He does not suppose his feelings to be
peculiar to himself: there are several other persons in the company who
have been equally in love with Socrates, and like himself have been
deceived by him. The singular part of this confession is the combination
of the most degrading passion with the desire of virtue and improvement.
Such an union is not wholly untrue to human nature, which is capable of
combining good and evil in a degree beyond what we can easily conceive. In
imaginative persons, especially, the God and beast in man seem to part
asunder more than is natural in a well-regulated mind. The Platonic
Socrates (for of the real Socrates this may be doubted: compare his public
rebuke of Critias for his shameful love of Euthydemus in Xenophon,
Memorabilia) does not regard the greatest evil of Greek life as a thing not
to be spoken of; but it has a ridiculous element (Plato's Symp.), and is a
subject for irony, no less than for moral reprobation (compare Plato's
Symp.). It is also used as a figure of speech which no one interpreted
literally (compare Xen.
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