BOOK III. XXVI. 5-1O
wealthiest needs must go, and those who have held the highest offices, and very kings and tyrants? Only you will descend hungry, if it so happen, and they bursting with indigestion and drunkenness. Did you ever easily find a beggar who was not an old man? Wasn't he extremely old? But though they are cold night and day, and lie forlorn on the ground, and have to eat only what is absolutely necessary, they approach a state where it is almost impossible for them to die;[1] yet you who are physically perfect, and have hands and feet, are you so alarmed about starving? Can't you draw water, or write, or escort boys to and from school, or be another's doorkeeper?—But it is disgraceful to come to such a necessity.—Learn, therefore, first of all, what the disgraceful things are, and after you have done that, come into our presence and call yourself a philosopher. But as the case stands now, do not even allow anyone else to call you one!
Is anything disgraceful to you which is not your own doing, for which you are not responsible, which has befallen you accidentally, as a headache or a fever? If your parents were poor, or if they were rich but left others as their heirs, and if they give you no help though they are living, is all this disgraceful to you? Is that what you learned at the feet of the philosophers? Have you never heard that the disgraceful thing is censurable, and the censurable is that which deserves censure? And whom do you censure for what is not his own doing, which he didn't produce himself? 10Well, did you produce this situation? did you make your father
- ↑ The argument is, one need hardly remark, quite unsound, for the death-rate among the poor is unquestionably much higher than among the wealthy.
