Truly, what you are now doing is the reverse ot what you are aiming to do. You expect to get a reputation for learning by zealously buying up the finest books, but the thing goes by opposites and in a way becomes proof of your ignorance. Indeed, you do not buy the finest; you rely upon men who bestow their praise hit-and-miss, you are a godsend to the people that tell such lies about books, and a treasure-trove ready to hand to those who traffic in them. Why, how can you tell what books are old and highly valuable, and what are worthless and simply in wretched repair

Not old, though they look old.

— unless you judge them by the extent to which they are eaten into and cut up, calling the book-worms into counsel to settle the question? As to their correctness and freedom from mistakes, what judgement have you, and what is it worth?

Yet suppose I grant you that you have selected the very éditions de luxe that were prepared by Callinus or by the famous Atticus with the utmost care.

Both Atticus and Callinus are mentioned again as scribes in this piece (24); Callinus is not elsewhere mentioned, but Atticus is supposed to be the “publisher” of the Atticiana, editions which had great repute in antiquity. It is hardly likely that he is Cicero’s friend.

What good, you strange person, will it do you to own them, when you do not understand their beauty and will never make use of it one whit more than a blind man would enjoy beauty in favourites? To be sure you look at your books with your eyes open and quite as much as you like, and you read some of them aloud with great fluency, keeping your eyes in advance of your lips; but I do not consider that enough, unless you know the merits and defects of each passage in their contents, unless you understand what every sentence means, how to construe the words, what expressions have been accurately turned by the writer in accordance with the canon of good use, and what are false, illegitimate, and counterfeit.

Come now, do you maintain that without instruction you know as much as we? How can you, unless, like the shepherd of old,

Hesiod: see the Theogony29 ff.

you once received a branch of laurel from the Muses? Helicon, which the goddesses are said to haunt, you never even heard of, I take it, and your haunts in your boyhood were not the same as ours. That you should even mention the Muses is impious. They would not have shrunk from showing themselves to a shepherd, a hardbitten, hairy man displaying rich tan on his body, but as for the like of you—in the name of your lady of Lebanon

Aphrodite, perhaps, or Astarte; in later times there was a notorious cult of Aphrodite on Lebanon: Eusebius, Vit. Constantini 3, 53.

dispense me for the present from giving a full description of you in plain language!—they would never have deigned, I am sure, to come near you, but instead of giving you laurel they would have scourged you with myrtle or sprays of mallow and would have made you keep your distance from those regions, so as not to pollute either Olmeios or Hippocrene, whose waters only thirsty flocks or the clean lips of shepherds may drink.

No matter how shameless you are and how courageous in such matters, you would never dare to say that you have had an education, or that you ever troubled yourself to associate intimately with books, or that So-and-so was your teacher and you went to school with So-and-so.

You expect to make up for all that now by one single expedient—by getting many books. On that theory, collect and keep all those manuscripts of Demosthenes that the orator wrote with his own hand, and those of Thucydides that were found to have been copied, likewise by Demosthenes, eight times over, and even all the books that Sulla sent from Athens to Italy.

Of the copies of his own works and those of Thucydides written by Demosthenes we have no other notice; Sulla took to Italy what was reported to have been the library of Aristotle: Plut. Sulla 26.

What would you gain by it in the way of learning, even if you should put them under your pillow and sleep on them or should glue them together and walk about dressed in them? “A monkey is always a monkey,” says the proverb, “even if he has birthtokens of gold.”

These were trinkets put in the cradle or the clothing of a child when it was abandoned, as proof of good birth and as a possible means of identification later. Hyginus (187) calls them insignia ingenwitatis.

Although you have a book in your hand and read all the time, you do not understand a single thing that you read, but you are like the donkey that listens to the lyre and wags his ears.

If possessing books made their owner learned, they would indeed be a possession of great price, and only rich men like you would have them, since you could buy them at auction, as it were, outbidding us poor men. In that case, however, who could rival the dealers and booksellers for learning, who possess and sell so many books? But if you care to look into the matter, you will see that they are not much superior to you in that point; they are barbarous of speech and obtuse in mind like you—just what one would expect people to be who have no conception of what is good and bad. Yet you have only two or three books which they themselves have sold you, while they handle books night and day.

What good, then, does it do you to buy them—unless you think that even the book-cases are learned because they contain so many of the works of the ancients!

Answer me this question, if you will—or better, as you are unable to answer, nod or shake your head inreply. If a man who did not know how to play the flute should buy the instrument of Timotheus or that of Ismenias,

Famous Theban flute-players of the fourth century B.c. for Timotheus, see also Lucian’s Harmonides.

for which [smenias paid seven talents in Corinth, would that make him able to play, or would it do him no good to own it since he did not know how to use it as a musician would? You did well to shake your head. Even if he obtained the flute of Marsyas or Olympus, he could not play without previous instruction. And what if a man should get the bow of Heracles without being a Philoctetes so as to be able to draw it and shoot straight? What do you think about him? That he would make any showing worthy of an archer? You shake your head at this, too. So, of course, with a man who does not know how to steer, and one who has not practised riding; if the one should take the helm of a fine vessel, finely constructed in every detail both for beauty and for seaworthiness, and the other should get an Arab or a “Centaur” or a “Koppa-brand,”

The “Centaur” horses probably came from Thessaly, the home of the Centaurs and a land of good horses. The “Koppa-brand” were marked ϙ, which in the alphabet of Corinth corresponded to K, and was used (on coins, for instance) as the abbreviation for Korinthos.

each would give proof, I have no doubt, that he did not know what to do with his property. Do you assent to this? Take my advice, now, and assent to this also; if an ignorant man like you should buy many books, would he not give rise to gibes at himself for his ignorance? Why do you shrink from assenting to this also? To do so is a clear giveaway, I maintain, and everybody who sees it at once quotes that very obvious proverb: “What has a dog to do with a bath?”