The two Sophists, having announced themselves as competent to teach virtue and stimulate pupils to a virtuous life, are entreated by Sokrates to exercise their beneficent influence upon the youth Kleinias, in whose improvement he as well as Ktesippus feels the warmest interest. Sokrates gives a specimen of what he wishes by putting a series of questions himself. Euthydêmus follows, and begins questioning Kleinias; who, after answering three or four successive questions, is forced to contradict himself. Dionysodorus then takes up the last answer of Kleinias, puts him through another series of interrogations, and makes him contradict himself again. In this manner the two Sophists toss the youthful respondent backwards and forwards to each other, each contriving to entangle him in some puzzle and contradiction. They even apply the same process to Sokrates, who cannot avoid being entangled in the net; and to Ktesippus, who becomes exasperated, and retorts upon them with contemptuous asperity. The alternate interference of the two Sophists is described with great smartness and animation; which is promoted by the use of the dual number, peculiar to the Greek language, employed by Plato in speaking of them. [Side-note: Contrast between the two different modes of interrogation.] This mode of dialectic, conducted by the two Sophists, is interrupted on two several occasions by a counter-exhibition of dialectic on the part of Sokrates: who, under colour of again showing to the couple a specimen of that which he wishes them to do, puts two successive batches of questions to Kleinias in his own manner.[6] The contrast between Sokrates and the two Sophists, in the same work, carried on respectively by him and by them, of interrogating Kleinias, is evidently meant as one of the special matters to arrest attention in the dialogue. The questions put by the couple are made to turn chiefly on verbal quibbles and ambiguities: they are purposely designed to make the respondent contradict himself, and are proclaimed to be certain of bringing about this result, provided the respondent will conform to the laws of dialectic--by confining his answer to the special point of the question, without adding any qualification of his own, or asking for farther explanation from the questioner, or reverting to any antecedent answer lying apart from the actual question of the moment.[7] Sokrates, on the contrary, addresses interrogations, each of which has a clear and substantive meaning, and most of which Kleinias is able to answer without embarrassment: he professes no other design except that of encouraging Kleinias to virtue, and assisting him to determine in what virtue consists: he resorts to no known quibbles or words of equivocal import. The effect of the interrogations is represented as being, not to confound and silence the youth, but to quicken and stimulate his mind and to call forth an unexpected amount of latent