BOOK III. XXIII. 28-32
come and hear that you are in a bad way, and that you are concerned with anything rather than what you should be concerned with, and that you are ignorant of the good and the evil, and are wretched and miserable." That's a fine invitation! And yet if the philosopher's discourse does not produce this effect, it is lifeless and so is the speaker himself Rufus used to say, "If you have nothing better to do than to praise me, then I am speaking to no purpose."[1] Wherefore he spoke in such a way that each of us as we sat there fancied someone had gone to Rufus and told him of our faults; so effective was his grasp of what men actually do, so vividly did he set before each man's eyes his particular weaknesses.
30Men, the lecture-room of the philosopher is a hospital;[2] you ought not to walk out of it in pleasure, but in pain. For you are not well when you come; one man has a dislocated shoulder, another an abscess, another a fistula, another a headache. And then am I to sit down and recite to you dainty little notions and clever little mottoes, so that you will go out with words of praise on your lips, one man carrying away his shoulder just as it was when he came in, another his head in the same state, another his fistula, another his abscess? And so it's for this, is it, that young men are to travel from home, and leave their parents, their friends, their relatives, and their bit of property, merely to cry "Bravo!" as you recite your clever little mottoes? Was this what Socrates used to do, or Zeno, or Cleanthes?
- ↑ At greater length in Gellius, 5, 1, 1.
- ↑ So it had, indeed, become in his time. Compare Introd. p. xxiv. Thus also one of the great libraries at Alexandria is said to have had over its portal: ἰατρεῖον τῆς ψυχῆς. If the story is true (which I very much doubt), the inscription surely belongs to the decadence, for such was clearly not the conception of science which prevailed in the great days of Alexandria.
