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The sculptors always gave me the face of a satyr — flat nose, bulging eyes, thick lips. My enemies used this against me. Alcibiades turned it into a compliment: he said I was like a Silenus figurine, ugly on the outside and full of tiny golden images of the gods within.

I did not mind the comparison. I was not a beautiful man. I was a stonecutter's son who spent his days in the agora asking uncomfortable questions. Beauty was never my instrument. The argument was my instrument. And the argument, as several of my interlocutors found to their considerable annoyance, was not something you could rebut by pointing at my face.