6.6
The Syracusan, seeing that with such conversation going on the banqueters were paying no attention to his show, but were enjoying one another’s company, said spitefully to Socrates, Socrates, are you the one nick-named the Thinker? Well, isn’t that preferable, he rejoined, to being called the Thoughtless? Yes, if it were not that you are supposed to be a thinker on celestial subjects.The Syracusan uses the word applied by the Greeks first to astronomical and then to philosophical (especially ontological) inquiry, a word of reproach for radical thinkers that was used against Socrates in Aristophanes’ burlesque, the Clouds, and later played a more serious part in Socrates’ trial.
6.7
Do you know, asked Socrates, anything more celestial than the gods? Syr. No; but that is not what people say you are concerned with, but rather with the most unbeneficial things. Soc. Even granting the expression, it would still be the gods that are my concern; for (1) they cause rain under the heavens and so are beneficial,This translation is an attempt to reproduce Socrates’ bad logic and worse pun whereby he takes the Syracusan’s expression ἀν-ωφελεστάτων (most useless, most unbeneficial) and not only splits it in twp but changes the negative prefix into the adverb ἄνωθεν (from above). and (2) they produce light, also under the heavens, and are thus again beneficial. If the pun is strained, he added, you have only yourself to blame for it, for annoying me.
