IX. Then Galaxidorus spoke: ‘Hercules! how hard it is to find a man quite free from vanity and superstition! Some are caught by these weaknesses against their will, owing to want of experience or of strength. Others, in order to appear singular and to be taken for friends of the Gods, bring the divine into all they do, making dreams and portents and such stuff a pretext for anything that enters their head. Now, to men in public [Sidenote: 580] stations, who are compelled to adapt their lives to a self-willed and petulant multitude, this may have its advantage; superstition is a bit wherewith to check a populace, and direct it to what is expedient. But to Philosophy such posturing is unbecoming in itself, and, moreover, it contradicts her professions; she undertakes to teach all that is good and expedient by the reason, and then, as though in despite of reason, goes back upon the Gods and away from the first principles of action; and, dishonouring demonstration, in which her own excellence is supposed to lie, turns to prophecies and visions seen in dreams, [Sidenote: B] things in which the weakest often have as great success as the strongest. This, I think, Simmias, is why your Socrates embraced a system of intellectual training which bore a more philosophical stamp, choosing that simple artless type as being liberal and most friendly to truth; and casting to the winds for the sophists, as a mere smoke from Philosophy, all pretentious nonsense.’ Theocritus broke in: ‘What, Galaxidorus, and has Meletus persuaded even you too that Socrates despised [Sidenote: C] what was divine, for that was the charge which he actually brought before the Athenians?’ ‘What was divine—no;’ he said, ‘but he received Philosophy from Pythagoras and Empedocles full of visions and myths and superstitions, and deeply dipped in mysteries; and trained her to look at facts, and be sensible, and pursue truth in soberness of reason.’ X. ‘Granted;’ said Theocritus, ‘but as to the Divine Sign of Socrates, good friend, are we to call it a falsity or what? To me, nothing recorded about Pythagoras seems to go so far towards the prophetic and divine. For, in plain words, as Homer has drawn Athena to Odysseus _In all his toils a presence and a stay_,[30] even so, apparently, did the spirit attach to Socrates, from the first, a sort of vision to go before and guide his steps in life, which alone _Passing before him shed a light around_[31]