that she is nothing to you, the anger of the Athenians might yet be softened.

SOCRATES: But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the many? Good men, and they are the only persons who are worth considering, will think of these things truly as they occurred.

[…]

SOCRATES: Then we must do no wrong?

CRITO: Certainly not.

SOCRATES: Nor when injured injure in return, as the many imagine; for we must injure no one at all?

CRITO: Clearly not.

SOCRATES: Then consider the matter in this way:–Imagine that I am about to play truant (you may call the proceeding by any name which you like), and the laws and the government come and interrogate me:

Perhaps, Crito, you suppose that if I go away to Thessaly or to some other city, I shall escape not only this death, but the talk about Sophia; that men there will say that the old man has at last come to his senses and put away his foolish admiration for a girl. Yet you know not what you ask. For if I flee to save the name of Socrates, I shall condemn that very inquiry which led me to see some spark of wisdom even in a despised woman. It is this that the Athenians cannot bear, that philosophy should be found, as it were, in so humble a dwelling. Let us then hear, not what Sophia or the youths would say, but what the laws themselves would say of such a flight.

‘Tell us, Socrates,’ they say; ‘what are you about? are you not going by an act of yours to overturn us–the laws, and the whole state, as far as in you lies? Do you imagine that a state can subsist and not be overthrown, in which the decisions of law have no power, but are set aside and trampled upon by individuals?’

[…]

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Plato:

When he would not flee, we turned from plans of escape to questions about the soul. All of us thought that if he believed in the life to come, it was because he dared not admit the life he had already chosen in Sophia’s shadow. Yet he spoke in such a way that even his denial became a strange hymn to her name.

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On the last day (from the Phaedo)

Tell this to Evenus, Cebes, and bid him be of good cheer; say that I would have him come after me if he be a wise man, and not tarry; and that to-day I am likely to be going, for the Athenians say that I must.

And if he wonders, as perhaps he will, how that man whom he knew, who would spend whole days in the workshop of Sophia talking with her and the young men about poetry and love and the care of the soul, can now so quietly give himself up to death, you shall tell him that I am not now deserting wisdom for the sake of a woman, but am going to the very mistress whose shadow I seemed to see in her. For the many think that my business was with Sophia the courtesan, but you who have been with me know that it was with sophia itself that I was always striving to converse, calling that striving by the name which men give it, philosophy.

Then he, or any man who has the spirit of philosophy, will be willing to die, but he will not take his own life, for that is held to be unlawful.

[…]

I admit the appearance of inconsistency in what I am saying; but there may not be any real inconsistency after all.

For when I followed Sophia in the streets and the youths followed me, it might well have appeared to those who saw only with the eyes that I was the prisoner, dragged about by the chain of desire; and that it was she who was free and leading me. Yet in truth, if I may speak enigmatically, whenever I looked upon her face, I was reminded rather of the thing itself whose name she bears, and it seemed to me that the god had set her there as an image to turn the eyes of the young from her body to the inquiry after what is beautiful and good in itself. So you must not think that I am now casting away that image in anger, like a man who has been deceived by a painted toy; I am only acknowledging more plainly that both she and I and all that we call ours are, as it were, the playthings of the gods.

There is a doctrine whispered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand. Yet I too believe that the gods are our guardians, and that we are a possession of theirs. Do you not agree?

[…]

Now the earth has divers wonderful regions, and is indeed in nature and extent very unlike the notions of geographers, as I believe on the authority of one who shall be nameless.

And perhaps, Simmias, you will say that I talk thus because I have spent too much time looking, not at the earth, but at the little corner of it where Sophia and the lads used to sit and argue, and that my old eyes are dazzled by the sight of her youth, so that I imagine every place where she has been to be fairer than in truth it is. Yet, if you consider, you will see that it is not her body that has led me into these tales, but rather the thought that even in so lowly and much-abused a life there appeared to me a desire to know and to answer, as the soul does in philosophy. This has made me suspect that our dwelling here is but a hollow and a shadow of something nobler, and that both she and we belong by nature elsewhere.

Well, then, he said, my conviction is, that the earth is a round body in the centre of the heavens, and therefore has no need of air or any similar force to be a support, but is kept there and hindered from falling or inclining any way by the equability of the surrounding heaven and by her own equipoise. For that which, being in equipoise, is in the centre of that which is equably diffused, will not incline any way in any degree, but will always remain in the same state and not deviate.

[…]

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Plato:

So Socrates died, owing a cock to Asclepius, as I have told elsewhere. But there is another debt which I have now at last repaid. For I owed Sophia herself the truth: that the city killed him not only for his questions, but for the scandal of his love of wisdom shining, for a moment, through her despised and youthful body.

There is one more scene I long concealed: the presence of his wife, Xanthippe. She came to the prison on the last day, weeping for him and, as all knew, burning with jealousy of Sophia. The words spoken then I cut from the public version and left only the barest outline. But they belong to the same hidden story: the old man’s denial, the young woman, and the metaphysical veils he drew over both.

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[…]

When we were come, we found Socrates just freed from chains, and Xanthippe, whom you know, holding his little child and sitting by him. As soon as she saw us she cried out in her accustomed manner and said:

‘O Socrates, this is the last time that you will converse with your friends, or they with you.’

And she added, for she was bitter against him: ‘And all for that Sophia and her painted wisdom, that you preferred to sit with her in the workshop rather than at home with your children. Now you will leave me a widow for the sake of her youth, and the city will say not that you loved wisdom, but that you ran after a whore.’

Socrates looked at Crito and said:

‘Crito, someone had better take her home.’

For, as he often said, the soul must not be confused by the cries of women when it is about to consider whether it goes to a better place. And now, seeing Xanthippe’s grief mingled with Sophia’s name, he feared less her reproaches than that we, his friends, should think that it was indeed for the sake of a young woman that he was dying, and not for that sophia which he would not separate from her. Therefore he hid her words under the silence which he called philosophy, and bade Crito remove her, that he might speak more freely of death and the soul.

And some of Crito’s people led her away, wailing and beating her breast.

[…]

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Plato:

After she had gone, he turned at once to the argument about philosophy and death, as if to show that he belonged not to his wife and children, nor to Sophia, but to that invisible wisdom whose name both women bore in different ways. Yet to us it was clear that the sharpest sting in Xanthippe’s lament was not the loss of her husband, but the rumour that he died for the sake of another woman’s youth.

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Sophia: the hidden dialogue

The scene is the Piraeus, in the back room of a perfumer’s shop that everyone knows is also a house of pleasure. Socrates is already old; Sophia is in the full insolent brightness of youth. Plato says he heard the conversation from one who was there, and later compared it with Socrates’ own account.

SOCRATES: So this is the famous Sophia, whom the city calls a whore and I have called a lover of wisdom.

SOPHIA: You are late, little old owl. I was told you were ugly, but you are even cuter than they said. Like a bust of Silenus that someone forgot to polish.

SOCRATES: You see, Plato, how the gods favour me: they give me a guide to beauty who begins by insulting my face. Tell me, Sophia, is this how you greet all your admirers?

SOPHIA: If I greeted them with hymns to Apollo, they would run away. They come because I am shameless. You too, I suppose.

SOCRATES: I come because I am ashamed of the city. They say you corrupt the young, and that I am your accomplice. I wish to examine this corruption, to see whether it is a weed or a strange medicinal herb.

SOPHIA: Oh, I like this. You make it sound deep, so I can pretend I am not just a girl who takes coins. Very well, question me. But make it quick, I have to rehearse.

SOCRATES: Rehearse what?

SOPHIA: A performance. A hymn to hateful coupling. We will climb the steps of Athena’s temple by night, in our bright chitons, and chant obscene verses about the archons while we dance around the altar. Some will be horrified, some will laugh, and all will talk. That is the point.

SOCRATES: You will dance obscene hymns in the house of the virgin goddess?

SOPHIA: Do not wrinkle your forehead like that, it makes your whole face fold up. It is not piety they want, but obedience. They bring bulls to be slaughtered, and that is called beautiful. We bring our bodies and our verses, and that is called impious. I say their piety is boring.

SOCRATES: And what do you hope to gain by this outrage?

SOPHIA: Attention. Anger. Fear. They must remember that we exist. The men up there in fine cloaks speak about the city on the hill; they forget the women and slaves in the hollow under their feet. So I will stamp on the marble until they feel us.

SOCRATES: You remind me of those painters who scratch vulgar words into the base of statues. The priests lift their eyes to the noble face of the god, the boys giggle at what is written by their sandals.

SOPHIA: Exactly. The god is theirs, the scratching is mine. I cannot own a temple, but I can stain it for a moment. That is my art.

SOCRATES: So you make yourself an image beneath the image, a kind of profane icon. You stand beside Athena not as rival, but as parody.

SOPHIA: Parody, yes. I like the sound of that. Makes it seem like I know letters. Write this down: I am the parody of the goddess. But I am also better than her.

SOCRATES: Better than Athena? You are very bold.

SOPHIA: She is on the pediment, I am in the street. Men fear her spear, but they love my legs. She stands there forever, I get old. Which is harder? To be cold and stone and adored, or to be warm and sweating and used up? I say my fate is more serious, so I am the greater goddess.

SOCRATES: And yet you call yourself a whore.

SOPHIA: They call me whore. I call myself expensive. I know exactly how many drachmas my body is worth, and that makes me wiser than the generals who throw away lives for free.

SOCRATES: Then you delight in being an object of purchase?

SOPHIA: Why not? An object is simple. A couch is a couch, a cup is a cup, a girl is a girl. They buy and think they own me. But when they leave their purse on the table and stare at me with their mouths open, they are the objects. I say: look, another statue of a man sitting like a donkey in heat. I am the sculptor who makes them.

SOCRATES: This is strange, Sophia. You sell yourself and yet you claim to be the buyer. You are used and yet say you are the user.

SOPHIA: You see, you are already fascinated. That is why you are here. You pretend you came to rescue the youth from me, but really you came to hear me say stupid things and then twist them into your clever knots.

SOCRATES: Perhaps. Or perhaps the god sent me to see how far wisdom will go when it puts on rouge and anklets. Tell me, when you dance obscene hymns in the temple, do you believe in the gods you mock?

SOPHIA: Believe? You mean, do I think there is a woman in the sky with an owl on her shoulder counting how many times I lift my skirt?

SOCRATES: Something like that.

SOPHIA: No. If she exists, she can count for herself. I do not care. The gods are like those statues on the Acropolis: they are there, everyone walks around them, and nobody touches them. I believe in what I can touch.

SOCRATES: And yet you use their images, their altars, their feasts.

SOPHIA: Of course. The forms are mine to play with. They carved Athena with a spear, I will carve Sophia with a garland of fig leaves and a dirty song. The form is theirs, the joke is mine.

SOCRATES: You are an impious believer.

SOPHIA: I am an impious believer in myself. That is enough. Now tell me, ugly little owl, why do you follow me? The other men come to me because they want to sweat. You come and ask questions. Are you too poor to pay?

SOCRATES: I am rich in questions, poor in drachmas. And perhaps I am not following you, but something that hides behind you, using you as a mask.

SOPHIA: You mean this famous wisdom you talk about all day? Your precious sophia hiding behind Sophia? Very poetic. Very boring.

SOCRATES: You find wisdom boring?

SOPHIA: I find anything boring that does not make someone furious. Does your wisdom make the archons sweat with rage? Does it make the women whisper? Does it make the boys draw obscene pictures on the walls?

SOCRATES: Sometimes.

SOPHIA: Then maybe your wisdom is not completely dead. But you talk so slowly, old man. By the time you have defined your terms, the night is over.

SOCRATES: And how do you define yourself, if not slowly?

SOPHIA: I do not define myself. I shout, I dance, I starve myself until the guards panic, I lie down in the middle of the agora and refuse to move until they drag me away. That is my definition.

SOCRATES: You starve yourself?

SOPHIA: Fasting is cheaper than wine. And when the prison gives me rotten barley and worms, not eating is the only way to say no. They think they are punishing me; I make their punishment my altar. When they see I would rather faint than swallow their filth, they grow afraid. A girl who is not afraid to die is more frightening than a soldier.

SOCRATES: You have been in prison, then.

SOPHIA: Many times. The last was for that little hymn in the temple. They threw me in the city dungeon, gave me water with a dead fly, bread that smelled like the harbour, and said: eat, or we will beat you. I said: I will not eat and you will not beat me, because if you beat me while I am fasting, and I die, you will have killed a girl for singing. The city will not like that.

SOCRATES: And did they beat you?

SOPHIA: They shouted, they threatened, they talked about bringing in some foreign torturer from Syracuse. But in the end they just left me there. Three days. I sang to keep myself company. The rats listened.

SOCRATES: And the gods? Did they listen?

SOPHIA: If they listened, they did not send figs. I think they were on holiday at Olympia. Or maybe they were sitting in some other city, watching some other girl. The gods are never where you need them. That is why I use their temples as theatres.

SOCRATES: So you say the gods have abandoned you.

SOPHIA: Maybe they were never there. Maybe we invented them, as I invent myself every time I put on a new veil. Who cares? It is more fun to act as if they are watching, so I can shock them.

SOCRATES: Yet even in your godless prison you fasted as if offering sacrifice. You turned your body into an altar.

SOPHIA: You make everything into an altar. If I sneeze, you will say I am consecrating the air. It is ridiculous.

SOCRATES: Ridiculous, yes. And yet there is something in it. You remind me of those tales from Thrace, where the women follow Dionysus into the hills, tearing animals apart and eating their flesh raw, to show that they belong to a god who is torn and reborn. They behave like madwomen, but some say there is wisdom in their frenzy.

SOPHIA: Wisdom again. You cannot leave it alone. Tell me, Socrates, do you desire me?

SOCRATES: You delight in asking dangerous questions.

SOPHIA: If you say no, you are a liar. If you say yes, you are ridiculous. Either way I win. Answer.

SOCRATES: If by desire you mean the stirring of the body, then I confess I am no longer a youth chasing shadows. Age has cooled my limbs.

SOPHIA: So you are useless. Very well, I will only charge you half.

SOCRATES: But if by desire you mean that restlessness of the soul that makes a man sit up at night thinking of another, then yes, I desire you. Not as a man desires a girl, but as a philosopher desires a riddle that will not be solved.

SOPHIA: A riddle. So I am a puzzle to be solved by an old man with no money. How flattering.

SOCRATES: You see, you call yourself idiot and whore, the city calls you shameful and dangerous, and yet when you speak, a different voice slips out, one that plays with the forms of god and city and law as if they were toys. That voice interests me.

SOPHIA: You mean the way I talk about myself as a goddess and a parody and an altar? I thought I was just being clever.

SOCRATES: You are being more than clever. You have made your body into an image through which the city talks to itself about what it fears and desires. That is both vulgar and holy.

SOPHIA: Holy. I like that word. It makes my mother furious when I use it. She says I shame my ancestors. I say: yes, and I do it beautifully.

SOCRATES: Your mother disapproves?

SOPHIA: She wanted me to marry a potter and have six children and grow fat at the hearth. Instead I wear saffron and dance on the altar. I say that is an improvement.

SOCRATES: And the young men who come to you, what do they seek?

SOPHIA: Mostly they seek to boast. They say: I have drunk with generals, I have argued with sophists, I have paid for the best girl in the Piraeus. I am a complete man. They want me to be their trophy. Which is fine; a trophy costs money.

SOCRATES: And do you ever love them?

SOPHIA: Love? You are so dramatic. I like some of them when they are stupid in an honest way. When they try to show off their poetry and confuse Sappho with some cheap dithyramb, I laugh. That is a sort of love.

SOCRATES: And do you love me?

SOPHIA: I find you cute. That is already too much. You speak like someone who has swallowed the whole library of the city and cannot digest it. Books come out of your mouth. It is funny.

SOCRATES: Cute. I will add that to my list of epithets.

SOPHIA: Do that. When the judges ask why you corrupted the youth, you can say: because a whore found me cute.

SOCRATES: They already ask. And they say I use you as a mask, calling my devotion to you by the noble name of philosophy.

SOPHIA: Maybe they are right. Maybe your philosophy is just an old man’s jealousy of youth, painted over with big words. You talk about the soul so no one notices you staring at my ankles.

SOCRATES: You judge me harshly, Sophia.

SOPHIA: I judge you fairly. You are half saint, half dog. That is why I let you talk so much. It is entertaining.

SOCRATES: And you, what are you?

SOPHIA: Half idiot, half goddess. That is enough for one life.

SOCRATES: Then listen, half idiot and half goddess, while I tell you something absurd. There are men from the islands who whisper a doctrine in secret. They say the soul is not at home here, that the body is a prison and the world a cave, and that the soul longs to return to a place where there is no buying and selling, no rotting bread, no archons, no brothels, only pure forms of beauty and justice.

SOPHIA: Sounds extremely dull. No brothels? What do they do all day, stare at each other’s foreheads?

SOCRATES: They contemplate, they say.

SOPHIA: Then I prefer the prison.

SOCRATES: Yet consider. If there is such a place, then every time you make yourself an image and stamp your feet in the temple, you are like a prisoner striking the door, saying: this is not my true house.

SOPHIA: Or I am just bored and like to annoy people. Not everything is deep, Socrates.

SOCRATES: That is the deepest thing you have said. Not everything is deep, and yet the soul insists on digging. Perhaps that is why I am fond of you. You remind me that wisdom must wear a ridiculous mask to be seen.

SOPHIA: Fond. You are fond of me. Like one is fond of a stray dog that barks at the statues.

SOCRATES: Exactly so.

SOPHIA: Then when they kill you for loving me, remember this conversation. You could have just paid for an hour like everyone else. Instead you made me into a metaphysical problem. Truly, you philosophers are stupid.

SOCRATES: Stupid, yes. But it is a beautiful stupidity. The kind of stupidity that stands in the agora when the soldiers of Sparta are at the gates and refuses to run, because it would rather be faithful to its own absurd idea of justice than prudent.

SOPHIA: You mean you are going to stay and let them poison you, just to be consistent with your own nonsense?

SOCRATES: Perhaps. And you, will you flee when they come for you again?

SOPHIA: I have thought of going to Corinth. They say the men there spend money like water. But if I leave, then who will climb the steps of Athena’s temple and sing my hateful hymns? The city would be too quiet. No, I will stay. It is stupid, but it is my stupidity.

SOCRATES: Then we share this: an irrational fidelity. You to your dance, I to my questions.

SOPHIA: Do not make us sound noble. I stay because I like to see the archons grind their teeth. You stay because you like to hear yourself speak.

SOCRATES: And between your teeth and my tongue, perhaps the city will learn something.

SOPHIA: Or perhaps we will both end up in the same prison, on the same rotten bread, and the rats will learn our songs. Which is also something.

SOCRATES: If that happens, will you sing for me?

SOPHIA: Of course. I will sing a hymn to the old owl who loved a whore and called it wisdom.

SOCRATES: And I will ask whether perhaps the whore was wisdom and the owl the fool.

SOPHIA: See? You cannot stop. Come, old man, the night is falling. I must go and practice my dance for the goddess.

SOCRATES: For the goddess, or for the city?

SOPHIA: For myself. The rest is decoration.

SOCRATES: Then go, Sophia. And remember: whether they call you whore or goddess, do not forget you are also an argument the city is having with itself.

SOPHIA: And you, do not forget you are cute when you stop talking.

SOCRATES: Then I will practise silence. That will be my next philosophy.

SOPHIA: Good luck with that.