‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I am glad I went there. For as the silent butt of Xantippe’s scorn I was free to turn my attention wholly to the strange places we visited. And in particular I satisfied to the full my desire to see and study a Woman’s Club, than which I had not been able to imagine anything more unnatural.’ ‘Tell us,’ said they both, ‘about a Woman’s Club.’ ‘If I did,’ said I with a smile, ‘I do not think you would believe me. But you would say that in America I had indulged myself too freely in potent distillations of the tail of the cock, and spoke the thing which was not.’ ‘Oh no, Socrates,’ exclaimed Phaelon, ‘for I have often heard the Americans spoken of before, and I know about the women who rule the men in the valley of the great river. The river is the Amazon, the greatest of all American rivers, and the inhabitants are called Amazons. Do I not understand rightly?’ ‘Not quite rightly,’ put in Agathon, ‘for the Amazon River is in another America altogether, and the chief rivers where Socrates was are the Mississippi and the Missouri, named, I believe, after the two first women who tamed their menfolk, the one her husband, the other her father.’ ‘You should also tell them, Agathon, should you not, that the method of domination is different, and that, whereas the Amazons triumphed by skill in arms and valour, the American women triumph by something more lasting and stronger than physical force. They have managed to make the men believe that they are superior and ought to be obeyed.’ ‘How so?’ said Lysis. ‘Is it in fact true that they are superior?’ ‘My answer will surprise you perhaps,’ I replied, ‘but I will answer boldly and say, Yes, if it is a better thing to be alive than dead, which, as I have said elsewhere, is not a thing we can decide. But it is certain that in America the women are more alive than the men. For the men work so hard that they kill themselves, and are so busy while living that they have no time for the proper business of life.’ ‘They must work, must they not,’ said Lysis, ‘in order to obtain the leisure for philosophy and public life, for I have heard that they have no slaves, and no class beneath the men, and if they did not work they would starve.’ ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘and learn how little you yet understand about the character of this extraordinary people, the most extraordinary, as I believe, that has yet appeared upon the face of the earth. For if you see men engaging of their own will in the most heavy and degrading employments of commerce, long after they have accumulated for themselves and their families not a sufficiency only but an extreme abundance both of those things that may be called necessities and those that are plainly luxuries, can anything be said of such men except that they are either ignoble in their own souls and ignorant of the true nature of what is good, or else that they are acting in obedience to the orders of some tyrant, and are, in fact, not freemen at all, but slaves?’