The Ignorant Book Collector (16-20)

For what expectation do you base upon your books that you are always unrolling them and rolling them up, glueing them, trimming them, smearing them with saffron and oil of cedar, putting slip-covers on them, and fitting them with knobs, just as if you were going to derive some profit from them? Ah yes, already you have been improved beyond measure by their purchase, when you talk as you do—but no, you are more dumb than any fish!—and live in a way that cannot even be mentioned with decency, and have incurred everybody’s savage hatred? as the phrase goes, for your beastliness! If books made men like that, they ought to be given as wide a berth as possible.

Two things can be acquired from the ancients, the ability to speak and to act as one ought, by emulating the best models and shunning the worst; and when a man clearly fails to benefit from them either in the one way or in the other, what else is he doing but buying haunts for mice and lodgings for worms, and excuses to thrash his servants for negligence?

Furthermore, would it not be discreditable if someone, on seeing you with a book in your hand(youalways

When Demetrius, the Cynic, while in Corinth, saw an ignorant fellow reading a beautiful book (it was the Bacchae of Euripides, I dare say, and he was at the place where the messenger reports the fate of Pentheus and the deed of Agave),[*] he snatched it away and tore it up, saying: “It is better for Pentheus to be torn to tatters by me once for all than by you repeatedly.”

Though I am continually asking myself the question, I have never yet been able to discover why you have shown so much zeal in the purchase of books. Nobody who knows you in the least would think that you do it on account of their helpfulness or use, any more than a bald man would buy a comb, or a blind man a mirror, or a deaf-mute a flute-player, or an eunuch a concubine, or a landsman an oar, or a seaman a plough. But perhaps you regard the matter as a display of wealth and wish to show everyone that out of your vast surplus you spepd money even for things of no use to you? Come now, as far as I know—and I too am a Syrian[*]—if you had not

The only remaining reason is that you have been convinced by your toadies that you are not only handsome and charming but a scholar and an orator and a writer without peer, and you buy the books to prove their praises true. They say that you hold forth to them at dinner, and that they, like stranded frogs, make a clamour because they are thirsty, or else they get nothing to drink if they do not burst themselves shouting.

To be sure, you are somehow very easy to lead by the nose, and believe them in everything; for once you were even persuaded that you resembled a certain royal person in looks, like the false Alexander, the false Philip (the fuller), the false Nero in our grandfathers’ time, and whoever else has been put down under the title “false.”[*]