Aspasia #1

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Socrates bebendo palavras de Aspasia, a que lavava mais branco as vestes e os argumentos.

[235e] Menexenus : And do you think that you yourself would be able to make the speech, if required and if the Council were to select you ?
Socrates : That I should be able to make the speech would be nothing wonderful, Menexenus ; for she who is my instructor is by no means weak in the art of rhetoric ; on the contrary, she has turned out many fine orators, and amongst them one who surpassed all other Greeks, Pericles, the son of Xanthippus.
Menexenus : Who is she ? But you mean Aspasia, no doubt.
Socrates : I do ; and also Connus the son of Metrobius ; [236a] for these are my two instructors, the one in music, the other in rhetoric. So it is not surprising that a man who is trained like me should be clever at speaking. But even a man less well taught than I, who had learnt his music from Lamprus and his rhetoric from Antiphon the Rhamnusian, — even such a one, I say, could none the less win credit by praising Athenians before an Athenian audience.
Menexenus : What, then, would you have to say, if you were required to speak ?
Socrates : Nothing, perhaps, myself of my own invention ; [236b] but I was listening only yesterday to Aspasia going through a funeral speech for these very people. For she had heard the report you mention, that the Athenians are going to select the speaker ; and thereupon she rehearsed to me the speech in the form it should take, extemporizing in part, while other parts of it she had previously prepared, as I imagine, at the time when she was composing the funeral oration which Pericles delivered ; and from this she patched together sundry fragments.
Menexenus : Could you repeat from memory that speech of Aspasia ?
Socrates : Yes, if I am not mistaken ; for I learnt it, to be sure, from her as she went along, [236c] and I nearly got a flogging whenever I forgot.
Menexenus : Why don’t you repeat it then ?
Socrates : But possibly my teacher will be vexed with me if I publish abroad her speech.
[Plato, Menexenus; destaques insanos]