During this show of temper, the young man’s uncle came up to him. He was a countryman—a mere layman to you philosophers. “Good heavens! Stop saying you’ve been cheated of a fortune because we bought some pretty talk from you and haven’t paid you the balance yet. In any case you still have what you sold to us: your capital of knowledge is not reduced. And what about my hopes in sending the young man to you in the first place? You’ve made him no better—he carried off my neighbour Echecrates’ daughter, a virgin, and raped her. He only just missed a summons for assault, but I paid a talent to Echecrates, who is a poor man, in recompense for his crime. The other day he thrashed his mother because she caught him carrying off the wine jar under his coat—his contribution, I suppose, to the wine-feast. As for passion and anger and shamelessness and recklessness and lying, he was far better last year than he is now. Yet I would have liked him to be helped by you in this sort of thing, rather than have all that knowledge which every day at dinner he parades at us, though we’ve no need of it: how a crocodile carried off a young lad, and promised to give him back if his father answered some question or other; or how when it’s day it can’t be night. Sometimes our fine gentleman even makes horns grow out of our heads, he twists our words so. “Have you stopped beating your wife?” is the modern equivalent of the ancient “Have you lost your horns?” We laugh at all this, especially when he stops up his ears and does his practice and says over to himself his ‘states’ and “conditions’ and ‘comprehensions’ and ‘images,’ and a string of other names like these. We hear him say that God is not in heaven but pervades everything—sticks and stones and beasts right down to the meanest. And when his mother asks him why he talks such nonsense, he laughs at her and says: ‘If I learn this “nonsense” properly, there will be nothing to stop me being the only rich man, the only king, and the rest slaves and scum compared with me.’”

This is what the man said. Now hear the philosopher’s reply, Hermotimus, the answer of experience: “If he had not come to me, don’t you think he would have done much worse, and even perhaps have faced the public executioner? As it is, philosophy and his regard for philosophy have put a bit in his mouth, and so he is more moderate and still tolerable. For it brings some shame on him if he shows himself unworthy of that dress and name, things which accompany him and serve as a tutor. So I deserve my pay from you, if not for any improvement I have made, at any rate for what out of respect for philosophy he has not done. Nurses too say as much, that little children must go to school: if they are still too young to learn anything good, at any rate they will be out of mischief while they are there. No, in general I think I have done what I had to do. Come tomorrow and bring along anyone you like who knows our teaching, and you will see how he asks questions and gives answers, how much he has learnt and how many books he has read already on axioms, syllogisms, comprehensions, properties, and all sorts of things. If he has beaten his mother or carried off girls, what is that to me?