(5) Reading {pros ten philian}, or if {phusin}, transl. "natural disposition." Chaer. A startling announcement, Socrates, from your lips, and most unlike you, to bid me the younger take precedence of my elder brother. Why, it is contrary to the universal custom of mankind, who look to the elder to take the lead in everything, whether as a speaker or an actor. Soc. How so? Is it not the custom everywhere for the younger to step aside when he meets his elder in the street and to give him place? Is he not expected to get up and offer him his seat, to pay him the honour of a soft couch, (6) to yield him precedence in argument? (6) Lit. "with a soft bed," or, as we say, "the best bedroom." My good fellow, do not stand shilly-shallying, (7) but put out your hand caressingly, and you will see the worthy soul will respond at once with alacrity. Do you not note your brother's character, proud and frank and sensitive to honour? He is not a mean and sorry rascal to be caught by a bribe--no better way indeed for such riff-raff. No! gentle natures need a finer treatment. You can best hope to work on them by affection. (7) Or, "have no fears, essay a soothing treatment." Chaer. But suppose I do, and suppose that, for all my attempts, he shows no change for the better? Soc. At the worst you will have shown yourself to be a good, honest, brotherly man, and he will appear as a sorry creature on whom kindness is wasted. But nothing of the sort is going to happen, as I conjecture. My belief is that as soon as he hears your challenge, he will embrace the contest; pricked on by emulous pride, he will insist upon getting the better of you in kindness of word and deed. At present you two are in the condition of two hands formed by God to help each other, but which have let go their business and have turned to hindering one another all they can. You are a pair of feet fashioned on the Divine plan to work together, but which have neglected this in order to trammel each other's gait. Now is it not insensate stupidity (8) to use for injury what was meant for advantage? And yet in fashioning two brothers God intends them, methinks, to be of more benefit to one another than either two hands, or two feet, or two eyes, or any other of those pairs which belong to man from his birth. (9) Consider how powerless these hands of ours if called upon to combine their action at two points more than a single fathom's length apart; (10) and these feet could not stretch asunder (11) even a bare fathom; and these eyes, for all the wide-reaching range we claim for them, are incapable of seeing simultaneously the back and front of an object at even closer quarters. But a pair of brothers, linked in bonds of amity, can work each for the other's good, though seas divide them. (12) (8) "Boorishness verging upon monomania." (9) "With which man is endowed at birth." (10) "More than an 'arms'-stretch' asunder."