16
For what expectation do you base upon your books that you are always unrolling them and rolling them up, glueing them, trimming them, smearing them with saffron and oil of cedar, putting slip-covers on them, and fitting them with knobs, just as if you were going to derive some profit from them? Ah yes, already you have been improved beyond measure by their purchase, when you talk as you do—but no, you are more dumb than any fish!—and live in a way that cannot even be mentioned with decency, and have incurred everybody’s savage hatred? as the phrase goes, for your beastliness! If books made men like that, they ought to be given as wide a berth as possible.
17
Two things can be acquired from the ancients, the ability to speak and to act as one ought, by emulating the best models and shunning the worst; and when a man clearly fails to benefit from them either in the one way or in the other, what else is he doing but buying haunts for mice and lodgings for worms, and excuses to thrash his servants for negligence?
18
Furthermore, would it not be discreditable if someone, on seeing you with a book in your hand(youalways have one, no matter what), should ask what orator or historian or poet it was by, and you, knowing from the title, should easily answer that question; and if then—for such topics often spin themselves out to some length in conversation—he should either commend or criticise something in its contents, and you should be at a loss and have nothing to say? Would you not then pray for the earth to open and swallow you for getting yourself into trouble like Bellerophon by carrying your book about?The letter that Bellerophon carried to the King of Lycia contained a request that he be put to death: Iliad 6, 155-195.
