Not to devour their meat in haste, nor giggle,and yet are men fit to enter into the fellowship of a family, city, married estate, private conversation, or public office, and to manage it without blame, without any previous instruction concerning good behavior in conversation? When one asked Aristippus this question, What, are you everywhere? he laughed and said, I throw away the fare of the waterman, if I am everywhere. And why canst not thou also answer, that the salary given to tutors is thrown [p. 80] away and lost, if none are the better for their discipline and instruction. But, as nurses shape and form the body of a child with their hands, so these masters, when the nurses have done with them, first receive them into their charge, in order to the forming of their manners and directing their steps into the first tracks of virtue. To which purpose the Lacedaemonian, that was asked what good he did to the child of whom he had the charge, answered well: I make good and honest things pleasant to children. These masters also teach them to bend down their heads as they go along, to touch salt fish with one finger only, but fresh fish, bread, and flesh with two; thus to scratch themselves, and thus to tuck up their garments.
Nor awkwardly their feet across to wriggle,
2
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Why do we, by asserting that virtue is not to be taught,
make it a thing that does not at all exist? For if by its
[p. 79]
being learned it is produced, he that hinders its being learned
destroys it. And now, as Plato1 says, we never heard that
because of a blunder in metre in a lyric song, therefore
one brother made war against another, nor that it put friends
at variance, nor that cities hereupon were at such enmity
that they did to one another and suffered one from another
the extremest injuries. Nor can any one tell us of a sedition raised in a city about the right accenting or pronouncing of a word,—as whether we are to say Τελχῖνας or
Τέλχινας,—nor that a difference arose in a family betwixt
man and wife about the woof and the warp in cloth. Yet
none will go about to weave in a loom or to handle a book
or a harp, unless he has first been taught, though no great
harm would follow if he did, but only the fear of making
himself ridiculous (for, as Heraclitus says, it is a piece of
discretion to conceal one's ignorance); and yet a man without instruction presumes himself able to order a family, a
wife, or a commonwealth, and to govern very well. Diogenes, seeing a youth devouring his victuals too greedily,
gave his tutor a box on the ear, and that deservedly, as
judging it the fault of him that had not taught, not of him
that had not learned better manners. And what? is it necessary to begin to learn from a boy how to eat and drink handsomely in company, as Aristophanes expresses it,—
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