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



 

have one, no matter what), should ask what orator
or historian or poet it was by, and you, knowing from
the title, should easily answer that question; and if
then—for such topics often spin themselves out to
some length in conversation—he should either commend or criticise something in its contents, and you
should be at a loss and have nothing to say? Would
you not then pray for the earth to open and swallow
you for getting yourself into trouble like Bellerophon
by carrying your book about? The letter that Bellerophon carried to the King of Lycia contained a request that he be put to death : Iliad 6, 155-195. 

 

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), 1041 ff. 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 The implication is: “And therefore ought to know about your circumstances, if anyone knows.” —if you had not




 

smuggled yourself into that old man’s will with all
speed, you would be starving to death by now, and
would be putting up your books at auction!

 

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.” Balas, in the second century B.c., claimed to be the brother of Antiochus V. Eupator on account of a strong resemblance in looks, and took the name of Alexander. At about the same time, after the defeat of Perses, Andriscus of Adramyttium, a fuller, claimed the name of Philip. The false Nero cropped up some twenty years after Nero’s death, and probably in the East, as he had strong support from the Parthians, who refused to surrender him to Rome.