No More Learning

But you will go down to the Academy[556] to run beneath the sacred olives
with some virtuous friend of your own age, your head encircled with the
white reed, enjoying your ease and breathing the perfume of the yew and
of the fresh sprouts of the poplar, rejoicing in the return of springtide
and gladly listening to the gentle rustle of the plane-tree and the elm.
If you devote yourself to practising my precepts, your chest will be
stout, your colour glowing, your shoulders broad, your tongue short, your
hips muscular, but your penis small. But if you follow the fashions of
the day, you will be pallid in hue, have narrow shoulders, a narrow
chest, a long tongue, small hips and a big tool; you will know how to
spin forth long-winded arguments on law. You will be persuaded also to
regard as splendid everything that is shameful and as shameful everything
that is honourable; in a word, you will wallow in debauchery like
Antimachus. [557]

CHORUS. How beautiful, high-souled, brilliant is this wisdom that you
practise! What a sweet odour of honesty is emitted by your discourse!
Happy were those men of other days who lived when you were honoured! And
you, seductive talker, come, find some fresh arguments, for your rival
has done wonders. Bring out against him all the battery of your wit, if
you desire to beat him and not to be laughed out of court.

UNJUST DISCOURSE. At last! I was choking with impatience, I was burning
to upset all his arguments! If I am called the Weaker Reasoning in the
schools, 'tis precisely because I was the first before all others to
discover the means to confute the laws and the decrees of justice. To
invoke solely the weaker arguments and yet triumph is a talent worth more
than a hundred thousand drachmae.
But see how I shall batter down the
sort of education of which he is so proud. Firstly, he forbids you to
bathe in hot water. What grounds have you for condemning hot baths?

JUST DISCOURSE. Because they are baneful and enervate men.

UNJUST DISCOURSE. Enough said! Oh! you poor wrestler! From the very
outset I have seized you and hold you round the middle; you cannot escape
me. Tell me, of all the sons of Zeus, who had the stoutest heart, who
performed the most doughty deeds?

JUST DISCOURSE. None, in my opinion, surpassed Heracles.

UNJUST DISCOURSE. Where have you ever seen cold baths called 'Baths of
Heracles'? [558] And yet who was braver than he?