7
That is how it seems to you at first; and then, after a little, you see two roads. To be more exact, one of them is but a path, narrow, briery, and rough, promising great thirstiness and sweat; Hesiod has been beforehand with us and has already described it very carefully, so that I shall not need to do so.Works and Days, 286-292. The other, however, is level, flowery, and wellwatered, just as I described it a moment ago, not to detain you by saying the same things over and over when you might even now be a speaker.
8
But I must add at least this much, that the rough, steep road used not to have many tracks of wayfarers, and whatever tracks there were, were very old. I myself, unlucky dog, got up by that road and did all that hard work without any need; but as the other was level and had no windings at all, I could see from a distance what it was like without having travelled it myself. You see, being still young, I could not discern what was better, but believed that poetEpicharmus. to be telling the truth when he said that blessings were engendered of toil.The thought is expressed in Works and Days, 289: “The immortal gods have put sweat before virtue;” but Lucian’s wording is closer to the famous line of E icharmus quoted (just after the passage from Hesiod) in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, 2, 1, 20: “’Tis at the price of toil that the gods sell us all their blessings.” That was not so, however; at all events, I notice that most people are accorded greater returns without any labour, through their felicitous choice of words and ways.
