The Dream (11-15)

You who are now poor, the son of a nobody,

"If any serious thing befall your friends, or even the state at large, all will look to you. When you chance to say anything the crowd will listen open-mouthed and marvel at you, and envy your gift and your father's good-fortune. And this immortality which they say is sometimes bestowed on men I will store up for you. For even when you yourself perish from the world you will never cease from companionship with the cultured and conversation with the noblest. You know whose son Demosthenes was, and yet I made him the man he was. You know that Aischines' mother was a dancer, and yet Philip paid court to him for my sake. Sokrates himself was brought up under the eye of this Art of Stonecutting, but you hear how his praises are sung on all sides from the moment when he perceived the

But if you reject such men as these, and brilliant achievements and ennobling words and a seemly guise, and honor and glory and fame and distinction, and political power and office, and respect as an orator and envy as a wit, you will wear a dirty shirt and take on the look of a slave; your hands will be full of crowbars and gravers and chisels and picks; you will stoop over your work, grovelling, prostrate, and altogether stunted; you will never look up or fix your thoughts on any manly, liberal theme; and you will ponder how to make your works symmetrical and well-shaped, but for your own symmetry and shapeliness you will take no care at all, making yourself of less worth than your stones."

While she was still speaking thus, and without waiting to hear her to the end, I seemed to spring up and leave the ugly woman in laborer's guise, and cross over to Culture right joyfully, particularly since that stick came into my head, and how the other had caused me a beating only yesterday on my first acquaintance with her. When she was deserted she at first went into a passion, smiting her hands together and grinding her teeth; but finally she grew rigid and turned to stone, as we hear Niobe did. Now even if this experience of her's seems extraordinary, do not disbelieve it, for dreams work wonders.

The other woman looked at me and said, "Now I will repay you for the justice of your judgment. Come forthwith and mount this car "-pointing to a car drawn by winged horses resembling Pegasus -"so that you may see what you would have missed knowing if you had not followed me." Thereupon I mounted the car, and she drove; and borne aloft I beheld, from the east to the west, cities and nations and peoples, and I sowed something upon the earth like Triptolemos. However, what it was that I sowed I do not now remember, but only this, that the people looked up at me from beneath and praised me, and sped me on my way wherever I passed in my flight.