Fugitivi

I followed close behind them. On my first arrival, the Greeks received me without enthusiasm: they did not, however, wholly reject my advances; by slow degrees I gained over seven men to be my companions and disciples, and Samos, Ephesus, and Abdera,[*](Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Democritus.) each added one to the little company.

And then there sprang up—I scarce know how—the tribe of sophists: men who had but little of my spirit, yet were not wholly alien to me; a motley Centaur breed, in whom vanity and

My followers would have restrained them, and exposed their errors: but they grew angry, and conspired against them, and in the end brought them under the power of the law, which condemned them to drink of hemlock. Doubttess I should have done well to renounce humanity there and then, and take my flight: but Antisthenes and Diogenes, and after them Crates, and our friend Menippus, prevailed upon me to tarry yet a little longer. Would that I had never yielded!' I should have been spared much pain in the sequel.

Zeus But, my dear, you are merely giving way to your feelings, instead of telling me what your wrongs were.

Philosophy Then hear them, father. There is a vile race upon the earth, composed for the most part of serfs and menials, creatures whose occupations have never suffered them to become acquainted with philosophy; whose earliest years have been spent in the drudgery of the fields, in learning those base arts for which they are most fitted—the fuller’s trade, the joiner’s, the cobbler’s—or in carding wool, that housewives may have ease in their spinning, and the thread be fit for warp and woof, Thus employed, they knew not in their youth so much as the name of Philosophy. But they had no sooner reached manhood, than they perceived the respect paid to my followers; how men submitted to their blunt speech, valued their advice, deferred to their judgement, and cowered beneath their censure; all this they saw, and held that here was a life for a king.

The learning, indeed, that befits a philosopher would have taken them long to acquire, if it was not utterly out of their reach. On the other hand, their own miserly handicrafts barely rewarded their toil with a sufficiency. To some, too, servitude was in itself an oppression: they knew it, in fact, for the intolerable thing it is. But they bethought them that there was still one chance left; their sheet-anchor, as sailors say, They took refuge with my lady Folly, called in the assistance of Boldness, Ignorance, and Impudence, ever their untiring coadjutors, and provided themselves with a stock of bran-new invectives; these they have ever ready on their tongues; ’tis their sole equipment; noble provision, is it not, for a philosopher? Nothing could be more plausible than the philosophic disguise they now assume, reminding one of the fabled ass of Cyme, in Aesop, who clothed himself in a lion’s skin, and, stoutly braying, sought to play the lion’s part; the beast, I doubt not, had his adherents.