No More Learning

' you exclaim. 'To
sacrifice the pursuits, the society of former days, the placid life
wherein sleep was measured by inclination, and my comings and goings were
unfettered, and all to precipitate myself bodily into this hideous gulf!
And why? What, in God's name, is my glorious recompense? Was there no
other way? Could I not have provided for myself better than this, and
preserved liberty and free-will into the bargain? Alas! the lion is fast
bound in the net. I am haled hither and thither. Pitiable is my lot,
where no honour is to be won, no favour to be hoped for. Untaught,
unpractised in the arts of flattery, I am pitted against professionals. I
am no choice spirit, no jolly companion; to raise a laugh is beyond me.
My presence (well do I know it) is a vexation to my patron, and then most
when he is in his most gracious mood. He finds me sullen; and how to
attune myself to him I know not. If I wear a grim face, I am a sour
fellow, scarcely to be endured. If I assume my most cheerful expression,
my smiles arouse his contempt and disgust. As well attempt to act a comic
part in the mask of tragedy! And what is the end of it all? My present
life has been another's: do I look to have a new life which shall be my
own? '

Your soliloquy is interrupted by the bell. The old routine awaits you:
you must trudge, and you must stand; and first anoint your limbs, if you
would hold out to the end. Dinner will be the same as ever, and go on as
late as ever. The change from all your former habits, the wakeful night,
the violent exercise, the exhaustion, are slowly undermining your health
at this moment, and preparing you for consumption or colic, for asthma or
the delights of gout. However, you hold out in spite of all, though many
a time your right place would be in bed. But that would never do: that
looks like shamming, like shirking your work. The result is that you grow
as pallid as a man at the point of death.

So much for your city life. And now for an excursion into the country.
I will content myself with a single detail. As likely as not it is a wet
day. Your turn for the carriage (as might be expected) comes last. You
wait and wait, till at last its return is out of the question, and you
are squeezed into some vehicle with the cook, or with my lady's _friseur_,
without even a proper allowance of straw. I shall make no scruple of
relating to you an experience of Thesmopolis the Stoic, which I had from
his own mouth; a most amusing incident, and just the sort of thing one
might expect to find happening again. He was in the service of a certain
wealthy and luxurious lady of quality, whom on one occasion he had to
accompany on a journey from Rome. The fun began at once. The philosopher
received as his travelling companion a beardless exquisite of the
pitch-plastering persuasion, by whom, you may be certain, my lady set
great store; his name, she informed the philosopher, was 'Robinetta. ' Is
not this a promising start? --the grave and reverend Thesmopolis, with his
hoary beard (you know what a long, venerable affair it is), side by side
with this rouged and painted ogler, whose drooping neck and plucked
throat suggested the vulture rather than the robin! 'Twas all that
Thesmopolis could do to persuade him not to wear his hair-net; and as it
was he had a sad journey of it, with the fellow singing and whistling all
the time--I daresay he would have danced there and then, if Thesmopolis
had not prevented him. But there was more to come, as you will see.
'Thesmopolis,' cries my lady, calling him to her, 'I have a great favour
to ask of you; now please don't say no, and don't wait to be asked twice,
there's a good creature. ' Of course, he said he would do anything she
wished. 'I only ask you, because I know you are to be trusted; you are so
good-natured and affectionate! I want you to take my little dog Myrrhina
in with you, and see that she wants for nothing. Poor little lady! she is
soon to become a mother. These hateful, inattentive servants take no
notice of _me_ when we are travelling, much less of her. You will be doing
me a great kindness, I assure you, in taking charge of her; I am so fond
of the sweet little pet! ' She prayed and almost wept; and Thesmopolis
promised. Imagine the ludicrous picture. The little beast peeping out from
beneath the philosophic cloak; within licking distance of that beard,
which perhaps still held traces of the thick soup of yesterday; yapping
away with its shrill pipe of a voice, as Maltese terriers will; and no
doubt taking other liberties, which Thesmopolis did not think worth
mentioning. That night at dinner, the exquisite, his fellow traveller,
after cracking a passable joke here and there at the expense of the other
guests, came to Thesmopolis. 'Of him,' he remarked, 'I have only this to
say, that our Stoic has turned Cynic. ' According to what I heard, the
little animal actually littered in his mantle!

Such are the caprices, nay, the insults, let me rather say, with which
the patron gradually breaks the spirit of his dependants. I know myself
of an orator, a very free speaker, who was actually ordered to stand up
and deliver a speech at table; and a masterly speech it was, trenchant
and terse. He received the congratulations of the company on being timed
by a _wine_--instead of a _water_-clock; and this affront, it is said, he
was content to put up, for the consideration of 8 pounds. But what of
that? Wait till you get a patron who has poetical or historical
tendencies, and spouts passages of his own works all through dinner: you
must praise, you must flatter, you must devise original compliments for
him,--or die in the attempt. Then there are the beaux, the Adonises and
Hyacinths, as you must be careful to call them, undeterred by the
eighteen inches or so of nose that some of them carry on their faces. Do
your praises halt? 'Tis envy, 'tis treason! Away with you, Philoxenus
that you are, to Syracusan quarries! --Let them be orators, let them be
philosophers, if they will: what matter for a solecism here and there?
Find Attic elegance, find honey of Hymettus in every word; and pronounce
it law henceforth, to speak as they speak.

If we had only men to deal with, it would be something: but there are the
women too. For among the objects of feminine ambition is this, of having
a scholar or two in their pay, to dance attendance at the litter's side;
it adds one more to the list of their adornments, if they can get the
reputation of culture and philosophy, of turning a song which will bear
comparison with Sappho's. So they too keep their philosopher, their
orator, or their _litterateur_; and give him audience--when, think
you? Why, at the toilet, by all that is ridiculous, among the rouge-pots
and hair-brushes; or else at the dinner-table. They have no leisure at
other times. As it is, the philosopher is often interrupted by the
entrance of a maid with a billet-doux. Virtue has then to bide her time;
for the audience will not be resumed till the gallant has his answer.

At rare intervals, at the Saturnalia or the Feast of Minerva, you will be
presented with a sorry cloak, or a worn-out tunic; and a world of
ceremony will go to the presentation. The first who gets wind of the
great man's intention flies to you with the news of what is in store
for you; and the bringer of glad tidings does not go away empty-handed. The
next morning a dozen of them arrive, conveying the present, each with his
tale of how he spoke up for you, or the hints he threw out, or how he was
entrusted with the choice, and chose the best. Not a man of them but
departs with your money in his pocket, grumbling that it is no more.

As to that salary, it will be paid to you sixpence at a time, and there
will be black looks when you ask for it. Still, you must get it somehow.
Ply your patron therefore with flatteries and entreaties, and pay due
observance to his steward, and let it be the kind of observance that
stewards like best; nor must you forget your kind introducer. You do get
something at last; but it all goes to pay the tailor, the doctor, or the
shoemaker, and you are left the proud possessor of nothing at all.

Meanwhile, jealousy is rife, and some slander is perhaps working its
stealthy way to ears which are predisposed to hear anything to your
discredit. For your employer perceives that by this time incessant
fatigues have worn you out; you are crippled, you are good for nothing
more, and gout is coming on. All the profit that was to be had of you, he
has effectually sucked out. Your prime has gone by, your bodily vigour is
exhausted, you are a tattered remnant. He begins to look about for a
convenient dunghill whereon to deposit you, and for an able-bodied
substitute to do your work. You have attempted the honour of one of his
minions: you have been trying to corrupt his wife's maid, venerable
sinner that you are! --any accusation will serve. You are gagged and
turned out neck and crop into the darkness. Away you go, helpless and
destitute, with gout for the cheering companion of your old age. Whatever
you once knew, you have unlearnt in all these years: on the other hand,
you have developed a paunch like a balloon; a monster insatiable,
inexorable, which has acquired a habit of asking for more, and likes not
at all the unlearning process. It is not to be supposed that any one else
will give you employment, at your age; you are like an old horse, whose
very hide has deteriorated in value. Not to mention that the worst
interpretation will be put upon your late dismissal; you will be credited
with adultery, or poisoning, or something of that kind. Your accuser, you
see, is convincing even in silence; whereas you--you are a loose-
principled, unscrupulous _Greek_. That is the character we Greeks
bear; and it serves us right; I see excellent grounds for the opinion
they have of us. Greek after Greek who enters their service sets up (in
default of any other practical knowledge) for wizard or poisoner, and
deals in love-charms and evil spells; and these are they who talk of
culture, who wear grey beards and philosophic cloaks! When these, who are
accounted the best of us, stand thus exposed, when men observe their
interested servility, their gross flatteries at table and elsewhere, it
is not to be wondered at that we have all fallen under suspicion. Those
whom they have cast off, they hate, and seek to make an end of them
altogether; arguing, naturally enough, that men who know their secrets,
and have seen them in all their nakedness, may divulge many a foible
which will not bear the light; and the thought is torment to them. The
fact is, that these great men are for all the world like handsomely bound
books. Outside are the gilt edges and the purple cover: and within? a
Thyestes feasts upon his own children; an Oedipus commits incest with his
mother; a Tereus woos two sisters at once. Such are these human books:
their brilliancy attracts all eyes, but between the purple covers lurks
many a horrid tale. Turn over the pages of any one of them, and you find
a drama worthy the pen of Sophocles or Euripides: close the volume--all
is gilt edge and exquisite tooling. Well may they hate the confidants of
such crimes, and plot their destruction! What if the outcast should take
to rehearsing in public the tragedy that he has got by heart?

I am minded to give you, after the manner of Cebes, a life-picture of
Dependence; with this before your eyes, you may judge for yourself,
whether it is the life for you. I would gladly call in the aid of an
Apelles or a Parrhasius, an Aetion or a Euphranor, but no such perfect
painters are to be found in these days; I must sketch you the picture in
outline as best I can. I begin then with tall golden gates, not set in
the plain, but high upon a hill. Long and steep and slippery is the
ascent; and many a time when a man looks to reach the top, his foot
slips, and he is plunged headlong. Within the gates sits Wealth, a figure
all of gold (so at least she seems); most fair, most lovely. Her lover
painfully scales the height, and draws near to the door; and that golden
sight fills him with amazement. The beautiful woman in gorgeous raiment
who now takes him by the hand is Hope. As she leads him in, his spirit is
stricken with awe. Hope still shows the way; but two others, Despair and
Servitude, now take charge of him, and conduct him to Toil, who grinds
the poor wretch down with labour, and at last hands him over to Age. He
looks sickly now, and all his colour is gone. Last comes Contempt, and
laying violent hands on him drags him into the presence of Despair; it is
now time for Hope to take wing and vanish. Naked, potbellied, pale and
old, he is thrust forth, not by those golden gates by which he entered,
but by some obscure back-passage. One hand covers his nakedness; with the
other he would fain strangle himself. Now let Regret meet him without,
dropping vain tears and heaping misery on misery,--and my picture is
complete.

Examine it narrowly in all its details, and see whether you like the idea
of going in at my golden front door, to be expelled ignominiously at the
back. And whichever way you decide, remember the words of the wise man:
'Blame not Heaven, but your own choice. '




APOLOGY FOR 'THE DEPENDENT SCHOLAR'


DEAR SABINUS,

I have been guessing how you are likely to have expressed yourself upon
reading my essay about dependants. I feel pretty sure you read it all and
had a laugh over it; but it is your running and general comment in words
that I am trying to piece on to it. If I am any good at divination, this
is the sort of thing: _To think that a man can set down such a scathing
indictment of the life, and then forget it all, get hold of the other end
of the stick, and plunge headlong into such manifest conspicuous slavery!
Take Midas, Croesus, golden Pactolus, roll them into one, multiply them,
and could they induce him to relinquish the freedom which he has loved
and consorted with from a child? He is nearly in the clutches of Aeacus,
one foot is on the ferryman's boat, and it is now that he lets himself be
dragged submissively about by a golden collar. _ [Footnote: Omitting as
a scholium, with Dindorf and Fritzsche, the words: hoia esti ton
tryphonton plousion ta sphingia kai ta kourallia. ] _There is some
slight inconsistency between his life and his treatise; the rivers are
running up-hill; topsy-turvydom prevails; our recantations are new-
fashioned; the first palinodist_ [Footnote: See _Stesichorus_ in
Notes. ] _mended words with words for Helen of Troy; but we spoil words
(those words we thought so wise) with deeds. _

Such, I imagine, were your inward remarks. And I dare say you will give
me some overt advice to the same effect; well, it will not be ill-timed;
it will illustrate your friendship, and do you credit as a good man and a
philosopher. If I render your part respectably for you, that will do, and
we will pay our homage to the God of words; [Footnote: i. e. Hermes. ] if I
fail, you will fill in the deficiency for yourself. There, the stage is
ready; I am to hold my tongue, and submit to any necessary carving and
cauterizing for my good, and you are to plaster me, and have your scalpel
handy, and your iron red-hot. Sabinus takes the word, and thus addresses
me:

_My dear friend, this treatise of yours has quite rightly been earning
you a fine reputation, from its first delivery before the great audience
I had described to me, to its private use by the educated who have
consulted and thumbed it since. For indeed it presents the case
meritoriously; there is study of detail and experience of life in
abundance; your views are the reverse of vague; and above all the book is
practically useful, chiefly but not exclusively to the educated whom it
might save from an unforeseen slavery. However, your mind is changed; the
life you described is now the better; good-bye to freedom; your motto is
that contemptible line:

Give me but gain, I'll turn from free to slave.

Let none hear the lecture from you again, then; see to it that no copy of
it comes under the eyes of any one aware of your present life; ask Hermes
to bring Lethe-water from below, enough to drug your former hearers; else
you will remind us of the Corinthian tale, and your writing, like
Bellerophon's, be your own condemnation. I assure you I see no decent
defence you can make, at least if your detractors have the humour to
commend the independence of the writings while the writer is a slave and
a voluntary beast of burden before their eyes.

They will say with some plausibility: Either the book is some other
good man's work, and you a jackdaw strutting in borrowed, plumes; or, if
it is really yours, you are a second Salaethus; the Crotoniate legislator
made most severe laws against adultery, was much looked up to on the
strength of it, and was shortly after taken in adultery with his
brother's wife. You are an exact reproduction of Salaethus, they will
say; or rather he was not half so bad as you, seeing that he was mastered
by passion, as he pleaded in court, and moreover preferred to leap
into the flames, like a brave man, when the Crotoniates were moved to
compassion and gave him the alternative of exile. The difference between
_your_ precept and practice is infinitely more ridiculous; you draw
a realistic word-picture of that servile life; you pour contempt on the
man who runs into the trap of a rich man's house, where a thousand
degradations, half of them self-inflicted, await him; and then in extreme
old age, when you are on the border between life and death, you take this
miserable servitude upon you and make a sort of circus exhibition of your
chains. The conspicuousness of your position will only make the more
ridiculous that contrast between your book and your life.

But I need not beat my brains for phrases of reprobation; there is one
good enough in a noble tragedy:

Wisdom begins at home; no wisdom, else.

And your censors will find no lack of illustrations against you; some
will compare you to the tragic actor; on the stage he is Agamemnon or
Creon or great Heracles; but off it, stripped of his mask, he is just
Polus or Aristodemus, a hireling liable to be hissed off, or even whipped
on occasion, at the pleasure of the audience. Others will say you have
had the experience of Queen Cleopatra's monkey: the docile creature used
to dance in perfect form and time, and was much admired for the
regularity and decorum of its movements, adapted to the voices and
instruments of a bridal chorus; alas, one day it spied a fig or almond a
little way off on the ground; flutes and measures and steps were all
forgotten, the mask was far off in several pieces, and there was he
chewing his find.

You, they will say, are the author (for 'actor' would understate the
case) who has laid down the laws of noble conduct; and no sooner is the
lump of figs presented than the monkey is revealed; your lips are the
lips of a philosopher, and your heart is quite other; it is no injustice
to say that those sentiments for which you claim admiration have 'wetted
your lips, and left your palate dry. ' You have not had to wait long for
retribution; you spoke unadvisedly in scorn of human needs; and, this
little while after, behold you making public renunciation of your
freedom! Surely Nemesis was standing behind your back as you drank in the
flattering tributes to your superiority; did she not smile in her divine
fore-knowledge of the impending change, and mark how you forgot to
propitiate her before you assailed the victims whom fortune's mutability
had reduced to such courses?

Now I want you to imagine a rhetorician writing on the theme that
Aeschines, after his indictment of Timarchus, was himself proved guilty
by eyewitnesses of similar iniquity; would, or would not, the amusement
of the audience be heightened by the fact that he had got Timarchus
punished for offences excused by youth, whereas he was himself an old man
at the time of his own guilt? Why, you are like the quack who offered a
cough-mixture which was to cure instantaneously, and could hardly get the
promise out for coughing. _

Yes, Sabinus, and there is plenty more of the same sort for an accuser
like you to urge; the subject is all handles; you can take hold of it
anywhere. I have been looking about for my best line of defence. Had I
better turn craven, face right-about, confess my sin, and have recourse
to the regular plea of Chance, Fate, Necessity? Shall I humbly beseech my
critics to pardon me, remembering that nothing is in a man's own choice--
we are led by some stronger power, one of the three I mentioned, probably,
and are not true agents but guiltless altogether, whatever we say or do?
Or will you tell me this might do well enough for one of the common herd,
but you cannot have _me_ sheltering myself so? _I_ must not brief Homer;
it will not serve me to plead:

No mortal man e'er yet escaped his fate;

nor again,

His thread was spun, then when his mother bare him.

On the other hand, I might avoid that plea as wanting in plausibility,
and say that I did not accept this association under the temptation of
money or any prospects of that kind, but in pure admiration of the
wisdom, strength, and magnanimity of my patron's character, which
inspired the wish to partake his activity. But I fear I should only have
brought on myself the additional imputation of flattery. It would be a
case of 'one nail drives out one nail,' and this time the one left in
would be the bigger; for flattery is the most servile, and consequently
reckoned the worst, of all vices.

Both these pleas, then, being excluded, what is left me but to confess
that I have no sound defence to make? I have indeed one anchor yet
aboard: I may whine over age and ill health, and their attendant poverty,
from which a man will purchase escape at any cost. The situation tempts
me to send an invitation to Euripides's _Medea_: will she come and
recite certain lines of hers on my behalf, kindly making the slight
changes needed? --

Too well I know how monstrous is the deed;
My poverty, but not my will, consents.

And every one knows the place in Theognis, whether I quote it or not,
where he approves of people's flinging themselves to the unplumbed deep
from sky-pointing crags, if one may be quit of poverty that way.

That about exhausts the obvious lines of defence; and none of them is
very promising. But never fear, my friend, I am not going to try any of
them. May never Argos be so hard put to it that Cyllarabis must be sown!
nor ever I be in such straits for a tolerable defence as to be driven
upon these evasions! No, I only ask you to consider the vast difference
between being a hireling in a rich man's house, where one is a slave, and
must put up with all that is described in my book--between that and
entering the public service, doing one's best as an administrator, and
taking the Emperor's pay for it. Go fully into the matter; take the two
things separately and have a good look at them; you will find that they
are two octaves apart, as the musical people say; the two lives are about
as like each other as lead is to silver, bronze to gold, an anemone to a
rose, a monkey to a man; there is pay, and there is subordination, in
each case; but the essence of the two things is utterly different. In one
we have manifest slavery; the new-comers who accept the terms are barely
distinguishable from the human chattels a man has bought or bred; but
persons who have the management of public business, and give their
services to states and nations, are not to have insinuations aimed at
them just because they are paid; that single point of resemblance is not
to level them down to the others. If that is to be the principle, we had
better do away with all such offices at once; governors of whole
provinces, prefects of cities, commanders of legions and armies, will all
fall under the same condemnation; for they are paid. But of course
everything is not to be upset to suit a single case; all who receive pay
are not to be lumped together.

It is all a mistake; I never said that all drawers of salaries lived a
degraded life; I only pitied those domestic slaves who have been caught
by compliments on their culture. My position, you see, is entirely
different; my private relations are as they were before, though in a
public capacity I am now an active part of the great Imperial machine. If
you care to inquire, you will find that my charge is not the least
important in the government of Egypt. I control the cause-list, see that
trials are properly conducted, keep a record of all proceedings and
pleas, exercise censorship over forensic oratory, and edit the Emperor's
rescripts with a view to their official and permanent preservation in the
most lucid, accurate, and genuine form. My salary comes from no private
person, but from the Emperor; and it is considerable, amounting to many
hundreds. In the future too there is before _me_ the brilliant prospect of
attaining in due course to a governorship or other distinguished
employment.

Accordingly I am now going to throw off reserve, come to grips with the
charge against me, and prove my case _a fortiori_. I tell you that nobody
does anything for nothing; you may point to people in high places--as high
as you like; the Emperor himself is paid. I am not referring to the taxes
and tribute which flow in annually from subjects; the chief item in the
Emperor's pay is panegyrics, world-wide fame, and grateful devotion; the
statues, temples, and consecrated ground which their subjects bestow upon
them, what are these but pay for the care and forethought which they apply
to public policy and improvements? To compare small things with great, if
you will begin at the top of the heap and work down through the grains of
which it is composed, you will find that we inferior ones differ from the
superior in point of size, but all are wage-earners together.

If the law I laid down had been that no one should do anything, I might
fairly have been accused of transgressing it; but as my book contains
nothing of the sort, and as goodness consists in doing good, what better
use can you make of yourself than if you join forces with your friends in
the cause of progress, come out into the open, and let men see that you
are loyal and zealous and careful of your trust, not what Homer calls a
vain cumberer of the earth?

But before all, my critics are to remember that in me they will be
criticizing not a wise man (if indeed there is such a person on earth),
but one of the common people, one who has indeed practised rhetoric and
won some little reputation therein, but has never been trained up to the
perfect virtue of the really great. Well, I may surely be forgiven for
that; if any one ever did come up to the ideal of the wise man, it has
not been my fortune to meet him. And I confess further that I should be
disappointed if I found you criticizing my present life; you knew me long
ago when I was making a handsome income out of the public profession of
rhetoric; for on that Atlantic tour of yours which included Gaul, you
found me numbered among those teachers who could command high fees. Now,
my friend, you have my defence; I am exceedingly busy, but could not be
indifferent to securing _your_ vote of acquittal; as for others, let
them all denounce me with one voice if they will; on them I shall waste
no more words than, What cares Hippoclides?




A SLIP OF THE TONGUE IN SALUTATION
[Footnote: This piece, which even in the Greek fails to convince us that
Asclepius heard the prayer with which it concludes, is still flatter in
English, because we have no words of salutation which correspond at once
in etymological meaning and in conventional usage to the Greek. The
English reader who cares to understand a piece so little worth his
attention, will obligingly bear in mind that the Greek word represented
here by Joy and Rejoice roughly answered in Lucian's time to our Good-
morning and How do you do, as well as to the epistolary My dear----;
while that represented by Hail or Health did the work of Good-night,
Good-bye, Farewell, and (in letters) Yours truly. ]


If a poor mortal has some difficulty in guarding against that spirit of
mischief which dwells aloft, he has still more in clearing himself of the
absurd consequences when that spirit trips him up. I am in both
predicaments at once; coming to make you my morning salutation, which
should have taken the orthodox form of Rejoice, I bade you, in a very
choice fit of absent-mindedness, Be healthy--a good enough wish in its
way, but a little untimely and unconnected with that early hour. I at
once went moist and red, not quite aware whether I was on my head or my
heels; some of the company took me for a lunatic, no doubt, some thought
I was in my second childhood, some that I had not quite got over my last
night's wine--though you yourself were the pink of good manners, not
showing your consciousness of the slip by any ghost of a smile. It
occurred to me to write to myself a little something in the way of
comfort, and so modify the distress my blunder gave me--prove to myself
that it was not absolutely unpardonable for an old man to transgress
etiquette so flagrantly before so many witnesses. As to apology, there
could be no occasion for that, when one's slip had resulted in so well-
omened a wish.

I began to write expecting my task to be very difficult, but found plenty
of material as I went on. I will defer it, however, till I have cleared
the way with a few necessary remarks on the three forms--Rejoice or Joy,
Prosper or Prosperity, Hail or Health. Joy is a very ancient greeting; but
it was not confined to the morning, or the first meeting.
They did
use it when they first saw one another:

Joy to thee, Lord of this Tirynthian land!

But again at the moment when the wine succeeded to the meal:

Achilles, Joy! We lack not fair repast--

so says Odysseus discharging his embassy. And even at parting:

Joy be with you! And henceforth know me God,
No longer mortal man.

In fact the apostrophe was not limited to any particular season, as now
to the morning alone; indeed they used it on gloomy, nay, on the most
lamentable occasions; in Euripides, Polynices ends his life with the
words,

Joy with you! for the darkness closes on me.

Nor was it necessarily significative of friendliness; it could express
hatred and the determination to see no more of another. To wish much joy
to, was a regular form for ceasing to care about.

The modern use of the word dates back to Philippides the dispatch-runner.
Bringing the news of Marathon, he found the archons seated, in suspense
regarding the issue of the battle. 'Joy, we win! ' he said, and died upon
his message, breathing his last in the word Joy. The earliest letter
beginning with it is that in which Cleon the Athenian demagogue, writing
from Sphacteria, sends the good news of his victory and capture of
Spartans at that place. However, later than that we find Nicias writing
from Sicily and keeping to the older custom of coming to business at once
with no such introduction.

Now the admirable Plato, no bad authority on such matters, would have us
reject the salutation Joy altogether; it is a mean wish, wanting in
seriousness, according to him; his substitute is Prosperity, which stands
for a satisfactory condition both of body and soul; in a letter to
Dionysius, he reproves him for commencing a hymn to Apollo with Joy,
which he maintains is unworthy of the Pythian, and not fit even for men
of any discretion, not to mention Gods.

Pythagoras the mystic has vouchsafed us no writings of his own; but we
may infer from his disciples, Ocellus the Lucanian and Archytas, for
instance, that he headed his letters neither with Joy nor Prosperity, but
recommended beginning with Hail. At any rate all the Pythagoreans in
writing to one another (when their tone is serious, that is) started with
wishing Health, which they took to be the prime need of soul and body
alike, and to include all human blessings. The Pentagram [Footnote: See
_Pythagoras_ in Notes. ], that interlaced triple triangle which served them
as a sort of password, they called by the name Health. They argued that
Health included Joy and Prosperity, but that neither of those two was
coextensive with Health. Some of them gave to the Quaternion, [Footnote:
See _Pythagoras_ in Notes. ] which is their most solemn oath, and sums
their perfect number, the name of Beginning of Health. Philolaus might be
quoted.

But I need hardly go so far back. Epicurus assuredly rejoiced in joy--
pleasure was the chief Good in his eyes; yet in his most earnest letters
(which are not very numerous), and in those to his most intimate friends,
he starts with Hail. And in tragedy and the old comedy you will
constantly find it used quite at the beginning. You remember,

Hail to thee, joy be thine--

which puts health before rejoicing clearly enough. And says Alexis:

All hail, my lord; after long time thou comest.

Again Achaeus:

I come in sorry plight, yet wish thee health.

And Philemon:

Health first I ask, and next prosperity,
Joy thirdly, and to owe not any man.

As for the writer of the drinking-song mentioned in Plato, what says
he? --'Best is health, and second beauty, and third wealth'; joy he
never so much as names. I need hardly adduce the trite saw:

Chief of them that blessings give,
Health, with thee I mean to live.

But, if Health is chief, her gift, which is the enjoyment of health,
should rank before other Goods.

I could multiply these examples by the thousand from poets, historians,
philosophers, who give Health the place of honour; but you will not
require any such childish pedantry of me, wiping out my original offence
by another; I shall do better to add a historical anecdote or two which
occur to me as relevant.

Eumenes of Cardia, writing to Antipater, states that just before the
battle of Issus, Hephaestion came at dawn into Alexander's tent. Either
in absence of mind and confusion like mine, or else under a divine
impulse, he gave the evening salutation like me--'Hail, sire; 'tis time
we were at our posts. ' All present were confounded at the irregularity,
and Hephaestion himself was like to die of shame, when Alexander said, 'I
take the omen; it is a promise that we shall come back safe from battle. '

Antiochus Soter, about to engage the Galatians, dreamed that Alexander
stood over him and told him to give his men the password Health; and with
this word it was that he won that marvellous victory.

Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, in a letter to Seleucus, just reversed the
usual order, bidding him Hail at the beginning, and adding Rejoice at the
end instead of wishing him Health; this is recorded by Dionysodorus, the
collector of his letters.

The case of Pyrrhus the Epirot is well worth mention; as a general he was
only second to Alexander, and he experienced a thousand vicissitudes of
fortune. In all his prayers, sacrifices, and offerings, he never asked
for victory or increase of his royal dignity, for fame or excessive
wealth; his whole prayer was always in one word, Health; as long as he
had that, he thought all else would come of itself. And it was true
wisdom, in my opinion; he remembered that all other good things are
worthless, if health is wanting.

Oh, certainly (says some one); but we have assigned each form to its
proper place by this time; and if you disregard that--even though there
was no bad meaning in what you did say--you cannot fairly claim to have
made no mistake; it is as though one should put a helmet on the shins, or
greaves on the head. My dear sir (I reply), your simile would go on all
fours if there were any season at all which did not require health; but
in point of fact it is needed in the morning and at noonday and at night
--especially by busy rulers like you Romans, to whom physical condition
is so important. And again, the man who gives you Joy is only beginning
auspiciously; it is no more than a prayer; whereas he who bids you Hail
is doing you a practical service in reminding you of the means to health;
his is more than a prayer, it is a precept.

Why, in that book of instructions which you all receive from the Emperor,
is not the first recommendation to take care of your health? Quite
rightly; that is the condition precedent of efficiency. Moreover, if I
know any Latin, you yourselves, in _returning_ a salutation, constantly
use the equivalent of Health.

However, all this does not mean that I have deliberately abandoned
Rejoice and substituted Hail for it. I admit that it was quite
unintentional; I am not so foolish as to innovate like that, and exchange
the regular formulae.

No, I only thank Heaven that my stumble had such very fortunate results,
landing me in a better position than I had designed; may it not be that
Health itself, or Asclepius, inspired me to give you this promise of
health? How else should it have befallen me? In the course of a long life
I have never been guilty of such a confusion before.

Or, if I may not have recourse to the supernatural, it is no wonder that
my extreme desire to be known to you for good should so confuse me as to
work the contrary effect. Possibly, too, one might be robbed of one's
presence of mind by the crowd of military persons pushing for precedence,
or treating the salutation ceremony in their cavalier fashion.

As to yourself, I feel sure that, however others may have referred it to
stupidity, ignorance, or lunacy, you took it as the sign of a modest,
simple, unspoiled, unsophisticated soul. Absolute confidence in such
matters comes dangerously near audacity and impudence. My first wish
would be to make no such blunder; my second that, if I did, the resulting
omen should be good.

There is a story told of the first Augustus. He had given a correct legal
decision, which acquitted a maligned person of a most serious charge. The
latter expressed his gratitude in a loud voice, thus:--'I thank your
majesty for this bad and inequitable verdict. ' Augustus's attendants
raged, and were ready to tear the man to pieces. But the Emperor
restrained them; 'Never mind what he said; it is what he meant that
matters. ' That was Augustus's view. Well, take my meaning, and it was
good; or take my word, and it was auspicious.

And now that I have got to this point, I have reason to fear that I may
be suspected of having made the slip on purpose, leading up to this
apology. O God of health, only grant me that the quality of my piece may
justify the notion that I wanted no more than a peg whereon to hang an
essay!




HERMOTIMUS, OR THE RIVAL PHILOSOPHIES


_Lycinus. Hermotimus_

_Ly_. Good morning, Hermotimus; I guess by your book and the pace
you are going at that you are on your way to lecture, and a little late.
You were conning over something as you walked, your lips working and
muttering, your hand flung out this way and that as you got a speech into
order in your mind; you were doubtless inventing one of your crooked
questions, or pondering some tricky problem; never a vacant mind, even in
the streets; always on the stretch and in earnest, bent on advancing in
your studies.

_Her_. I admit the impeachment; I was running over the details of
what he said in yesterday's lecture. One must lose no chance, you know;
the Coan doctor [Footnote: Hippocrates] spoke so truly: _ars longa,
vita brevis_. And what be referred to was only physic--a simpler
matter. As to philosophy, not only will you never attain it, however long
you study, unless you are wide awake all the time, contemplating it with
intense eager gaze; the stake is so tremendous, too,--whether you shall
rot miserably with the vulgar herd, or be counted among philosophers and
reach Happiness.

_Ly_. A glorious prize, indeed! however, you cannot be far off it
now, if one may judge by the time you have given to philosophy, and the
extraordinary vigour of your long pursuit. For twenty years now, I should
say, I have watched you perpetually going to your professors, generally
bent over a book taking notes of past lectures, pale with thought and
emaciated in body. I suspect you find no release even in your dreams, you
are so wrapped up in the thing. With all this you must surely get hold of
Happiness soon, if indeed you have not found it long ago without telling
us.

_Her_. Alas, Lycinus, I am only just beginning to get an inkling of
the right way. Very far off dwells Virtue, as Hesiod says, and long and
steep and rough is the way thither, and travellers must bedew it with
sweat.

_Ly_. And you have not yet sweated and travelled enough?

_Her_. Surely not; else should I have been on the summit, with
nothing left between me and bliss; but I am only starting yet, Lycinus.

_Ly_. Ah, but Hesiod, your own authority, tells us, Well begun is
half done; so we may safely call you half-way by this time.

_Her_. Not even there yet; that would indeed have been much.

_Ly_. Where _shall_ we put you, then?

_Her_. Still on the lower slopes, just making an effort to get on;
but it is slippery and rough, and needs a helping hand.

_Ly_. Well, your master can give you that; from his station on the
summit, like Zeus in Homer with his golden cord, he can let you down his
discourse, and therewith haul and heave you up to himself and to the
Virtue which he has himself attained this long time.

_Her_. The very picture of what he is doing; if it depended on him
alone, I should have been hauled up long ago; it is my part that is still
wanting.

_Ly_. You must be of good cheer and keep a stout heart; gaze at the
end of your climb and the Happiness at the top, and remember that he is
working with you. What prospect does he hold out? when are you to be up?
does he think you will be on the top next year--by the Great Mysteries,
or the Panathenaea, say?

_Her_. Too soon, Lycinus.

_Ly_. By next Olympiad, then?

_Her_. All too short a time, even that, for habituation to Virtue
and attainment of Happiness.

_Ly_. Say two Olympiads, then, for an outside estimate. You may fairly be
found guilty of laziness, if you cannot get it done by then; the time
would allow you three return trips from the Pillars of Heracles to India,
with a margin for exploring the tribes on the way instead of sailing
straight and never stopping. How much higher and more slippery, pray, is
the peak on which your Virtue dwells than that Aornos crag which Alexander
stormed in a few days?

_Her_. There is no resemblance, Lycinus; this is not a thing, as you
conceive it, to be compassed and captured quickly, though ten thousand
Alexanders were to assault it; in that case, the sealers would have been
legion. As it is, a good number begin the climb with great confidence,
and do make progress, some very little indeed, others more; but when they
get half-way, they find endless difficulties and discomforts, lose heart,
and turn back, panting, dripping, and exhausted. But those who endure to
the end reach the top, to be blessed thenceforth with wondrous days,
looking down from their height upon the ants which are the rest of
mankind.

_Ly_. Dear me, what tiny things you make us out--not so big as the Pygmies
even, but positively grovelling on the face of the earth. I quite
understand it; your thoughts are up aloft already. And we, the common men
that walk the earth, shall mingle you with the Gods in our prayers; for
you are translated above the clouds, and gone up whither you have so long
striven.

_Her_. If but that ascent might be, Lycinus! but it is far yet.

_Ly_. But you have never told me _how_ far, in terms of time.

_Her_. No; for I know not precisely myself. My guess is that it will
not be more than twenty years; by that time I shall surely be on the
summit.

_Ly_. Mercy upon us, you take long views!

_Her_. Ay; but, as the toil, so is the reward.

_Ly_. That may be; but about these twenty years--have you your master's
promise that you will live so long? is he prophet as well as philosopher?
or is it a soothsayer or Chaldean expert that you trust? such things are
known to them, I understand. You would never, of course, if there were any
uncertainty of your life's lasting to the Virtue-point, slave and toil
night and day like this; why, just as you were close to the top, your fate
might come upon you, lay hold of you by the heel, and lug you down with
your hopes unfulfilled.

_Her_. God forbid! these are words of ill omen, Lycinus; may life be
granted me, that I may grow wise, and have if it be but one day of
Happiness!

_Ly_. For all these toils will you be content with your one day?

_Her_. Content? yes, or with the briefest moment of it.

_Ly_. But is there indeed Happiness up there--and worth all the pains? How
can you tell? You have never been up yourself.

_Her_. I trust my master's word; and he knows well; is he not on the
topmost height?

_Ly_. Oh, do tell me what he says about it; what is Happiness like?
wealth, glory, pleasures incomparable?

_Her_. Hush, friend! all these have nought to do with the Virtuous
life.

_Ly_. Well, if these will not do, what _are_ the good things he offers to
those who carry their course right through?

_Her_. Wisdom, courage, true beauty, justice, full and firm knowledge of
all things as they are; but wealth and glory and pleasure and all bodily
things--these a man strips off and abandons before he mounts up, like
Heracles burning on Mount Oeta before deification; he too cast off
whatever of the human he had from his mother, and soared up to the Gods
with his divine part pure and unalloyed, sifted by the fire. Even so those
I speak of are purged by the philosophic fire of all that deluded men
count admirable, and reaching the summit have Happiness with never a
thought of wealth and glory and pleasure--except to smile at any who count
them more than phantoms.

_Ly_. By Heracles (and his death on Oeta), they quit themselves like
men, and have their reward, it seems. But there is one thing I should
like to know: are they allowed to come down from their elevation
sometimes, and have a taste of what they left behind them? or when they
have once got up, must they stay there, conversing with Virtue, and
smiling at wealth and glory and pleasure?

_Her_. The latter, assuredly; more than that, a man once admitted of
Virtue's company will never be subject to wrath or fear or desire any
more; no, nor can he feel pain, nor any such sensation.

_Ly_. Well, but--if one might dare to say what one thinks--but no--let me
keep a good tongue in my head--it were irreverent to pry into what wise
men do.

_Her_. Nay, nay; let me know your meaning.

_Ly_. Dear friend, I have not the courage.

_Her_. Out with it, my good fellow; we are alone.

_Ly_. Well, then--most of your account I followed and accepted--how
they grow wise and brave and just, and the rest--indeed I was quite
fascinated by it; but then you went on to say they despised wealth and
glory and pleasure; well, just there (quite between ourselves, you know)
I was pulled up; I thought of a scene t'other day with--shall I tell you
whom? Perhaps we can do without a name?

_Her_. No, no; we must have that too.

_Ly_. Your own professor himself, then,--a person to whom all
respect is due, surely, not to mention his years.

_Her_. Well?

_Ly_. You know the Heracleot, quite an old pupil of his in philosophy by
this time--red-haired--likes an argument?

_Her_. Yes; Dion, he is called.

_Ly_. Well, I suppose he had not paid up punctually; anyhow the other day
the old man haled him before the magistrate, with a halter made of his own
coat; he was shouting and fuming, and if some friends had not come up and
got the young man out of his hands, he would have bitten off his nose, he
was in such a temper.

_Her_. Ah, _he_ is a bad character, always an unconscionable time paying
his debts. There are plenty of others who owe the professor money, and he
has never treated any of them so; they pay him his interest punctually.