peaceful seas and surfaces are like fields. Whatever a soldier says comes from his area of expertise: he uses words like shield, sword, breastplate, helmet, spear, bow and arrows, death, wound and victory. Socrates and Plato, Xenophon and Theophrastus, Zeno and Aristotle, the Stoics and the Peripatetics, are constantly the topics of conversation among the philosophers. The orators raise Lysias, Hyperides, Pericles and Demosthenes, the Gracchi, the Catos, the Ciceros and the Hortensiuses to the heavens