Leontion. The poor naiad had done it, in vain.
Ternissa. All these labourers will soon finish the plantation, if you superintend them, and are not appointed to some magistrature.
Epicurus. Those who govern us are pleased at seeing a philosopher out of the city, and more still at finding in a season of scarcity forty poor citizens, who might become seditious, made happy and quiet by such employment.
Two evils, of almost equal weight, may befall the man of erudition: never to be listened to, and to be listened to always. Aware of these, I devote a large portion of my time and labours to the cultivation of such minds as flourish best in cities, where my garden at the gate, although smaller than this, we find sufficiently capacious. There I secure my listeners; here my thoughts and imaginations have their free natural current, and tarry or wander as the will invites: may it ever be among those dearest to me!—those whose hearts possess the rarest and divinest faculty, of retaining or forgetting at option what ought to be forgotten or retained.
Leontion. The whole ground then will be covered with trees and shrubs?
Epicurus. There are some protuberances in various parts of the eminence, which you do not perceive till you are upon them or above them. They are almost level at the top, and overgrown with fine grass; for they catch the better soil brought down in small quantities by the rains. These are to be left unplanted: so is the platform under the pinasters, whence there is a prospect of the city, the harbour, the isle of Salamis, and the territory of Megara. ‘What then!’ cried Sosimenes, ‘you would hide from your view my young olives, and the whole length of the new wall I have been building at my own expense between us! and, when you might see at once the whole of Attica, you will hardly see more of it than I could buy.’
Leontion. I do not perceive the new wall, for which Sosimenes, no doubt, thinks himself another Pericles.
Epicurus. Those old junipers quite conceal it.
Ternissa. They look warm and sheltering; but I like the rose-laurels much better: and what a thicket of them here is!
Epicurus. Leaving all the larger, I shall remove many thousands of them; enough to border the greater part of the walk, intermixed with roses.