Selected Essays of Plutarch

SELECTED ESSAYS OF PLUTARCH

TRANSLATED WITH INTRODUCTION

BY

T. G. TUCKER

LITT.D. (CAMB.), HON. LITT.D. (DUBLIN)

PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

Volume I.

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

1913

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.

PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK, TORONTO

MELBOURNE AND BOMBAY

PREFACE

The essays here rendered into English have not been selected as the very best pieces in Plutarch’s Moralia, but, first, as typical examples of his writing in that kind, and, second, as covering between them a tolerably large field of interesting matter. The Moralia offer us perhaps the best of all extant material for judging the civilization of the middle classes of society just before and after the year 100 of our era. From them and from Pliny’s Letters we are able to form a fairly complete picture of a large part of that sounder social element which lay between the froth and the dregs.

In the Introduction some remarks are offered concerning Plutarch’s literary style. Here it will suffice to say that the English version does not seek to be either more formal or more vivacious, either more imposing or more humorous, than the original. An attempt has been made to preserve the tone as faithfully as the substance. In making Plutarch write as he does in the following pages the translator hopes that il ne luy a au moins rien presté qui le desmente ou qui le desdie. It is fair to add that no modern version of the Moralia has been consulted for the purposes of this rendering. In the Introduction, however, one cannot fail to owe much suggestion to Gréard and Volkmann.

In the spelling of Greek proper names every modern scholar must follow his own best judgement. It does not follow that, because it is necessary to say ‘Plato’ and usual to say ‘Parmenio’, it is equally judicious to say ‘Chilo’. Nor can any safe rule be laid down for a choice between ‘Pisistratus’ and ‘Peisistratus’. Perhaps the most advisable course is to safeguard, as far as possible, the pronunciation of those who are unfamiliar with Greek, and the spelling ‘Pheidias’ may do something towards correcting the common English tendency to pronounce the first syllable as it is pronounced in ‘fiddle’. Notes upon the proper names will be found after the text by readers who may require them.

The text generally adopted is that of Bernardakis in the Teubner series, but recourse has been had throughout to Wyttenbach, and in a number of places which are commonly acknowledged to be corrupt the translator has ventured on a modest emendation of his own. These places are marked in the translation by an asterisk in the margin, and the readings adopted will be found at the end of the book in an appendix on the Greek text. Critics would have saved themselves much trouble if they had observed that, though hiatus is regularly avoided in the genuine writings of Plutarch, no hiatus is created by a word ending in iota or upsilon, vowels which carry a semi-vowel glide in themselves.

The orthodox order, Greek and Latin titles, and sectional references of the pieces here chosen are as follows. The English titles belong to the present version.

On Bringing up a Boy (περὶ παίδων ἀγωγῆς: De liberis educandis), 1-14 C.

On the Student at Lectures (περὶ τοῦ ἀκούειν: De recta ratione audiendi), 37 C-48 D

On Fawner and Friend (πῶς ἄν τις διακρίνειε τὸν κόλακα τοῦ φίλου: Quomodo adulator ab amico internoscatur), 48 E-74 E.

Advice to Married Couples (γαμικὰ παραγγέλματα: Coniugalia praecepta), 138 B-146.

Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages (τῶν ἑπτὰ σοφῶν συμπόσιον: Septem sapientum convivium), 146 B-164 D.

On Garrulousness (περί ἀδολεσχίας: De garrulitate), 502 B-515.

Concerning Busybodies (περὶ πολυπραγμοσύνης: De curiositate), 515 B-523 B.

On Moral Ignorance in High Places (πρὸς ἡγεμόνα ἀπαίδευ τον: Ad principem ineruditum), 779 D-782 F.

On Old Men in Public Life (εἰ πρεσβυτέρῳ πολιτευτέον: An seni respublica gerenda sit), 783 B-797 F.

INTRODUCTION

The age in which Plutarch was educated and in which he wrote his Ethica is, from the literary point of view, closely similar to the so-called ‘Augustan’ age of English writing. Of all the periods of English style and thought, he would probably have found himself most at home in that of Pope, Addison, and Steele, or in its continuation with Goldsmith and Johnson. He flourished at a time when intellectual interests were remarkably keen, if not very profound; when literature, if for the most part it ventured on no high imaginative flights, did at least aim at some practical bearing upon the conduct of life; when men found entertainment, and probably some measure of moral or social help, in the readable essay or the friendly epistle; when facts, merely as such, were accepted as interesting if interestingly set forth; and when Philosophy, if she deigned to keep her feet upon the ground and to speak as one of the mortals, met with a due welcome from either sex. An eighteenth-century Plutarch might conceivably have written the moral papers of Johnson without Johnson’s ponderousness, or have contributed to the Spectator papers more full than Addison’s of those ‘ideas’ in which Matthew Arnold found that writer so deficient. He might have written, though in a prose form, the Essay on Man, being meanwhile as willing as Pope to owe the bulk of his matter to other minds, but not so willing as Pope to play the expositor without first playing the earnest and critical student. Plutarch did not, so far as we are aware, try his hand at verse. To judge by his comments upon poetic duty and by his quotations—which are regularly taken from the best writers of a classical age already far remote—his conception of the poetic office was too exalted to permit of his dabbling in that domain. Had he done so, and had he followed the fashion of his times, he would perhaps have come nearer to our ‘Augustans’ even than in his prose. In poetry it was the age of description, reflection, satire, and moralizing, in the highest degree sensible, studiously informed with ‘wit’—in the broader Queen Anne sense of that word—and characterized by extreme deftness of pointed and quotable phrase, but in no sense creative, imaginative, or inspired. Its ideal contents consisted of ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’. The attitudes of both prose-writer and poet belonged to the intellectual and aesthetic spirit of the period, and so far as that spirit finds an individual embodiment in the Greek half of the Roman Empire, it finds him in Plutarch of Chaeronea.

It would be difficult to suggest with any precision the place which Plutarch might have filled in Victorian literature. A distinguished and popular ‘man of letters’ and an educator of public opinion he assuredly would have been. Given a width of reading, a persistent self-culture, and a careful but unpedantic style, corresponding to those which he practised in his own generation, he might have made—as he did then—an admirable biographer and essayist. He might have been a contributor of substantial papers to the quarterlies and other higher reviews. He might, and probably would, have been an eminent lecturer; possibly, with a broad practical Christianity substituted for his broad practical Platonism, a preacher not only eminent but also in the best sense popular. He would certainly have made a brilliant expositor of whatever he undertook to expound. He was no Plato or Aristotle; he would have been no Carlyle or Herbert Spencer; but he might have been much that Macaulay was outside of politics.

As to the date of Plutarch’s birth there can be no certainty. Approximately it may be put down as A. D. 48. It is accepted that his death did not occur before the year 120; it may have taken place somewhat, though not much, later. Born in the days of Claudius, he lived through the reigns of Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan, and saw at least the first three years of the rule of Hadrian. He must have been nearly fifty before the last tyrant of the early Empire fell, but the remainder of his life was spent under the most beneficent régime, and amid the greatest peace and prosperity, ever experienced in the ancient world. The pax Romana was at its profoundest, the sense of security at its fullest; the fact of general well-being was everywhere most palpable. There was at the same time, or in consequence, a vigorous revival of intellectual life. At no period of antiquity would it have been possible for a man of studious habits and of mild and genial disposition to enjoy a leisure so undisturbed or a society so free from those forms of preoccupation which preclude an engrossing interest in things purely of the mind. For the orator who is fired by the natural heat of democratic politics, for the patriotic poet from whom thrilling verse must be wrung by the wrongs, the decline, or the yet unrealized aspirations of his country, there was indeed no stimulation or scope. But for the cultivation of the humanities, for the indulgence of a taste for art and belles-lettres, for the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity, for the search after interesting knowledge—physical, mathematical, antiquarian, historical, philological—and for the thoughtful observation of men and manners, the time was almost ideal. In the absence of anxious and absorbing problems of the present there was leisure for a contemplative and critical survey of the past, and for making acquaintance with ‘the best that had been thought and said’ by it. Since the immediate human environment was no longer distracted and distracting with the clamorous urgencies of external or internal strife and danger, it was possible to look abroad over a wider field, to contemplate the more spacious world of man and his work, of Nature and her facts, beauties, and marvels. It was therefore the age of the encyclopaedist, the traveller, the commentator, the describer, the collector—collector of curiosities, of objects of art, of books, of stories from history, of apophthegms, of pointed and interesting quotations. The prevailing aim was mental and social culture. This was the one object of education, however much its professors might dissent from each other according to the degrees of philistinism in their respective temperaments.

The aim of contemporary education—generally realized with more definiteness than educational aims are wont to be in modern times—was to turn the pupil into a gentleman, to equip him for the art of living and conducting himself as such. There could, of course, hardly fail to be those who regarded this kalokagathia too much from the exterior point of view, while others fixed their attention more decidedly, and often perhaps too exclusively, upon the inward and spiritual grace. There were also considerable differences between the Greek and Roman conceptions of a gentleman. But in the main this end was universally avowed—to turn the raw material of the boy into a man both capable and clubbable, whether from a public or a private standpoint. The things to be sought were the right accomplishments, the right morals, and the right manners. The accomplishments included, beyond all else, literary information and culture, argumentative dexterity, and a capacity for speech. The right morals were based mainly upon reasoned self-command. The right manners were chiefly those of urbanity, dignity, and that care of the person, the voice, the dress, and the deportment upon which all ages have insisted according to their several lights or tastes. It might be that the teaching ‘philosopher’, whose concern was with the soundness of the morals, had his quarrel with the teaching ‘sophist’, whose business was with the rhetoric and its excellence for exhibition purposes or for the gaining of various forms of influence. The philosopher might think the sophist superficial, showy, and often actually pernicious, while the sophist might look upon the philosopher as visionary, pedantic, and often a positive clog upon practical efficiency. Nevertheless no typically cultured person of the day would have questioned that, in order to be complete—or, as Coleridge calls it, ‘orbicular’—education must include its due measure of both forms of teaching.

After his years of infancy the boy, under the supervision of his paedagogus—ideally a slave of superior character, but too often a person who was merely useless for harder work—passed into a school, where he was first taught his letters and then proceeded to the reading, learning, and recital of classical poetry, to the study of music, and to some acquaintance with elementary arithmetic and geometry. Next, taken in hand by the rhetorical teacher in a higher school, he was made to write and deliver descriptions and essays, mostly on trite and unreal themes of a historical or pseudo-historical nature, to develop his powers of invention on either side of a chosen topic, and to cultivate a fastidious diction, pointed phrase, and the elocutionary arts and graces. From artificial harangues and the ‘speaking of a piece’ he advanced to the imaginary pleading of forensic cases, in which the law was often as fictitious as the facts. When, upon reaching the age for assuming the toga virilis, he was emancipated from the custody of the paedagogus and the discipline of the school, his formal education commonly ceased. If he proceeded further, as many did, to what may be considered as the equivalent of a university course, he might elect to study philosophy, to study ‘sophistic’, or to dally with both in such measure as seemed likely to set off the abilities or consolidate the culture of a gentleman. Even in the more mature years of life the intellectually-disposed grandee had a habit of maintaining near his person a salaried philosopher as a kind of domestic monitor, and audiences of wealth and fashion readily gathered in Rome and elsewhere to listen to lectures on philosophy by professors who properly understood the art of clear and pleasant exposition. For the most part the typical Roman, less genuinely impassioned than the Greek for thought pure and simple, looked upon any ‘specializing’ in philosophy as likely to lead either to too cloistered a virtue or to the acquisition of eccentric, if not dangerous, views. A certain modicum of philosophical knowledge might be an adornment to life, and a certain modicum of philosophical training might impart a steadiness to character, but the study must not be pursued to the point at which the student himself stood in danger of becoming a ‘philosopher’. With the Greeks philosophical specializing was commonly subject to no such reprehension, partly because of the inborn Hellenic ardour for study and esteem of learning, partly because in this domain, even more than in the rhetorical, the Greeks were the accepted teachers throughout the Roman sphere.

This, or nearly this, was the attitude of the educational world in the first decades of the second century, and it was in this world that Plutarch of Chaeronea became a figure of special eminence and distinction. For in whatever light the modern reader may regard Plutarch as a man of letters, to his own times he was first and foremost an educator. It is from this point of view that we must consider both his Parallel Lives and his Moral Essays, if we are to perceive in them that unity of character and purpose which he intended all his work to possess.

Plutarch, then, was born about A. D. 48 in the very heart of Greece, at the comparatively small town of Chaeronea, famous as the scene of the decisive victory of the Macedonians over the southern Greeks, and also of that in which the forces of Mithridates were routed by Sulla. His family must have been of high local standing, and the fact that his father—a man of cultivated tastes and refined manners—was the owner of the ‘finest kind of horses’ is enough to show, to those who appreciate the significance of the word hippotrophia, that he must have been possessed of considerable means. The same conclusion may be drawn both from what Plutarch himself incidentally reveals concerning his brothers, Lamprias and Timon, as well as other members of the family circle, and also from what is known of his own life and upbringing. That as a boy he passed through the orthodox curriculum, is obvious from his wide acquaintance with literature and his intelligent, if not particularly profound, references to both music and mathematics. When of an age to receive an education in philosophy, he was placed, or placed himself, chiefly under the distinguished Ammonius, an Alexandrian philosopher of a broad semi-Platonist, semi-Peripatetic school, who had become established in a prominent intellectual and public position at Athens. It was the accepted rule for the student to attend, but not necessarily to confine himself to, the lectures of a selected teacher. Often he lived in that teacher’s house, or at least, in intimate connexion therewith. If the philosopher was strictly conscientious he felt it his duty to watch over the developing character of his pupil, to visit him with any deserved reproof,[^[1]] to serve as his father confessor, to answer his questions, and to meet his moral and intellectual difficulties. The familiar phrase ‘guide, philosopher, and friend’ perhaps describes the relations with unusual exactness. We find both Plutarch and his brother in the company of Ammonius at Delphi when Nero, in the year 66, graced that city with his imperial and artistic presence.

His formal education completed, we discover little of the younger manhood of Plutarch, except that he must have been in high local estimation, partly, perhaps, from the position of his family, but doubtless no less on account of his own conspicuous gifts. Had this not been the case, he would hardly have been appointed as one of a delegation of two sent on a mission to the Roman proconsul of the province. At what age he was first entrusted with civic functions as aedile, or with a Delphic priesthood (then merely a ceremonial office open to any layman), or with other public positions, we cannot say. We can only be sure that to his learning he added a recognizable capacity for public business. However many hours he may have devoted to study and to the compilation of those ample commonplace-books which evidently served him in such good stead, he prided himself on carrying his philosophic attainments into the local Chamber or on to the local platform. In his judgement this procedure was not only a vindication of philosophy and a method of keeping the faculties energetic; it was also a patriotic duty.

As has been already said, this was an age of travel. Facilities of transport were plentiful; the seas and main roads were secure from pirate or enemy; journeys were at least as expeditious as at any modern time until the employment of steam. We know of visits made by Plutarch to Alexandria, various parts of Greece, Rome, and the north of Italy. Rome he must have visited at least twice, and in this metropolis and ‘epitome of the world’ he made acquaintance with a large circle of men of distinction, transacted public business (presumably on behalf of his native town, of which he may have been sent as representative), delivered lectures,[^[2]] and apparently acted as a sort of consulting physician to morally perturbed members of Roman society. He must have spoken always in Greek, for he confesses that—like most other Greek writers—he had given almost no attention to Latin; nor is any such avowal needed from a person who, even after looking into the language, believed sine patris to be the Latin for ‘without a father’. Greek, however, was then as much the universal language of the cultured as, until recently, French was the universal accomplishment of fashion, diplomacy, and the traveller.

The Rome with which Plutarch was immediately acquainted was the Rome of Vespasian and of the earlier half of Domitian’s reign. Had his sojourn in the capital taken place some fifteen or twenty years later, it is in the highest degree probable that he would have been further known to us through an acquaintance with Pliny or some other Roman writer of that date. That a Greek, and especially one who had a difficulty in reading Latin, should make no mention of contemporary Latin authors—that in his heart he should rather despise them—is only characteristic of the Hellenic attitude of the time. But that the amiable Pliny, who has an appreciative word to say of almost every one within his social horizon, including comparatively obscure philosophers like Euphrates, should say nothing of so eminent a figure as Plutarch, amounts to evidence that the two had never met. A man who could make close friends of consulars like Sosius Senecio and Mestrius Florus, and who enjoyed an intimacy with Paccius and Fundanus, could not have failed to win the notice of the Horace Walpole of his day. Quintilian, Silius, Statius, Martial, Pliny, Suetonius, and Juvenal were all writing when Plutarch was already the coryphaeus of Greek culture, and if not one of them mentions his name, it is because he was living in remote Chaeronea and forgathering only with his chosen circle of philosophers, men of letters, artists, or musicians in that town or in Athens, Corinth, and other Greek centres near at hand.

To Chaeronea Plutarch must have retired by middle life. There he married Timoxena, a lady of position, but of quiet tastes, had issue four sons and a daughter, identified himself with the civic and religious concerns of his town, delivered lectures, imparted instruction on the lines of a modified or latitudinarian Platonic philosophy, industriously read the books in his moderate but useful library, made copious extracts therefrom, wrote his Lives and those occasional papers known as his Ethica or Moral Essays, and enjoyed the discussion of many a knotty question—often perhaps of little or no importance beyond the fact of its forming a problem—in the agreeable society of his relatives or his cultivated friends and guests. At such gatherings he was the leader, doubtless dominating the conversation—though in his more courteous way—somewhat as Johnson dominated the coterie described by Boswell. Often, we gather, he varied this quiet course of life by means of excursions to other Greek cities—Athens, Sparta, Aedepsus—where he most probably delivered an occasional lecture, and where, as we are certain, he thoroughly enjoyed himself in table-talk.[^[3]]

That he gave philosophical education, though apparently not of a systematic and pedagogic kind, to persons of both sexes is known from his own references to the practice. Whether he did so for money or not, we cannot tell. The later Platonists by no means felt bound to adopt the attitude of Socrates and Plato towards the taking of fees. The world had changed, and the res angusta was often more powerful than a principle which had ceased to appear entirely rational. But there is every reason to suppose that Plutarch was a man of independent means; we know further that a genial frugality was the rule of his household, and that he entertained a becoming contempt for the obsequious or the advertiser. The day of the endowed professor, whether of philosophy or sophistic, was still to dawn for Greece under Marcus Aurelius, and it never dawned at all for so small a town as Chaeronea. We may take it therefore that, whether with or without fee or present, Plutarch was able to choose his own pupils—in all likelihood the sons and daughters of his friends—and that, in dealing with them or with a wider audience, he maintained the fullest dignity and independence, and practised all the amiable candour which he explicitly recommends.

For any lack of originality, of speculative audacity, of profundity (or the obscurity which is so often mistaken for that virtue), Plutarch fully compensates. To his generation he served as a milch-cow of practical philosophy on its ethical side. He browsed on literature and thought, secreted the most valuable constituents, and yielded the cream to his hearers or readers. So far as he belonged to a philosophic school, it was that of the Old Academy. In other words, he would have labelled himself a Platonist. It is probable that he was as much attracted by the superb literary style of Plato, the nature of the man, and the nobility of his conceptions, as by anything capable of crystallization into a philosophy. These qualities attracted even the dilettante, while in the more specially philosophic world time had done much to refract the real Plato, to extract dogma from him, and to create a large Aberglaube about his writings. Be that as it may, there is much in Plato that Plutarch does not accept, and there is much outside of Plato to which he gives a welcome. Towards Stoics and Epicureans—whose doctrines, like those of the Christians, would logically withhold men from public activity—he is distinctly, though never virulently, hostile, and when his pen ranges itself against particular schools, it is against these.[^[4]] It is easier, in fact, to say to what sect Plutarch did not belong than to associate him definitively with any other. Nevertheless it is as a Platonist that he would have classed himself, and it is especially by the later Neo-Platonists that he was quoted as a divinely gifted writer who lent literary charm and potency to wisdom. So broad, however, was his teaching, and in many respects so adaptable even to Christianity, that early writers of the Church had no scruple in borrowing liberally from him.[^[5]]

Into whatever shape he may have systematized his views, and however popular his treatment of them, Plutarch ranked with the philosophers. If he was opposed to Stoicism and Epicureanism, he was, like other philosophers, no less opposed to sophistic. To him the representatives of that art were apt to seem shallow and showy.[^[6]]

He held, with the Socratics in general, that the basis of right action is knowledge, and he had no belief in empiricism. Not that he rejected either established moral views or established religion. He was no sceptic, still less an atheist. As Friedländer has well argued, there was no ancient cult of atheism. Plutarch, indeed, is remarkably receptive in the matter of deities. The Egyptian worship of Isis and Osiris, which had made great progress throughout the Roman Empire, appeared to him equally tenable with the worship practised by his own ancestors. In the polytheism in which he acquiesced, such divinities were only other forms of those known in Hellas, and he found no difficulty in reconciling and combining the two sets of notions and cults. He was deeply tinged with Orientalism, though his culture and his natural good taste made him despise corybantic demonstrations and what Friedländer has called ‘dirty mortifications’. He held the Eranian belief in daemonic agencies, which acted upon mankind from the one side as the gods did from the other. If he appears to rise to the conception of ‘God’ in the singular, the word is rather to be taken as denoting the sum of divine wisdom and beneficent dispensation. Like all the best minds of his own and many a previous generation, he found moral difficulties in accepting the characters ascribed to the deities in the best literature of earlier Greece, and therefore, while approving of the established education in poetry, he necessarily felt some qualms as to the possible effects. Poetry served in the schools ‘as introduction to philosophy, history, geography, and astronomy’, and it had much to do with the formation of religious and ethical notions. Homer, Pindar, Sophocles, and Menander were ‘learned and wise’, and boys were brought to regard them as inspired. Hence Plutarch’s treatise on Poets as Moral Teachers of the Young. The point of view in that essay is not, indeed, entirely rational. It was not so easy for Plutarch as it is for us to realize that moral and religious ideas in Greek literature had passed through an evolution corresponding to the development of intellect and society. Instead of frankly recognizing the limitations of Homer or the inconsistencies of the dramatists in this respect, he puts a highly ingenious constraint upon the connexion between any dubious sentiment and its context. It is only when he fails in such a tour de force that he consents to censure the poet. In this procedure he was by no means the first. The battle of the ‘takers of objection’ (προβληματικοί) and the ‘solvers of difficulties’ (λυτικοί) was centuries old. That Plutarch should range himself as far as possible with the solvers is a circumstance which would naturally follow both from his love of literature and from his constitutionally reverential temperament.

As has been often observed, the purpose running through the Parallel Lives and the Moral Essays is one and the same. The philosophy of Plutarch was ethical. For logic and dialectic he shows no liking. His object was to relate philosophy to life, to bring home a philosophy which could be lived. By philosophy he meant the best conduct of life, based on an understanding of the nature of virtue—τὸ καλόν, the right, the honourable, the becoming. From philosophy we are to learn not only what is due to ourselves, but what is due to the gods, to the laws, to parents, children, friends, enemies, fellow-citizens, and strangers. The Essays, like those of Seneca or Bacon, deal with separable components or manifestations of right and wrong character, with duties and circumstances: the Lives meanwhile afford us concrete examples or object lessons from history.[^[7]] Yet life, even that of a philosopher, is not made up entirely of preaching and exhortation, least of all when the philosopher is at the same time a man of the world and a man of letters. Plutarch felt a lively interest in all such posers as were mooted in the talk of the table or of the loungers’ club. He therefore includes among his occasional papers—whether written by request or under the fashionable fiction of a request—a number of treatises on physical, antiquarian, literary, and artistic topics which can hardly be said to bear with any immediateness upon the ethical perfection of the reader. As a change, therefore, from the treatment of Superstition or Inquisitiveness or The Restraint of Anger, of Rules for Married Couples and Rules of Health and rules for The Student at Lecture, he may in a spare moment discuss such matters as The Face in the Moon or questions in Roman custom.

The majority of the pieces in the present selection speak for themselves. With the one exception to be mentioned immediately, they all bear the impress of the man. There is the same moral broadmindedness and sobriety, the same shrewd sense of le bonhomme Plutarque, the same faculty for popularizing[^[8]] without descending to vapidity, the same knack of relieving the sermon by means of anecdote, quotation, or interesting item of information at the point where the discourse threatens to become tedious. It is true that the German critic, in his indefatigable search for the unecht, has impugned the authorship of the Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages[^[9]] on grounds unintelligible to those who do not expect a dinner-table conversation to be a systematic treatise, and who are satisfied to believe that a mixture of serious talk, banter, and narrative, and a frequent transition of subject, are precisely the things for which one would look on such an occasion. Every feature of the style is Plutarchan, and, if Plutarch did not write the piece, we can only feel unmixed regret that he did not, and unmixed surprise that its real author should sacrifice the credit of his performance. With the article on The Bringing-up of a Boy the case is different. Wyttenbach has sufficiently pointed out its frequent feebleness of argument, its turbid arrangement, the exceeding triteness of its ideas, and its unaccountable omissions. To us moderns it is of great interest for the light which it throws on the education of the period, and for its incidental revelations of the conditions of domestic life and the domestic affections. Otherwise it is a puerile performance and savours of nothing but the student essay. If it be argued that it is one of Plutarch’s juvenile works, the answer is that it is unlike him to be disingenuous; and disingenuous he must be, if in his early youth he pretends to have ‘often impressed upon parents’ this or that. Antiquity produced far too many amateur essays in imitation of great authors—imitations actually ascribed to those authors by a recognized fiction of the schools—for us to do an injustice to Plutarch when an easier solution lies so close to our hands. Perhaps, again, the piece on Fawner and Friend[^[10]] suffers from an occasional longueur, but there are few writers who do not at some less felicitous moment perpetrate paragraphs less vivacious than their average.

As a stylist Plutarch is apt to be underrated. He is, it is true, no laborious atticist, and makes no point of writing like a purist in the classic manner of a Plato or a Lysias. But this does not mean that he is in the least negligent in either word or sentence. On the contrary, his words are selected with extreme care, and his sentences—where the text is sound, as for the most part it is—are rounded off and interlinked as watchfully as any natural writing need require. It is true that his vocabulary is large and his expression full, but, when his words are properly weighed and their metaphorical and other differentiations duly perceived, no understanding reader will call him verbose.[^[11]] He displays an immense command of language, but no word plays an idle part, and if (like Cicero, whom in many respects he resembles) he is fond of joining what are erroneously called synonyms, it needs but little appreciation of verbal values to realize that the added words invariably carry some amplification, some more precise definition, or some emphasis helpful to a full grasp upon the sense. It is true also that his sentences are apt to appear—like the sentences of Ruskin’s earlier days—somewhat lengthy; nevertheless they commonly atone by lucidity of construction for any demand they may make upon sustained attention.[^[12]] In a modern English dress they must necessarily be broken up, but a practised reader of Plutarch finds no more difficulty with them in the original than he would find with a passage of Demosthenes or Plato. To one who becomes familiar with them they are at least as agreeable as the staccato brevities of Seneca. What chiefly exacts some effort from the reader of Plutarchan Greek is the fact that its words are extraordinarily charged with metaphor and allusion.[^[13]] His choice of one word rather than another is always nicely calculated. This truth once recognized, a reader cannot fail to admire both the consistency with which the writer maintains his similitude while he is upon it, and also the copious resources of vocabulary upon which he draws for the purpose. Meanwhile, despite any length of sentence and fullness of praise, Plutarch neither irritates with tricks and mannerisms nor wearies with pedantry and ponderousness. A pedant he could not be. He is no writer of Johnsonese. To him the best words are those which best suit their context, and he has no objection whatever to a dash of the colloquial or a touch of the homely or naïve. It is one of his characteristic merits that he knows when to take the higher and when the lower road of diction. He also knows when he is in danger of stylistic monotony. Plutarch was a teacher, but, like all truly intelligent members of that profession, he recognized that the most uninspiring attitude to adopt is the severely and unremittingly pedagogic. ‘The knack of style,’ it has been said, ‘is to write like a human being,’ and Plutarch, a professor of humanity without a chair, is always and entirely human. That his pen must have moved with extraordinary facility is evident from the number of his publications. Apart from his Lives (of which not all are extant), his Moralia include over eighty pieces, long or short, and it is certain that many others had disappeared[^[14]] before the present collection became available in its eleventh-century MS.

It is not here implied that he is never culpable, never over-loaded. There are times, though rare ones, at which we feel that his memory or his notebook has been unduly exploited. We feel that he might have spared us an illustration which does not illustrate or a similitude which is deficient in similarity. To a certain extent he is a Euphuist, and though Guevara perhaps owed nothing directly to him (as he did to Seneca[^[15]]), it is manifest that Plutarch sometimes strains a point in order to achieve an over-ingenious comparison. The contagion of the thing, like that of Euphuism in the Elizabethan age, was in the air, and Plutarch assuredly does not err more often or more heinously with one generation than Shakespeare did with another. Wide reading and natural fecundity easily slip into sins which narrow resources and slow invention are impotent to commit.

There are numerous signs that the pendulum of classical interest is swinging in the direction of the literature of the early Empire. The exclusive toujours perdrix of the Attic and Ciceronian periods has apparently begun to jade the palate, and writers like Seneca and Plutarch are coming into their own once more. There was a time when these authors were perhaps better known than any others. That they were worthy of prime consideration is manifest from the immense influence which they exercised upon the ardent and inquiring spirits of the sixteenth and following centuries, in England no less than on the Continent. Authors who could make such an appeal to Montaigne, to the Elizabethan dramatists, to Bacon, or to Jeremy Taylor,[^[16]] are surely not to be despised because they belong stylistically to a ‘silver’ age, or because their strength lies mostly in the fact that they are a mine of ideas, wise saws, and pointed moral instances. Seneca, as being a writer of Latin, was naturally the earlier and more widely read,[^[17]] but from the publication of the editio princeps of Plutarch by Aldus in 1509 our author sprang into peculiar estimation among the recovered spirits of antiquity. It was, however, due to Amyot that both his Lives and his Essays became accessible to those who had little or no Greek. The Essays were rendered into idiomatic French by that admirable translator in the year 1572,[^[18]] and Montaigne was by no means the only reader among nous autres ignorans who made the Plutarch of Amyot his breviary, and who ‘drew his water incessantly’ from him. It was not the literary etiquette of the Elizabethan age to acknowledge all the obligations one might owe even to a contemporary, much less to the ancients, and the stores of Plutarch might be rifled without much fear of detection, and certainly with no fear of reproach. When Lyly, in Euphues and his Ephoebus,[^[19]] takes it in hand to bring up a child in the way he should go, he is in a large measure simply translating, expanding, and emphasizing the pseudo-Plutarch on the Bringing-up of a Boy and interspersing the discourse with pickings from other essays, particularly that on Garrulousness.[^[20]] Montaigne, of course, with his bland unreserve, credits Plutarch via Amyot with a multitude of observations, while Bacon, when following the new vogue of the essay, sometimes refers us to ‘Plutarke’, and at least on one occasion informs us that ‘Mountaigny saith’ a thing which on reference to the said ‘Mountaigny’ we find to be Plutarchan.

Though it is no part of the present Introduction to examine in detail the influence of the philosopher of Chaeronea upon modern writers, or to make an inventory of his contributions to English literature, it is at least worth asking whether an author whom genius once delighted to exploit, and from whom so many good things have filtered down to us through various channels, may not be well worth reading at first hand. To Professor Mahaffy[^[21]] Plutarch ‘is a pure and elevating writer, full of precious information, and breathing a lofty moral tone’, and to Professor Gilbert Murray[^[22]] he is ‘one of the most tactful and charming of writers, and one of the most lovable characters in antiquity’. Said Emerson[^[23]]: ‘Plutarch will be perpetually rediscovered from time to time as long as books last.’

CONTENTS

In the following imaginary ‘Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages’ the supposed narrator is a certain Diocles of Corinth, a professional diviner and expiator of omens connected with the court of Periander, who was despot of Corinth from 625 B. C. to 585 B. C. The dramatic date is towards the close of that period. It must not be assumed that Plutarch is pretending to be historical, and anachronisms must be disregarded.

The Seven Sages are here Thales, Bias, Pittacus, Solon, Chilon, Cleobulus, Anacharsis (see Notes on Persons and Places). The list varies with different writers, but Thales, Bias, Pittacus, and Solon are invariably, and Chilon is regularly, included in the canon. Periander is himself sometimes made one of the number, and a certain Myson also appears.

The qualities which constituted a ‘sage’ in this connexion were those of keen practical sense and insight, and a power of crystallizing the results into pithy maxims. He was not a ‘philosopher’ in the later sense of that word.

DINNER-PARTY OF THE SEVEN SAGES

We |146 B| may be sure, Nicarchus, that in process of time facts will become so obscured as to be altogether beyond ascertainment, seeing that in the present instance, where they are so fresh and recent, the world accepts accounts of them which are pure concoctions. In the first place, the party at dinner did not consist—as you have been told—merely of seven, but of |C| more than twice that number. I was myself included, both as being professionally intimate with Periander and as the host of Thales, who had taken up his quarters with me by Periander’s directions. In the second place, whoever related the conversation to you, reported it incorrectly. Presumably he was not one of the company. Inasmuch, therefore, as I have plenty of spare time and my years do not warrant me in putting off the narrative with any confidence, I will—since you are all so eager—tell you the whole story from the beginning.

Periander |D| had prepared his entertainment, not in the city, but in the banquet-hall at Lechaeum, close to the temple of Aphrodite, the festival being in her honour. For after having refused to sacrifice to Aphrodite since the love-affair which led to his mother’s suicide, he was now for the first time, thanks to certain dreams on the part of Melissa, induced to pay honour and court to that goddess.

Inasmuch as it was summer-time and the road all the way to the sea was crowded with people and vehicles, and therefore full of dust and a confusion of traffic, each of the invited guests was supplied with a carriage and pair handsomely caparisoned. Thales, however, on seeing the carriage at the door, simply |E| smiled and sent it away. Accordingly we turned off the road and proceeded to walk quietly through the fields, a third member of our party being Niloxenus of Naucratis, a man of high character who had formed a close acquaintance with Solon and Thales in Egypt. His presence was due to his having been sent on another mission to Bias. Of its purpose he was himself unaware, although he suspected that the sealed document of which he was the bearer contained a second problem for solution. He had been instructed, in case Bias could do nothing, to show the missive to the wisest of the Greeks. ‘It is a godsend to me,’ |F| said Niloxenus, ‘to find you all here, and, as you perceive’—showing us the paper—‘I am bringing the letter to the dinner.’ At this Thales remarked with a laugh, ‘In case of trouble, once more to Priene![^[24]] For Bias will solve the difficulty, as he did the first, without assistance.’ ‘What do you mean,’ said I, ‘by “the first”?’ ‘The king,’ replied Thales, ‘sent him an animal for sacrifice, and bade him pick out and send back the worst and best portion of the meat. Thereupon our friend, with excellent judgement, took out and sent the tongue; and he is manifestly held in high repute and admiration in consequence.’ |147| ‘That is not the only reason,’ said Niloxenus, ‘Bias does not object—as you do—to be, and to be called, a friend of kings. In your own case the king not only admires you on general grounds, but he was hugely delighted with your method of measuring the pyramid. Without any fuss or the need of any instrument, you stood your stick at the end of the shadow thrown by the pyramid, and the fall of the sunlight making two triangles, you showed that the pyramid stood in the same ratio to the stick as the one shadow to the other.[^[25]] But, as I observed, you were charged with being a king-hater, and |B| certain outrageous expressions of yours concerning despots were reported to him. For example, when asked by the Ionian Molpagoras what was the strangest sight you had seen, you answered, “An aged despot.” Again, at a drinking-party, when the talk fell upon animals, you stated that among wild animals the worst was the despot, and among tame animals the sycophant. However much a king may claim to differ from a despot, he does not welcome language of that kind.’ ‘Nay,’ said Thales, ‘the former remark belongs to Pittacus, who once made it in a playful attack on Myrsilus. My own observation |C| was that I should regard as a strange sight, not an aged despot, but an aged navigator. None the less, my feelings at the altered version are those of the young fellow who, after throwing at the dog and hitting his step-mother, remarked, “Not so bad, after all.” Yes, I regarded Solon as very wise in refusing to act the despot. Our Pittacus also, if he had kept clear of monarchy, would not have said that “it is hard to be good”. As for Periander, his despotism may be regarded as an inherited disease, from which he is making a creditable recovery, inasmuch as up to the present he keeps wholesome company, cultivates the society of sensible men, and will have nothing to say to that “cutting down of the tall poppies” suggested by my fellow-countryman |D| Thrasybulus. A despot who desires to rule over slaves rather than men is no better than a farmer who is ready to reap a harvest of darnel and cammock in preference to wheat and barley. Among the many undesirable features of despotic rule, the one desirable element is the honour and glory, in a case where the subjects are good but the ruler is better, and where they are great but he is regarded as greater. If he is satisfied with safety without honour, his right course would be to rule over a herd of sheep, horses, or oxen, not over human beings. However, |E| your visitor here has launched us upon an inopportune topic. We are walking to a dinner, and he should have remembered to moot questions suited to the occasion. For you will doubtless admit that there is a certain preparation necessary for the guest as well as for the host. The people of Sybaris, I understand, send their invitations to the women a year in advance, so that they may have plenty of time to prepare their dress and their jewelry before coming to dinner. In my own opinion one who is to play the diner in the proper way requires still more time for real and true preparation, inasmuch as it is harder to arrive at the appropriate adornment of character than at the useless and superfluous adornment of the person. When a man of sense comes to |F| dinner, he does not bring himself to be filled like a vessel, but to contribute something either serious or sportive. He is to listen or talk about such matters as the occasion asks of the company, if they are to find pleasure in each other’s society. An inferior dish may be put aside, and if a wine is poor, one may take refuge with the Nymphs.[^[26]] But when your table-companion is an ill-bred bore who gives you a headache, he utterly ruins the enjoyment of any wine or dish or musical entertainment. |148| Nor have you the resource of an emetic for that kind of annoyance, but in some cases the mutual antipathy lasts all your life, an insulting or angry incident at your wine having resulted in a kind of nausea. Chilon was therefore quite right when, on receiving his invitation yesterday, he only accepted after ascertaining the full list of the guests. As he remarked, when people cannot help going to sea or on a campaign, and a shipmate or tentmate proves disagreeable, they are obliged to put up with him; but no sensible man will form one of an indiscriminate wine-party. The mummy which the Egyptians regularly bring in and exhibit at their parties, bidding you |B| remember that you will very soon be like it, may be an unwelcome and unseasonable boon-companion; yet the custom is not without its point. Even if it may not incite you to drink and enjoy yourself, it does incite to mutual liking and regard. “Life,” it urges, “is short in duration; do not make it long by vexations.”’

After talk of this nature on the way we arrived at the house. As we had anointed ourselves, Thales decided not to take a bath, but proceeded to visit and inspect the race-tracks, the wrestling-grounds, and the handsomely decorated park along the shore. Not that he was greatly taken with anything of that kind, but he would not appear to despise or slight Periander’s display |C| of public spirit. The other guests, as soon as each had anointed himself or bathed, were being led by the servants through the cloister into the dining-room. Anacharsis, however, was seated in the cloister, and in front of him stood a girl, who was parting his hair with her hands. Upon her running to meet Thales in the frankest possible manner, he kissed her and said with a laugh, ‘That’s right: make our foreign visitor beautiful, so that he may not frighten us by looking like a savage, when he is really a most civilized person.’ Upon my asking him who the child was, he replied, ‘Don’t you know the wise and far-famed |D| Eumetis? That, by the way, is her father’s name for her, though most people call her Cleobuline, after him.’ ‘I presume,’ said Niloxenus, ‘your compliment refers to the girl’s cleverness in constructing riddles. Some of her puzzles have found their way as far as Egypt.’ ‘Not at all,’ rejoined Thales. ‘Those are merely the dice with which, on occasion, she plays a match for fun in conversation. There is more in her than that: an admirable spirit, a practical intellect, and an amiable character, by which she renders her father’s rule over his fellow country-men more gentle and popular.’ ‘Yes,’ remarked Niloxenus, ‘one |E| can see it by looking at her simplicity and unpretentiousness. But how is it she is attending to Anacharsis so affectionately?’ ‘Because,’ was the answer, ‘he is a man of virtue and learning, and has given her zealous and ungrudging instruction in the Scythian manner of dieting and purging the sick. I should say that at the present moment, while looking after the gentleman so amiably, she is getting some lesson and talking it over.’

As we were just approaching the dining-room, we were met by Alexidemus of Miletus, the natural son of the despot Thrasybulus. |F| He was coming out in a state of excitement and angrily muttering something which conveyed no meaning to us. When he saw Thales he collected himself a little, stopped, and said: ‘Look how we have been insulted by Periander! He would not allow me to take ship home when I was anxious to do so, but begged me to stay for the dinner; and, when I come to it, he assigns me a degrading place at table, and lets Aeolians, islanders, and goodness knows whom, take precedence of Thrasybulus. For since I was commissioned by Thrasybulus, it is evident that, in my person, he means to insult and humiliate |149| him, by treating him as if he were nobody.’ ‘I see,’ said Thales, ‘what you are afraid of. In Egypt they say of the stars, according to their increase or decrease of altitude in the regions they traverse, that they become ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than themselves. You are afraid that in your own case your place at table may mean a similar loss of brightness and eminence, and you propose to show less spirit than the Lacedaemonian, who, upon being put by the director in the last place in a chorus, remarked, “A capital way of making even this place one of honour.” When we take our places,’ continued Thales, ‘we should not ask who have seats above us, but how we are to make ourselves agreeable to our immediate neighbours. As a means of immediately securing a beginning of friendly feeling on their part, we should cultivate, |B| or rather bring with us, instead of irritation, a tone of satisfaction at being placed in such good company. The man who is annoyed with his place at table is more annoyed with his next neighbour than with his host, and he earns the dislike of both.’ ‘That,’ retorted Alexidemus, ‘is mere talk. In practice I notice that even you sages are greedy for precedence’—and therewith he passed us and went off. Upon our expressing surprise at the man’s peculiar behaviour, Thales said, ‘A crazy person, constitutionally wrong-headed. When he was still a mere lad and a quantity of valuable perfume had been presented to Thrasybulus, he emptied it into a big wine-cooler, poured in some neat wine, and drank it off, thereby bringing ill-odour upon |C| Thrasybulus instead of the contrary.’

At this point an attendant came up and said, ‘Periander requests you to take Thales here along with you and examine an object which has just been brought to him, to see whether it is a mere matter of accident or signifies something portentous. He appears himself to be greatly agitated, regarding it as a pollution, and as a smirch upon the festival.’ Whereupon he proceeded to lead us to one of the apartments off the garden. Here a youth, apparently a herdsman, still beardless and with considerable handsomeness of person, opened a leather wrapper and displayed a baby thing which he told us was the offspring of a mare. The upper parts, as far as the neck and arms, were human, the lower parts equine; its voice when it cried was that |D| of a new-born child. Niloxenus, exclaiming ‘Heaven help us!’ turned away from the sight; but Thales took a prolonged look at the young fellow, and with a smile remarked—in accordance with his regular habit of twitting me in connexion with my profession—‘I suppose, Diocles, you are thinking of setting your purifications to work and giving trouble to the averting powers, in the belief that a great and terrible thing has happened?’ ‘Of course I am, Thales,’ said I, ‘for the token indicates strife and discord, and I am afraid it may affect no less a matter than marriage and its issue. As you see, before we have expiated the original offence, the goddess is giving warning of a second.’ |E| To this Thales made no answer, but began to move off—laughing. Upon Periander coming to the door to meet us, and putting questions as to what we had seen, Thales turned from me, took him by the hand, and said: ‘Anything Diocles bids you do, you will perform at your leisure. My own advice is to be more careful as to your herdsmen.’ On hearing this speech Periander appeared to be greatly delighted, for he burst out laughing and hugged and kissed Thales, who observed: ‘I should say, Diocles, that the sign has found its fulfilment already; for you see what a serious misfortune has befallen us in the |F| refusal of Alexidemus to be present at dinner.’

When we had actually entered the room, Thales, speaking in a louder tone, said: ‘And where was the seat to which the gentleman objected?’ Upon the place being pointed out, he went round and occupied it himself, taking me with him, and remarking: ‘Why, I would have paid something for the |150| privilege of sharing the same table with Ardalus.’ The Ardalus in question was a Troezenian, a flute-player and priest of the Ardalian Muses, whose worship was established by the original Ardalus of Troezen. Thereupon Aesop—who happened to have arrived recently on a simultaneous mission from Croesus to Periander and to the god at Delphi, and was present on a low stool close to where Solon was reclining above—said, ‘A Lydian mule, having caught sight of his reflection in a river and conceived an admiration for the size and beauty of his body, gave a toss of his mane and set out to run like a horse; but after a while, reflecting that he was the son of an ass, he quickly |B| stopped his career and dropped his pride and conceit.’ At this Chilon, speaking in broad Laconian, observed: ‘Ye’re slow yersel, an’ ye’re running the mule’s gait.’

At this point Melissa came in and reclined beside Periander, whereas Eumetis sat at her dinner.

Thales, addressing me—I was on the couch above Bias—said: ‘Diocles, why don’t you inform Bias that our visitor from Naucratis has come to him again with royal problems to solve, so that he may be sober and capable of looking after himself when he receives the communication?’ Bias replied: ‘Nay, our friend here has been trying for a long time to frighten me with that warning. But I am aware that, besides his other capacities, Dionysus is styled Solver[^[27]] in right of wisdom. I feel |C| no fear, therefore, that my being “filled with the god” will cause me to make a less hopeful fight of it.’

While jokes of this kind were passing between these great men over their dinner, I was noticing that the meal was unusually frugal, and I was led to meditate on the fact that to invite and entertain wise and good men means no additional expense, but rather a curtailment of it, since it eliminates fancy dishes, out-of-the-way perfumes and sweetmeats, and lavish decantings of costly wines. Though Periander, being a despot and a person |D| of wealth and power, indulged in such things pretty nearly every day, on this occasion he was trying to impress the company with a show of simplicity and modest expenditure. He put aside and out of sight not only the display usually made in other things, but also that used by his wife, whom he made present herself in modest and inexpensive attire.

The tables were removed; Melissa caused garlands to be distributed; and we poured libations. After the flute-girl had played a short piece to accompany them, and had then withdrawn, Ardalus, addressing Anacharsis, asked if there were any flute-girls among the Scythians. Instantly he replied, ‘No, nor |E| yet vines.’ When Ardalus rejoined: ‘Well, but the Scythians have gods;’ ‘Quite true,’ said he: ‘gods who understand human language. We are not like the Greeks, who imagine they speak better than the Scythians, and yet believe that the gods would rather listen to pieces of bone and wood.’ ‘Ah,’ said Aesop, ‘what if you knew, Sir Visitor, that the present-day flute-makers have given up using the bones of fawns and have taken to those of asses? They maintain that these sound better—a fact which explains Cleobuline’s riddle upon the Phrygian flute: |F|

With a shin that was horned

Did an ass that was dead

Deal a blow on my ear.

It is a wonderful thing that the ass, who is otherwise particularly crass and unmusical, should supply us with a bone particularly fine and melodious.’ ‘Now that,’ said Niloxenus, ‘is precisely the objection which the Busirites bring against us of Naucratis; for asses’ bones for flutes are already in use with us. With them, on the contrary, it is profanation even to listen to a trumpet, because it sounds like the bray of an ass. You know, I presume, that the ass is treated contemptuously by the Egyptians because of Typhon?’

A silence here occurred, and, as Periander perceived that Niloxenus, though eager to enter upon the subject, was shy |151| of doing so, he said: ‘To my mind, gentlemen, it is a commendable practice, whether of community or ruler, to take the business of strangers first and of citizens afterwards. On the present occasion, therefore, I propose that for a short time we suspend any topics of our own, as being local and familiar, and that we treat ourselves as an Assembly and ‘grant an audience’ to those royal communications from Egypt, of which our excellent friend Niloxenus is the bearer to Bias, and which Bias desires that you should join him in considering.’ ‘Yes,’ said Bias: ‘for where, or with whom, could one more readily face the risk—if it must be faced—of answering in a case like this, especially when the king’s instructions are that, though |B| the matter is to begin with me, it is to go the round of you all?’ Niloxenus thereupon offered him the document, but Bias bade him open it himself and read every word to the whole company. The contents of the letter were to the following effect:

Amasis, King of Egypt, to Bias, wisest of the Greeks

The King of Ethiopia is engaged in matching his wits against mine. Hitherto he has had the worst of it, but has finally concocted a terrible poser in the shape of a command that I should ‘drink up the sea’. If I meet it with a solution, I am to have a number of his villages and towns. If not, I am to surrender the cities in the neighbourhood of Elephantine. Do you, therefore, take the matter |C| in hand and send Niloxenus back to me at once. Any return which friends or countrymen of yours require from me will be made without hesitation on my part.

This part of the letter having been read, Bias was not long in answering. After a few moments of meditation and a brief conversation with Cleobulus, who was close to him at table, he said: ‘Do you mean to say, my friend from Naucratis, that Amasis, though reigning over so many subjects and possessed of so large and excellent a country, will be ready to drink up the sea in order to win a few miserable insignificant villages?’ ‘Take it that he will, Bias,’ replied Niloxenus, ‘and consider how it can be done.’ ‘Very well then,’ said he: ‘let him tell |D| the Ethiopian to stop the rivers that run into the ocean, while he is himself drinking up the sea at present existing. The command applies to the sea as it is, not as it is to be later on.’ Bias no sooner made this speech than Niloxenus was so delighted that he rushed to embrace and kiss him. After the rest of the company had cheered and applauded, Chilon said with a laugh, ‘Sir Visitor from Naucratis, before the sea is all drunk up and lost, set sail and tell Amasis not to be asking how to make away with all that brine, but rather how to render his kingship sweet and drinkable for his subjects. Bias is a past master at teaching |E| such a lesson, and, if Amasis learns it, he will have no further occasion for his golden footpan[^[28]] in dealing with the Egyptians. They will all be courting and making much of him for his goodness, even if he is declared to be of a thousand times lower birth than he actually is.’ ‘Yes, and by the way,’ said Periander, ‘it would be a good thing if all—“man after man”, as Homer has it—were to contribute a similar offering to His Majesty. A bonus of the kind thrown in would not only make the returns on his venture more valuable to him, but would also be the best thing in the world for us.’

Chilon thereupon asserted that Solon was the right man to |F| make a beginning on the subject, not only because he was senior to all the rest and was in the place of honour at the table, but because, having legislated for the Athenians, he held the greatest and completest position as a ruler. At this Niloxenus remarked quietly to me, ‘People believe a good deal that is false, Diocles; and they mostly take a delight in inventing for themselves, and in accepting with avidity from others, mischievous stories about wise men. For instance, it was reported |152| to us in Egypt that Chilon had cancelled his friendship and his relations of hospitality with Solon, because Solon declared that laws were alterable.’ At this I answered, ‘The story is ridiculous; for in that case Chilon ought to begin by disclaiming Lycurgus and all his laws, as having altered the whole Lacedaemonian constitution.’

After a brief delay Solon said: ‘In my opinion a king or despot would win most renown by furnishing his fellow-citizens with a popular, in place of a monarchical, government.’ The second to speak was Bias, who said: ‘By identifying his behaviour with the laws of his country.’ Thales came next with the statement that he considered a ruler happy ‘if he died naturally of old age‘. Fourth Anacharsis: ‘If good sense never failed him.’ |*| Fifth Cleobulus: ‘If he trusted none of those about him.’ Sixth Pittacus: ‘If the ruler could get his subjects to fear, not him, but |B| for him.’ Next Chilon said that ‘the ruler’s conceptions should never be mortal, but always immortal‘.

After hearing these dicta, we claimed that Periander himself should express an opinion. With anything but cheerfulness, and pulling a serious face, he replied: ‘Well, the opinion I have to add is that every one of the views stated practically disqualifies a man of sense from being a ruler.’ Whereupon Aesop, as if in a spirit of reproof, said, ‘You ought, of course, to have discussed this subject by yourselves, and not to have delivered an attack upon rulers under pretence of being their advisers and friends.’ |C| ‘Don’t you think,’ said Solon, taking him by the head and smiling, ‘that one can make a ruler more moderate and a despot more reasonable by persuading him that it is better to decline such a position than to hold it?’ ‘And pray who,’ he replied, ‘is likely to follow you in the matter rather than the God, whose opinion is given in the oracle delivered to yourself:

Blessèd the city that hearkens to one commander’s proclaiming.’

‘True,’ said Solon, ‘but, as a matter of fact, the Athenians, though with a popular government, do listen to one proclaimer |D| and ruler in the shape of the law. You have a wonderful gift at understanding ravens and jackdaws, but your hearing of the |*| voice of modesty is indistinct. While you think that a state is best off when it listens, as the God says, to “one”, you believe that the best convivial party is that in which everybody talks on every subject.’ ‘Yes,’ said Aesop, ‘for you have not yet legislated to the effect that “a slave shall not get tipsy” is to stand on the same footing with those Athenian ordinances of yours which say “a slave shall not indulge in love or in dry-rubbing with oil”.’[^[29]] At this Solon broke into a laugh, and Cleodorus the physician remarked: ‘But, in one respect, talking when the wine is taking effect does stand on the same footing with dry-rubbing—it is very pleasant.’ ‘Consequently,’ |E| broke in Chilon, ‘it is the more to be avoided.’ ‘Yes,’ said Aesop again,[^[30]] ‘Thales did appear to recommend getting old as quickly as possible.’ Periander laughed, and said: ‘Aesop, we have been properly punished for dropping into other questions before bringing forward the whole of those from Amasis, as we proposed. Pray look at the rest of the letter, Niloxenus, and take advantage of the gentlemen being all here together.’ ‘As for that,’ replied Niloxenus, ‘whereas the command sent by the Ethiopian can only be called a “doleful |F| dispatch”—as Archilochus would say—your friend Amasis has shown a fine and more civilized taste in setting such problems. He bade him name the oldest thing, the most beautiful, the greatest, the wisest, the most universal, and—not stopping there—the most beneficent, the most harmful, the most powerful, and the easiest.’ ‘Well, and did his answers give the solution in each case?’ ‘His replies were these,’ said Niloxenus. ‘It is |153| for you to listen and judge; for the king is very anxious neither to be guilty of pettifogging with the answers, nor to let any slip on the part of the answerer escape without refutation. I will read you the replies as given. What is the oldest thing?—Time. What the greatest?—The universe. What the wisest?—Truth. What the most beautiful?—Light. What the most universal?—Death. What the most beneficent?—God. What the most harmful?—Evil genius. What the strongest?—Fortune. What the easiest?—That which is pleasant.’

Well, Nicarchus, after the reading of this second passage there was a silence. Then Thales asked Niloxenus if Amasis was satisfied with the solutions. Upon his replying that he had |B| accepted some, but was dissatisfied with others, Thales said, ‘And yet not one of them is unassailable. There are great blunders and signs of ignorance all through. For instance, how can Time be the oldest thing, seeing that, while some of it is past and some present, some of it is future? Time which is to come after us must be regarded as younger than the events and persons of the present. Again, to call Truth wisdom appears to me as bad as making out that the light is the eye. Next, if he considered Light beautiful—as indeed it is—how came he to ignore the sun? As for the rest, the answer concerning gods and evil spirits is bold and dangerous, while in that |C| concerning Fortune the logic is exceedingly bad. Fortune would not be so readily upset if it was the strongest and most powerful thing in existence. Nor yet again is Death the most universal thing, for in the case of the living it has no existence. However, to avoid seeming merely to criticize the work of others, let us express views of our own and compare them with his. I am ready to be the first to be questioned point by point, if Niloxenus so desires.’

In relating the questions and answers I will put them exactly as they occurred. What is the oldest thing? ‘God,’ said Thales: ‘for He is without birth.’ What is greatest? ‘Space: for |D| while the universe contains everything else, it is space that contains the universe.’ What is most beautiful? ‘The cosmos: for everything duly ordered is part of it.’ What is wisest? ‘Time: for it is Time that has either discovered things or will discover them.’ What most universal? ‘Expectation: for those who have nothing else have that.’ What most beneficent? ‘Virtue: for it makes other things beneficent by using them rightly.’ What most harmful? ‘Vice: for most things suffer from its presence.’ What most powerful? ‘Necessity: for it is invincible.’ What most easy? ‘The natural; not pleasure, for people often fail to cope with that.’

The whole company being satisfied with Thales and his |E| acumen, Cleodorus observed: ‘It is questions and answers of this kind, Niloxenus, that are proper for kings. On the other hand, the barbarian who gave Amasis the sea to drink, required the short answer made by Pittacus to Alyattes, when he wrote the Lesbians a letter containing an arrogant command. The reply was merely a recommendation to eat onions and hot bread.’[^[31]]

Here Periander joined in; ‘I may remind you, Cleodorus, that even in old times the Greeks had a habit of posing each |F| other with similar difficulties. We are told, for instance, that there was a gathering at Chalcis of the most distinguished poets among the wise men of the day, in order to celebrate the funeral of Amphidamas—a great warrior who had given much trouble to the Eretrians and had fallen in the fighting for Lelantum. The verses composed by the poets were so well matched, that it became a difficult and troublesome matter to judge between them, and the reputation of the competitors—Homer and Hesiod—caused the jury much diffidence and |154| embarrassment. Thereupon they had recourse to questions of the present kind, and Homer—as Lesches tells us—propounded the following:

Tell me, Muse, of such things as neither before have befallen,

Nor shall hereafter befall?

To which Hesiod instantly replied:

When in eager pursuit of the prize the chariots, one ’gainst the other

Are dashed by the ringing-hoof’d steeds round the tomb where Zeus lieth buried.

This answer, it is said, won particular admiration and secured him the tripod.’

‘But pray what is the difference,’ asked Cleodorus, ‘between such questions and Eumetis’s riddles? It is no doubt right |B| enough for her to set women such puzzles by way of amusement, constructing them as other women plait their bits of girdles or hair-nets. But for sensible men to treat them with any seriousness is absurd.’ Eumetis would apparently have liked to make some retort, but she was too shy, and checked herself, her face mantled with blushes. ‘Nay,’ said Aesop, by way of championing her, ‘it is surely more absurd to be unable to solve them. Take for example the one she set us just before dinner:

I saw a man glue bronze on a man; with fire did he glue it.

Can you tell me what that means?’ ‘No, and I don’t want |C| to be told either,’ answered Cleodorus. ‘And yet,’ said Aesop, ‘no one is so familiar with the thing, or does it so well, as you. If you deny it, cupping-glasses[^[32]] will bear me out.’ At this Cleodorus laughed, for he made more use of cupping-glasses than any medical man of the day, and the estimation in which that remedy is held is especially due to him. ‘I beg to ask, Periander,’ said Mnesiphilus the Athenian, a close friend and admirer of Solon, ‘that the conversation, like the wine, shall not be limited to wealth or rank, but shall be put on a democratic footing and made to concern all alike. In what has just been |D| said about wealth and kingship there is nothing for us commoners. We think, therefore, that you should take a government with equal rights, and each of you again contribute some opinion, beginning once more with Solon.’ It was decided that this should be done. First came Solon. ‘Well, Mnesiphilus, you, like every other Athenian, have heard what opinion I hold about such a government. But if you desire to hear it again now, it seems to me that a community is in the soundest condition, and its popular government most securely maintained, when the wrongdoer is accused and punished quite as much by those who |E| have not been wronged as by the man that has.’ The second to speak was Bias, who said that the best popular government is ‘that in which every one fears the law as he would a despot.’ Next came Thales with ‘that in which there are no citizens either too rich or too poor.’ Anacharsis followed with ‘that in which, while everything else is treated as equal, superiority is determined by virtue and inferiority by vice.’ In the fifth place Cleobulus affirmed that a democracy is most soundly conducted ‘when its public men are more afraid of blame than of the law‘. Sixth, Pittacus: ‘Where the bad are not permitted to hold office and the |F| good are not permitted to decline it.’ Last of all Chilon expressed the view that the best free government is ‘that which pays least attention to the orators and most to the laws.’ Periander once more summed up at the end by saying that they all appeared to him to be praising ‘that democratic government which most resembled an aristocratic.’

Upon the conclusion of this second discussion I begged that they would also tell us the proper way to deal with a household; ‘for while there are few who are at the helm of a kingdom or a commonwealth, we all play our parts in the hearth and home.’ |155| At this Aesop said with a laugh: ‘No! not if in “all” you include Anacharsis. He has no home, but actually prides himself on being homeless, and on using a wagon—in the same way as they tell us the sun roams about in a chariot, occupying first one and then another region of the sky.’ ‘Yes,’ retorted Anacharsis, ‘and that is why, unlike any other—or more than any other—god, he is free and independent, ruling all and ruled by none, but always playing the king and holding the reins. You, however, fail to realize the surpassing beauty and marvellous |B| size of his car, otherwise you would not have tried to raise a laugh by jocosely comparing it with ours. It seems to me, Aesop, that to you a home means those coverings of yours made by clay and wood and tiles. You might as well regard a “snail” as meaning the shell instead of the animal. It is therefore natural that you should find cause to laugh at Solon, when he beheld all the costly splendour in the house of Croesus and yet refused to declare off-hand that its possessor was happy and blessed in his home; “for”—he argued—“I am more desirous of looking at the fine things in the man than at those in his house.” It appears, moreover, that you have forgotten your own fox. That animal, when she and the leopard were engaged in a dispute as to which was the more “cunningly marked”, begged the judge to examine her on the inside, inasmuch as she would be found to possess more “marks of cunning” from that point of view. But you go inspecting the productions of carpenters |C| and stone-masons, and regarding those as the “home”, instead of the inward and domestic constituents in the case—the children, wife, friends, and servants. If these have good sense and good morals, a man who shares his best means with them possesses a good and happy home, even if it be but an ant-hill or a bird’s-nest.’ ‘That,’ he continued, ‘is my answer to Aesop and my contribution to Diocles. But it is only fair that each of the others should express his own views.’

Thereupon Solon said that in his opinion the best household was ‘that in which the resources are acquired without dishonesty, |D| watched over without distrust, and expended without repentance‘. According to Bias it was ‘that inside which the master behaves for his own sake as well as he does outside for the law’s sake‘. According to Thales, ‘that in which the master can find most time to himself‘. According to Cleobulus, ‘where the master has more who love than fear him.’ Pittacus would have it that the best house is ‘that which wants no luxury and lacks no necessity‘. Chilon’s view was that the house should be ‘as like as possible to a state ruled by a king‘, and he went on to observe that when some one urged Lycurgus to establish a republic at Sparta, he |E| answered: ‘You begin by creating a republic at home.’

This topic also having been dealt with, Eumetis left the room in company with Melissa. Periander then pledged Chilon in a capacious goblet, and Chilon in turn pledged Bias. At this Ardalus got up, and, addressing Aesop, said: ‘Perhaps you will be good enough to pass yonder cup on to us, seeing that these gentlemen are passing theirs to each other, as if it were a Bathycles’s goblet,[^[33]] and are giving no one else a turn.’ ‘Nay,’ |F| replied Aesop, ‘there is to be nothing democratic about this cup either, for Solon has been keeping it all to himself for quite an age.’ Thereupon Pittacus, addressing Mnesiphilus, asked why Solon, by not drinking, was testifying against the verses in which he had written

Now do I welcome the tasks of the Cyprus-born goddess and Bacchus,

And tasks of the Muses that bring cheer to the heart of mankind.

‘Because,’ said Anacharsis, before Mnesiphilus could speak, ‘he is frightened at that cruel law of your own, Pittacus, where the words run, If any one commit any offence when drunk, the penalty to be double that paid by a man who was sober.’ ‘And you,’ retorted Pittacus, ‘showed such wanton contempt of the law that last year, when you had got intoxicated at that |156| party at Delphi, you asked for a prize and a victor’s wreath.’ ‘And why not?’ asked Anacharsis. ‘A prize was offered to him who drank most, and, since I was the first to get tipsy, I, of course, claimed the reward of victory. Otherwise will you gentlemen tell me what is the end and aim of drinking a large quantity of unmixed wine, if it is not to get intoxicated?’ Pittacus laughed, while Aesop told the following story. ‘A wolf, having seen some shepherds eating a sheep in a tent, came close up to them, and said: “What a to-do you would have made if I had been doing that!”’ At this Chilon remarked, ‘Aesop has properly taken his revenge. A moment ago we put the muzzle on him, and now he sees that others have taken the words out of Mnesiphilus’ mouth. It was Mnesiphilus who was requested to answer on behalf of Solon.’ ‘Well, in doing so,’ said Mnesiphilus, ‘I speak with knowledge. In Solon’s opinion |B| the concern of every art and faculty of man or God is with results rather than with agencies, the end rather than the means. A weaver, I take it, would consider his object to be a cloak or mantle rather than the arrangement of his shuttle-rods or the picking-up of his straightening-stones. To a blacksmith it is rather the welding of iron and putting an edge on an axe than any of the processes necessary thereto, such as the kindling of his charcoal or the preparation of lime. Still more would a master-builder object if, instead of a ship or a house, we declared his object to be the boring of wood or the mixing of mortar. The Muses would utterly scout the notion that their |C| concern is with a harp or flute, instead of with the cultivation of character and the soothing of the emotions of their votaries by means of melodies properly attuned. So—to come to the point—the object of Aphrodite is not sexual intercourse, nor that of Dionysus wine and tipsiness, but the friendly feeling, the longing, the companionship, and the close mutual understanding which they produce in us by those agencies. These are what Solon calls divine “tasks”, and he means that these are the objects which he appreciates and cultivates in his old age. Of reciprocal affection between men and women Aphrodite is the creator, using pleasure as the means of melting and commingling their souls at the same time with their bodies; while in ordinary cases, where persons are not very intimate or particularly acquainted, Dionysus uses wine as a kind of fire to soften and supple their dispositions, and so provides a starting-point towards a blending in mutual friendship.

‘But when such men meet together as Periander has invited in your persons, there is no need, I take it, of the goblet and the wine-ladle. The Muses set before you all, in the form of conversation, a mixing-bowl containing no intoxicant and yet abundance of pleasure, grave or gay. In this they stir friendly feeling, blend it, and pour it forth, while for the most part the |E| ladle is allowed to lie undisturbed “above the bowl”—a thing which Hesiod forbids where the company is better qualified for drinking than for conversation.’

‘As for pledging one another,’ he continued, ‘I gather that with the ancients the ceremony consisted of one large goblet going the round, each man drinking a measured “allowance” (as Homer tells us), and then letting his neighbour take his share, as he would do with a sacrificial portion.’

When Mnesiphilus had finished, the poet Chersias—who had ceased to be under censure and had lately been reconciled to |F| Periander through Chilon’s intercession—remarked, ‘Are we also to understand that, when the gods were the guests of Zeus and were pledging each other, he poured in their drink by measure, as Agamemnon did for his chieftains?’ ‘And pray, Chersias,’ said Cleodorus, ‘if Zeus has his ambrosia brought—as you poets say he does—by doves which find the greatest difficulty in flying over the Clashing Rocks, don’t you think |157| that his nectar is also scarce and hard to get, and that consequently he is sparing of it and doles it out economically?’ ‘Perhaps so,’ replied Chersias. ‘Since, however, the question of household economy has again been mooted, perhaps some one will deal with the remainder of the question. And that, I take it, is to discover what amount of property will be sufficient to meet all needs.’ ‘To the wise man,’ said Cleobulus, ‘the law has supplied the standard; but in reference to weak characters I will repeat a story which my daughter told her brother. The Moon, she said, asked her mother to weave a tunic to fit her; whereat the mother answered, “How can I possibly |B| weave one to fit? At one time I see you as a full moon, at another as a crescent, and at another gibbous.” Similarly, my dear Chersias, there is no way of determining the amount of means requisite for a weak and foolish person. His wants vary with his appetites and experiences, his case being that of Aesop’s dog, of whom our friend says that in winter he huddled and curled himself up with the cold, and contemplated making a house; but in summer it was different; he stretched himself out when he slept, thought himself a big fellow, and decided that it was both a laborious and an unnecessary task to build so large a house to cover him. Don’t you observe, Chersias’—he went on—‘that even insignificant people, though they will at one moment draw themselves into a very modest compass, with the idea of living a close and simple Spartan life, at another |C| time will fancy they are going to die of want unless they have all the money in the world—all the king’s and all the private people’s?’

Chersias having nothing to say, Cleodorus joined in. ‘Well, but,’ he said, ‘I perceive that there is no equal distribution in the properties which even you sages respectively possess.’ ‘Yes, my dear sir,’ said Cleobulus, ‘because the law, like a weaver, allots us the amount which properly and reasonably fits each case. In your own profession, substituting reason for law, you feed |D| and diet and physic the sick by prescribing, not the same quantity for everybody, but the proper quantity for each case.’ Here Ardalus interposed. ‘I suppose, then,’ he asked, ‘it is at the bidding of some law that Epimenides—the friend of you gentlemen and the guest of Solon—abstains from other kinds of food and passes the day without breakfast or dinner by merely putting in his mouth a little of that “anti-hunger essence” which he makes up for himself?’ This remark having arrested the attention of the party, Thales mockingly observed that Epimenides was a sensible man for refusing to be troubled—as |E| Pittacus was—with grinding and cooking his own food. ‘You must know,’ he said, ‘that when I was at Eresus, I heard my hostess singing to the mill:

Grind, mill, grind;

For Pittacus is grinding,

As he kings it over great Mytilene.’

Then Solon expressed his surprise that Ardalus had not read the law ordaining the diet in question, seeing that it was written in the verses of Hesiod. ‘For it is he who first supplied Epimenides with hints for that form of nourishment, by teaching him to make trial |F|

How great and sustaining the food that in mallow and asphodel lieth.

‘Nay,’ said Periander, ‘do you imagine Hesiod conceived of anything of the kind? Don’t you suppose that, with his habitual praise of economy, he is merely urging us to try the most frugal dishes as being the most agreeable? The mallow makes good eating, and asphodel-stalk is sweet; but I am told that anti-hunger and anti-thirst drugs—for they are drugs rather than foods—include among their ingredients some sort of foreign honey and cheese, and a large number of seeds which are difficult to procure. Most certainly, therefore, Hesiod would find that the “rudder” hung “above the smoke” and

The works of the drudging mules and the oxen’s labour would perish,

|158| if all that provision is to be made. I am surprised, Solon, if your guest, on recently making his great purification of Delos, failed to note how they present to the temple—as commemorative samples of the earliest form of food—mallow and asphodel-stalk along with other cheap and self-grown produce. The natural reason for which Hesiod also recommends them to us is that they are simple and frugal.’ ‘Not only so,’ remarked Anacharsis, ‘but both vegetables bear the highest possible character for wholesomeness.’ ‘You are quite right,’ said Cleodorus. ‘That Hesiod possessed medical knowledge is manifest from the careful and well-informed manner in which he speaks about diet, the mixing of wine, good quality in water, |B| bathing, women, and the way to seat infants. But it seems to me that there is more reason for Aesop to declare himself a pupil of Hesiod than there is for Epimenides. It is to the speech of the hawk to the nightingale that our friend owes the first promptings to his admirably subtle wisdom in many tongues. But for my part I should be glad to hear what Solon has to say. We may assume that, in his long association with Epimenides at Athens, he asked him what motive or subtle purpose he had in adopting such a diet.’

‘What need was there to ask him that question?’ replied Solon. ‘It was self-evident that the next best thing to the |C| supreme and greatest good is to require the least possible food. You allow, I suppose, that the greatest good is to require no food at all?’ ‘Not I, by any means,’ answered Cleodorus, ‘if I am to say what I think, especially with a table in front of us. Take away food, and you take away the table—that is to say, the altar of the Gods of Friendship and Hospitality. As Thales tells us that, if you do away with the earth, the whole cosmos will fall into confusion, so the abolition of food means the dissolution of house and home. For with it you do away with the hearth-fire, the hearth, the wine-bowl, all entertainment and hospitality—the most humanizing and essential elements in our mutual relations. Or rather you do away with the whole of life, if life is “a passing of the time on the part |D| of a human being involving a series of actions”, most of those actions being evoked by the need, and in the acquirement, of food. Of immense importance, my good friend, is the question |*| of mere agriculture. Let agriculture perish, and the earth that it leaves us becomes unsightly and foul, a corrupt wilderness of barren forest and vagabond streams. The ruin of agriculture means the ruin of all arts and crafts as well; for she takes the lead of them, and provides them with their basis and their |E| material. Do away with her, and they count for nothing. There is an end also to our honouring the gods. Men will thank the Sun but little, and the Moon still less, for mere light and warmth. Where will you find altar or sacrifice to Zeus of the Rain, Demeter of the Plough, or Poseidon the Fosterer of Plants? How can Dionysus be Boon-Giver, if we need nothing that he gives? What sacrifice or libation shall we make? What offering of firstfruits? All this means the overthrow and confounding of our most important interests. Though to cling to every pleasure in every case is to be a madman, to avoid every pleasure in every case is to be a block. By all means let the soul have |F| other pleasures of a superior kind to enjoy; the body can find no pleasure more right and proper than that derived from taking food. All the world recognizes the fact, for this pleasure people take openly, sharing with each other in the table and the banquet, whereas their amorous pleasure is screened by night and all the darkness possible. To share that pleasure with others is considered as shameless and brutelike as it is not to share in the case of the table.’

Here, as Cleodorus paused for a moment, I joined in: ‘And is there not another point—that in discarding food we also |159| discard sleep? If there is no sleep, there is no dreaming either, and we lose our most important means of divination. Moreover, life will be all alike, and there will be practically no purpose in wearing a body round our soul. Most of its parts, and the most important, are provided as instruments to feeding—the tongue, teeth, stomach, and liver. None of them is without its work, and none has other business to attend to. Consequently any one who has no need of food has no need of a body either. Which means that a person has no need of himself; for it is thanks to the body that each of us is a “self”.’ ‘Such,’ I added, ‘are our contributions on behalf of the belly. If Solon or any one else has objections to bring, we will listen.’

‘Of course I have objections,’ replied Solon. ‘I have no |B| wish to be thought a poorer judge than the Egyptians. After cutting open a dead body, they take out the entrails and expose them to the sunlight. They then throw those parts into the river and proceed to attend to the rest of the body, which is now regarded as purified. Yes, therein in truth lies the pollution of our flesh. It is its Tartarus—like that in Hades—full of “dreadful streams”, a confused medley of wind and fire and of dead things. For while itself lives, nothing that feeds it can be alive. We commit the wrong of murdering animate things and of destroying plants, which can claim to have life through the fact that they feed and grow. I say destroying, because |C| anything that changes from what nature has made it into something else, is destroyed; it must perish utterly in order to become the other’s sustenance. To abstain from eating flesh, as we are told Orpheus did in ancient times, is more a quibble than an avoidance of crime in the matter of food. The only way of avoiding it, and the only way of attaining to justice by a complete purification, is to become self-sufficing and free of external needs. If God has made it impossible for a thing to secure its own preservation without injury to another, He has also endowed it with the principle of injustice in the shape of its own nature. Would it not, therefore, be a good thing, my dear friend, if, when cutting out injustice, we could cut out the belly, the gullet, and the liver, which impart to us no perception |D| of anything noble and no appetite for it, but partly resemble the utensils for cooking butcher’s meat—such as choppers and stew-pans—and partly the apparatus for a bakery—ovens, water-tanks, and kneading-troughs? Indeed, in the case of most |*| people you can see their soul shut up in their body as if in a baker’s mill, and perpetually going round and round at the business of getting food. Take ourselves, for example. Just now we were neither looking at nor listening to one another, but we all had our heads down, slaving at the business of feeding. But now that the tables have been removed, we have—as you perceive—become free, and with garlands on our heads we are |E| engaged in sociable and leisurely conversation together, because we have arrived at the state of not requiring food. Well then, if the state in which we now find ourselves remains as a permanence all our lives, shall we not be at perpetual leisure to enjoy each other’s society? We shall have no fear of poverty. Nor shall we know the meaning of wealth, since the quest for luxuries is but the immediate consequence and concomitant of the use of necessaries.

‘But, thinks Cleodorus, there must be food so that there may be tables and wine-bowls and sacrifices to Demeter and the Maid. Then let some one else demand that there shall be war and fighting, so that we may have fortifications and arsenals and |F| armouries, and also sacrifices in honour of slaying our hundreds, such as they say are the law in Messenia. Another, I suppose, is aggrieved at the prospect of the healthfulness which would follow. A terrible thing if, because there is no illness, there is no more use in soft bedclothes, and no more sacrificing to Asclepius or the Averting Powers, and if medical skill, with all its drugs and implements, must be put away into inglorious hiding! What is the difference between these arguments and the other? Food is, in fact, “taken” as a “remedy” for hunger, and all who use food are said to be “taking care” of |160| themselves and using some “diet”; and this implies that the act is not a pleasant and agreeable performance, but one which Nature renders compulsory. Certainly one can enumerate more pains than pleasures arising from feeding. Further still; whereas the pleasure affects but a small region of the body, and lasts but a short time, it needs no telling how full we become of ugly and painful experiences through the worry and difficulty of digesting.

Homer had these in view, I suppose, when he used as a proof that the gods do not die the fact that they do not feed:

For they eat not the bread of corn, nor drink they the wine that is ruddy,

And therefore blood have they none in their veins, and are called the Immortals.

Food, he gives us to understand, is the necessary means not only |B| for living, but for dying. From it come our diseases, feeding themselves with the feeding of our bodies, which suffer quite as much from repletion as from want. Very often it is an easier business to get together our supply of victuals than to make away with them and get quit of them again when once they are in the body. Just suppose it were a question with the Danaids what sort of life they would live and what they would do if they could get rid of their menial labour at filling the cask. When we raise the question, “Supposing it possible to cease from heaping into this unconscionable flesh all these things from |C| land and sea, what are we going to do?” it is because in our ignorance of noble things we are content with the life which our necessities impose. Well, as those who have been in slavery, when they are emancipated, do for themselves and on their own account what they used formerly to do in the service of their masters, so is it with the soul. As things are, it feeds the body with continual toil and trouble; but let it get quit of its menial service, and it will presumably feed itself in the enjoyment of freedom, and will live with an eye to itself and the truth, with nothing to distract and deter it.’

This, Nicarchus, concluded the discussion as to food.

While Solon was still speaking, Gorgos, Periander’s brother, entered the room. It happened that, in consequence of certain |D| oracles, he had been sent on a mission to Taenarum in charge of a sacrificial embassy. After we had welcomed him, and Periander had taken him to his arms and kissed him, he sat down by his brother on the couch and gave him a private account of some occurrence which appeared to cause Periander various emotions as he listened to it. At one part he was manifestly vexed, at another indignant; often he showed incredulity, and this was followed by amazement. Finally he laughed and said to us, ‘I should like to tell the company the news; but I have |E| scruples about it, because I heard Thales once say that when a thing is probable we should speak of it, but when it is impossible we should say nothing about it.’ At this Bias interposed, ‘Yes, but here is another wise saying of Thales, that “while we should disbelieve our enemies even in matters believable, we should believe our friends even when the thing is unbelievable”. By enemies I presume he meant the wicked and foolish, and by friends the good and wise.’ ‘Very well then,’ said Periander, ‘you must let every one hear it; or rather you must pit the story you have brought us against those new-fangled dithyrambs and overcrow them.’

Gorgos then told us his story.

His sacrificial ceremony had occupied three days, and on the |F| last there was an all-night festival with dancing and frolic by the sea-shore. The sea was covered with the light of the moon, and, though there was no wind, but a dead calm, there appeared in the distance a ripple coming in past the promontory, accompanied by foam and a very appreciable noise of surge. At this they all ran in astonishment down to the place where it was |*| coming to land. This happened so quickly that, before they could guess what was approaching, dolphins were seen, some of them massed together and moving in a ring, some leading the way to the levellest part of the shore, and others as it were |161| bringing up the rear. In the middle there stood out above the sea, dim and indistinct, the shape of a body being carried. So they came on, until, gathering together and coming to land at the same moment, they put ashore a human being, alive and moving; after which they themselves retired in the direction of the promontory, leaping out of the water more than ever and for some reason, apparently, frolicking and bounding for joy. ‘Many of our number,’ continued Gorgos, ‘fled from the sea in a panic, but a few found the courage to approach along with myself, and discovered that it was Arion, the harp-player. Not only did he utter his own name, but his dress spoke for itself, |B| for he was actually wearing the festal robes which he adopted when performing at the competitions. Well, we brought him to a tent, and, inasmuch as there was nothing the matter with him except that he was evidently tired and overstrained from the rushing motion, we heard him tell a story which no one would believe except us who actually saw the end of it.

‘What Arion told us was this. He had for some time made up his mind to leave Italy, and had been made the more eager to do so by a letter from Periander. Accordingly, when a Corinthian merchant-vessel appeared on the scene, he at once went on board and put to sea. They had a moderate wind for three days, when he perceived that the sailors were forming a plot to make away with him, and was afterwards secretly informed |C| by the pilot that they had resolved to do the deed that night. At this, being helpless and at a loss what to do, he acted upon a kind of heaven-sent impulse. He decided that he would adorn his person and—while still alive—put on his own shroud in the shape of his festal attire. Then, in meeting his death, he would sing a finale to life, and in that respect show no less spirit than the swan does. Accordingly, having dressed himself and given notice that he felt moved to perform the Pythian hymn on behalf of the safety of himself and the ship and crew, |D| he took his stand on the poop by the bulwarks. After some prelude invoking the gods of the sea, he began to sing the piece. Just before he was half-way through, the sun began to set into the sea and the Peloponnese to come into sight. Thereupon the sailors no longer waited for night, but advanced to their murderous deed. Arion, seeing their knives unsheathed and the pilot beginning to cover his face from the sight, ran back and hurled himself as far as possible from the vessel. Before, however, his body had all sunk into the water, a number of dolphins ran under him and bore him up. At first he was filled with bewilderment, distress, and alarm; but when he found himself riding easily, and saw many of them gathering about |E| him in a friendly way, and taking turns at the work as if it were a necessary duty belonging to them all; and when the long distance at which the vessel was left behind showed how great was their speed; he said that what he felt was not so much fear of death or desire of life, as eagerness to be rescued, so that he might become recognized as the object of divine favour, and might have his reputation as a religious man assured.

At the same time, observing that the sky was full of stars, and that the moon was rising bright and clear, while the sea |F| on all sides was waveless and a kind of path was being cut for his course, he was led to reflect that Justice has more eyes than one, and that God looks abroad with all those orbs upon whatever deeds are done by land or sea. By these reflections (he told us) he found relief from the weariness which was by this time beginning to weigh upon his body, and when at last, dexterously avoiding and rounding the lofty and precipitous headland which ran out to meet them, they swam close in by the shore and |162| brought him safely to land like a ship into harbour, he realized beyond doubt that he had been steered on his voyage by the hand of God. ‘When Arion had told us this story,’ continued Gorgos, ‘I asked him where he thought the ship would put in. He answered that it would certainly be at Corinth, but that it was left far behind; for, after throwing himself off it in the evening, he believed he had been carried over sixty miles and a calm had fallen immediately.’ Gorgos added, however, that after ascertaining the names of the captain and pilot, and also the ship’s flag, he had sent out vessels and soldiers to the various landing-places to keep a watch. Moreover, he had Arion with |B| him in hiding, so that they might not hear of his rescue beforehand and make their escape. ‘The event,’ he said, ‘has proved truly miraculous; for no sooner did we arrive here than we learned that the ship had been seized by the soldiers, and the traders and sailors arrested.’

Thereupon Periander ordered Gorgos to get up and go out at once and place the men in custody where no one would approach them or tell them of Arion’s escape.

‘Well now,’ said Aesop, ‘you gentlemen make fun of my jackdaws and crows for talking. Do dolphins behave in this outrageous way?’ To which I replied, ‘A different matter, |C| Aesop! A story to the same effect as this has been believed and written among us for more than a thousand years, ever since the times of Ino and Athamas.’

Solon here interposed: ‘Well, Diodes; let us grant that these events are in the sphere of the divine and beyond us. But what happened to Hesiod is on our own human plane. You have probably heard the story.’ ‘For my part, no,’ I answered. ‘Well, it is worth hearing. Hesiod and a Milesian—I think it was—shared the same room as guests in a house at |D| Locri. The Milesian having been found out in a secret intrigue with the host’s daughter, Hesiod fell under suspicion of having all along known of the offence and helped in concealing it. Though in no way guilty, he fell a victim to cruel circumstance at a critical time of anger and misrepresentation. For the girl’s brothers lay in wait for him at the Nemeum in Locris and killed him, together with his servant, whose name was Troilus. Their bodies having been pushed into the sea, that of Troilus, which was carried out into the current of the river Daphnus, was caught by a low wave-washed rock projecting a little above the water. The rock still bears his name. Meanwhile the |E| dead body of Hesiod was picked up immediately off the shore by a shoal of dolphins, who proceeded to carry it to Rhium, close to Molycrea. It happened that the Locrians were engaged in the Rhian festival and fair, which is still a notable celebration in those parts. At sight of the body being borne towards them they were naturally amazed, and when, on running down to the shore, they recognized the corpse—for it was still fresh—they could think of nothing but tracking out the murder, so high was the renown of Hesiod. Their object was soon achieved. They discovered the murderers, threw them into the sea, and razed their house to the ground. Meanwhile Hesiod was buried near the Nemeum. Most strangers, however, are ignorant of his tomb, which has been concealed because the people of |F| Orchomenus are in quest of it, from a desire, it is said, to recover the remains and bury them in their own country in accordance with an oracle.

‘If, then, dolphins show such affectionate interest in the dead, it is still more natural for them to render help to the living, especially if they have been charmed by the flute or the singing of tunes. For, of course, we are all aware that music is a thing which these animals enjoy and court, swimming and gambolling beside a ship as its oarsmen row to the tune of song and flute in calm weather. They take a delight also in children when |163| swimming, and they have diving matches with them. Hence there is an unwritten law that they shall not be harmed. No one hunts them or injures them; the only exception being that, when they get into the nets and do mischief to the catch, they are punished with a beating, like naughty children. I further remember hearing some Lesbians tell of a girl having been rescued from the sea by a dolphin. I am not, however, sure as to the exact details, and, since Pittacus knows them, he is the right person to tell us about them.’

Pittacus thereupon assured us that the story had good warrant and was mentioned by many authorities. ‘An oracle was given to the colonizers of Lesbos that, when on the voyage they came across the reef known as Mesogeum, they should then and |B| there throw a bull into the water as an offering to Poseidon, and a live virgin to Amphitrite and the Nereids. There were seven chiefs, all of whom were kings, Echelaus—whom the Pythian oracle had assigned as leader of the colony—making an eighth. Echelaus was still a bachelor. When as many of the seven as had unmarried girls cast lots, the lot fell upon the daughter of Smintheus. Upon getting near the place, they decked her in fine clothes and gold ornaments, and, after offering prayer, were on the point of lowering her into the water. Now it happened that one of the party on the ship—assuredly a gallant young man—was in love with her. His name has been preserved to us as Enalus. This youth, in the passion of the |C| moment, seized by an eager but utterly hopeless desire to succour the girl, darted forward at the right instant and, throwing his arms about her, cast himself along with her into the sea. Now from the first there was spread among the contingent a rumour, lacking certainty, but nevertheless widely believed, that they were safe and had been rescued; and at a later date, it is said, Enalus appeared in Lesbos and told how they had been carried by dolphins through the sea and cast ashore without harm upon the mainland. He had other still more miraculous experiences to tell, which held the crowd spellbound with amazement, but for all of which he gave actual evidence. For when an enormous wave was rushing sheer round |D| the island and people were terrified, he alone ventured to face it. |*| On its retiring, a number of polypi followed him to the temple of Poseidon. From the largest of these he took a stone which it was carrying, and offered it as a dedication. That stone we call Enalus.

‘Speaking generally, the man who knows the difference between impossible and unfamiliar, between unreasonable and unexpected, will be most a man after your own heart, Chilon; he will neither believe nor disbelieve without discrimination, but will carefully observe your own rule of “nothing in excess”.’

Anacharsis next made the remark that, as Thales believed |E| all the greatest and most important components of the universe to contain soul, there was no reason to wonder if the most splendid actions were brought to pass by the will of God. ‘For the body is the instrument of the soul, and soul is the instrument of God. And as, though many of the motions of the body proceed from itself, the most and the finest are produced by the soul, so again is it with the soul. While it performs many actions on its own motion, in other cases it is but lending itself, as the aptest of all instruments, to the use of God, for Him to direct and apply it as He chooses. It would,’ said he, ‘be |F| a very strange thing if, while fire, wind, water, clouds, and rain are God’s instruments, by which He often preserves and nourishes and often kills and destroys, He has never on any occasion at all used animals as His agents. On the contrary, it is natural that, in their dependence upon the divine power, they should lend themselves more responsively to motions from God than does the bow to the Scythian or the lyre and flute to the Greek.’

After this the poet Chersias mentioned, among other cases of persons rescued in hopeless situations, that of Cypselus, Periander’s father. When he was a newborn babe, the men who had been sent to make away with him were turned from their purpose because he smiled at them. When they changed their minds and came back to look for him, he was not to be found, his mother having hidden him in a chest. ‘It is for this reason |164| that Cypselus built the house at Delphi, believing that the god had then stopped him from crying so that he might elude the search.’

At this Pittacus, addressing Periander, observed, ‘I have to thank Chersias, Periander, for mentioning that house; for I have often wanted to ask you the meaning of those frogs which are carved in such large size at the base of the palm-tree. What reference have they to the god or to the dedication?’ Periander having bidden him ask Chersias, who knew the reason and was present when Cypselus consecrated the house, Chersias said with |B| a smile, ‘No: I will give no information until these gentlemen have told me the meaning of their Nothing in excess and Know thyself, and of those words which have kept many people from marrying, made many distrustful, and reduced some to positive dumbness—the words Give a pledge, and Mischief is nigh.’ ‘Why do you need us to tell you that,’ said Pittacus, ‘seeing that you have so long admired the stories in which Aesop practically deals with each of those maxims?’ ‘Nay,’ replied Aesop, ‘he does need it, when he is joking at me. But when he is in earnest, he proves that Homer was their inventor. He says that Hector “knew himself”, inasmuch as, though |C| he attacked the rest,

Ajax, Telamon’s son, he would not fight, but he shunned him,

and that Odysseus recommends “nothing in excess” since he urges Diomede

Nay, prithee, Tydeus’ son; nor praise me much nor reprove me.

As for a pledge, not only is it the general opinion that he is reprobating it as a misguided and futile thing when he says

Sorry, I trow, to take are the pledges that sorry folk offer,

but our friend Chersias here tells us how “Mischief” was hurled from heaven by Zeus because she was present when he was tripped |D| up through pledging his word in connexion with the birth of Heracles.’

Here Solon interposed. ‘Well, Homer was a very wise man, and we should do well to take his advice:

Already the night is here; night bids, and ’tis good to obey her.

Let us therefore pour an offering to the Muses and to Poseidon and Amphitrite, and then—with your permission—break up the party.’

This, Nicarchus, terminated the party on that occasion.

ON OLD MEN IN PUBLIC LIFE

It is well known, Euphanes, that as an admirer of Pindar you |783 B| are fond of quoting his ‘fine and forcible words’:

When struggle is afoot, excuses

Cast a deep cloud on valour.

In connexion with the struggles of public life timidity and weakness can find plenty of excuses, but as a last and most desperate plea they urge ‘advancing years’. This is their pretext par excellence for blunting ambition and putting it out of countenance. They argue that there is a fitting close to a public, as much as to an athletic, career. For these reasons |C| I think it well to take my own ordinary reflections upon ‘old men in public life’ and lay them before yourself. They may prevent either of us from deserting that long companionship which has hitherto followed a common path, and from abandoning that public life which may be regarded as a familiar friend from youth up, in order to adopt another which is unfamiliar, and with which there is no time for us to become thoroughly intimate. I would have us abide by our original principle, and determine that life and the worthy life shall end together. It is not for us to convert the brief remainder into a confession that the bulk of our time has been wastefully applied to no good purpose. |D|

It is not, indeed, true—as some one told Dionysius—that ‘despotism is a fine shroud’. In his case the combination of absolutism with injustice was only made all the more complete a calamity by the fact that it never ceased. It was therefore a shrewd remark of Diogenes, when at a later date he saw Dionysius’ son in a humble private station at Corinth. ‘Dionysius,’ said he, ‘you are far from receiving your deserts. Instead of living a free and fearless life here with us, you ought to have been there, housed in the despot’s palace and made to live in it, like your father, till old age.’ It is different with constitutional and democratic statesmanship. When a man has learned to show himself a profitable subject as well as a profitable ruler, he |E| does indeed obtain at death a ‘fine shroud’, in the shape of the good name earned by his life. For this—to quote Simonides—

Is the last thing to sink beneath the ground,

except in cases where high human interests and noble zeal are earlier to fail and die than natural desires.

Are the active and divine elements of our being more evanescent than the passionate and corporeal? That were an unworthy view to hold; as unworthy as to accept the doctrine that the |F| only thing of which we never weary is making gain. On the contrary, we should improve upon Thucydides, and regard as ‘the only thing that never ages’ not ‘the love of honour‘, but that public spirit and activity which even ants and bees maintain till the end. No one has ever seen old age convert a bee into a drone. Yet there are some who claim that public men who have passed their prime should sit and be fed in seclusion at home, allowing their practical abilities to rust away in idleness. |784| Cato used to say that, to the many plagues of its own from which old age suffers, there is no justification for deliberately adding the disgrace of vice. There are many vices, but none can do more than weak and cowardly inactivity to disgrace a man in years—a man who skulks away from the public offices to look after a houseful of women, or to supervise gleaners and reapers in the country.

Where now

Is Oedipus? Where the famed riddles now?

It is one thing to wait till old age before commencing public life, and to be like Epimenides, who—so they say—fell asleep a youth and fifty years afterwards awoke an old man. If, in |B| such a case, one were to divest himself of that quiet habit which has lasted all his life, and were to plunge into struggles and worries with which he was unfamiliar, and for which he was not trained by intercourse with public affairs or with mankind, there would be room for remonstrance. We might say, as the Pythian priestess said, ‘You come too late’ in your quest of office and leadership. You are past the time for knocking at the door of the Presidency. You are like some blundering reveller whose surprise visit is not made till night; or like some stranger who is in quest, not of a new district or country, but of a new life, about which you know nothing. If Simonides says

The State is a man’s teacher,

it is true only of those who have the time to change their teacher and learn a new lesson—a lesson slowly and laboriously acquired by means of many a struggle and experience, and only when it |C| can take its hold sufficiently early on a natural genius for bearing toils and troubles with equanimity.

To resume. We find that, on the contrary, it is striplings and youths whom sensible men do their best to keep out of public business. Witness our laws, under which the crier in the Assembly, when inviting speech and advice, calls upon the platform in the first instance not an Alcibiades or a Pytheas, but persons over fifty. Foolish audacity and lack of experience |D| are nowhere so out of place as in a deliberator or a judge.[^[34]] Cato, when past eighty and on his defence, said it was hard to have to defend himself before one set of people after having lived with another. It is agreed on all hands that the measures of Caesar—the conqueror of Antony—became considerably more regal and good for the public towards the end of his life. Once, when by stern application of custom and law he was correcting the rising generation, and they made an outcry, his own words were: ‘Young men, listen to an old man to whom old men listened |E| when he was young.’ It was in old age, too, that the statesmanship of Pericles reached its greatest influence. This was the time when he induced the Athenians to enter upon the war, and when he successfully opposed their ill-timed eagerness to fight a battle against sixty thousand men-at-arms, by all but sealing up the public armouries and the locks of the gates. As for what Xenophon writes of Agesilaus, it is best to quote verbatim. ‘Is there any youth with whom this old man did not compare to advantage? Who in the prime of life was so formidable to an enemy as Agesilaus was at the most advanced age? Of whom was the foe so glad to be rid as of Agesilaus, though he was old |F| when his end came? Who inspired such courage in his own side as Agesilaus, although close upon the end of life? What young man was more regretted by his friends than Agesilaus, though he died when full of years?’

Well, if time was no hindrance to the great actions of men like these, what of us, who nowadays enjoy the luxury of a public life which admits of no despots, no fighting, no sieges, but only of warless contests and of ambitions which are for the most part settled by just means according to law and reason? Are we |785| to play the coward? Must we confess that we are the inferiors, not merely of the commanders and popular leaders of those days, but of the poets, leaders of thought, and actors? Take Simonides. He won choric victories in old age, as is evident from the last lines of the epigram:

And withal to Simonides fell the glory and prize of the poet;

Fell to Leoprepes’ son, come to his eightieth year.

Take Sophocles. It is said that, when his sons charged him with being in his dotage, he read in his defence the entrance ode of the Oedipus at Colonus, beginning:

To this land of the steed, O stranger,

To the goodliest homes on earth,

Thou hast come—to the white Colonus,

Fond haunt of the nightingale,

Where her clear voice trills its sorrow

In the green of the leafy dell....

a lyric which won such admiration that he left the court, as it |B| might have been the theatre, amid the applause and cheers of the audience. A little epigram, admitted to be by Sophocles, contains the words:

Five years and fifty Sophocles had seen,

Ere for Herodotus he wrought a song.

Take Philemon, the comic poet, and Alexis. They were still putting plays upon the stage, still winning crowns, when death overtook them. Take Polus, the tragedian. Eratosthenes and Philochorus inform us that, shortly before his end, and when |C| he was seventy, he acted eight tragedies in four days.

Is it, I say, creditable that old men of the platform should show a poorer spirit than old men of the stage? That they should retire from the sacred contests—for ‘sacred’ these veritably are—and give up the rôle of the public man in exchange for goodness knows what other part? From king, say, to farmer is a descent indeed. Demosthenes calls it cruel treatment of the Paralus, to make that sacred warship carry cargoes of timber, vine-stakes, and cattle for Meidias. But suppose a public man abandons the Presidentship of Games, his seat on the Federal Board, his high place in the Sacred League, and is found |D| measuring out barley-meal and olive-cake, or shearing sheep. It cannot but look as if he were needlessly courting the status of ‘old worn-out horse’. As for leaving a public career to engage in vulgar and petty trade, one might as well take some self-respecting lady, strip off her gown, give her an apron, and keep her in a tavern. Turn public ability to mere business and money-making, and its rank and character |E| are lost.

Or if, as a last alternative, people choose to talk of ‘ease and enjoyment’, when they mean luxurious self-indulgence; if they recommend the public man to adopt that process of idle senile decay, I hardly know which of two ugly comparisons will best hit off such a life. Shall I say it is a case of sailors taking ‘Aphrodite-holiday’ and keeping it up for ever, without waiting till their ship is berthed, but deserting it while still on the voyage? Or is it a case of ‘Heracles-chez-Omphale’—as some sorry humourists depict him—wearing a saffron gown and quietly allowing Lydian handmaids to fan him and braid his hair? Are we to treat our public man in that way? To strip off his |F| lion’s-skin, lay him on a couch, and feast him, with lute and flute lulling him all the while? Or should we not take warning by the retort of Pompey the Great to Lucullus? The latter, after his campaigns and public services, had given himself up to baths, dinners, social entertainments in the daytime, profound indolence, and new-fangled notions in the way of house-building. Meanwhile he accused Pompey of a fondness for place and power unsuited to his years. Pompey replied that for an old man effeminacy was more unseasonable than office. When he was |786| ill and the doctor ordered him fieldfares—the bird being then out of season and difficult to procure—and when some one told him that Lucullus had a large number in his preserves, he refused to send for or receive one, exclaiming, ‘What? Pompey could not live but for the luxury of Lucullus?’

It may be true that nature ordinarily seeks pleasure and delight. But, with an old man, the body has become incapable of all pleasures except a few which are essential. Not only is it the case that

The Queen of Love turns weary from the old,

|B| as Euripides has it. Though they may retain the appetite for eating and drinking—generally in a dulled or toothless form—they find a difficulty in whetting the edge or sharpening the teeth even of that. It is in the mind that one must lay up a stock of pleasures, though not of the mean and ignoble kind indicated by Simonides, when he told those who reproached him with avarice that, though age had robbed him of other joys, he had still one left to support his declining years—the joy of money-making. In public activity there are pleasures of the greatest and noblest sort, such as we may believe to be the only, or the chief, enjoyment of the gods themselves—I mean those which result from a beneficent deed or a fine achievement.

Nicias the painter was so taken up with his artistic work that he was often obliged to ask his servants whether he had had his |C| bath or his breakfast. Archimedes stuck so closely to his drawing-board that, in order to anoint him, his attendants had to drag him away and strip him by force. He then went on drawing his diagrams in the ointment on his body. Carus the flutist (an acquaintance of your own) used to say that people did not know how much more pleasure he himself got from playing than he gave to others; otherwise an audience would be paid to listen instead of paying. Can we fail to perceive how great are the pleasures derived from fine actions and public-spirited achievements by those who put high qualities to use? Nor is it by means of those effeminate titillations which soft and agreeable movements exert upon the flesh. The ticklings of the flesh |D| are spasmodic, fickle, intermittent, whereas the pleasures of noble deeds—the creations of the true statesman’s art—will bear the soul aloft in grandeur and pride and joy, as if, I will not say upon the ‘golden wings’ of Euripides, but upon those ‘celestial pinions’ described by Plato.

Remember the instances of which you have so often heard. Epaminondas, when asked what had been his most pleasurable experience, replied, ‘Having been victorious at Leuctra while |E| my father and mother were still alive.’ When Sulla first reached Rome after purging Italy of its civil wars, he could not sleep a wink that night. As he has written in his own Notes and Recollections, so elated was his mind with the greatness of his joy and happiness, that it seemed to walk on air. If we admit, with Xenophon, that ‘no hearing is so agreeable as praise‘, no sight, recollection, or reflection is so fraught with gratification as the contemplation of exploits of our own in the conspicuous public arena of office and statesmanship. Not but what, when |F| a grateful goodwill testifies to our achievements, and when there is a rivalry of commendation productive of well-earned popularity, our merit acquires a gloss and brilliance which adds to our sense of pleasure.

Therefore, instead of permitting our reputation to wither in our old age like an athlete’s crown, we must be constantly adopting new devices and making fresh efforts to enliven the sense of past obligation, to enhance it, and to make it permanent. We must act like the craftsmen who were required to provide for the security of the Delian ship. They used to replace unsound timbers by others, and, by means of insertions and repairs, were regarded as keeping the vessel immortal and indestructible from |787| the oldest times. Reputation is like flame. There is no difficulty in keeping it alive; it merely requires a little feeding with fuel. But let either of them become extinct and cold, and it will take some trouble to rekindle.

Lampis, the shipowner, was once asked how he made his fortune. ‘Making the big one,’ he answered, ‘was easy enough; but it was a long and hard business to make the little one.’ So with political power and reputation. Though not easy to get in the first instance, anything will suffice to maintain and increase them when once they are great. It is as with a friend, when once he becomes such. He does not look for a large number of important services in order to retain his friendship; |B| small tokens, consistently shown, will keep his constant affection. Nor are the confidence and friendship of the people perpetually calling for you to open your purse, to play the champion, or to hold an office. They are retained by mere public spirit—by being in no haste to desert or shirk the burden of care and watchfulness.

Campaigns are not matters of everlastingly facing the enemy, fighting, and besieging. They have also their times of sacrifice, their occasional social gatherings, their periods of ample leisure, when jest and nonsense are toward. And why should one look upon public life with dread, as being laborious, wearisome, and devoid of consolations, seeing that the theatre, processions, awards, ‘dances of the Muses and Gladsomeness,’ and honour |C| after honour to the gods relax the stern brow of the Bureau or the Chamber, and yield a manifold return of inviting entertainment?

In the next place jealousy, the greatest bane of public life, is less severe upon old age. For, to quote Heracleitus, ‘dogs bark at the man they do not know.’ Though jealousy may fight with the beginner at the doors of the platform and refuse him access, no savageness or fierceness is shown to a man of familiar and established reputation, but he finds friendly admittance. For this reason some have compared jealousy to smoke. In the case of beginners, during the process of kindling, it pours forth in clouds; when they are in full blaze, it disappears. And while |D| people resist and dispute other forms of superiority—in merit, birth, or public spirit—through a belief that any acknowledgement to others means so much derogation to themselves, the primacy which is due to time—‘seniority’ in the proper sense—is conceded without a grudge. Respect paid to the aged has the unique quality of doing more honour to the giver than to the recipient.

Moreover it is not every one who expects to attain to the power derived from wealth, eloquence, or wisdom; whereas no public man despairs of winning the esteem and distinction to which age gradually leads.

Imagine a navigator, who has managed his ship safely in the face of contrary winds and waves, and then, when the weather |E| becomes fair and calm, wishes to lay her to. It is just as strange when a man has fought his ship in a long battle with jealousies, and then, after they are quietly laid, backs out of public life, and, in abandoning his activities, abandons his partners and associates. The more time there has been, the more friends and fellow-workers he has made; but he is neither in a position to lead them with him off the stage, as a poet does his chorus, |F| nor has he the right to leave them in the lurch. A long public life is like an old tree. To pull it up is no easy task, because of its many roots and its entanglement with many interests, which involve worse wrenching and disturbance when you leave them than when you stay.

And if political conflict does leave you some remnant of jealousy or antagonism to face when you are old, it is better to quell it by means of your position than to turn your back and retire without armour or weapons of defence. People are not so ready to attack you out of jealousy when you are still in action as they are out of contempt when you give it up.

|788| We may also appeal to the great Epaminondas and his remark to the Thebans. It was winter at the time, and the Arcadians were inviting them to enter the city and live in the houses. This he refused to allow, observing: ‘At the present time they come to look at you and admire your wrestling and military exercises; but if they see you sitting by the fire and chewing your beans, they will regard you as no better than themselves.’ So with an aged man. When making a speech, transacting business, or receiving honours, he is a dignified spectacle; but when he lies all day on a couch or sits in the corner of a public |B| resort talking drivel and wiping his nose, he is an object of contempt. This is precisely what Homer teaches, if you read him rightly. Nestor, who was campaigning at Troy, received high respect and honour; whereas Peleus and Laertes, the stay-at-homes, were despised, and counted for nothing.

Nay, even intellectual power begins to fail those who have let themselves relax. Idleness gradually renders it feeble and flaccid, in the absence of some necessary exercise of thought to keep the logical and practical faculty perpetually alive and in trim.

Like glossy bronze, ’tis use that makes it shine.

Bodily weakness may be a drawback to public activity in the |C| case of those who, in spite of their years, make the platform or the Cabinet their goal. But it is more than compensated by the advantage of their caution and prudence. They do not dash into public affairs with the expression of opinions prompted by error or vanity as the case may be, and carrying the mob with them in as excited a condition as a stormy sea; but they deal in a mild and reasonable fashion with such matters as arise. It is for this reason that, in times of disaster or alarm, communities feel the need of a Board of Government consisting of senior men. Often they have fetched back from the country |D| an old man who neither asked nor wished it, and have compelled him to put his hand to the helm and steer the ship of State into safety, while they thrust aside generals and popular leaders, despite all their ability to shout, to talk without taking breath, and also, no doubt, to make ‘sturdy stand and doughty fight’ against the enemy. When Chares, the son of Theochares—a man in the prime of bodily strength and condition—was brought into the ring in opposition to Timotheus and Iphicrates by the public speakers of Athens, with the claim that ‘this is the kind of general the Athenians should have’, Timotheus |E| replied: ‘By no manner of means. No doubt that is the sort needed to carry the general’s baggage; but the general should be one who “sees before and after”, and whose calculations as to policy no distractions can disturb.’ Sophocles said ‘he was glad that old age had enabled him to escape from sexual passion—a fierce and mad master.’ But in public life we have to escape, not from one master—the love of women—but from many madder still; from contentiousness, vanity, and the desire to be first and greatest—a malady most fertile in envy, jealousy, and |F| feud. Some of these feelings are abated or dulled, some are altogether chilled and quenched, by old age. And though old age may do something to diminish our zest for action, it does more to guard us from the intemperate heat of passion, so that we can bring a sober and steady reason to bear upon our thoughts.

By all means, in dealing with one who begins to play the youth when his hair is grey, let it be—as it is considered—sound warning to say:

Misguided man, stay quiet in thy bed.

|789| Let us remonstrate with an old man when he rises from a long privacy, as from a bed of sickness, and bestirs himself to obtain a command or an official post. But suppose a man has lived a life of public action and thoroughly played the part. To prevent him from going on till ‘finis and the torch’, to call him back and bid him change the road he has long followed, is utterly unfeeling, and bears no resemblance to the case just given. If an old man has his wreath on and is scenting himself in readiness to marry, there is nothing unreasonable in trying to dissuade him by quoting the lines addressed to Philoctetes:

But, pray, where is the bride, where the young maid,

Would welcome thee? Rare bridegroom thou, poor soul!

Nay, they are fond of making jests of the kind at their own |B| expense:

I’m marrying old, and for the neighbours’ good:

I know it.

But when a man has been long married, and has lived with his wife for years without a fault to find, to tell him that he should divorce her because he is old, and that he should live by himself or get a wretched concubine in place of his lawful spouse, is the very extreme of absurdity. In the same way when an aged man seeks to enter politics—Chlidon the farmer, Lampon the ship’s captain, or some philosopher from the Garden[^[35]]—there is some reason in admonishing him, and keeping him to the state of inactivity to which he has been used. But it is urging a public man to act |C| with injustice and ingratitude, when we take hold of a Phocion, a Cato, or a Pericles, and say, ‘Sir Athenian—or Sir Roman—

Thine age is wither’d and thy head o’erfrosted;

therefore sue for a divorce from statesmanship, have done with the worrying business of the platform and the Board of War, and make haste into the country, to live with farming “for a waiting-maid” or to occupy the rest of your days with thrift and the keeping of accounts.’

Well, but (it may be asked) what of the soldier in the comedy with his

Discharged! No pay! because of my white hair?

Quite true, my friend. The War-God’s servants must be in the prime of manly vigour. Their business is with

War and war’s baleful work,

in which, though an old man’s grey hair may be hidden by his |D| helmet,

Yet in secret his thews are aweary,

and, though the spirit be willing, the strength can no longer respond.

But the ministers of Zeus—the God of Council, of Assembly, of the State—are not asked for deeds of hand and foot, but for counsel and foresight. We ask them for advice, not such as to evoke roars of mere noise in the Assembly, but full of sense and shrewdness, and safe to follow. In their case the despised white hair and wrinkles become the visible tokens of experience. They suggest moral force, and are therefore a help to persuasion. |E| It is the part of youth to obey; of old age to guide; and that state is safest where

Best are the old men’s counsels,

And best the young man’s spear.

Homer’s

And first he summon’d to council the old men mighty-hearted

By the side of the ship of Nestor,

is a touch greatly admired. For the same reason the Select Board associated with the kings at Sparta was called by the Pythian oracle ‘elder-born’, but by Lycurgus ‘old men’ sans phrase, while the Roman Council is called Senatus down to the present time. The law crowns a man with the circlet and the wreath, Nature crowns him with grey hair, and both are the venerable emblems of sovereign rank. Moreover, the words |F| geras, ‘prerogative,’ and gerairein, ‘honour with prerogative’—derived from geron, ‘old man’—retain a dignified sense, not because the old man’s bath is warmed and his bed a softer one, but because he amounts to a king in the state by virtue of his wisdom; and wisdom is like a late-fruiting plant, it is only in old age that nature brings out its special excellence and perfect quality.

When the king of kings prayed to the gods

Would that among the Achaeans were ten such as he to advise me!

|790| —meaning Nestor—not one of the ‘valorous’ and ‘prowess-breathing’ Achaeans complained. They all admitted that not only in statesmanship, but in war also, age was of great moment, since

More worth is one sage thought than many a hand,

and one rational and cogent judgement achieves the finest and most important results in public affairs.

Now kingship, the most complete and comprehensive form of public activity, is full of cares, labours, and preoccupations. Seleucus, it was said, used to declare that if ordinary people knew what a business it was merely to write and read so many letters, they would not pick up the crown if they found it |B| lying in the street. And the story goes that, when Philip was proposing to encamp in an excellent position, but was told that there was no fodder for the pack-animals, he exclaimed: ‘Good Heavens! what is our life worth, when we are obliged to suit it to the convenience of our asses?’ Ought we then to give the same advice to a king when he has grown old? Bid him lay aside the crown and the purple, take to a cloak and a crutched stick, and live in the country, for fear people should think it officious and unseasonable of him to be reigning when he is grey?

But we have no right to talk in this way about an Agesilaus, or a Numa, or a Darius. Neither then should we compel a Solon |C| to leave the Council of the Areopagus, nor a Cato the Senate, nor yet urge a Pericles to leave popular government to look after itself. It is contrary to reason that in our youth we should bounce upon the platform, spend upon the public all the passionate licence of our ambition, and then, when age arrives and brings the wisdom of experience, desert and betray our public standing like a woman whom we have used at our pleasure.

In Aesop, when the hedgehog wanted to pick off his ticks, the fox would not let him. ‘These are glutted,’ said he, ‘and |D| if you get rid of them, hungry ones will be at you in their place.’ So with public life. If it is perpetually shedding the old men, it will necessarily be plagued with young ones, who are thirsting for notoriety and power but devoid of political sense. How can they be otherwise, if they are to have no elderly statesman to watch and learn from? A ship’s captain is not made by treatises on navigation. He must often have stood upon the quarter-deck and watched the struggle with wave and wind and stormy nights, when

The sailor on the brine longs sore

For Tyndareus’ twin sons.

And can the handling of a State and the persuading of Assembly |E| or Council be rightly left to a young man because he has read a book or taken down a lecture on statesmanship in the Lyceum? Though he has not taken his stand many a time beside rudder-rope and tiller, leaned first to this side and then to that, while generals and public leaders were pitting their knowledge and experience against each other, and so learned his lesson in the midst of dangers and difficulties? Beyond question, No! For the education and training of the young, if for no other reason, old men should play a public part. A teacher of letters or of music himself reads or plays a passage over first by way of example |F| to his pupils. So the authority on statesmanship must guide a young man, not simply by talking or suggesting from outside, but by the practical administration of public business. It is by deeds as well as by words that he will mould him to the true shape, filled with the breath of life. It is training of this kind—not in the schools where you practise safe forms of wrestling under mannerly professors, but in contests truly Olympian and Pythian—that makes one, as Simonides puts it,

Keep pace, as with the steed the wearied colt;

|791| —Aristeides with Cleisthenes, Cimon with Aristeides, Phocion with Chabrias, Cato with Fabius Maximus, Pompeius with Sulla, Polybius with Philopoemen. It was by attaching themselves when young to older men, by using them as supports to their own growth, by being raised to their standard of statesmanlike achievement, that they acquired the political experience which brought them fame and power.

When certain professors declared that the claim of Aeschines, the Academic philosopher, to have been a pupil of Carneades was contrary to fact, he replied, ‘O yes: I was a disciple of Carneades at the time when age had taken all the fuss and noise |B| out of his teaching and reduced it to practical and serviceable shape.’ With the statesmanship of an old man, however, it is not merely the talking, but the deeds, that lose all ostentation and itch for notoriety. They tell us that, when the iris has grown old and exhausted all crude exuberance of perfume, its fragrance gains in sweetness. So with the views and suggestions of the old. There is no crudeness in them, but always a quality of quiet solidity. For this reason, as I have said, we must have elderly men in public life. Plato speaks of mixing water with neat wine as the bringing of a ‘frenzied god’ to sanity by the |C| ‘chastening of another who is sober’. So when young spirits in the Assembly are a-boil with the intoxication of glory and ambition, we need the old men’s caution to qualify them and to eliminate their mad excess of fire.

There is another consideration. It is an error to suppose that statesmanship is like a voyage or a campaign—carried on for an ulterior object and discontinued when that is attained. Statesmanship is not a public burden, to be borne only so long as needs must. It is the career of a civilized being with a gift for citizenship and society, and with a natural disposition to live a life of public influence, worthy aims, and social helpfulness for as long as occasion calls.

The right course therefore is to be a public man, not to have been one; just as it is right to speak the truth, not to |D| have spoken it; to act honestly, not to have so acted; to love one’s country and fellow-citizens, not to have loved them. Those are Nature’s objects, and where men are not utterly demoralized by idleness and effeminacy, her promptings are such as these:

Thy sire begat thee for rich use to men,

and

Ne’er let us cease from service to mankind.

To urge the plea of ill-health or disablement is to blame disease and injury, not old age. Young men are often sickly, old men often vigorous. It is therefore not the old whom we should discourage, but the incapable. It is the capable whom |E| we should encourage, not the young. Aridaeus was young, and Antigonus old; but while Antigonus annexed nearly the whole of Asia, Aridaeus was like the ‘super’ upon the stage—a king with nothing to say, and a butt for whoever happened to be in power. To demand of the sophist Prodicus or the poet Philetas—who, young though they might be, were thin, sickly, and constantly taking to their beds through ill-health—that they should take up public life, were folly. But it were folly also to hinder old men like Phocion, or Masinissa the African, or the Roman Cato, from holding office or military command. The |F| Athenians being set upon an ill-timed war, Phocion ordered that every man under sixty should take up arms and serve. When this made them angry, he said, ‘There is no hardship. I, who am to be with you in command, am over eighty.’ And of Masinissa Polybius relates that he died when he was ninety, leaving a child of four, of whom he was the father. Shortly before his death he beat the Carthaginians in a great battle, |792| and the next day was seen in front of his tent eating a loaf of cheap coarse bread. To expressions of surprise he answered that he did so to keep himself in training.

For like to goodly bronze, it shines in use,

While a house crumbles, if left idle long,

says Sophocles. We may say the same of that glossy brightness of the mind, to which we owe calculation, memory, and sound judgement.

For the same reason it is said that wars and campaigns make better kings than inactivity. Attalus, the brother of Eumenes, was so thoroughly enervated by long peace and |B| idleness that Philopoemen, one of his intimates, had simply to shepherd him and keep him fat. In fact, the Romans used to inquire of arrivals from Asia, whether ‘the king had any influence with Philopoemen’. It would be hard to find a Roman general more able than Lucullus, so long as he kept his intellect braced with action. But he surrendered himself to a life of inactivity, stayed at home, thought of nothing, and became as lifeless and shrunken as a sponge in a calm. Afterwards, in his old age, he so tamely accepted a certain freedman, Callisthenes, for his keeper, that the man |C| was thought to be bewitching him with spells and drugs, till at last his brother Marcus drove the fellow away and himself took to managing and tutoring him for the short remainder of his life. On the other hand, Darius, the father of Xerxes, used to say that he became his wisest in times of danger; and Ateas the Scythian declared that, when he had nothing to do, he could see nothing to distinguish him from his grooms. When some one asked the elder Dionysius if he had time to spare, he replied: ‘Heaven forbid I ever should!’ Whereas a bow, they tell us, is broken by stringing it tight, a mind is broken by leaving it loose. If a musician gives up listening |D| for pitch, a geometrician the solving of problems, an arithmetician the constant habit of calculation, old age will enfeeble the ability along with the loss of its exercise, although the art in these cases is not a ‘practic’ one, but a ‘theoretic’. In the case of the special ability of the statesman—his caution, wisdom, and justice, together with an experienced knack of hitting the right language at the right time; that is to say, a faculty for creating persuasion—it is kept in good condition by constant speech, action, calculation, and judicial decision. It would be a dire mistake for it to abandon such activities |E| and permit all those important virtues to leak away from the mind. For it naturally means a decline of kindly interest in man and society—a thing which should be without limit or end.

Suppose your father had been Tithonus. Suppose, though he was immortal, old age had made him require close and constant care. You would not, I imagine, have run away and repudiated the task of tending him, talking to him, and helping him, just because you had ‘borne the burden for a long time’. Well, your fatherland—or ‘motherland’ as it is called in Crete—has claims prior to those of parents, and greater. Your country’s life has been a long one, but she is not without old age. She is |F| not sufficient to herself, but is in perpetual need of watchful and considerate help. She therefore grasps at the statesman and holds him back:

Clutching his garment she stays him, though eager he be for departure.

You are aware that I have performed my public duty at many a Pythian festival. But you would not say ‘Plutarch, you have done enough in the way of sacrifices, processions, and choruses. You are now in years; it is time to put off your wreath; age entitles you to leave the shrine alone’. Well, look at your own duty in the same way. In the sacred service of the State you are coryphaeus and prophet, and it is not for you to abandon that worship of Zeus, God of State and Assembly, in which you have been so long initiated and are so thoroughly versed.

|793| Permit me now to leave the arguments for quitting public life, and to examine another point. We must beware of inflicting upon our old age an unbecoming or exacting task, when so many portions of public work are so well suited to that time of life. If it had been proper for us to go on singing all our days, there are at our disposal many keys and modes, or, as the musicians call them, ‘systems.’ Our right course in our old age would have been to cultivate, not a mode both high and sharp, but one combining ease with appropriate character. And since Nature prompts mankind to act and speak—even more |B| than it prompts the swan to sing—until the end, our duty is not to lay action aside, like a lyre of too high a pitch, but to lower the key and adapt it to such forms of public effort as are light, unexacting, and within an old man’s compass. We do not leave our bodies entirely without muscular exercise because we cannot use the spade and the jumping-weights, or hurl the discus, or practise fencing, as we used to do. We swing or walk, and in some cases the breathing is exercised and warmth stimulated by playing a gentle game of ball, or by conversation.

On the one hand, then, do not let us allow ourselves to become |C| stiff and torpid from inactivity. On the other, let us not undertake any and every official position, clutch at any and every kind of public work, and bring such an exposure upon old age that it is driven to exclaim in despair:

Right hand, how fain art thou to grasp the spear!

How vain thy longing, in thy strengthlessness!

Even in the prime of strength a man wins no credit if he tries to take on his shoulders the whole pack of public business, and |D| refuses—like Zeus, according to the Stoics—to leave anything to others; if he insinuates himself everywhere and has his finger in everything, through an insatiable greed for notoriety or through jealousy of any one who contrives to get a share of honour and power in the community. But when a man is quite old, then, apart from the discredit, wretchedly hard work is entailed by that itch for office which is always courting every ballot-box, that meddlesomeness which lies in wait for every opportunity of acting on a jury or a committee, that ambition which snaps up every appointment as delegate or proctor. |E| Such work is a heavy tax on an old man, even when people are well-disposed. But the opposite may very well be the case. For young men hate him because he leaves them no opportunities and prevents them from coming to the front; while the rest of the community looks upon his itch for office and precedence with the same disapproval as upon the itch of other old men for money and pleasure.

When Bucephalus was growing old, Alexander, being unwilling to overwork him, used to ride some other horse while reviewing the phalanx and getting it into position before the |F| battle. Then, after giving the word for the day, he changed his mount to Bucephalus, and at once led the charge and tried the fortunes of war. In the same way a sensible public man—in this case handling his own reins—will, when in years, hold aloof from unnecessary effort, leaving more vigorous persons to deal with the minor matters of state, but himself playing a zealous part in great ones.

Athletes keep their bodies from all contact with necessary labours and in perfect trim for useless ones. We, on the contrary, will leave petty little details alone, and will keep ourselves in reserve for matters of moment. No doubt, as Homer says,

To the young all labours are seemly,

and the world gives consent and approval, calling them ‘public-spirited’ and ‘energetic’ when they do a large number of little things, and ‘noble’ and ‘lofty-minded’ when they do brilliant and distinguished things. At that time of life there are |794| occasions when a venturesome aggressiveness is more or less in season and wears a grace of its own. But what when an elderly man consents to perform routine services to the public, such as letting out taxes, or superintending harbours and markets? What when he seizes opportunities of being sent on a mission to some governor or other powerful personage—a position for which there is no necessity, which contains no dignity, and which necessitates time-serving and complaisance? To my mind, my friend, his case is one for regret and commiseration; some may even think it distressingly vulgar.

Not even positions of authority are any longer a suitable |B| sphere for him, unless they are of high rank and importance; such a position, for example, as you now hold in the Presidentship of the Areopagite Council, not to mention the distinguished rank of Amphictyon,[^[36]] which your country has imposed upon you all your life, with its

Welcome toil and labour sweet to bear.

Even these honours we should not seek, but should make from holding them. We should ask, not for them, but to be excused from them. It should seem, not that we are taking office to ourselves, but that we are surrendering ourselves to office. The Emperor Tiberius used to say that a man over sixty should be ashamed of holding out his wrist to a physician. But he should |C| be more ashamed of holding out his hand to the public in solicitation of its ‘vote and influence’. That situation is as humiliating and ignoble as the contrary is honourable and dignified—I mean when your country chooses you, calls you, and waits for you, and when you come down amidst respect and welcome, a ‘reverend signior’ indeed, to meet your distinction with gracious acceptance.

Similarly with speaking in the Assembly. A man of advanced age should not be perpetually springing upon the platform and crowing back to every cock that crows. Young men are like horses, and he should not, by constantly grappling with |D| them and irritating them, lose control of their respect, or encourage the practice and habit of resistance to the reins. He should sometimes leave them to make a restive plunge for distinction, keeping out of the way and not interfering, unless the matter at stake is vital to the public safety or to decency and honour. In that case he should not wait to be called, but should let some one take him by the hand, or carry him in his chair, and push his way at more than full speed, like Appius Claudius in Roman history. The Romans had been defeated by Pyrrhus in a great battle, and Appius heard that the Senate |E| was listening to proposals for a truce and a peace. This was more than he could bear, and, though blind of both eyes, along he came in his chair through the Forum to the Senate House. He went in, planted himself before them, and said: ‘Hitherto I have been distressed at the loss of my sight; now I could pray to be also unable to hear—that you are meditating so ignoble and disgraceful a transaction.’ Thereupon, partly by reproaches, partly by advice and encouragement, he persuaded them to have |F| immediate recourse to arms and to fight Pyrrhus to a finish for the prize of Italy.

Again, when it became manifest that, in acting the demagogue, Peisistratus was aiming at absolutism, and yet no one ventured to resist or prevent it, Solon brought out his weapons with his own hands, piled them in front of his house, and called upon the citizens to help. And when Peisistratus sent and asked him what gave him the confidence to do so, he replied, ‘My age.’

Things so vital as these, it is true, are rousing enough to fire even the most worn-out of old men, so long as he possesses the breath of life at all. Otherwise he will sometimes, as I have said, be showing good taste if he declines to perform paltry and menial tasks which bring more worry to the doer than good |793| to the persons for whom they are done. There are also occasions when he will wait for the citizens to call for him, feel the need of him, and come to his house to fetch him. He is wanted, and therefore his appearance on the scene will carry more weight. But for the most part, though present, he will be silent and will leave the younger generation to do the speaking, while he acts as umpire to the match of political ambition. And if it goes beyond bounds, he will offer a mild reproof and courteously put an end to outbreaks of self-assertion, recrimination, or ill-temper. When a motion is wrong, he will reason with and correct the mover, but without blaming him. When it is right, he will commend it without reserve and will cheerfully acquiesce, often surrendering an argumentative victory in order that |B| a young man may get on in the world and be in good heart. In some cases he will supply a deficiency while paying a compliment, like Nestor with his

No man, I trow, will find fault with thy words among all the Achaeans:

None say thee nay. Yet not to an end hast thou brought all the matter.

True ’tis, thou art yet but young, and myself might be thine own father.

There is a practice still more statesmanlike. One may not merely teach a lesson openly in public by means of a reproval unaccompanied by any sting of humiliation or injury to prestige. Still more may be done in private for persons with good political abilities. We may offer them kindly suggestions and assistance |C| towards the bringing forward of useful arguments and public measures, encourage them to high aims, help them to acquire a distinguished tone of mind, and—as riding-masters do with their horses—see that at first the people shall be gentle and docile for them to mount. And if so be a young man should make a failure, instead of leaving him to despond, we may rouse and comfort him. It was in this way that the spirits and courage of Cimon were revived by Aristeides, and those of Themistocles by Mnesiphilus, when they began by incurring ill-odour and a bad name for forwardness and recklessness. It is also said of Demosthenes that, when he was in great distress at his failure |D| in the Assembly, he was taken to task by a very old man who had heard Pericles, and who told him that he had no right to despair of himself, seeing that he possessed gifts so much like those of that eminent person. So when Timotheus was hissed for his innovations and treated as guilty of an outrage on music, Euripides bade him keep up his courage, since he would soon be dictating to his audience.

At Rome the term of the Vestal Virgins is divided into three stages—one for learning, one for the performance of the ceremonies, and the third for teaching. So with the votaries of |E| Artemis at Ephesus; each is called first a novice, next a priestess, and then a past-priestess. In the same way the complete statesman is during the first part of his public career still engaged in learning the mysteries; during the last part he is engaged in teaching and initiating.

Whereas to superintend the athletics of others is to take no part in them oneself, it is otherwise with those who train a youth in public business and the political arena, and who make sure that for the good of his country he shall

Be speaker of words and eke doer of deeds.

They perform good service, not in some petty inconsiderable |F| part of public life, but in one to which Lycurgus devoted his first and foremost attention—training the young to give to every old man the same unfailing obedience as to a lawgiver. What had Lysander in his mind, when he declared that the finest form of old age is to be found at Lacedaemon? Did he mean that at Lacedaemon elderly people had the best opportunities of doing nothing, of lending money, of sitting together and playing dice, or of meeting together at an early hour to drink? Surely not. He meant that all persons at that time of life hold, as it were, a magisterial position; that they are, in a sense, public fathers or guardians, who not only look after matters of state, but take active cognisance of everything a young |796| man may do in connexion with his training-school, his pastimes, or his style of living. Such a position makes them an object of fear to wrong-doers, and of respect and affection to the well-behaved. For young men make a point of cultivating their society, because of the way in which they encourage steadiness and nobility of character by sympathy and approbation and without jealousy.

The last-named feeling is not a becoming one at any time of life. But whereas in the case of a young man it finds plenty of respectable names—‘rivalry’, ‘emulation’, ‘ambition’—in an old man it is a coarse and vulgar sentiment altogether out of place. The aged statesman should therefore be entirely free from jealousy. He should be no malignant old tree, |B| unequivocally snubbing the shoots and checking the growth of plants which spring up beside or beneath it, but should give them a kindly welcome and every opportunity to cling to him and twine about him. He should hold young people upright, lead them by the hand, and foster them, not only by wise suggestion and advice, but by surrendering to them political tasks which bring honour and distinction, or which afford scope for services of an innocent nature and yet welcome and gratifying to the public.

When a task is a stubborn and arduous one, or when it is like a medicine which stings and gives pain at the moment, while its beneficial effects are not produced till afterwards, he |C| should not prescribe it for young people. Instead of subjecting them in their inexperienced state to the uproars of an unreasonable mob, he should himself accept the unpopularity attaching to salutary measures. By this means he will render a youth both more well-disposed and also more zealous in other duties.

Meanwhile it must be remembered that statesmanship does not consist solely in holding office, acting as envoy, shouting loudly in the Assembly, and indulging in a fine frenzy of speeches and motions on the platform. The generality of people may think that these make a statesman, just as they think that talking |D| from a chair and delivering lectures based on books make a philosopher. But they fail to discern the sustained statesmanship or philosophy which is revealed consistently day after day in actions and conduct. As Dicaearchus used to say, the word peripatein, ‘walk’, has now come to be used of persons taking a turn in the colonnades rather than of those who are walking into the country or to see a friend. It is the same with acting the statesman as it is with acting the philosopher. For Socrates to play the philosopher there was no arranging of forms, seating himself in a chair, or observing a fixed time—arranged with his associates—for a discussion or discourse. He played the philosopher while joking with you, perhaps, or drinking with you, |E| or possibly campaigning with you, or at market with you, and finally when he was in prison and drinking the poison. He was thus the first to show that life affords scope for philosophy at every moment, in every detail, in every feeling and circumstance whatsoever. Statesmanship should be regarded in the same light. Foolish persons, even if they are Ministers of War, or Secretaries, or platform-speakers, should not be considered as acting the statesman, but as courting the mob, or making a display, or creating dissension, or doing public service because they must. But when a man possesses public spirit and broad interests, and is a keen patriot and a ‘state’s man’ in the literal sense, even if he has never worn official garb, he is playing the statesman all the time. He does so by stimulating men of |F| ability, giving advice to those who need it, lending his help to deliberation, discouraging bunglers, and fortifying persons of sense. And this does not mean that he goes to the Assembly Theatre or Senate House out of pride of place when canvassed or pressed, and, when he gets there, merely puts in an appearance—if he does so—by way of pastime, as he might at a show or entertainment. It means that, even if not present in body, he |797| is present in spirit; that he asks how the business goes, and is pleased or vexed as the case may be.

Aristeides at Athens and Cato at Rome held few public offices; but they made their whole life a perpetual service to their country. Though Epaminondas won many a distinguished success as commander-in-chief, he is no less famous for what he did in Thessaly at a time when he held no command or office. The generals had plunged the phalanx into a difficult situation. The enemy was attacking them with his missiles, |B| and they were in confusion. Epaminondas was therefore summoned from the ranks, and, after allaying the panic of the army by words of encouragement, he proceeded to make an orderly disposition of the phalanx—which was in a state of turmoil—extricated it with ease, posted it so as to confront the enemy, and compelled him to change his tactics and retire.

Once when King Agis was in Arcadia, and was in the act of leading his army into action in full order of battle, one of the elder Spartans shouted out that he was proposing to ‘mend one error by another’, meaning (as Thucydides says) that ‘his |C| present unseasonable ardour was intended to repair the discredit of his retreat’ from Argos. Agis listened, took the advice, and retired. Menecrates actually had a seat placed for him every day at the doors of the Government Office, and the Ephors frequently rose and consulted him upon questions of the first importance; so great was his reputation for wisdom and shrewdness. The story goes that, when he had completely lost all physical strength and was for the most part confined all day to his bed, upon the Ephors sending for him to the Agora, he got up and set out to walk. As he was toiling slowly along, he met |D| some children on the way, and asked them: ‘Do you know anything more binding than to obey a master?’ Upon their replying, ‘Lack of the power,’ his reason told him that this brought his service to an end, and he turned back home. For though zeal should not fail so long as ability lasts, we must not put pressure upon it when left helpless.

Once more, Scipio, whether in the field or in politics, constantly sought the advice of Gaius Laelius to such an extent as to make some people say of his achievements that Scipio was the actor, but the author was Gaius. And Cicero himself acknowledges that the greatest and finest of the successful measures of his consulship were devised with the help of the philosopher Publius Nigidius.

|E| There is, then, nothing to prevent an aged man from advancing the public good in many a department of statesmanship. He has the best of means thereto: reason, judgement, plain-speaking, and ‘thought discreet‘, as the poets say. It is not merely our hands and feet or the strength of our bodies that are part and parcel of the possessions of the State. Most important are the mind and the beauties of the mind—temperance, justice, and wisdom. It is monstrous that, as these come late and |F| slowly to their own, our house and farm and other goods and chattels should get the benefit of them, while, in a public way, to our country and our fellow-citizens, we make ourselves of no further use because of ‘time’. For what time takes away from our powers of active effort is less than what it adds to those of guidance and statesmanship. It is for this reason that, when Hermes is represented in an elderly form, though he has no hands or feet, his virile parts are tense—an indirect way of saying that there is little need for old men’s bodies to be hard at work, so long as their power of reasoned speech is—as it ought to be—vigorous and generative.

ADVICE TO MARRIED COUPLES

|138 B| To Pollianus and Eurydice with Plutarch’s best wishes.

When they were shutting you in your bridal chamber, the ancestral ritual was duly applied to you by the priestess of Demeter. I believe that now, if reason also were to take you in hand and join in the nuptial song, it would prove of some service, and would support the tune as prescribed.

In the musical world they used to call one of the modes for the flute ‘the Horse-and-Mare’, because, apparently, the strains in that key were provocative of union between those animals. Well, philosophy has many excellent sermons to give, but none |C| more worthy of serious attention than that upon marriage. By it she exerts a spell upon those who come together as partners in life, and renders them gentle and tractable to each other. I have, therefore, taken the main points of the lessons which you have repeatedly heard, brought up as you have been in the company of Philosophy. I have arranged them in a series of brief comparisons to make them easier to remember, and am sending them as a present to you both. In doing so I pray that the Muses may graciously lend aid to Aphrodite, since, if it is their province to see that a lyre or a harp shall be in tune, it is no less so to provide that the music of the married home shall be harmonized by reason and philosophy. When people in olden times assigned a seat with Aphrodite to Hermes, it was because |D| the pleasure of marriage stands in special need of reason; when to Persuasion and the Graces, it was in order that the married pair might obtain their wishes from each other by means of persuasion, and not by contention and strife.

The Rules:

1. Solon bade the bride eat a piece of quince before coming to the bridegroom’s arms—apparently an enigmatical suggestion that, as a first requirement, a pleasant and inviting impression should be gathered from an agreeable mouth and speech.

2. In Boeotia, after veiling the bride, they crown her with a wreath of thorny asparagus. As that plant yields the sweetest eating from among the roughest prickles, so a bride, if the groom does not run away in disgust because he finds her difficult and vexatious at first, will afford him a sweet and gentle companionship. One who shows no patience with the girl’s first |E| bickerings is as bad as those who let the ripe grapes go because once they were sour. Many a young bride is affected in the same way. First experiences disgust her with the bridegroom, and she makes as great a mistake as if, after enduring the sting of the bee, she were to abandon the honeycomb.

3. It is especially at the beginning that married people should beware of quarrel and friction. Let them note how vessels which have been mended will at first easily pull to pieces on the slightest occasion, but as time goes on and they become solid at the seams, it is as much as fire and iron can do to separate |F| the parts.

4. Fire is readily kindled in chaff, dry rushes, or hare’s fur, but quickly goes out unless it gets a further hold upon something capable both of keeping it in and feeding it. So with that fierce blaze of passion which is produced in the newly-married by physical enjoyment. You must not rely upon it nor expect it to last, unless it is built round the moral character, gets a hold upon your rational part, and so obtains a permanent vitality.

5. Doctoring the water is no doubt a quick and easy way of |139| catching fish, but it renders them bad and uneatable. So when women work artificially upon their husbands with philtres and spells, and control them by the agency of pleasure, they have but crazy simpletons and dotards for their partners. While Circe derived no good from the men she had bewitched, and made no use of them when turned into swine and asses, she found the greatest pleasure in the rational companionship of the wise Odysseus.

6. A woman who is more desirous of ruling a foolish husband than of obeying a wise one, is like a traveller who would rather lead a blind man than follow one who possesses sight and knowledge.

|B| 7. Why should people disbelieve that Pasiphae, though consort to a king, fell in love with an ox, when they see that some women find a strict and continent husband wearisome, and prefer to live with one who is as much a mass of ungoverned sensuality as a dog or a goat?

8. When a rider is too weak or effeminate to vault upon a horse, he teaches the animal itself to bend its legs and crouch. In the same way some men who marry high-born or wealthy women, instead of improving themselves, put indignities upon their wives, in the belief that they will be more easily ruled when humbled. The proper course is, while using the rein, to maintain the dignity of the wife, as one would the full height of the horse.

|C| 9. When the moon is at a distance from the sun, we see it bright and luminous. When it comes near him, it fades and is lost to view. With a properly conducted woman it is the contrary. She should be most visible when with her husband; in his absence she should keep at home and out of sight.

10. Herodotus was wrong in saying that when a woman lays aside her tunic she lays aside her modesty. On the contrary, a chaste wife puts on modesty in its place. Between married persons the token of greatest regard is greatest modesty.

11. If two notes are taken in accord, the lower of the two is |D| the dominant. So, though every action in a well-conducted house is performed by both parties in tune, it will reveal the husband’s leadership and priority of choice.

12. The Sun vanquished the North Wind. When the wind endeavoured to take off the man’s cloak by violence and blowing a gale, he only tightened his mantle the more and held it the closer. But when, after the wind, the sun became hot, the man began to grow warm. When at last he sweltered, he took off not only his cloak but his tunic. The parable applies to the generality of women. When their husbands take violent measures to do away with extravagant indulgence, they show |E| fight and temper; but if you reason with them, they give it up peaceably and practise moderation.

13. Cato expelled from the Senate a man who had kissed his own wife in the presence of his daughter. This, perhaps, was too severe a step. But if—as is the case—it is unseemly to be fondling and kissing and embracing each other in company, it is surely more unseemly to be scolding and quarrelling in company, and, while treating your love-passages as a sacred secret between you and your wife, to make an open display of fault-finding |F| and reproach.

14. A mirror,[^[37]] though decorated with gold and precious stones, is of no use unless it shows you your form true to life. Similarly there is no advantage in a rich wife, if her conduct does not represent that of her husband and harmonize with it in character. If the reflection which it offers is glum when you are joyful, but wears a merry grin when you are gloomy and distressed, the mirror is faulty and bad. A wife is a poor thing and out of place if she is in the dumps when her husband is disposed for frolic or love-making, but is all fun and laughter when he is serious. In the former case she is disagreeable; in |140| the latter, she slights you. Geometers tell us that lines and surfaces make no movement by themselves, but only in conjunction with the bodies to which they belong. In the same way a woman should be free from peculiar states of mind of her own, but should act as the husband’s partner in his earnestness and his jest, in his preoccupation and his laughter.

15. A man who dislikes to see his wife eating with him, teaches her to satisfy her appetite when she gets by herself. Similarly one who is never a merry companion to her, nor shares in her sport and laughter, teaches her to look for private pleasures apart from him.

|B| 16. When the Persian kings are dining or feasting, their legitimate wives sit at their side. But when they wish to amuse themselves or get tipsy, they send those wives away and summon their minstrel-women and concubines. The practice is a right one, at least to the extent that they do not permit their wives to take part in wanton and licentious scenes. So, if a private man, who lacks self-control or good-breeding in his pleasures, is guilty of a lapse with a common woman or a menial, the wife should not be indignant and resentful, but should reflect that, out of respect for her, he finds some other woman to share his riot and lasciviousness.

|C| 17. When kings are fond of music, they make many musicians; when of learning, learned men; when of athletics, gymnasts. So when the love of a husband is for the person, his wife will be all for dress; when for pleasure, she becomes lewd and wanton; when for goodness and virtue, she shows herself discreet and chaste.

18. When a Lacedaemonian girl was once asked whether she had already embraced a man, she answered, ‘No, indeed; but he has embraced me.’ Such, I believe, is the right attitude for a lady—not to shun or dislike caresses, when the husband begins them, nor yet to begin them of her own accord. The one course is bold and immodest, the other disdainful and |D| unaffectionate.