על שכל אדם ישר הוא בן חורין ב׳Every Good Man is Free 2
א׳
1II. [8] “Surely your other statements too,” they continue, “are contrary to reason, brimful of shameless effrontery and madness or one knows not what to call them, for even names are difficult to find appropriate to such extravagance. You call those rich who are utterly destitute, lacking the very necessaries, who drag on their sorry, miserable life, scarcely providing their daily subsistence, starving exceptions to the general prosperity, feeding on the empty breath of virtue as grasshoppers are said to feed on air.
ב׳
2[9] You call those poor who are lapped round by silver and gold and a multitude of landed possessions and revenues and numberless other good things in unstinted abundance, whose wealth not only benefits their kinsfolk and friends but steps outside the household to do the same to multitudes of fellow tribesmen and wardsmen, and taking a still wider sweep endows the state with all that either peace or war demands.
ג׳
3[10] It is part of the same fantastic dream when you dare to ascribe slavery to the highly connected, the indisputably nobly born, who have not only parents but grandparents and ancestors right down to the founders of the family greatly distinguished both in the male and the female line: freedom to those who are heirs in the third generation to the branding iron, the fetter, and immemorial thraldom.”
ד׳
4[11] So they think, but all this is as I have said, the shallow talk of men with minds bedimmed, slaves to opinion, basing themselves on the senses, whose unstable council is always open to bribes from its suitors.
ה׳
5[12] If they whole-heartedly sought for truth, they ought not to let themselves be outdone in prudence by the sick in body. They in their desire for health commit themselves to physicians, but these people show no willingness to cast off the soul-sickness of their untrained grossness by resorting to wise men from whom they can not only unlearn their ignorance but gain that knowledge which is mankind’s peculiar property.
ו׳
6[13] But since we have it on the sacred authority of Plato that envy has no place in the divine choir, and wisdom is most divine and most free-handed, she never closes her school of thought but always opens her doors to those who thirst for the sweet water of discourse, and pouring on them an unstinted stream of undiluted doctrine, persuades them to be drunken with the drunkenness which is soberness itself.
ז׳
7[14] Then when like initiates in the mysteries they have taken their fill of the revelations, they reproach themselves greatly for their former neglect and feel that they have wasted their time and that their life while they lacked wisdom was not worth the living.
ח׳
8[15] It is well then that the young, all of them and everywhere, should dedicate the first fruits of the flower of their prime above all else to culture, wherein it is good for both youth and old age to dwell. For just as new vessels are said to retain the scents of the substances first poured into them, so, too, the souls of the young take indelible impressions of the ideas first presented to them and do not have them washed away by the stream of the later influx, and so they preserve the original form for all to see.