The Ignorant Book Collector (26-30)

The other way is easier, not to buy books any longer. You are well enough educated; you have learning to spare; you have all the works of antiquity almost at the tip of your tongue; you know not only all history but all the arts of literary composition, its merits and defects, and how to use an Attic vocabulary; your many books have made you wondrous wise, consummate in learning. There is no reason why I should not have my fun with you, since you like to be gulled!

As you have so many books, I should like to ask you what you like best to read? Plato? Antisthenes? Archilochus? Hipponax? Or do you scorn them and incline to occupy yourself with the orators? Tell me, do you read the speech of Aeschines against Timarchus? No doubt you know it all and understand everything in it, but have you dipped into Aristophanes and Eupolis? Have you read the Baptae, the whole play?[*] Then did it have no effect upon you, and did you not blush when you saw the point of it? Indeed, a man may well wonder above all what the state of your soul is when you

Leave the books alone and attend to your own affairs exclusively. Yet you ought not to do that, either; you ought to be put to shame by Phaedra in Euripides, who is indignant at women and says:

They shudder not at their accomplice, night,

Nor chamber-walls, for fear they find a voice.

I know that in all this I am wasting words, and, as the proverb has it, trying to scrub an Ethiop white. You will buy them and make no use of them and get yourself laughed at by men of learning who are satisfied with the gain that they derive, not from the beauty of books or their expensiveness, but from the language and thought of their author.

You expect to palliate and conceal your ignorance by getting a reputation for this, and to daze people by the number of your books, unaware that you are doing the same as the most ignorant physicians, who get themselves ivory pill-boxes and silver cupping-glasses and gold-inlaid scalpels; when the time comes to use

So it is with you: you might, to be sure, lend your books to someone else who wants them, but you cannot use them yourself. But you never lent a book to anyone; you act like the dog in the manger, who neither eats the grain herself nor lets the horse eat it, who can.

I give myself the liberty of saying this much to you for the present, just about your books; about your other detestable and ignominions conduct you shall often be told in future.