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punched-up as your own, you would still love me.”
    Alcibiades endeavored to induce Socrates to resume his dissertation on that subject which my arrival had interrupted, but before he could, the actor Alcaeus returned the topic to the shamed women of Potidaea.
    “Let us not employ lightly, gentlemen, the word ‘degradation.’ War is degradation. Its object is the ultimate degradation—death. These women have not been slain. Their bruises of the flesh will heal.”
    “You surprise me, my excellent friend,” Alcibiades replied. “As an actor you of all people should know that death takes many and far more evil forms than the physical. Isn’t that what tragedy is all about? Consider Oedipus, Clytemnestra, Medea. Their wounds would heal as well. Yet were they not ruined utterly from within?”
    Mantitheus spoke. “If you ask me, it is not these women who suffer true debasement, but their fathers and brothers who permit them to be used in this hateful manner. These men possess options. They could starve. They could fight and die. In truth these young women are heroes. Consider that when a man risks all in defense of his country, he is crowned for valor. Are not these girls the same? Are they not sacrificing their most cherished possessions, their maidenhood and name of virtue, to succor their beleaguered countrymen? What if, come spring, their confederates the Spartans at last get off their asses and trek here to their aid? What if it is ourselves who are routed? By the gods, the Potidaeans should erect statues to these brave girls! In fact, taken in this light, our young gentleman here” [he indicated myself] “is not delivering these noble lasses from shame, but denying them their shot at immortality.”
    Laughter and choruses of “Again, again” greeted this, accompanied by raps of wine bowl bottoms upon the wooden crates and trunks which served as tables for the banquet.
    “But wait,” Alcibiades broke in, “I see our friend Socrates smiling. He is about to speak. In all conscience we must warn our comrade Polemides, or perhaps as Odysseus approaching the Isle of the Sirens stopper his ears with wax. For once exposed to the sweet discourse of our friend, he will find himself enslaved forever, as are we all.”
    “You make sport of me as usual, Alcibiades,” the man Socrates declared. “Must I endure such abuse, gentlemen, coming from this fellowwho of all ignores my counsel, attending only to his own pursuit of popularity?”
    Socrates the son of Sophroniscus sat across from me. Of all assembled, his appearance was far the least prepossessing. He was stocky, thick-lipped and pug-nosed, already at forty quite bald, and his cloak, blood-besmirched yet from a skirmish earlier in the month, was of a cloth coarse and pecunious as a Spartan’s.
    The men began chaffing him about an incident of several days prior. Apparently Socrates, standing outside in the bitter cold, had been seized midmorning with some enigma or perplexity. There he remained, in open sandals on the ice, pondering the issue daylong to the marvel of all who beheld him, themselves shivering indoors with their feet swathed in fleeces. The soldiers peeked out at intervals; there Socrates remained. It was not until nightfall that, his puzzlement resolved, he abandoned his self-imposed post and decamped to the fire for supper. Led by Alcibiades, the party demanded now to hear what riddle had with such tenacity occupied their friend’s mind.
    “We were speaking of degradation,” Socrates began. “Of what does this consist? Is it not that apprehension of an individual according to a solitary quality, to the exclusion of all the manifold facets of his soul and being, then using him or her thereby? In the case of these unhappy women, that quality is their flesh and its utility in gratifying our own base desires. We dismiss all else that renders them human, descended of the gods.
    “Note further, gentlemen, that this single quality by which we