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?

The Baptae of Eupolie appears to have been a satire upon the devotees of Cotys (Cotytto), a Thracian goddess worshipped with orgiastic rites.

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 lay hold of your books, and of your hands when you open them. When do you do your reading? In the daytime? Nobody ever saw you doing it. - At night, then? When you have already given instructions to your henchmen, or before you have talked with them? Come, in the name of Cotys, never again dare to do such a thing.

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.Hippolytus417 f. But if you have made up your mind to cleave to the same infirmity at all costs, go ahead: buy books, keep them at home under lock and key, and enjoy the fame of your treasures—that is enough for you. But never lay hands on them or read them or sully with your tongue the prose and poetry of the ancients, that has done you no harm.

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 them, however, they do not know how to handle them, but someone who has studied his profession comes upon the scene with a knife that is thoroughly sharp, though covered with rust, and frees the patient from his pain. But let me compare your case with something still more comical. Consider the barbers and you will observe that the master-craftsmen among them have only a razor and a pair of shears and a suitable mirror, while the unskilled, amateurish fellows put on view a multitude of shears and huge mirrors; but for all that, they cannot keep their ignorance from being found out. In fact, what happens to them is as comical as can be—people have their hair cut next door and then go to their mirrors to brush it.

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.