I will free you from your uncertainty. Trust those who have made the journey before, Lycinus, and you cannot go wrong.

Whom do you mean? Which road did they go? Which of the guides did they follow? The same uncertainty appears to us in another guise shifting from events to persons.

What do you mean?

That the man who took Plato’s path and had him for travelling-companion will obviously praise Plato’s route, and so with Epicurus’s and the rest and you with yours. What about it, Hermotimus? Is that not so?

Of course.

Then you have not freed me from my uncertainty. I am just as much in the dark which of the travellers to trust. For I see that each of them and the guide himself have tried only one way, and he praises that one and says that it alone leads to the city. But I cannot know whether he is speaking the truth. That he has reached some destination and has seen some city or other, I will perhaps grant him. But whether he has seen the one he should have seen (that in which you and I want to live) or whether, when he should have gone to Corinth, he has arrived at Babylon and thinks he has seen Corinth, I still do not know—certainly not everyone who has seen a city has seen Corinth, if Corinth is not the only city. What particularly makes me uncertain is this—my knowing that only one road can possibly be the right one. Only one road is the Corinth road, and the other roads lead anywhere except to Corinth, unless a man is so much out of his wits as to think that both the road to the Hyperboreans and the road to India lead to Corinth.

How could that be, Lycinus? Different roads lead to different places.

Well then, my dear Hermotimus, no little deliberation is needed when we choose roads and guides, and we shall not act according to the saying and go off wherever our feet take us; in that way we shall be going off on the road to Babylon or Bactra instead of the road to Corinth without realising it. It is by no means sound to trust to fortune and hope we shall perhaps take the best road, if we start out on one or the other without enquiry. It is possible for even that to happen, and perhaps at some period of time’s long history it has already happened; but in a matter of such importance I think we ought not to run such a reckless risk or confine hope entirely within narrow bounds, ready as the proverb says to sail the Aegean or Ionian seas on a mat; then we should have no right to accuse fortune, if with her arrows and spears she did not altogether hit the one thing that is true among the many that are not. Even Homer’s archer did not succeed in that—when he should have shot the dove he cut the string; Teucer I think it was. Homer, Il. xxiii 867. No, there was much more reason to expect one of the many others to be wounded and fall foul of the arrow than that particular one out of them all. The risk is not slight, if in ignorance we rush into one of the by-ways instead of the straight route in the hope that fortune will make a better choice on our behalf—I think you see that. For still to turn round and come back again in safety is no easy matter once a man casts off his mooring lines and surrenders himself to the wind; he must be tossed about on the sea, usually sick and frightened and with a bad head from the swell, whereas he ought in the first place, before he sailed out, to have climbed up to some look-out and seen whether the wind was fair and favourable for those who wanted to sail over to Corinth, and indeed he ought to have selected the very best navigator and a sound ship able to withstand such a heavy sea.