Somnium sive vita Luciani

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

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

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,

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

"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

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,

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,

"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

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

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.