22
LYCINUS That I will, Sopolis, since you have cleared the way for me, and the advice which will follow is to your address, Lexiphanes. If you really desire to be genuinely praised for style and to have a great name among the public, avoid and shun all this sort of thing. After beginning with the best poets and reading them under tutors, pass to the orators, and when you have become familiar with their diction, go over in due time to Thucydides and Plato—but only after you have first disciplined yourself thoroughly in attractive comedy and sober tragedy. When you have garnered all that is fairest from these sources, you will be a personality in letters. Before, you had unconsciously become like the images shaped for the market by the modellers of figurines, coloured with red and blue on the surface, but clay on the inside, and very fragile.
23
If you do this, abiding for a time the reproach of illiteracy and feeling no shame to mend your knowledge, you will address the public confidently and will not be laughed at as you are now, or talked about in an uncomplimentary manner by our best people, who dub you “the Greek” and “the Athenian” when you do not deserve to be numbered even among the most intelligible of barbarians. Before all else, however, please remember not to imitate the most worthless productions of the Sophists who lived only a little before our own time, or to go nibbling at that stuff as you do now —tread that sort of thing underfoot and copy the ancient models only. And do not let yourself be enticed by the wind-flowers of speech, but follow the custom of the athletes and habituate yourself to solid nourishment. Above all, sacrifice to the Graces and to Clearness; you are very remote from them at present!
24
As for vanity, boastfulness and malice, blustering and bawling, away with them, and with girding at the works of all others and thinking that you yourself will be first if you carp at the achievements of everyone else.
