When I had just left school, and was beginning to grow up, my father consulted with his friends as to what further training he should give me. The majority decided against a liberal education; it would demand, they said, great labor, much time, considerable expense, and brilliant good-luck; whereas our means were small and called for some speedy succor. Now, if I should learn one of the industrial arts, I would, in the first place, be immediately able to support myself by my trade, and live no longer at my father's expense, great boy that I was. And in a short time I could gladden his heart by bringing home my earnings every day.

Accordingly, this question was made the theme of a second deliberation: What trade is the best and the easiest to learn, is becoming to a free citizen, and calls for least expense in tools while it furnishes a sufficient income? Each member of the council recommended a different trade, according to his theory or experience. But my father looked towards my uncle-for my mother's brother was there, reputed to be a master of the statuary's art—and said, “It would be unseemly if any other craft should carry the day when you are present. So take him" (pointing to me), “receive him in charge, and teach him to be a good stone-worker and mason and sculptor. He has ability to become even this last, and a natural skill in that direction, as you know." The ground of his opinion was my childish play at modelling in wax. Whenever the school-masters let me go, I would fall to scraping the wax from my writing-tablets and fashioning cows and horses, and, upon my word, even men, too, and with some truth to nature--at least my father thought so. The school-masters used to flog me for them; but now this very thing won me praise for my talents, and great hopes that I would speedily master my trade were based on my prowess in modelling.

As soon as a propitious day was settled on for beginning my trade, I was handed over to my uncle, with no very strong objection on my part, for it seemed to me to offer a delightful form of play and a chance to cut a figure before my mates, if I should be seen carving gods and making little statues for myself and my chosen favorites. The first thing I did was what might have been expected of a beginner. My uncle gave me a chisel of some sort and bade me work gently at a flat block that lay in the middle of the room, addressing me in the words of the proverb: "Well begun is half done." But in my ignorance I bore down too hard and broke the block. My uncle, in a fury, caught up a stick that lay to his hand and struck at my devoted head in no gentle or persuasive fashion, so that tears were my introduction to art.

I ran away from him and came home, bawling all the way with streaming eyes, and I related the story of the stick and denounced what I called my uncle's brutality, adding that he treated me thus from jealousy lest I should surpass him in his art. My mother was greatly incensed, and called her brother all manner of hard names, and when night came I fell asleep, still in tears, and my mind was busy all night long.

Now, up to this point all that I have told is the laughable history of a hobbledehoy; but listen, my friends, to a sequel no longer contemptible, but calling for close attention. For, to quote Homer, The gods sent me a vision in my sleep through the ambrosial night, so vivid that it fell in nowise short of reality. To this day, after so great a lapse of time, the forms I saw remain in my eyes and the sounds I heard ring in my ears, and this shows how distinct it all was.

Two women laid hold of me, each taking a hand and dragging me towards herself with great energy and strength; indeed, they almost tore me asunder in their contention. For first one of them would prevail and all but get possession of me, and then I would be plucked away again by her rival. And they screamed in concert, one of them crying that it was her property she wished to get hold of, and the other that the first was vainly striving for what did not belong to her. This first woman was masculine and workmanlike, with rough hair and callous hands. Her garments were girded up and full of marble chips, just as my uncle's were wont to be when he was polishing stone. But the other was of a very fair countenance, and her figure was shapely and her clothing well-ordered. Now at last they left it to me to decide which of them I would fain join. And first the harsh, man-like one spoke :

"My child," she said, "I am the Art of Stonecutting, which you began yesterday to learn, friendly to you and a relative by blood, inasmuch as your grandfather"—naming my mother's father-" was a stone-cutter, and your two uncles, and both of them are very well thought of on my account. If you are willing to hold aloof from this woman's folly and nonsense "-pointing to her rival" and to come and dwell with me, you will in the first place be generously nurtured and have strong shoulders, and you will be a stranger to all jealousy; you will never leave your fatherland and family to go out into foreign countries, and it is not for mere words that you will win praise from every one.

Do not be repelled by my shabby exterior and my soiled garments, for it was after beginning thus that the great Pheidias, too, showed the world his Zeus, and Polykleitos fashioned his Hera, and Myron won praise and Praxiteles wonder. Now these men are worshipped with the gods. If, then, you should become one of these, you, too, would certainly be famous throughout the world. You will make your father, too, an object of envy, and turn all eyes towards the land that bore you." Thus, and at even greater length, spoke Handicraft, sprinkling her speech from end to end with stammering and rusticities in her eager argument and effort to persuade me. But I can no longer call it to mind, for most of it has already escaped my memory. When she now had made an end, the other began, somewhat in this way:

"I, my child, am Culture, an acquaintance and familiar of yours already, although you have not yet made full trial of me. This person has told you in advance what you will gain, forsooth, by becoming a stone-cutter; namely, that you will be nothing but a workman, toiling with your body, on which all your hopes of a livelihood will depend. You will be yourself obscure; your gains will be small and sordid, your mind dwarfed, your progress despicable. Your friends will not seek you out, your enemies will not fear you, your townsfolk will not envy you. You will be simply an artisan, one of the undistinguished crowd, tripping over every obstacle, and the obedient servant of every one capable of expressing himself, while you live the life of a dumb beast, a treasure-trove for any stronger man than you. And even if you should become a Pheidias or a Polykleitos, and should produce many marvellous works, it is your art that the world will praise, and not one of those who behold them, if he has sense, would pray to become like you. For they will deem you just what you are, a mechanic, an artisan, living by the sweat of your brow.

But if you will hearken to me, I will display before you, to begin with, many works and wondrous doings of men of old, and I will report their sayings to you and make you master, so to speak, of all learning. I will adorn your soul, which is the dominant power within you, with many graces to wit, self-control, righteousness, reverence, gentleness, equity, wisdom, strength, love of beauty, taste for the worthiest pursuits. For these are the things that really make the spotless beauty of the soul. No sequence of events in the past or present will escape you; nay, by my help you will behold even the future, and I will teach you erelong the nature of the whole universe, the divine as well as the human.

You who are now poor, the son of a nobody, meditating the adoption of such an ignoble craft, shall be shortly felicitated and envied by the world; you shall have honor and praise and glory among the noblest; you shall be clad like this -here she indicated her own garments, which were splendid in the extreme-" and you shall be deemed worthy of office and eminence. When you go abroad you will not be unknown and obscure in a foreign land. I will set such marks upon you that every one who sees you will nudge his neighbor and point you out with his finger, saying, 'That is he.'

"If any serious thing befall your friends, or even the state at large, all will look to you. When you chance to say anything the crowd will listen open-mouthed and marvel at you, and envy your gift and your father's good-fortune. And this immortality which they say is sometimes bestowed on men I will store up for you. For even when you yourself perish from the world you will never cease from companionship with the cultured and conversation with the noblest. You know whose son Demosthenes was, and yet I made him the man he was. You know that Aischines' mother was a dancer, and yet Philip paid court to him for my sake. Sokrates himself was brought up under the eye of this Art of Stonecutting, but you hear how his praises are sung on all sides from the moment when he perceived the better part and ran away from her and deserted to me.

But if you reject such men as these, and brilliant achievements and ennobling words and a seemly guise, and honor and glory and fame and distinction, and political power and office, and respect as an orator and envy as a wit, you will wear a dirty shirt and take on the look of a slave; your hands will be full of crowbars and gravers and chisels and picks; you will stoop over your work, grovelling, prostrate, and altogether stunted; you will never look up or fix your thoughts on any manly, liberal theme; and you will ponder how to make your works symmetrical and well-shaped, but for your own symmetry and shapeliness you will take no care at all, making yourself of less worth than your stones."

While she was still speaking thus, and without waiting to hear her to the end, I seemed to spring up and leave the ugly woman in laborer's guise, and cross over to Culture right joyfully, particularly since that stick came into my head, and how the other had caused me a beating only yesterday on my first acquaintance with her. When she was deserted she at first went into a passion, smiting her hands together and grinding her teeth; but finally she grew rigid and turned to stone, as we hear Niobe did. Now even if this experience of her's seems extraordinary, do not disbelieve it, for dreams work wonders.

The other woman looked at me and said, "Now I will repay you for the justice of your judgment. Come forthwith and mount this car "-pointing to a car drawn by winged horses resembling Pegasus -"so that you may see what you would have missed knowing if you had not followed me." Thereupon I mounted the car, and she drove; and borne aloft I beheld, from the east to the west, cities and nations and peoples, and I sowed something upon the earth like Triptolemos. However, what it was that I sowed I do not now remember, but only this, that the people looked up at me from beneath and praised me, and sped me on my way wherever I passed in my flight.

When she had shown these things to me, and me to these admiring people, she brought me down again, no longer dressed as I was when I flew away, but seeming to myself to arrive like a grandee born to the purple. She came upon my father himself, who was standing by and waiting for me, showed him my clothes and me, in what state I came, and reminded him, too, of the decision they had come near making about me. These are the things that I remember seeing when hardly more than a boy, I think, and still terrified at the thought of a flogging.

But in the midst of my narrative some one says, "Dear me, how tedious and long-winded his dream is." Or another interrupts with, "This is a mid-winter night's dream, when the nights are longest; or perhaps he is a three-night man himself, like Hercules. How did it enter his head to spin out this nonsense for us and recall the nights of his childhood and old, decrepit dreams, served up with the chill of death on them and stale already? Does he take us, forsooth, for interpreters of dreams?" No, my friend, and neither did Xenophon relate his dream when he thought his father's house was afire and the rest of it—you know his dream -as a bit of acting, nor was he consciously talking nonsense, seeing that he was in the midst of warfare and distress and surrounded by enemies.

No, his narrative had a useful purpose, and so I, too, have related this dream to you to the end that young men may turn to the better part and lay hold of culture, particularly those who are tempted by poverty to play truant and sink to the worse life, to the destruction of what may have been noble natures. I am sure that these will be fortified by hearing my story, and will take me for a sufficient example if they bear in mind. the origin whence I set forth after the higher life, and that my desire was for culture, so that I never lost heart in my old poverty, and, lastly, the guise in which I have come to you, certainly, to say the least of it, not less famous than any of the statuaries.