The Education of Children (17)

It should be the general rule to keep the young away from any association with base men; for they carry away something of their badness. This duty Pythagoras [*] also has enjoined in the form of allegories which I shall now quote and explain. For they contribute no small influence towards the acquisition of virtue. For example:

Do not taste of black-tails [*]; that is, Do not spend your time with men of black character, because of their malevolence.

Do not step over the beam of a balance; that is, one should give greatest heed to justice and not transgress it.

Do not sit on a peck measure; as much as to say that we should avoid idleness and have forethought for providing our daily bread.

Do not give your hand to everybody; instead of, Do not make friends too readily.

Do not wear a tight ring; means that one should live his life unhampered, and not subject it to any bond.

Do not poke a fire with steel; [*] instead of,

Do not provoke an angry man. Indeed, it is wrong to do so, and we should yield to men who are in a temper.

Do not eat your heart; as much as to say, Do not injure your soul by wasting it with worries.

Abstain from beans; means that a man should keep out of politics, for beans were used in earlier times for voting upon the removal of magistrates from office. [*]

Do not put food into a slop-pail; signifies that it is not fitting to put clever speech into a base mind. For speech is the food of thought, and baseness in men makes it unclean.

Do not turn back on reaching the boundaries; that is, when people are about to die and see the boundary of their life close at hand, they should bear all this with serenity and not be faint-hearted.

I return to the subject suggested at the beginning of the chapter. As I said there, the young should be kept away from every sort of base men, and most of all from flatterers. Let me repeat here what I say over and over again to many fathers: There is no class of persons more pernicious than flatterers, nor any that more surely and quickly gives youth a nasty tumble. They utterly ruin both fathers and sons, bringing to sorrow the old age of those and the youth of these, and dangling pleasure as an irresistible lure to get their advice taken. To sons who are to inherit wealth fathers commend sobriety, flatterers drinking to excess; fathers commend self-restraint, flatterers profligacy; fathers

frugality, flatterers extravagance; fathers industry, flatterers indolence, saying, All life is but a moment. We must live, not merely exist.[*] Why should we give a thought to your father’s threats? He’s an old twaddler with one foot already in the grave, and before long we’ll take his coffin on our shoulders and carry him out. Another of them posts a drab in the young man’s path, or prostitutes a married woman for him, and spoils and wastes the father’s provision for old age. Detestable is their whole tribe, pretenders of friendship, without a vestige of honest speech, flatterers of the rich but despisers of the poor, addressing themselves with instinctive art to the young, grinning broadly when their patrons laugh, spurious claimants to any spirit, and bastard members of human life, subsisting at the beck and nod of the wealthy; free-born by freak of fortune, but slaves by choice. Whenever they are not treated with insult, they feel themselves insulted because then they do not fulfil the purpose for which they are kept. So if any father is concerned for the good upbringing of his children, he must drive away these detestable creatures, and quite as much must he drive away schoolmates who show depravity, for these also are capable of corrupting the most likely natures.