Not less remarkable than his appearance, and well suited to it, was the language in which these familiar inquiries of Socrates were usually clothed. Constant intercourse with all classes, high and low, had given him a store of familiar illustrations, often more forcible than elegant, derived from the habits and experience of artificers, whose peculiar terms of art he loved to introduce in a style which must have contrasted oddly with the pompous language of the sophists. Alcibiades thus characterizes his style in the banquet of Plato: “A man so unlike all others as Socrates, both for himself and for his manner of conversation, one could hardly find by inquiry, either of those now living nor of old times; unless one were to liken him, as I have said, to no man indeed, but to the Silenuses and Satyrs, both him and his speech. And, in truth, I omitted this in what I said before, that his speech is very like to the figures of Silenus when opened. For if a person should wish to hear the speeches of Socrates, they would appear at first quite ridiculous; in such terms and words are they clothed outwardly, as if it were in the hide of a saucy satyr. For he talks of asses and their burdens, and of braziers, and leather–cutters, and tanners, and always seems to say the same things through the same medium; so that an unwise or unexperienced man would laugh at his words. But he who sees them open, and gets at their inside, will find, first, that they alone, of all discourses, have meaning within them; then that they are most divine, and contain most images of virtue in themselves; and reach to the greatest extent, or rather to everything, which he who wishes to be good and honourable ought to regard.”[192] Now the bulk of those who came into contact with Socrates were unwise or inexperienced; therefore they laughed at him, as Alcibiades said they would; but it is quite as probable that a large portion, especially of those who were entrapped into the sort of cross–examination above described, became angry, or, to use a familiar expression, were bored. We may fairly conjecture that Socrates had the reputation of being the greatest bore of his day;[193] and this in the laughter–loving town of Athens, would have been quite enough to neutralize all notion of gratitude for his persevering attempts to teach his countrymen that they knew little or nothing, instead of everything, as they flattered themselves, or at least everything worth knowing.