When she had shown these things to me, and
me to these admiring people, she brought me
down again, no longer dressed as I was when I
flew away, but seeming to myself to arrive like a
grandee born to the purple. She came upon my
father himself, who was standing by and waiting
for me, showed him my clothes and me, in what
state I came, and reminded him, too, of the decision they had come near making about me.
These are the things that I remember seeing
when hardly more than a boy, I think, and still
terrified at the thought of a flogging.

 

But in the midst of my narrative some one says,
"Dear me, how tedious and long-winded his
dream is." Or another interrupts with, "This is


 



a mid-winter night's dream, when the nights are
longest; or perhaps he is a three-night man himself, like Hercules. How did it enter his head
to spin out this nonsense for us and recall the
nights of his childhood and old, decrepit dreams,
served up with the chill of death on them and
stale already? Does he take us, forsooth, for
interpreters of dreams?"
No, my friend, and neither did Xenophon relate
his dream when he thought his father's house
was afire and the rest of it—you know his dream
-as a bit of acting, nor was he consciously talking nonsense, seeing that he was in the midst of
warfare and distress and surrounded by enemies.

 
No, his narrative had a useful purpose, and so I,
too, have related this dream to you to the end
that young men may turn to the better part and
lay hold of culture, particularly those who are
tempted by poverty to play truant and sink to the
worse life, to the destruction of what may have
been noble natures. I am sure that these will
be fortified by hearing my story, and will take
me for a sufficient example if they bear in mind.
the origin whence I set forth after the higher life,
and that my desire was for culture, so that I never
lost heart in my old poverty, and, lastly, the guise
in which I have come to you, certainly, to say the
least of it, not less famous than any of the statuaries.