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O mortal men! Why do we assert that virtue is unteachable, and thus make it non-existent? For if learning begets virtue, the prevention of learning destroys it. Yet truly, as Plato Cleitophon, 407 c; Cf.Moralia, 534 f. says, just because a foot of verse is out of measure with the lyre and fails to harmonize with it, brother does not war with brother, nor does friend quarrel with friend, nor do states conceive hatred toward other states and wreak upon each other the most extreme injuries and suffer them as well; nor can anyone say that civil strife has ever broken out in a state over a question of accent, as, for instance, whether we should read Telchines or Telchines,The latter, according to Herodianus Technicus, i. p. 17 (ed. Lentz). nor that a quarrel has ever arisen in a household between husband and wife as to which is the warp and which the woof. Yet, for all that, no one, unless he has received instruction, would attempt to handle a loom or a book or a lyre, though he would suffer no great harm if he did so, but he is merely afraid of becoming ridiculous (for, as HeracleitusDiels, Frag. d. Vorsokratiker 5, i. p. 172, Frag. 95; the fragment is given more fully in Moralia, 644 f and in a different form in Frag. 1 of That Women Also Should be Educated (Bernardakis, vol. vii. p. 125). says, It is better to conceal ignorance); but everyone thinks that without instruction he will handle successfully a home, a marriage, a commonwealth, a magistracy - though he has not learned how to get along with wife, or servant, or fellow-citizen, or subject, or ruler!
