17. I say nothing of
the Greeks, since you boast of your knowledge of them, even to the
extent of saying that, in attaching yourself to foreign literature, you
have forgotten your own language. I am afraid that, according to the
old proverbs, I might be like the pig teaching Minerva, and the man
carrying fagots into the wood. I only wonder that, being as you are the
Aristarchus3028
| 3028 A native of Samothrace who died at Cyprus b.c. 157. He was tutor to the children of Ptolemy
Philometor, and was renowned as a rhetorician and a critic. |
of our time, you should have
shewn ignorance of these matters which every boy knows. It is, no
doubt, from your mind being fixed on the meaning of what you write, but
partly also from your being so sharp-sighted for the manufacture of
calumnies against me, that you despise the precepts of Grammarians and
orators, that you make no attempt to set straight words which have got
transposed when the sentence has become complicated, or to avoid some
harsh collocation of consonants, or to escape from a style full of
gaps. It would be ridiculous to point to one or two wounds when the
whole body is enfeebled and broken. I will not select portions for
criticism; it is for him to select any portion which is free from
faults. He must have been ignorant even of the Socratic saying:
“Know thyself.”
To steer the ship the untaught
landsman fears;
Th’ untrain’d
attendant dares not give the sick
The drastic southernwood. The
healing drug
The leech alone prescribes.
Th’ artificer
Alone the tools can wield. But
poetry
Train’d or untrain’d
we all at random write.3029
| 3029 Horace Ep. ii, 1, 114–7. |
Possibly he will swear that he
has never learned to read and write; I can easily believe that without
an oath. Or perhaps he will take refuge in what the Apostle says of
himself: “Though I be rude in speech, yet not in
knowledge.” But his reason for saying this is plain. He had been
trained in Hebrew learning and brought up at the feet of Gamaliel,
whom, though he had attained apostolic rank, he was not ashamed to call
his master; and he thought Greek eloquence of no account, or at all
events, in his humility, he would not parade his knowledge of it. So
that3030
‘his preaching should stand not in
the persuasive wisdom of words but in the power of the things
signified.’ He despised other men’s riches since he was
rich in his own. Still it was not to an illiterate man who stumbled in
every sentence that Festus cried, as he stood before his judgment
seat:
“Paul thou art beside
thyself; much learning doth make thee mad.”3031
You who can hardly do more than mutter in
Latin, and who rather creep like a tortoise than walk, ought either to
write in Greek, so that among those who are ignorant of Greek you may
pass for one who knows a foreign tongue; or else, if you attempt to
write Latin, you should first have a grammar-master, and flinch from
the ferule, and begin again as an old scholar among children to learn
the art of speaking. Even if a man is bursting with the wealth of
Crœsus and Darius, letters will not follow the money-bag. They are
the companions of toil and of labour, the associates of the fasting not
of the full-fed, of self-mastery not of self-indulgence.3032
| 3032 Jerome often accuses Rufinus of self-indulgence. See esp. Letter
cxxv, c. 18. |
It is told of Demosthenes that he
consumed more oil than wine, and that no workman ever shortened his
nights as he did. He for the sake of enunciating the single letter Rho
was willing to take a dog as his teacher; and yet you make it a crime
in me that I took a man to teach me the Hebrew letters. This is the
sort of wisdom which makes men remain unlearned: they do not choose to
learn what they do not know. They forget the words of
Horace:
Why through false shame do I
choose ignorance,
Rather than seek to
learn?
That Book of Wisdom also which
is read to us as the work of Solomon says:3033
“Into a malicious soul wisdom
shall not enter, nor dwell in the body that is subject to sin. For the
Holy Spirit of discipline3034
will flee
deceit and remove from thoughts which are without understanding.”
The case is different with those who only wish to be read by the
vulgar, and do not care how they may offend the ears of the learned;
and they despise the utterance of the poet which brands the forwardness
of noisy ignorance.
’Twas you, I think, whose
ignorance in the streets
Murder’d the wretched
strain with creaking reed.
If you want such things, there
are plenty of curly-pated fellows in every school who will sing you
snatches of doggrel from Miletus; or you may go to the exhibition of
the Bessi3035
| 3035 A
tribe of Thrace; probably troupes of them came to exhibit in
Rome. |
and see people shaking with
laughter at the Pig’s Testament, or at any jesters’
entertainment where silly things of this kind are run after. There is
not a day but you may see the dressed-up clown in the streets whacking
the buttocks of some blockhead, or half-pulling out people’s
teeth with the scorpion which he twists round for them to bite. We need
not wonder if the books of know-nothings find plenty of
readers.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
