The Dream (6-10)

Two women laid hold of me, each taking a hand and dragging me towards herself with great energy and strength; indeed, they almost tore me asunder in their contention. For first one of them

"My child," she said, "I am the Art of Stonecutting, which you began yesterday to learn, friendly to you and a relative by blood, inasmuch as your grandfather"—naming my mother's father-" was a stone-cutter, and your two uncles, and both of them are very well thought of on my account. If you are willing to hold aloof from this woman's folly and nonsense "-pointing to her rival" and to come and dwell with me, you will in the first place be generously nurtured and have strong shoulders, and you will be a stranger to all jealousy; you will never leave your fatherland and family to go out into foreign countries, and it is not for mere words that you will win praise

Do not be repelled by my shabby exterior and my soiled garments, for it was after beginning thus that the great Pheidias, too, showed the world his Zeus, and Polykleitos fashioned his Hera, and Myron won praise and Praxiteles wonder. Now these men are worshipped with the gods. If, then, you should become one of these, you, too, would certainly be famous throughout the world. You will make your father, too, an object of envy, and turn all eyes towards the land that bore you." Thus, and at even greater length, spoke Handicraft, sprinkling her speech from end to end with stammering and rusticities in her eager argument and effort to persuade me. But I can no longer call it to mind, for most of it has already escaped my memory. When she now had made an end, the other began, somewhat in this way:

"I, my child, am Culture, an acquaintance and familiar of yours already, although you have not yet made full trial of me. This person has told you in advance what you will gain, forsooth, by becoming a stone-cutter; namely, that you will be nothing but a workman, toiling with your body, on which all your hopes of a livelihood will depend. You will be yourself obscure; your gains will be small and sordid, your mind dwarfed, your progress despicable. Your friends will not seek you out, your enemies will not fear you,

But if you will hearken to me, I will display before you, to begin with, many works and wondrous doings of men of old, and I will report their sayings to you and make you master, so to speak, of all learning. I will adorn your soul, which is the dominant power within you, with many graces to wit, self-control, righteousness, reverence, gentleness, equity, wisdom, strength, love of beauty, taste for the worthiest pursuits. For these are the things that really make the spotless beauty of the soul. No sequence of events in the past or present will escape you; nay, by my help you will behold even the future, and I will teach you erelong the nature of the whole universe, the divine as well as the human.