Discourses - Book III   

used to send different people to different teachers. Therefore they
used to come to him and ask to be introduced to philosophy by him; and
he would take them and recommend them. Not so; but as he accompanied
them he would say, "Hear me to-day discoursing in the house of
Quadratus." Why should I hear you? Do you wish to show me that you put
words together cleverly? You put them together, man; and what good
will it do you? "But only praise me." What do you mean by praising?
"Say to me, "Admirable, wonderful." Well, I say so. But if that is
praise whatever it is which philosophers mean by the name of good,
what have I to praise in you? If it is good to speak well, teach me,
and will praise you. "What then? ought a man to listen to such
things without pleasure?" I hope not. For my part I do not listen even
to a lute-player without pleasure. Must I then for this reason stand
and play the lute? Hear what Socrates says, "Nor would it be seemly
for a man of my age, like a young man composing addresses, to appear
before you." "Like a young man," he says. For in truth this small
art is an elegant thing, to select words, and to put them together,
and to come forward and gracefully to read them or to speak, and while
he is reading to say, "There are not many who can do these things, I
swear by all that you value."
Does a philosopher invite people to hear him? As the sun himself
draws men to him, or as food does, does not the philosopher also
draw to him those who will receive benefit? What physician invites a
man to be treated by him? Indeed I now hear that even the physicians
in Rome do invite patients, but when I lived there, the physicians
were invited. "I invite you to come and hear that things are in a
bad way for you, and that you are taking care of everything except
that of which you ought to take care, and that you are ignorant of the
good and the bad and are unfortunate and unhappy." A fine kind of
invitation: and yet if the words of the philosopher do not produce
this effect on you, he is dead, and so is the speaker. Rufus was
used to say: "If you have leisure to praise me, I am speaking to no
purpose." Accordingly he used to speak in such a way that every one of
us who were sitting there supposed that some one had accused him
before Rufus: he so touched on what was doing, he so placed before the
eyes every man's faults.
The philosopher's school, ye men, is a surgery: you ought not to
go out of it with pleasure, but with pain. For you are not in sound
health when you enter: one has dislocated his shoulder, another has an
abscess, a third a fistula, and a fourth a headache. Then do I sit and
utter to you little thoughts and exclamations that you may praise me
and go away, one with his shoulder in the same condition in which he
entered, another with his head still aching, and a third with his
fistula or his abscess just as they were? Is it for this then that
young men shall quit home, and leave their parents and their friends
and kinsmen and property, that they may say to you, "Wonderful!"
when you are uttering your exclamations. Did Socrates do this, or
Zeno, or Cleanthes?
What then? is there not the hortatory style? Who denies it? as there
is the style of refutation, and the didactic style. Who, then, ever