Kitap 3
23
While you are in this bad disposition, then, and gaping after applauders, and counting your hearers, can you be of benefit to others? To-day I had many more hearers. Yes, many; we think there were five hundred. You say nothing; estimate them at a thousand. Dion never had so great an audience. How should he? And they have a fine taste for discourses. What is excellent, sir, will move even a stone. Here is the language of a philosopher! Here is the disposition of one who is to be beneficial to mankind! Here is the man, attentive to discourses, who has read the works of the Socratic philosophers, as such; not as if they were the writings of orators, like Lysias and Isocrates! have often wondered by what arguments—These words are the beginning of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates; and it was a debate among the minute critics, whether argument or arguments was the proper reading.—C. No; By what argument; that is the more perfectly accurate expression. Is this to have read them any otherwise than as you read little pieces of poetry? If you read them as you ought, you would not dwell on such trifles, but would rather consider such a passage as this: Anytus and Melitus may kill, but they cannot hurt me. And am always so disposed as to defer to none of my friends, but to that reason which, after examination, appears to me to be the best.Plato, Apology, 18; Crito, 6.—H. Hence, whoever heard Socrates say, know, or teach anything? But he sent different people to different instructors; they came to him, desiring to be introduced to the philosophers; and he took them and introduced them. No; but [you think] as he accompanied them he used to give them such advice as this: Hear me discourse to-day at the house of Quadratus. Why should I hear you? Have you a mind to show me how finely you put words together, sir? And what good does that do you? But praise me. What do you mean by praising you? Say, Incomparable! prodigious! Well; I do say it. But if praise be that which the philosophers call by the appellation of good, what have I to praise you for? If it be good to speak well, teach me, and I will praise you. What, then; ought these things to be heard without pleasure? By no means. I do not hear even a harper without pleasure; but am I therefore to devote myself to playing upon the harp? Hear what Socrates says to his judges: It would not be decent for me to appear before you, at this age, composing speeches like a boy.Plato, Apology, 1.—H. Like a boy, he says. For it is, without doubt, a pretty accomplishment to select words and place them together, and then to read or speak them gracefully in public; and in the midst of the discourse to observe that he vows by all that is good, there are but few capable of these things. But does a philosopher apply to people to hear him? Does he not attract those who are fitted to receive benefit from him, in the same manner as the sun or their necessary food does? What physician applies to anybody to be cured by him? (Though now indeed I hear that the physicians at Rome apply for patients; but in my time they were applied to.) I apply to you to come and hear that you are in a bad way, and that you take care of everything but what you ought; that you know not what is good or evil, and are unfortunate and unhappy. A fine application! And yet, unless the discourse of a philosopher has this effect, both that and the speaker are lifeless.
