[174b]
for going unasked to dinner?”“For anything,” he said he replied, “that you may bid me do.”“Come along then,” he said; “let us corrupt the proverb with a new version: What if they go of their own accord,The good men to our Goodman's1 board?Though indeed Homer2 may be said to have not merely corrupted the adage, but debauched it: for after setting forth Agamemnon as a man eminently good at warfare,
1 The name Agathon resembles the Greek for “good men's” in the proverb, which seems to have been: αὐτόματοι δ᾽ ἀγαθοὶ ἀγαθῶν ἐπὶ δαῖτας ἴασι (Athen. i. 8A; Bacchyl. fr. 33). The “corruption” consists in putting the dative Ἀγάθων（ι） for ἀγαθῶν; though perhaps the reference is to another form of the proverb which had δειλῶν (cravens') instead of ἀγαθῶν.
2 Hom. Il. 17.587 Μενέλαον ὑπετρέσας, ὃ τὸ πάρος γε μαλθακὸς αἰχμητής, and Hom. Il. 2.408 αὐτόματος δέ οἱ ἦλθε βοὴν ἀγαθὸς Μενέλαος.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1925.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.