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.

That is the better way, Lycinus, by far. Yet I know that if you made a round tour of them all you would find no others who were better pilots or more experienced navigators than the Stoics; and, if you want to reach Corinth some day, you will follow them, treading the tracks of Chrysippus and Zeno. No other way is possible.

Do you see, Hermotimus, how universal is that assertion you have made? Plato’s fellow-traveller, Epicurus’s follower, and the rest of them, would say the same, every one of them, that I could not go to Corinth without his company. So I must either believe them all alike (which is ridiculous) or disbelieve them all alike. The latter is by far the safest course until we discover the true one.

Come now, suppose that I, just as I am, still ignorant which of them all has the truth, should choose your way, putting my trust in you, a friend, but one who knows only the way of the Stoics and has travelled by this road alone; then suppose one of the gods brought Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, and the rest, back to life, and they stood round me and put questions to me, or even, by Zeus, brought me into court and sued me each and every one of them for maltreatment, saying: “My good Lycinus, what was the matter with you? Who persuaded you to give Chrysippus and Zeno preference over us, who are older by far than they? They were born only yesterday, or the day before, and you have given us no chance to speak, and you have put nothing of what we say to the test.” Supposing they said this, how could I answer them? Or will it be enough if I say that I was persuaded by Hermotimus, a friend of mine? Their answer I know would be: “We, Lycinus, do not know this Hermotimus, whoever he is, and he does not know us either. So you had no right to condemn us all and give a judgment in default against us through relying on a man who is acquainted with only one way in philosophy, and even that perhaps not fully. Lawgivers, Lycinus, do not instruct judges to adopt this procedure, or to give one party a hearing and not allow the other to speak on its own behalf what it thinks is to its own advantage. No, they say that both sides must be given an equal hearing, so that by comparing the opposing arguments they may be assisted in discovering the true and the false, and if they do not adopt this procedure the law allows an appeal to another court.”

Such or something like it is the argument they would use. Or one of them perhaps would even put an additional question to me: “Tell me this, Lycinus: suppose an Ethiopian, a man who had never seen other men like us, because he had never been abroad at all, should state and assert in some assembly of the Ethiopians that nowhere in the world were there any men white or yellow or of any other colour than black, would he be believed by them? Or would one of the older Ethiopians say to him: ‘Come now, you are very bold. How do you know this? You have never left us to go anywhere else, and indeed you have never seen what things are like among other peoples?’” I for my part would say that the old man had asked a fair question. Or what do you advise, Hermotimus?

The fellow will certainly go on and say to me something like this: “Let us make a comparison, Lycinus, and posit a man who knows only the Stoic tenets, like this friend of yours, Hermotimus; he has never gone abroad to Plato’s country or stayed with Epicurus or in short with anyone else. Now, if he said that there was nothing in these many lands as beautiful or as true as the tenets and assertions of Stoicism, would you not with good reason think him bold in giving his opinion on all, and that when he knows only one, and has never put one foot outside Ethiopia?” What answer do you think I should give him?

This very true one, of course: that we do learn Stoicism very thoroughly indeed, since we think fit to pursue this branch of philosophy, but we are not unacquainted with what the others say. For our teacher explains all that to us as he goes along, and knocks it down with his own comments.