Grym. As a slave. For if it is as you have expounded, and I know nothing which seems truer than what you say, there are very many much greater and more distinguished than I am, who are slaves.
Flex. Don’t be lightly disgusted at what I have said. Betake yourself home. Alone, think over what I have said. Examine my statements, ponder over them. The more you turn them over in mind, the more you will recognise they are true and certain.
Grym. I beseech you proceed, if you yet have further to add, for I feel that at this moment I am a changed man. For the future I shall seem to be another person from my former self.
Flex. Would that it may happen to thee as it did to the philosopher Polaemon!
Grym. What happened to him?[84]
Flex. Owing to a single oration of Xenocrates, from being one of the worst and most incorrigible, he turned out most studious of wisdom and the seeker of every virtue, and was the successor of Xenocrates in the Academy. But thou, my son, now openly hast recognised to how great a degree is lacking in thee the goodness, which others have in an overflowing measure. Now truly, and of thine own good will, thou yieldest place to others and honourest the good in them where thou seest them well furnished, and where thou seest thyself to be deficient. And if thou thus humblest thyself, and seemest to be of slight attainments, thou wilt meet no one for whom thou feelest abject contempt, and whom thy conscience in thy heart does not place before thyself. For thou wilt not be led away to believe any one to be worse than thyself, unless his badness and malice manifest themselves openly, whilst thine own evil carefully skulks within and is ashamed.
Grym. And what follows?
III. Epilogue
Flex. If thou doest these things, then wilt thou get the real, solid, noble education itself, and true urbanity; and if, as we are supposing now, thou followest after a courtly life, thou wilt be pleasing to all and dear to all. But even this thou wilt not set at high value, but what will then be the sole care to thee will be, to be acceptable to the Eternal God.