Euthydemus (285)

Soc.

So then I, observing that they were getting rather savage with each other, began to poke fun. at Ctesippus, saying: Ctesippus, my feeling is that we ought to accept from our visitors what they tell us, if they are so good as to give it, and should not quarrel over a word. For if they understand how to do away with people in such sort as to change them from wicked and witless to honest and intelligent, and that too whether they have discovered for themselves or learnt from somebody else this peculiar kind of destruction or undoing, which enables them to destroy a man in his wickedness and set him up again in honesty; if they understand this—and obviously they do; you know they said that their newly discovered art was to turn wicked men into good—let us then accord them this power; let them destroy the lad for us, and make him sensible, and all the rest of us likewise. If you young fellows are afraid, let the experiment be made on me as a corpus vile[*]; for I, being an elderly person, am ready to take the risk and put myself in the hands of Dionysodorus here, as if he were the famous Medea of Colchis. Let him destroy me, and if he likes let him boil me down, or do to me whatever he pleases: only he must make me good. Then Ctesippus said: On this Dionysodorus said: he replied, he said, he replied: he said.