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By indicating these things to the young, we shall not allow them to acquire any leaning toward such characters as are mean, but rather an emulation of the better, and a preference for them, if we unhesitatingly award censure to the one class and commendation to the other. It is particularly necessary to do this with tragedies in which plausible and artful words are framed to accompany disreputable and knavish actions. For the statement of Sophocles Nauck, Trag.Graec. Frag., Sophocles, No. 755. is not altogether true when he says: From unfair deed fair word cannot proceed. For, as a fact, he is wont to provide for mean characters and unnatural actions alluring words and humane reasons. And you observe also that his companion-at-arms in the dramatic art has represented Phaedra Presumably in the Hippolytus Veiled; cf. Nauck, Trag.Graec. Frag., Eurip., 491. as preferring the charge against Theseus that it was because of his derelictions that she fell in love with Hippolytus. Of such sort, too, are the frank lines, aimed against Hecuba, which in the Trojan Women Euripides, The Trojan Women, 919. he gives to Helen, who there expresses her feeling that Hecuba ought rather to be the one to suffer punishment because she brought into the world the man who was the cause of Helen’s infidelity. Let the young man not form the habit of regarding any one of these things as witty and adroit, and let him not smile indulgently, either, at such displays of verbal ingenuity, but let him loathe the words of licentiousness even more than its deeds.
