28
Leave the books alone and attend to your own affairs exclusively. Yet you ought not to do that, either; you ought to be put to shame by Phaedra in Euripides, who is indignant at women and says: They shudder not at their accomplice, night, Nor chamber-walls, for fear they find a voice. Hippolytus417 f. But if you have made up your mind to cleave to the same infirmity at all costs, go ahead: buy books, keep them at home under lock and key, and enjoy the fame of your treasures—that is enough for you. But never lay hands on them or read them or sully with your tongue the prose and poetry of the ancients, that has done you no harm.
28
I know that in all this I am wasting words, and, as the proverb has it, trying to scrub an Ethiop white. You will buy them and make no use of them and get yourself laughed at by men of learning who are satisfied with the gain that they derive, not from the beauty of books or their expensiveness, but from the language and thought of their author.
