"For like hell mouth I loath
Who holds not in his words and thoughts one indistinguished troth."[1]
And not only is practice regarded as the culmination of theory, the habit formed upon the active principle, Philosophy, but the question of personal honour is involved in the harmony between creed and deed; and one mark of distinction between sophist and philosopher is that the external apparatus of the former—"his contracted brows and studied gravity of aspect"—do not indicate the possession of the virtues which are the pride of the latter.[2]
Plutarch frequently lays strenuous weight on this point;[3] Seneca, Dion, Aurelius, Epictetus, Apuleius, are crowded with sermons on its importance.[4] And if pure professions are to be carried out into pure actions,
- ↑ Iliad, ix. 312-3 (Chapman's translation). This actual text is
quoted in Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists (i. 25) as a criticism
on some of the false and fantastic exercises of the Sophists. The
"distant lapse" referred to in the text is constantly evident in the
dramas of the best Athenian period. And history shows that there
was a strong tendency in the Hellenic character agreeing with that
indicated by the evidence of the dramatists, notwithstanding the
outcry raised when Euripides summed up the whole matter in his
famous line in the Hippolytus (Hipp. 612). - ↑ Philostratus: Vitæ Sophistarum, lib. i. sec. 24.
- ↑ E.g., De Stoic. Repug., 1033 A, B; De Audiendo, 43 F.
- ↑ See frequent passages in Seneca's letters to Lucilius, e.g. Ep. i. 16, 20. Cf. De Vita Beata, cap. 18, where Seneca defends himself and other philosophers against the charge "aliter loqueris: aliter vivis." He will not be deterred from the pursuit of virtue by any truth human weakness may have to admit in the charge. This note is well marked in both Aurelius and Epictetus (ii. 19. Cf. Aulus Gellius, xvii. 19). The praise of Ulysses at the end of the De Deo Socratis of Apuleius is couched in the same strain.
