| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: strigils; his girdle, which he has woven himself, is of a finer than
Persian quality. He is a vainer, lighter nature than the two great
Sophists (compare Protag.), but of the same character with them, and
equally impatient of the short cut-and-thrust method of Socrates, whom he
endeavours to draw into a long oration. At last, he gets tired of being
defeated at every point by Socrates, and is with difficulty induced to
proceed (compare Thrasymachus, Protagoras, Callicles, and others, to whom
the same reluctance is ascribed).
Hippias like Protagoras has common sense on his side, when he argues,
citing passages of the Iliad in support of his view, that Homer intended
Achilles to be the bravest, Odysseus the wisest of the Greeks. But he is
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Hellenica by Xenophon: II
B.C. 386. Indeed the late events had so entirely shaped themselves in
conformity with the wishes of the Lacedaemonians, that they determined
to go a step farther and chastise those of their allies who either had
borne hard on them during the war, or otherwise had shown themselves
less favourable to Lacedaemon than to her enemies.[1] Chastisement was
not all; they must lay down such secure foundations for the future as
should render the like disloyalty impossible again.[2] As the first
step towards this policy they sent a dictatorial message to the
Mantinaeans, and bade them raze their fortifications, on the sole
ground that they could not otherwise trust them not to side with their
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: the ancients called Polypus. But the animal which you have seen
likest to most of them is a sea-anemone.
Look now at this piece of fresh coral--for coral it is, though not
like the coral which your sister wears in her necklace. You see
it is full of pipes; in each of those pipes has lived what we will
call, for the time being, a tiny sea-anemone, joined on to his
brothers by some sort of flesh and skin; and all of them together
have built up, out of the lime in the sea-water, this common
house, or rather town, of lime.
But is it not strange and wonderful?
Of course it is: but so is everything when you begin to look into
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