SOCRATES: That I should be able to speak is no great wonder, Menexenus, considering that I have an excellent mistress in the art of rhetoric,--she who has made so many good speakers, and one who was the best among all the Hellenes--Pericles, the son of Xanthippus. MENEXENUS: And who is she? I suppose that you mean Aspasia. SOCRATES: Yes, I do; and besides her I had Connus, the son of Metrobius, as a master, and he was my master in music, as she was in rhetoric. No wonder that a man who has received such an education should be a finished speaker; even the pupil of very inferior masters, say, for example, one who had learned music of Lamprus, and rhetoric of Antiphon the Rhamnusian, might make a figure if he were to praise the Athenians among the Athenians. MENEXENUS: And what would you be able to say if you had to speak? SOCRATES: Of my own wit, most likely nothing; but yesterday I heard Aspasia composing a funeral oration about these very dead. For she had been told, as you were saying, that the Athenians were going to choose a speaker, and she repeated to me the sort of speech which he should deliver, partly improvising and partly from previous thought, putting together fragments of the funeral oration which Pericles spoke, but which, as I believe, she composed. MENEXENUS: And can you remember what Aspasia said? SOCRATES: I ought to be able, for she taught me, and she was ready to strike me because I was always forgetting. MENEXENUS: Then why will you not rehearse what she said? SOCRATES: Because I am afraid that my mistress may be angry with me if I publish her speech. MENEXENUS: Nay, Socrates, let us have the speech, whether Aspasia's or any one else's, no matter. I hope that you will oblige me. SOCRATES: But I am afraid that you will laugh at me if I continue the games of youth in old age. MENEXENUS: Far otherwise, Socrates; let us by all means have the speech. SOCRATES: Truly I have such a disposition to oblige you, that if you bid me dance naked I should not like to refuse, since we are alone. Listen then: If I remember rightly, she began as follows, with the mention of the dead:--(Thucyd.)