[1]: The phrase refers especially to a very vigorous sport which combined wrestling and boxing.
[2]: This gymnasium (the Lyceum) was a public one, open to persons of all ages, and was a common resort of Socrates and the sophists.
[3]: Socrates believed that his conduct was occasionally guided by a spiritual voice or sign peculiar to himself. By Plato’s account it was always negative, but the present instance shows how Xenophon might have some reason for saying that it was sometimes positive.
[4]: The cloister ran round the central open court, and was reached by passing through the undressing-room.
[5]: i.e. the famous Alcibiades, who died in 404 B.C. at the age of 44. The supposed time of this discussion must be a year or two before Socrates’ death (399 B.C.).
[6]: γραμματισταί were the schoolmasters who taught reading and writing and explained the difficulties of Homer in primary education.
[7]: The quibbling throughout this passage is a willful confusion of the two very different uses of the verb to be (εἶναι), (a) in predication, where it has nothing to do with existence, and (b) by itself, as stating existence.
[8]: Euthydemus seizes on the ambiguous use of κακῶς which may mean either badly or injuriously.
[9]: Lit. a Carian slave.
[10]: This satyr was fabled to have challenged Apollo to a musical contest, and on his fluting being judged inferior to Apollo’s harping he was flayed alive by the god for his presumption, and his skin was hung up like a bag or bottle in a cave; cf. Herod. vii. 26.
[11]: The argument is that, if we cannot speak what is not, or falsely, of a thing (this assumption being based on the old confusion of being with existence), there can be only one description of a thing in any given relation, and so there is no room for contradiction. This argument is commonly ascribed to Anthisthenes, the founder of the Cynic sect and opponent of Plato. It is not clear who exactly are meant by the followers of Protagoras or the others before his time.
[12]: i.e. νοεῖ, intend.
[13]: Cf. above, Plat. Euthyd. 271c.
[14]: Cf. Hom. Od. 4.385 ff. Proteus was an ancient seer of the sea who, if one could catch him as he slept on the shore and hold him fast while he transformed himself into a variety of creatures, would tell one the intentions of the gods, the fate of absent friends, etc.
[15]: Cf. Hom. Od. 4.456.
[16]: Cf. Plat. Euthyd. 282d.
[17]: i.e. geometers etc. are not to be regarded as mere makers of diagrams, these being only the necessary and common machinery for their real business, the discovery of mathematical and other abstract truths.
[18]: Cf. Aesch. Seven 2 Whoso at helm of the state keeps watch upon affairs, guiding the tiller without resting his eyelids in sleep.
[19]: Cf. Pind. N. 7. Megara, a colony of Corinth, revolted, and when the Corinthians appealed to the sentiment attaching to Corinthus, the mythical founder of Megara, the Megarians drove them off taunting them with using a vain repetition.
[20]: Lit. the big wave that comes in every three.
[21]: i.e. any kinsman or helper I might summon would only add to the number of your victims.
[22]: Cf. Plat. Gorg. 494a, where the life of a stone is given as a proverbial example of a life without pleasure or pain.
[23]: i.e. treating two different things as the same.
[24]: Two fabulous giants (Geryon had three, Briareus fifty, pairs of arms).
[25]: The quibble is on the double meaning of δυνατὰ ὁρᾶν—(a)possible, and (b)able to see. So in what follows, σιγῶντα λέγειν may mean both the speaking of a silent person, or speaking of silent things.
[26]: The Greek works follow a usual form of prayer or hymn to the gods.
[27]: Zeus was the ancestral or tutelary god of the Dorians
[28]: Cf. Eur. Ion 64-75. Apollo begot Ion upon Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus.
[29]: Cf. Pind. O. 1., which begins—Ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ.
[30]: The allusion is probably to Isocrates.