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As you have often bought Homer among your other books, have someone take the second book of his Iliad and read it to you. Do not bother about the rest of the book, for none of it applies to you; but he has a description of a man making a speech, an utterly ridiculous fellow, warped and deformed in body.Iliad2,212. Now then, if that man, Thersites, should get the armour of Achilles, do you suppose that he would thereby at once become both handsome and strong; that he would leap the river, redden its stream with Trojan gore, and kill Hector—yes, and before Hector, kill Lycaon and Asteropaeus—when he cannot even carry the “ash tree” on his shoulders?Cf, Iliad 19, 387 fi You will hardly say so. No, he would make himself a laughing-stock, limping under the shield, falling on his face beneath the weight of it, showing those squint eyes of his under the helmet every time he looked up, making the corselet buckle up with the hump on his back, trailing the greaves on the ground —disgracing, in short, both the maker of the arms and their proper owner. Do not you see that the same thing happens in your case, when the roll that you hold in your hands is very beautiful, with a slipcover of purple vellum and a gilt knob, but in reading it you barbarize its language, spoil its beauty and warp its meaning? Men of learning laugh at you, while the toadies who live with you praise you —and they themselves for the most part turn to one another and laugh!
