The flyting becomes more bitter as Thrasymachus senses defeat in the dialogue. He suddenly engages an argumentum ad hominem (personal attack):
"Tell me, Socrates, have you got a nurse?"
"Why do you ask such a question, I said, when you ought rather to be answering?"
"Because she leaves you to snivel, and never wipes your nose . . . ."
And Thrasymachus concludes by calling Socrates a fool.
Midway in his attempt to define the nature of justice, Socrates flytes at his brothers in verse:
"Sons of Ariston . . . divine offspring of an illustrious hero."
That epithet is funnily true also of Ariston's third son, the man who is writing the dialogue in hand.
In thus discussing the rhetorical ploy of flyting as adopted by the speakers in the dialogues, I am not attempting any "system" of accessing the dialogues, nor am I attempting any sort of "cataloguing" Platonisms. But if any "stalled" student of Plato is curious enough to pursue the witty habit of classical insult, at least that is a kind of curiosity, perhaps the beginnings of philosophy.
