Epicureans, some do know their respective doctrines, and some do not
(without prejudice to their general respectability)?
_Her_. That is true.
_Ly_. Well, don't you think it will be a troublesome business to
distinguish the first, and know them from the ignorant professors?
_Her_. Very.
_Ly_. So, if you are to recognize the best of the Stoics, you will have to
go to most, if not all, of them, make trial, and appoint the best your
teacher, first going through a course of training to provide you with the
appropriate critical faculty; otherwise you might mistakenly prefer the
wrong one. Now reflect on the additional time this will mean; I purposely
left it out of account, because I was afraid you might be angry; all the
same, it is the most important and necessary thing of all in questions
like this--so uncertain and dubious, I mean. For the discovery of truth,
your one and only sure or well-founded hope is the possession of this
power: you _must_ be able to judge and sift truth from falsehood; you must
have the assayer's sense for sound and true or forged coin; if you could
have come to your examination of doctrines equipped with a technical skill
like that, I should have nothing to say; but without it there is nothing
to prevent their severally leading you by the nose; you will follow a
dangled bunch of carrots like a donkey; or, better still, you will be
water spilt on a table, trained whichever way one chooses with a
finger-tip; or again, a reed growing on a river's bank, bending to every
breath, however gentle the breeze that shakes it in its passage.
If you could find a teacher, now, who understood demonstration and
controversial method, and would impart his knowledge to you, you would be
quit of your troubles; the best and the true would straightway be
revealed to you, at the bidding of this art of demonstration, while
falsehood would stand convicted; you would make your choice with
confidence; judgement would be followed by philosophy; you would reach
your long-desired Happiness, and live in its company, which sums up all
good things.
_Her_. Thank you, Lycinus; that is a much better hearing; there is
more than a glimpse of hope in that. We must surely look for a man of
that sort, to give us discernment, judgement, and, above all, the power
of demonstration; then all will be easy and clear, and not too long. I am
grateful to you already for thinking of this short and excellent plan.
_Ly_. Ah, no, I cannot fairly claim gratitude yet. I have not discovered
or revealed anything that will bring you nearer your hope; on the
contrary, we are further off than ever; it is a case of much cry and
little wool.
_Her_. Bird of ill omen, pessimist, explain yourself.
_Ly_. Why, my friend, even if we find some one who claims to know this art
of demonstration, and is willing to impart it, we shall surely not take
his word for it straight off; we shall look about for another man to
resolve us whether the first is telling the truth. Finding number two, we
shall still be uncertain whether our guarantor really knows the difference
between a good judge and a bad, and shall need a number three to guarantee
number two; for how can we possibly know ourselves how to select the best
judge? You see how far this must go; the thing is unending; its nature
does not allow us to draw the line and put a stop to it; for you will
observe that all the demonstrations that can possibly be thought of are
themselves unfounded and open to dispute; most of them struggle to
establish their certainty by appealing to facts as questionable as
themselves; and the rest produce certain truisms with which they compare,
quite illegitimately, the most speculative theories, and then say they
have demonstrated the latter: our eyes tell us there are altars to the
Gods; therefore there must be Gods; that is the sort of thing.
_Her_. How unkindly you treat me, Lycinus, turning my treasure into
ashes; I suppose all these years are to have been lost labour.
_Ly_. At least your chagrin will be considerably lessened by the
thought that you are not alone in your disappointment; practically all
who pursue philosophy do no more than disquiet themselves in vain. Who
could conceivably go through all the stages I have rehearsed? you admit
the impossibility yourself. As to your present mood, it is that of the
man who cries and curses his luck because he cannot climb the sky, or
plunge into the depths of the sea at Sicily and come up at Cyprus, or
soar on wings and fly within the day from Greece to India; what is
responsible for his discontent is his basing of hopes on a dream-vision
or his own wild fancy, without ever asking whether his aspirations were
realizable or consistent with humanity. You too, my friend, have been
having a long and marvellous dream; and now reason has stuck a pin into
you and startled you out of your sleep; your eyes are only half open yet,
you are reluctant to shake off a sleep which has shown you such fair
visions, and so you scold. It is just the condition of the day-dreamer;
he is rolling in gold, digging up treasure, sitting on his throne, or
somehow at the summit of bliss; for dame _How-I-wish_ is a lavish
facile Goddess, that will never turn a deaf ear to her votary, though he
have a mind to fly, or change statures with Colossus, or strike a gold-
reef; well, in the middle of all this, in comes his servant with some
every-day question, wanting to know where he is to get bread, or what he
shall say to the landlord, tired of waiting for his rent; and then he
flies into a temper, as though the intrusive questioner had robbed him of
all his bliss, and is ready to bite the poor fellow's nose off.
As you love me, do not treat me like that. I see you digging up treasure,
spreading your wings, nursing extravagant ideas, indulging impossible
hopes; and I love you too well to leave you to the company of a life-long
dream--a pleasant one, if you will, but yet a dream; I beseech you to get
up and take to some every-day business, such as may direct the rest of
your life's course by common sense. Your acts and your thoughts up to now
have been no more than Centaurs, Chimeras, Gorgons, or what else is
figured by dreams and poets and painters, chartered libertines all, who
reek not of what has been or may be. Yet the common folk believe them,
bewitched by tale and picture just because they are strange and monstrous.
I fancy you hearing from some teller of tales how there is a certain lady
of perfect beauty, beyond the Graces themselves or the Heavenly
Aphrodite, and then, without ever an inquiry whether his tale is true,
and such a person to be found on earth, falling straight in love with
her, like Medea in the story enamoured of a dream-Jason. And what most
drew you on to love, you and the others who worship the same phantom,
was, if I am not mistaken, the consistent way in which the inventor of
the lady added to his picture, when once he had got your ear. That was
the only thing you all looked to, with that he turned you about as he
would, having got his first hold upon you, averring that he was leading
you the straight way to your beloved. After the first step, you see, all
was easy; none of you ever looked round when he came to the entrance, and
inquired whether it was the right one, or whether he had accidentally
taken the wrong; no, you all followed in your predecessors' footsteps,
like sheep after the bell-wether, whereas the right thing was to decide
at the entrance whether you should go in.
Perhaps an illustration will make my meaning clearer: when one of those
audacious poets affirms that there was once a three-headed and six-handed
man, if you accept that quietly without questioning its possibility, he
will proceed to fill in the picture consistently--six eyes and ears,
three voices talking at once, three mouths eating, and thirty fingers
instead of our poor ten all told; if he has to fight, three of his hands
will have a buckler, wicker targe, or shield apiece, while of the other
three one swings an axe, another hurls a spear, and the third wields a
sword. It is too late to carp at these details, when they come; they are
consistent with the beginning; it was about that that the question ought
to have been raised whether it was to be accepted and passed as true.
Once grant that, and the rest comes flooding in, irresistible, hardly now
susceptible of doubt, because it is consistent and accordant with your
initial admissions. That is just your case; your love-yearning would not
allow you to look into the facts at each entrance, and so you are dragged
on by consistency; it never occurs to you that a thing may be self-
consistent and yet false; if a man says twice five is seven, and you take
his word for it without checking the sum, he will naturally deduce that
four times five is fourteen, and so on _ad libitum_. This is the way
that weird geometry proceeds: it sets before beginners certain strange
assumptions, and insists on their granting the existence of inconceivable
things, such as points having no parts, lines without breadth, and so on,
builds on these rotten foundations a superstructure equally rotten, and
pretends to go on to a demonstration which is true, though it starts from
premisses which are false.
Just so you, when you have granted the principles of any school, believe
in the deductions from them, and take their consistency, false as it is,
for a guarantee of truth. Then with some of you, hope travels through,
and you die before you have seen the truth and detected your deceivers,
while the rest, disillusioned too late, will not turn back for shame:
what, confess at their years that they have been abused with toys all
this time? so they hold on desperately, putting the best face upon it and
making all the converts they can, to have the consolation of good company
in their deception; they are well aware that to speak out is to sacrifice
the respect and superiority and honour they are accustomed to; so they
will not do it if it may be helped, knowing the height from which they
will fall to the common level. Just a few are found with the courage to
say they were deluded, and warn other aspirants. Meeting such a one, call
him a good man, a true and an honest; nay, call him philosopher, if you
will; to my mind, the name is his or no one's; the rest either have no
knowledge of the truth, though they think they have, or else have
knowledge and hide it, shamefaced cowards clinging to reputation.
But now for goodness' sake let us drop all this, cover it up with an
amnesty, and let it be as if it had not been said; let us, assume that
the Stoic philosophy, and no other, is correct; then we can examine
whether it is practicable and possible, or its disciples wasting their
pains; it makes wonderful promises, I am told, about the Happiness in
store for those who reach the summit; for none but they shall enter into
full possession of the true Good. The next point you must help me with--
whether you have ever met such a Stoic, such a pattern of Stoicism, as to
be unconscious of pain, untempted by pleasure, free from wrath, superior
to envy, contemptuous of wealth, and, in one word, Happy; such should the
example and model of the Virtuous life be; for any one who falls short in
the slightest degree, even though he is better than other men at all
points, is not complete, and in that case not yet Happy.
_Her_. I never saw such a man.
_Ly_. I am glad you do not palter with the truth. But what are your hopes
in pursuing philosophy, then? You see that neither your own teacher, nor
his, nor his again, and so on to the tenth generation, has been absolutely
wise and so attained Happiness. It will not serve you to say that it is
enough to get near Happiness; that is no good; a person on the doorstep is
just as much outside and in the air as another a long way off, though with
the difference that the former is tantalized by a nearer view. So it is to
get into the neighbourhood of Happiness--I will grant you so much--that
you toil like this, wearing yourself away, letting this great portion of
your life slip from you, while you are sunk in dullness and wakeful
weariness; and you are to go on with it for twenty more years at the
least, you tell me, to take your place when you are eighty--always
assuming some one to assure you that length of days--in the ranks of the
not yet Happy. Or perhaps you reckon on being the exception; you are to
crown your pursuit by attaining what many a good man before you, swifter
far, has pursued and never overtaken.
Well, overtake it, if that is your plan, grasp it and have it whole, this
something, mysterious to me, of which the possession is sufficient reward
for such toils; this something which I wonder how long you will have the
enjoyment of, old man that you will be, past all pleasure, with one foot
in the grave; ah, but perhaps, like a brave soul, you are getting ready
for another life, that you may spend it the better when you come to it,
having learned how to live: as though one should take so long preparing
and elaborating a superlative dinner that he fainted with hunger and
exhaustion!
However, there is another thing I do not think you have observed: Virtue
is manifested, of course, in action, in doing what is just and wise and
manly; but you--and when I say you, I mean the most advanced
philosophers--you do not seek these things and ensue them, but spend the
greater part of your life conning over miserable sentences and
demonstrations and problems; it is the man who does best at these that
you hail a glorious victor. And I believe that is why you admire this
experienced old professor of yours: he nonplusses his associates, knows
how to put crafty questions and inveigle you into pitfalls; so you pay no
attention to the fruit--which consists in action--, but are extremely
busy with the husks, and smother each other with the leaves in your
debates; come now, Hermotimus, what else are you about from morning to
night?
_Her_. Nothing; that is what it comes to.
_Ly_. Is it wronging you to say that you hunt the shadow or the snake's
dead slough, and neglect the solid body or the creeping thing itself? You
are no better than a man pouring water into a mortar and braying it with
an iron pestle; he thinks he is doing a necessary useful job, whereas, let
him bray till all's blue (excuse the slang), the water is as much water as
ever it was.
And here let me ask you whether, putting aside his discourse, you would
choose to resemble your master, and be as passionate, as sordid, as
quarrelsome, ay, and as addicted to pleasure (though that trait of his is
not generally known). Why no answer, Hermotimus? Shall I tell you a plea
for philosophy which I lately heard? It was from the mouth of an old, old
man, who has quite a company of young disciples. He was angrily demanding
his fees from one of these; they were long overdue, he said; the day
stated in the agreement was the first of the month, and it was now the
fifteenth.
The youth's uncle was there, a rustic person without any notion of your
refinements; and by way of stilling the storm, _Come, come, sir_, says he,
_you need not make such a fuss because we have bought words of you and not
yet settled the bill. As to what you have sold us, you have got it still;
your stock of learning is none the less; and in what I really sent the boy
to you for, you have not improved him a bit; he has carried off and
seduced neighbour Echecrates's daughter, and there would have been an
action for assault, only Echecrates is a poor man; but the prank cost me a
couple of hundred. And the other day he struck his mother; she had tried
to stop him when he was smuggling wine out of the house, for one of his
club-dinners, I suppose. As to temper and conceit and impudence and brass
and lying, he was not half so bad twelve months ago as he is now. That is
where I should have liked him to profit by your teaching; and we could
have done, without his knowing the stuff he reels of at table every day:
'a crocodile [Footnote: See _Puzzles_ in Notes.] seized hold of a baby,'
says he, 'and promised to give it back if its father could answer'--the
Lord knows what; or how, 'day [Footnote: See _Puzzles_ in Notes.] being,
night cannot be'; and sometimes his worship twists round what we say
somehow or other, till there we are with horns [Footnote: See _Puzzles_ in
Notes.] on our heads! We just laugh at it--most of all when he stuffs up
his ears and repeats to himself what he calls temperaments and conditions
and conceptions and impressions, and a lot more like that. And he tells us
God is not in heaven, but goes about in everything, wood and stone and
animals--the meanest of them, too; and if his mother asks him why he talks
such stuff, he laughs at her and says if once he gets the 'stuff' pat off,
there will be nothing to prevent him from being the only rich man, the
only king, and counting every one else slaves and offscourings._
When he had finished, mark the reverend philosopher's answer. _You should
consider_, he said, _that if he had never come to me, he would have
behaved far worse--very possibly have come to the gallows. As it is,
philosophy and the respect he has for it have been a check upon him, so
that you find he keeps within bounds and is not quite unbearable; the
philosophic system and name tutor him with their presence, and the
thought of disgracing them shames him. I should be quite justified in
taking your money, if not for any positive improvement I have effected,
yet for the abstentions due to his respect for philosophy; the very
nurses will tell you as much: children should go to school, because, even
if they are not old enough to learn, they will at least be out of
mischief there. My conscience is quite easy about him; if you like to
select any of your friends who is acquainted with Stoicism and bring him
here to-morrow, you shall see how the boy can question and answer, how
much he has learnt, how many books he has read on axioms, syllogisms,
conceptions, duty, and all sorts of subjects. As for his hitting his
mother or seducing girls, what have I to do with that? am I his keeper?_
A dignified defence of philosophy for an old man! Perhaps _you_ will say
too that it is a good enough reason for pursuing it, if it will keep us
from worse employments. Were our original expectations from philosophy
at all of a different nature, by the way? did they contemplate anything
beyond a more decent behaviour than the average? Why this obstinate
silence?
_Her_. Oh, why but that I could cry like a baby? It cuts me to the
heart, it is all so true; it is too much for me, when I think of my
wretched, wasted years--paying all that money for my own labour, too! I
am sober again after a debauch, I see what the object of my maudlin
affection is like, and what it has brought upon me.
_Ly_. No need for tears, dear fellow; that is a very sensible fable
of Aesop's. A man sat on the shore and counted the waves breaking;
missing count, he was excessively annoyed. But the fox came up and said
to him: 'Why vex yourself, good sir, over the past ones? you should let
them go, and begin counting afresh.' So you, since this is your mind, had
better reconcile yourself now to living like an ordinary man; you will
give up your extravagant haughty hopes and put yourself on a level with
the commonalty; if you are sensible, you will not be ashamed to unlearn
in your old age, and change your course for a better.
Now I beg you not to fancy that I have said all this as an anti-Stoic,
moved by any special dislike of your school; my arguments hold against
all schools. I should have said just the same if you had chosen Plato or
Aristotle, and condemned the others unheard. But, as Stoicism was your
choice, the argument has seemed to be aimed at that, though it had no
such special application.
_Her_. You are quite right. And now I will be off to metamorphose
myself. When we next meet, there will be no long, shaggy beard, no
artificial composure; I shall be natural, as a gentleman should. I may go
as far as a fashionable coat, by way of publishing my renunciation of
nonsense. I only wish there were an emetic that would purge out every
doctrine they have instilled into me; I assure you, if I could reverse
Chrysippus's plan with the hellebore, and drink forgetfulness, not of the
world but of Stoicism, I would not think twice about it. Well, Lycinus, I
owe you a debt indeed; I was being swept along in a rough turbid torrent,
unresisting, drifting with the stream; when lo, you stood there and
fished me out, a true _deus ex machina_. I have good enough reason,
I think, to shave my head like the people who get clear off from a wreck;
for I am to make votive offerings to-day for the dispersion of that thick
cloud which was over my eyes. Henceforth, if I meet a philosopher on my
walks (and it will not be with my will), I shall turn aside and avoid him
as I would a mad dog.
HERODOTUS AND AETION
I devoutly wish that Herodotus's other characteristics were imitable; not
all of them, of course--that is past praying for--, but any one of them:
the agreeable style, the constructive skill, the native charm of his
Ionic, the sententious wealth, or any of a thousand beauties which he
combined into one whole, to the despair of imitators. But there is one
thing--the use he made of his writings, and the speed with which he
attained the respect of all Greece; from that you, or I, or any one else,
might take a hint. As soon as he had sailed from his Carian home for
Greece, he concentrated his thoughts on the quickest and easiest method
of winning a brilliant reputation for himself and his works. He might
have gone the round, and read them successively at Athens, Corinth,
Argos, and Sparta; but that would be a long toilsome business, he
thought, with no end to it; so he would not do it in detail, collecting
his recognition by degrees, and scraping it together little by little;
his idea was, if possible, to catch all Greece together. The great
Olympic Games were at hand, and Herodotus bethought him that here was the
very occasion on which his heart was set. He seized the moment when the
gathering was at its fullest, and every city had sent the flower of its
citizens; then he appeared in the temple hall, bent not on sight-seeing,
but on bidding for an Olympic victory of his own; he recited his
_Histories_, and bewitched his hearers; nothing would do but each
book must be named after one of the Muses, to whose number they
corresponded.
He was straightway known to all, better far than the Olympic winners.
There was no man who had not heard his name; they had listened to him at
Olympia, or they were told of him by those who had been there; he had
only to appear, and fingers were pointing at him: 'There is the great
Herodotus, who wrote the Persian War in Ionic, and celebrated our
victories.' That was what he made out of his _Histories_; a single
meeting sufficed, and he had the general unanimous acclamation of all
Greece; his name was proclaimed, not by a single herald; every spectator
did that for him, each in his own city.
The royal road to fame was now discovered; it was the regular practice of
many afterwards to deliver their discourses at the festival; Hippias the
rhetorician was on his own ground there; but Prodicus came from Ceos,
Anaximenes from Chios, Polus from Agrigentum; and a rapid fame it
brought, to them and many others.
However, I need not have cited ancient rhetoricians, historians, and
chroniclers like these; in quite recent times the painter Aetion is said
to have brought his picture, _Nuptials of Roxana and Alexander_, to
exhibit at Olympia; and Proxenides, High Steward of the Games on the
occasion, was so delighted with his genius that he gave him his daughter.