the good or evil of which depends the well-being of your all,--about this
you never consulted either with your father or with your brother or with
any one of us who are your companions. But no sooner does this foreigner
appear, than you instantly commit your soul to his keeping. In the
evening, as you say, you hear of him, and in the morning you go to him,
never deliberating or taking the opinion of any one as to whether you ought
to intrust yourself to him or not;--you have quite made up your mind that
you will at all hazards be a pupil of Protagoras, and are prepared to
expend all the property of yourself and of your friends in carrying out at
any price this determination, although, as you admit, you do not know him,
and have never spoken with him: and you call him a Sophist, but are
manifestly ignorant of what a Sophist is; and yet you are going to commit
yourself to his keeping.

When he heard me say this, he replied: No other inference, Socrates, can
be drawn from your words.

I proceeded: Is not a Sophist, Hippocrates, one who deals wholesale or
retail in the food of the soul? To me that appears to be his nature.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul?

Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care,
my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he
sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body;
for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are
really beneficial or hurtful: neither do their customers know, with the
exception of any trainer or physician who may happen to buy of them. In
like manner those who carry about the wares of knowledge, and make the
round of the cities, and sell or retail them to any customer who is in want