But a man who
loves wealth and is enthralled by gold and measures
happiness by purple and power, who has not tasted
liberty or tested free speech or contemplated truth,
whose constant companions are flattery and servility;
a min who has unreservedly committed his soul to
pleasure and has resolved to serve none but her,
fond of extravagant fare and fond of wine and


 

women, full of trickery, deceit and falsehood; a
man who likes to hear twanging, fluting and emasculated singing—
 
"Such folk,” said he, “should live
in Rome, for every street and every square is full of
the things they cherish most,
 A reminiscence of Aratus (Phaenom. 2): ‘ And every
human-street and every square is full of the presence of
God.” 
and they can admit
pleasure by every gate—by the eyes, by the ears
and nostrils, by the throat and reins, Its everflowing, turbid stream widens every street; it
brings in adultery, avarice, perjury and the whole
family of the vices, and sweeps the flooded soul bare
of self-respect, virtue, and righteousness; and then the
ground which they have left a desert, ever parched
with thirst, puts forth a rank, wild growth of lusts.”
That was the character of the city, he declared,
and those all the good things it taught.

 

“For
my part,” said he, “when I first came back from
Greece, on getting into the neighbourhood of Rome
I stopped and asked myself why I had come here,
repeating the well-known words of Homer:
 Odyss. 11, 93. 
‘Why
left you, luckless man, the light of day’—Greece,
to wit, and all that happiness and freedom— and
came to see’ the hurly-burly here—informers,
haughty greetings, dinners, flatterers, murders,
legacy-hunting, feigned friendships? And what in
the world do you intend to do, since you can neither
go away nor do as the Romans do?”





 
 
“After communing with myself in this vein and
pulling myself out of bowshot as Zeus did Hector
in Homer,

 From out the slaughter, blood, and battle-din, Iliad 11, 163. 
I decided to be a stay-at-home in future. Choosing
thereby a sort of life which seems to most people
womanish and spiritless, I converse with Plato,
Philosophy and Truth, and seating myself, as it
were, high up in a theatre full of untold thousands,
I look down on what takes place, which is of a
quality sometimes to afford amusement and laughter,
sometimes to prove a man’s true steadfastness.

 

“Indeed (if it is right to speak in praise of what is
bad), don’t suppose that there is any better school for
virtue or any truer test of the soul than this city and
the life here; it is no small matter to make a stand
against so many desires, so many sights and sounds
that lay rival hands on a man and pull him in every
direction. One must simply imitate Odysseus and
sail past them; not, however, with his hands bound
(for that would be cowardly) nor with his ears
stopped with wax, but with ears open and body
free, and in a spirit of genuine contempt.