The Scythian or Consul (81)

During this show of temper, the young man’s uncle came up to him. He was a countryman—a mere layman to you philosophers. “Good heavens! Stop saying you’ve been cheated of a fortune because

we bought some pretty talk from you and haven’t paid you the balance yet. In any case you still have what you sold to us: your capital of knowledge is not reduced. And what about my hopes in sending the young man to you in the first place? You’ve made him no better—he carried off my neighbour Echecrates’ daughter, a virgin, and raped her. He only just missed a summons for assault, but I paid a talent to Echecrates, who is a poor man, in recompense for his crime. The other day he thrashed his mother because she caught him carrying off the wine jar under his coat—his contribution, I suppose, to the wine-feast. As for passion and anger and shamelessness and recklessness and lying, he was far better last year than he is now. Yet I would have liked him to be helped by you in this sort of thing, rather than have all that knowledge which every day at dinner he parades at us, though we’ve no need of it: how a crocodile carried off a young lad, and promised to give him back if his father answered some question or other; or how when it’s day it can’t be night. Sometimes our fine gentleman even makes horns grow out of our heads, he twists our words so. [*] We laugh at all this, especially when he stops up his ears and does his practice and says over to himself his ‘states’ and “conditions’ and ‘comprehensions’ and ‘images,’ and a string of other names like these. We hear him say that God is not in heaven but pervades everything—sticks and stones and beasts right down to the meanest. And when his mother asks him why he talks such nonsense, he laughs at her and says: ‘If I learn this “nonsense” properly, there will be nothing to stop me being the only rich man, the only king, and the rest slaves and scum compared with me.’”