To Nicocles (46-50)

How, then, can one advise or teach or say anything of profit and yet please such people? For, besides what I have said of them, they look upon men of wisdom with suspicion, while they regard men of no understanding as open and sincere; and they so shun the verities of life that they do not even know their own interests: nay, it irks them to take account of their own business and it delights them to discuss the business of others;

and they would rather be ill in body than exert the soul and give thought to anything in the line of duty. Observe them when they are in each other’s company, and you will find them giving and taking abuse; observe them when they are by themselves, and you will find them occupied, not with plans, but with idle dreams. I am, however, speaking now not of all, but of those only who are open to the charges I have made.

This much, however, is clear, that those who aim to write anything in verse or prose which will make a popular appeal should seek out, not the most profitable discourses, but those which most abound in fictions; for the ear delights in these just as the eye delights in games and contests. Wherefore we may well admire the poet Homer and the first inventors of tragedy, seeing that they, with true insight into human nature, have embodied both kinds of pleasure in their poetry;

for Homer has dressed the contests and battles of the demigods in myths, while the tragic poets have rendered the myths in the form of contests and action, so that they are presented, not to our ears alone, but to our eyes as well. With such models, then, before us, it is evident that those who desire to command the attention of their hearers must abstain from admonition and advice, and must say the kind of things which they see are most pleasing to the crowd.

I have dwelt on these matters because I think that you, who are not one of the multitude but a king over the multitude, ought not to be of the same mind as men at large; you ought not to judge what things are worthy or what men are wise by the standard of pleasure, but to appraise them in the light of conduct that is useful;