persons and associating ever with them, if it were possible, neither to eat nor drink but only to look into their eyes and sit beside them. What then, she asked, suppose we? if it were given to any one to behold the absolute beauty, in its clearness, its pureness, its unmixed essence; not replete with flesh and blood and colours and other manifold vanity of this mortal life; but if he were able to behold that divine beauty (monoeides)+ simply as it is. Do you think, she said, that life would be a poor thing to one whose eyes were fixed on that; seeing that, (hô dei)+ with the organ through which it must be seen, and communing with that? Do you not think rather, she asked, that here alone it will be his, seeing the beautiful with that through which it may be seen (namely with the imaginative reason, ho nous+) to beget no mere phantasms of virtue, as it is no phantom he [123] apprehends, but the true virtue, as he embraces what is true? And having begotten virtue (virtue is the child that will be born of this mystic intellectual commerce, or connubium, of the imaginative reason with ideal beauty) and reared it, he will become dear to God, and if any man may be immortal he will be. Symposium, 210.+ The essential vice of sophistry, as Plato conceived it, was that for it no real things existed. Real things did exist for Plato, things that were "an end in themselves"; and the Platonic Socrates was right:-- Plato has written so well there, because he was no scholar of the Sophists as he understood them, but is writing of what he really knows. NOTES 99. +Transliteration: sophistai. Liddell and Scott definition: "at Athens, one who professed to make men wise." 102. +Transliteration: pleista eidê. Pater's translation: "the greatest possible variety." Pater refers to the Funeral Oration given by Pericles to commemorate the Athenians who, to date, had died in the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 2.41.1. 107. +Plato, Republic 492. 109. +Transliteration: peithous didaskaloi. Pater's translation: "teachers of persuasion." Plato, Republic 365d. 109. +Transliteration: dêmos. Liddell and Scott definition: "the common people." 110. +Plato, Republic 496. 111. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein. Pater's translation: "The doing, by every part . . . of its own proper business therein." The translation elaborates on the original, but captures its meaning accurately. Plato, Republic 433a-b. 111. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein. Pater's translation: "The doing, by every part . . . of its own proper business therein." Plato, Republic 433a-b. 112. +Transliteration: sophos gar kai theios anêr. E-text editor's translation: "for he was a wise and excellent man." Plato, Republic 331e. 112. +Transliteration: alla ti poiousa. Pater's translation: "but, by doing what. . ." Plato, Republic 367b.