The Scythian or Consul (59)

LYCINUS

How slippery you are, Hermotimus! And how you glide through my fingers! But you have helped us: you thought you had got away, but you have fallen into the same net.

HERMOTIMUS

What do you mean?

LYCINUS

You take an object which is quite self-evident and which is known to everyone, wine, and you compare to it things that are unlike and the object of universal dispute, they are so uncertain. I certainly cannot say how in your view philosophy and wine are comparable, except perhaps at this one point that philosophers sell their lessons as wine-merchants their wines—most of them adulterating and cheating and

giving false measure. Now let us examine your logic. You say that all the wine in a butt is the same, the whole measure; that is certainly not unreasonable. Now if you care to draw ever so little of it and take a taste, you say you would know at once the quality of the whole butt; this too follows and I would not deny it. Look at what comes next: do philosophy and these who, like your teacher, study philosophy say the same things to you on the same topics every day, or different things on different days? It is quite clear, my friend, that there are many different topics; you would not have stayed with him twenty years like an Odysseus in your wanderings and journeying, if he had said the same things all the time, but you would have been satisfied with one hearing.