The Scythian or Consul (27)

HERMOTIMUS

I will free you from your uncertainty. Trust those who have made the journey before, Lycinus, and you cannot go wrong.

LYCINUS

Whom do you mean? Which road did they go? Which of the guides did they follow? The same uncertainty appears to us in another guise shifting from events to persons.

HERMOTIMUS

What do you mean?

LYCINUS

That the man who took Plato’s path and had him for travelling-companion will obviously praise Plato’s route, and so with Epicurus’s and the rest and you with yours. What about it, Hermotimus? Is that not so?

HERMOTIMUS

Of course.

LYCINUS

Then you have not freed me from my uncertainty. I am just as much in the dark which of the travellers

to trust. For I see that each of them and the guide himself have tried only one way, and he praises that one and says that it alone leads to the city. But I cannot know whether he is speaking the truth. That he has reached some destination and has seen some city or other, I will perhaps grant him. But whether he has seen the one he should have seen (that in which you and I want to live) or whether, when he should have gone to Corinth, he has arrived at Babylon and thinks he has seen Corinth, I still do not know—certainly not everyone who has seen a city has seen Corinth, if Corinth is not the only city. What particularly makes me uncertain is this—my knowing that only one road can possibly be the right one. Only one road is the Corinth road, and the other roads lead anywhere except to Corinth, unless a man is so much out of his wits as to think that both the road to the Hyperboreans and the road to India lead to Corinth.

HERMOTIMUS

How could that be, Lycinus? Different roads lead to different places.