Many days elapsed, and I had been attending lectures again for a long time, before his letter in reply reached Nicopolis; but I will set it down here, as also a second letter from him on the same subject. In the first, Scaurus expressed his satisfaction at my meeting with Arrian (whom he knew and described as an extremely sensible and promising young man, likely to get on). He added a hope that I would take precisely Arrian’s view of the advantage to be derived from philosophy. But a large part of his letter—much more than I could have wished—was occupied with our “wonderful discovery” (as he called it) that Plato and Xenophon disagreed in their versions of the Apologia of Socrates. On this he rallied us as mere babes in criticism, but, said he, not much more babyish than many professed critics, who cannot be made to understand that—outside poetry, and traditions learned by rote, and a few “aculeate sayings” (so he called them) of philosophers and great men—no two historians ever agree independently—he laid stress on “_independently_”—for twenty consecutive words, in recording a speech or dialogue. “I will not lay you a wager,” said he, “for it would be cheating you. But I will make you an offer. If you and Arrian, between you, can find twenty identical consecutive words of Socrates in the whole of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Plato’s Dialogues, I will give you five hundred sesterces apiece[1]. Your failure (for fail you will) ought to strike you as all the more remarkable because both Plato and Xenophon tell us that Socrates used to describe himself as ‘_always saying the same things about the same subjects_.’ That one similar saying they have preserved. For the rest, these two great biographers, writing page upon page of Socratic talk, cannot agree exactly about ‘_the same things_’ for a score of consecutive words!”