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Section 123

Socrates. So you must know well that both in gold and in silver those men are the wealthiest of the Greeks, and the king himself is the wealthiest among them; for from such sources the greatest and most numerous revenues come to the kings, and furthermore the royal tribute which the Lacedaemonians pay to the kings is not small. And the wealth of the Lacedaemonians is great compared to Greek wealth, but compared to the Persian wealth and that of their king it is nothing. Since I once heard a trustworthy man who had gone up to the king, who said that he passed through a very large and excellent region, nearly a day's journey, which the locals call the girdle of the king's wife; and there is another which is called the veil, and many other beautiful and good places separated for the adornment of the woman, and each of the places has a name from each of the adornments. So I think, if someone were to say to the king's mother, the wife of Xerxes, Amestris, that the son of Dinomache intends to array himself against your son, a woman whose adornment is perhaps worth fifty minas if very much, and her son has not even three hundred plethra of land in Erchia, she would wonder in what on earth this Alcibiades trusts when he intends to contend against Artaxerxes, and I think she would say that there is nothing else in which this man trusts when attempting this except care and wisdom; for these alone are worth speaking of among the Greeks. Since if she learned that this Alcibiades is now making the attempt first of all being not yet quite twenty years old, and secondly completely uneducated, and in addition to these things, when his lover tells him that he must first learn and take care of himself and practice before thus going to contend with the king, he is unwilling, but says that he is sufficient just as he is, I think she would marvel and ask: What on earth then is it in which the youth trusts? If then we were to say that it is in beauty and size and birth and wealth and the nature of his soul, she would consider us, Alcibiades, to be mad, looking at all such things among themselves.