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[2] For the maxim "Know thyself" exhorts us to become educated and to get prudence, it being only by these means that a man may come to know himself, either because it is chiefly those who are uneducated and thoughtless that think themselves to be very sagacious—and that, according to Plato, is of all kinds of ignorance the worst1—or because such people consider wicked men to be virtuous, and honest men, on the contrary, to be of no account; for only in this one way may a man know himself and his neighbour—by getting an education and a sagacity that are superior.

1 The ignorance, Plato would say, that mistakes itself for knowledge.

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

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