previous next

[148a] cease to hold the same view—well, if the god to whom you are going should even now appear to you and ask before you uttered any prayer, whether you would be content to obtain one of those things which were mentioned at the beginning, or whether he should leave you to pray as you were, how do you suppose you would make the best of your chance—by accepting his offer, or by praying for something on your own account?

Alcibiades
Well, by the gods, I could not answer your question, Socrates, offhand. Why, I take it to be a fatuous request,1


1 i.e., that I should answer offhand. The pun in , μάργον, alluding to the “fatuous” Margites, cannot be rendered in English.

Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 8 translated by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1955.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

Creative Commons License
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.

load focus Greek (1903)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: