1. Not with the stones of Eubœa and Sparta let the structure of your city walls be variegated; but let the discipline and teaching that comes from Greece penetrate with order the minds of citizens and statesmen. For with the thoughts of men are cities well established, and not with wood and stone.
2. If thou wouldst have a household well established, then follow the example of the Spartan Lycurgus. For even as he did not fence the city with walls, but fortified the inhabitants with virtue, and so preserved the city free for ever, thus do thou not surround thyself with a great court and set up lofty towers, but confirm the dwellers in the house with good-will, and faith, and friendliness, and no harmful thing shall enter; no, not if the whole army of evil were arrayed against it.
3. Which of us will not admire Lycurgus, the Lacedæmonian? For having lost an eye at the hands of one of the citizens, and having received the young man from the people that he should punish him as he would, he refrained from this; but having taught him and proved him to be a good man, he brought him into the theater. And when the Lacedæmonians marveled, I received this man from you, he said, insolent and violent; I give him back to you mild and civil.
CHAPTER VII.
on friendship.
1. Whereinsoever a man is zealous, this, it is fair to suppose, he loveth. Are men, then, zealous for evil things? Never.[1] Or, perchance, for things which do not concern them? Nor for them either. It remaineth, then, that they are zealous about good things only; and that if they are zealous about them, they also love them. Whosoever, then, hath understanding of good things, the same would know how to love. But he who is not able to distinguish good things from evil, and things that are neither from both, how could this man yet be capable of loving? To love, then, is a quality of the wise alone.
2. And how is this, saith one, for I am foolish, and none the less do I love my child. By the Gods! I wonder, then, how you have begun by confessing yourself to be foolish. For wherein do you lack? Do you not use your senses? do you not judge of appearances? do you not bring to the body the nourishment it needeth, and the covering and habitation? Wherefore, then, confess yourself to be a fool? Because, forsooth, you are often perplexed by appearances, and troubled, and you are vanquished by their plausibility; and you take the same things to be now good, and now evil, and then indifferent; and, in a word, you grieve and fear and envy, and are troubled, and changed—for these things you confess yourself a fool.
3. But do you never change in love? But is it wealth, and pleasure, and, in short, things, alone that you sometimes take to be good and sometimes evil? and do you not take the same men to be now good, now evil? and sometimes you are friendly disposed towards them, and sometimes hostile? and sometimes you praise them, and sometimes you blame?
——“Yea, even so I do.”
What then? a man who hath been deceived about another, is he, think you, his friend?