Observe, then, not only when you are perusing the writings of philosophers and
listening to
[p. 423] their discourses, whether you do not give more attention to
the mere language than to the subject matter, and whether you are not more on
the alert for passages which involve something difficult and odd rather than for
those which convey something useful, substantial, and beneficial; moreover, when
you are busying yourself with poems and history, you must watch yourself to see
whether anything escapes you among the ideas which are suitably expressed and
tend to improvement of character or alleviation of emotion. For as Simonides
1
says of the bee that it flits among the flowers,
Making the yellow honey its
care,
while the rest of the world contents itself with their colour and
fragrance, getting nothing else from them, so, while the rest of the world
ranges amid poems for the sake of pleasure or diversion, if a man, through his
own initiative, finds and collects something worth while, it is reasonable to
expect that he at last, from force of habit and fondness for what is beautiful
and appropriate, has made himself capable of appreciating it. In the case, for
example, of persons who make use of Plato and Xenophon for their language, and
gather therefrom nothing else but the purity of the Attic style, like dew and
bloom, what can you say of them, save that they are the sort of persons that
content themselves with the sweet odour and bouquet of medicines, but have no
desire for their sedative and purgative virtues, nor the power to discern them ?
But those who are making still more and more progress are always able to derive
benefit, not only from what is said, but also from what is seen and done, and to
gather what is appropriate and useful therefrom.
[p. 425] Examples
are found in the stories told of Aeschylus and of others like him. Aeschylus at
the Isthmian games was watching a boxing-match, and when one of the men was hit
the crowd in the theatre burst into a roar. Aeschylus nudged Ion of Chios, and
said, ‘You see what a thing training is ; the man who is hit says nothing
; it is the spectators who shout.’
2 Brasidas caught a mouse among
some dried figs, got bitten, and let it go ; thereupon he said to himself,
‘Heavens, there is nothing so small or weak that it will not save its
life if it has courage to defend itself.’
3 Diogenes
4 at the first
sight of a man drinking from his hands took his cup from his wallet and threw it
away. Thus attention and intense application makes persons perceptive and
receptive of anything that conduces to virtue, from whatever source it come.
This is more apt to be the case if they combine theory with practice, not only,
as Thucydides
5 said, ‘carrying on their practice amid dangers,’
but also when confronted by pleasures or contentions, and when busy over
lawsuits and pleadings at court and the conduct of public offices, thus, as it
were, giving themselves a demonstration of their convictions, or rather arriving
at their convictions by putting them to a practical test; whereas, those who are
still studying, and busily looking to see what they can get from philosophy
which they can straightway haul out for display in the Forum, or at a gathering
of young men, or at an evening party at Court, ought not to be thought to
practise philosophy any more than apothecaries are to be thought to practise
medicine ; or rather, a charlatan of this sort does not
[p. 427] differ at all from the bird described by Homer,
6 for
whatever he gets he proffers through the mouth to his pupils as to an ‘
unfledged brood,’
Badly, however, it goes with himself,
if he does
not devote to his own advantage, or assimilate at all, anything of what he
receives.
