consider how much the greatness of their birth, their interest, and their
riches, had puffed up their minds; if we reflect on the ill company they
fell into, and the many opportunities they had of debauching themselves,
can we be surprised that, after they had been so long absent from
Socrates, they arrived at length to that height of insolence to which
they have been seen to arise? If they have been guilty of crimes, the
accuser will load Socrates with them, and not allow him to be worthy of
praise, for having kept them within the bounds of their duty during their
youth, when, in all appearance, they would have been the most disorderly
and least governable. This, however, is not the way we judge of other
things; for whoever pretended that a musician, a player on the lute, or
any other person that teaches, after he has made a good scholar, ought to
be blamed for his growing more ignorant under the care of another master?
If a young man gets an acquaintance that brings him into debauchery,
ought his father to lay the blame on the first friends of his son among
whom he always lived virtuously? Is it not true, on the contrary, that
the more he finds that this last friendship proves destructive to him,
the more reason he will have to praise his former acquaintance. And are
the fathers themselves, who are daily with their children, guilty of
their faults, if they give them no ill example? Thus they ought to have
judged of Socrates; if he led an ill life, it was reasonable to esteem
him vicious; but if a good, was it just to accuse him of crimes of which
he was innocent?

And yet he might have given his adversaries ground to accuse him, had he
but approved, or seemed to approve those vices in others, from which he
kept himself free: but Socrates abhorred vice, not only in himself, but
in everyone besides. To prove which, I need only relate his conduct
toward Critias, a man extremely addicted to debauchery. Socrates
perceiving that this man had an unnatural passion for Euthydemus, and