Chapters 1–10

1 “Are our rhetoricians tormented by a new tribe of Furies when they cry: “These scars I earned in the struggle for popular rights; I sacrificed this eye for you: where is a guiding hand to lead me to my children? My knees are hamstrung, and cannot support my body’? Though indeed even these speeches might be endured if they smoothed the path of aspirants to oratory. But as it is, the sole result of this bombastic matter and these loud empty phrases is that a pupil who steps into a court thinks that he has been carried into another world. I believe that college makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there. It is pirates standing in chains on the beach, tyrants pen in hand ordering sons to cut off their fathers’ heads, oracles in time of pestilence demanding the blood of three virgins or more, honey-balls of phrases, every word and act besprinkled with poppy-seed and sesame.

2 People who are fed on this diet can no more be sensible than people who live in the kitchen can be savoury. With your permission I must tell you the truth, that you teachers more than anyone have been the ruin of true eloquence. Your tripping, empty tones stimulate certain absurd effects into being, with the result that the substance of your speech languishes and dies. In the age when Sophocles or Euripides found the inevitable word for their verse, young men were not yet being confined to set speeches. When Pindar and the nine lyric poets were too modest to use Homer’s lines, no cloistered pedant had yet ruined young men’s brains. I need not go to the poets for evidence. I certainly do not find that Plato or Demosthenes took any course of training of this kind. Great style, which, if I may say so, is also modest style, is never blotchy and bloated. It rises supreme by virtue of its natural beauty. Your flatulent and formless flow of words is a modern immigrant from Asia to Athens. Its breath fell upon the mind of ambitious youth like the influence of a baleful planet, and when the old tradition was once broken, eloquence halted and grew dumb. In a word, who after this came to equal the splendour of Thucydides or Hyperides? Even poetry did not glow with the colour of health, but the whole of art, nourished on one universal diet, lacked the vigour to reach the grey hairs of old age. The decadence in painting was the same, as soon as Egyptian charlatans had found a short cut to this high calling.”

3 Agamemnon would not allow me to stand declaiming out in the colonnade longer than he had spent sweating inside the school. “Your talk hasan uncommon flavour, young man,” he said, “and what is most unusual, you appreciate good sense. I will not therefore deceive you by making a mystery of my art. The fact is that the teachers are not to blame for these exhibitions. They are in a madhouse, and they must gibber. Unless they speak to the taste of their young masters they will be left alone in the colleges, as Cicero remarks.” Like the toadies [of Comedy] cadging after the rich man’s dinners, they think first about what is calculated to please their audience. They will never gain their object unless they lay traps for the ear. A master of oratory is like a fisherman; he must put the particular bait on his hook which he knows will tempt the little fish, or he may sit waiting on his rock with no hope of a catch.

4 Then what is to be done? It is the parents who should be attacked for refusing to allow their children to profit by stern discipline. To begin with they consecrate even their young hopefuls, like everything else, to ambition. Then if they are in a hurry for the fulfilment of their vows, they drive the unripe schoolboy into the law courts, and thrust eloquence, the noblest of callings, upon children who are still struggling into the world. If they would allow work to go on step by step, so that bookish boys were steeped in diligent reading, their minds formed by wise sayings, their pens relentless in tracking down the right word, their ears giving a long hearing to pieces they wished to imitate, and if they would convince themselves that what took a boy’s fancy was never fine; then the grand old style of oratory would have its full force and splendour. As it is, the boy wastes his time at school, and the young man is a laughing-stock in the courts. Worse than that, they will not admit when they are old the errors they have once imbibed at school.

5 But pray do not think that I impugn Lucilius’s rhyme about modesty. I will myself put my own views in a poem:

If any man seeks for success in stern art and applies his mind to great tasks, let him first perfect his character by the rigid law of frugality. Nor must he care for the lofty frown of the tyrant’s palace, or scheme for suppers with prodigals like a client, or drown the fires of his wit with wine in the company of the wicked, or sit before the stage applauding an actor’s grimaces for a price.

“But whether the fortress of armoured Tritonis smiles upon him, or the land where the Spartan farmer lives, or the home of the Sirens, let him give the years of youth to poetry, and let his fortunate soul drink of the Maeonian fount. Later, when he is full of the learning of the Socratic school, let him loose the reins, and shake the weapons of mighty Demosthenes like a free man. Then let the company of Roman writers pour about him, and, newly unburdened from the music of Greece, steep his soul and transform his taste. Meanwhile, let him withdraw from the courts and suffer his pages to run free, and in secret make ringing strains in swift rhythm; then let him proudly tell tales of feasts, and wars recorded in fierce chant, and lofty words such as undaunted Cicero uttered. Gird up thy soul for these noble ends; so shalt thou be fully inspired, and shalt pour out words in swelling torrent from a heart the Muses love.”

6 I was listening to him so carefully that I did not notice Ascyltos slipping away. I was pacing the gardens in the heat of our conversation, when a great crowd of students came out into the porch, apparently from some master whose extemporary harangue had followed Agamemnon’s discourse. So while the young men were laughing at his epigrams, and denouncing the tendency of his style as a whole, I took occasion to steal away and began hurriedly to look for Ascyltos. But I did not remember the road accurately, and I did not know where our lodgings were. So wherever I went, I kept coming back to the same spot, till I was tired out with walking, and dripping with sweat.

7 At last I went up to an old woman who was selling country vegetables and said, “Please, mother, do you happen to know where I live?”’ She was charmed with such a polite fool. “Of course I do,” she said, and got up and began to lead the way. I thought her a prophetess. . . ., and when we had got into an obscure quarter the obliging old lady pushed back a patchwork curtain and said, “This should be your house.” I was saying that I did not rememberit, when I noticed some menand naked women walking cautiously about among placards of price. Too late, too late I realized that I had been taken into a bawdy-house. I cursed the cunning old woman, and covered my head, and began to run through the brothel to another part, when just at the entrance Ascyltos met me, as tired as I was, and half-dead. It looked as though the same old lady had brought him there. I hailed him with a laugh, and asked him what he was doing in such an unpleasant spot.

8 He mopped himself with his hands and said, “If you only knew what has happened to me.” “What is it?” I said. “Well,” he said, on the point of fainting, “I was wandering all over the town without finding where I had left my lodgings, when a respectable person came up to me and very kindly offered to direct me. He took me round a number of dark turnings and brought me out here, and then began to offer me money and solicit me. A woman got threepence out of me for a room, and he had already seized me. The worst would have happened if I had not been stronger than he.”’ . . . .

Every one in the place seemed to be drunk on aphrodisiacs . . . but our united forces defied our assailant. . . .

9 I dimly saw Giton standing on the kerb of the road in the dark, and hurried towards him. . . . I was asking my brother whether he had got ready anything for us to eat, when the boy sat down at the head of the bed, and began to cry and rub away the tears with his thumb. My brother’s looks made me uneasy, and I asked what had happened. The boy was unwilling to tell, but I added threats to entreaties, and at last he said, “That brother or friend of yours ran into our lodgings a little while ago and began to offer me violence. I shouted out, and he drew his sword and said, ‘If you are a Lucretia, you have found your Tarquin.’”

When I heard this I shook my fist in Ascyltos’s face. “What have you to say?” I cried, “You dirty fellow whose very breath is unclean?” Ascyltos first pretended to be shocked, and then made a great show of fight, and roared out much more loudly: “Hold your tongue, you filthy prizefighter. You were kicked out of the ring in disgrace. Be quiet, Jack Stab-inthe-dark. You never could face a clean woman in your best days.

10 I was the same kind of brother to you in the garden, as this boy is now in the lodgings.” “You sneaked away from the master’s talk,” I said.

Well, you fool, what do you expect? I was perishing of hunger. ‘Was I to go on listening to his views, all broken bottles and interpretation of dreams? By God, you are far worse than I am, flattering a poet to get asked out to dinner.”

Then our sordid quarrelling ended in a shout of laughter, and we retired afterwards more peaceably for what remained to be done. .

But his insult came into my head again. “Ascyltos,’ I said, “I am sure we cannot agree. We will divide our luggage, and try to defeat our poverty by our own earnings. You are a scholar, and so am I. Besides, I will promise not to stand in the way of your success. Otherwise twenty things a day will bring us into opposition, and spread scandal about us all over the town.” Ascyltos acquiesced, and said, “But as we are engaged to supper to-night like a couple of students, do not let us waste the evening. I shall be pleased to look out for new lodgings and a new brother to-morrow?” “Waiting for one’s pleasures is weary work,” I replied. . . .