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?

You didn’t make me his chaperon.” This was the defence of philosophy that the old man gave. Would you too agree, Hermotimus, that it is enough that we study philosophy in order to keep out of mischief? Or was it with other hopes that we thought it worth while to study philosophy in the first place, not so that in our goings and comings we should present a fairer face than the layman? Why do you not answer this as well?

Only because I could almost weep. Your argument is true, and I’m driven to this: I’m in anguish at the time I’ve wasted like a fool, and at all the money I’ve paid for my labours, too. I was drunk and now I am sober and am seeing just what it was that I loved and what I have gone through for it.

Why tears, honest friend? There’s a deal of sense, I think, in that fable of Aesop’s where a man sits on the shore by the water’s edge to count the waves. When he fails he is hurt and takes it badly, until the Fox comes up to him and says: “Why are you worrying about those that have gone, my noble sir? Let them go and begin your count from here.” And so with you; since that is your view, you will do better in the future to make up your mind to join in the common life. Share in the city life of everyday, and give up your hopes of the strange and puffed-up. You will not be ashamed, if you are wise, to learn afresh in your old age and make a change for the better.

In all that I have said, my dear friend, do not think that I have directed my argument against the Stoa, or that I have some special hatred for the Stoics. No, it applied to all alike. I should have said the same to you if you had chosen the school of Plato or Aristotle and condemned the rest without a trial. As it is, you have given pride of place to the Stoics, and so the argument has seemed to be directed against the Stoa, although it had no particular grudge against it.

You are right. I am going away to do just that—to make a change—of dress as well. You will soon see me without this big, shaggy beard. I shall not punish my daily life, but all will be liberty and freedom. Perhaps I shall even put on purple, to show everybody that I’ve no part in that nonsense now. Could I but spew out all that I have heard from them! I can tell you that I would not flinch from drinking hellebore, for the opposite reason to Chrysippus—to remember their doctrines no more. So it is no small favour that I owe you, Lycinus: you came and pulled me out when I was being carried away by a rough, turbid torrent, giving myself to it and going with the stream. You were a “God from the machine,” as in the play. I think I might well shave my head like free men who are saved from shipwreck, to give thanks for salvation today now that I have had so heavy a mist shaken off my eyes. If in the future I ever meet a philosopher while I am walking on the road, even by chance, I will turn round and get out of his way as if he were a mad dog.