I have been guessing how you are likely to have expressed yourself upon reading my essay about dependants1. I feel pretty sure you read it all and had a laugh over it; but it is your running and general comment in words that I am trying to piece on to it. If I am any good at divination2, this is the sort of thing: To think that a man can set down such a scathing3 indictment4 of the life, and then forget it all, get hold of the other end of the stick, and plunge5 headlong into such manifest conspicuous6 slavery! Take Midas, Croesus, golden Pactolus, roll them into one, multiply them, and could they induce him to relinquish7 the freedom which he has loved and consorted8 with from a child? He is nearly in the clutches of Aeacus, one foot is on the ferryman’s boat, and it is now that he lets himself be dragged submissively about by a golden collar. 26 There is some slight inconsistency between his life and his treatise9; the rivers are running up-hill; topsy-turvydom prevails; our recantations are new-fashioned; the first palinodist 27 mended words with words for Helen of Troy; but we spoil words (those words we thought so wise) with deeds.
Such, I imagine, were your inward remarks. And I dare say you will give me some overt10 advice to the same effect; well, it will not be ill-timed; it will illustrate11 your friendship, and do you credit as a good man and a philosopher. If I render your part respectably for you, that will do, and we will pay our homage12 to the God of words; 28 if I fail, you will fill in the deficiency for yourself. There, the stage is ready; I am to hold my tongue, and submit to any necessary carving13 and cauterizing14 for my good, and you are to plaster me, and have your scalpel handy, and your iron red-hot. Sabinus takes the word, and thus addresses me:
My dear friend, this treatise of yours has quite rightly been earning you a fine reputation, from its first delivery before the great audience I had described to me, to its private use by the educated who have consulted and thumbed it since. For indeed it presents the case meritoriously15; there is study of detail and experience of life in abundance; your views are the reverse of vague; and above all the book is practically useful, chiefly but not exclusively to the educated whom it might save from an unforeseen slavery. However, your mind is changed; the life you described is now the better; good-bye to freedom; your motto is that contemptible16 line:
Give me but gain, I’ll turn from free to slave.
Let none hear the lecture from you again, then; see to it that no copy of it comes under the eyes of any one aware of your present life; ask Hermes to bring Lethe-water from below, enough to drug your former hearers; else you will remind us of the Corinthian tale, and your writing, like Bellerophon’s, be your own condemnation17. I assure you I see no decent defence you can make, at least if your detractors have the humour to commend the independence of the writings while the writer is a slave and a voluntary beast of burden before their eyes.
They will say with some plausibility18: Either the book is some other good man’s work, and you a jackdaw strutting19 in borrowed, plumes20; or, if it is really yours, you are a second Salaethus; the Crotoniate legislator made most severe laws against adultery, was much looked up to on the strength of it, and was shortly after taken in adultery with his brother’s wife. You are an exact reproduction of Salaethus, they will say; or rather he was not half so bad as you, seeing that he was mastered by passion, as he pleaded in court, and moreover preferred to leap into the flames, like a brave man, when the Crotoniates were moved to compassion21 and gave him the alternative of exile. The difference between your precept22 and practice is infinitely23 more ridiculous; you draw a realistic word-picture of that servile life; you pour contempt on the man who runs into the trap of a rich man’s house, where a thousand degradations24, half of them self-inflicted, await him; and then in extreme old age, when you are on the border between life and death, you take this miserable25 servitude upon you and make a sort of circus exhibition of your chains. The conspicuousness26 of your position will only make the more ridiculous that contrast between your book and your life.
But I need not beat my brains for phrases of reprobation27; there is one good enough in a noble tragedy:
Wisdom begins at home; no wisdom, else.
And your censors28 will find no lack of illustrations against you; some will compare you to the tragic29 actor; on the stage he is Agamemnon or Creon or great Heracles; but off it, stripped of his mask, he is just Polus or Aristodemus, a hireling liable to be hissed30 off, or even whipped on occasion, at the pleasure of the audience. Others will say you have had the experience of Queen Cleopatra’s monkey: the docile31 creature used to dance in perfect form and time, and was much admired for the regularity32 and decorum of its movements, adapted to the voices and instruments of a bridal chorus; alas33, one day it spied a fig34 or almond a little way off on the ground; flutes35 and measures and steps were all forgotten, the mask was far off in several pieces, and there was he chewing his find.
You, they will say, are the author (for ‘actor’ would understate the case) who has laid down the laws of noble conduct; and no sooner is the lump of figs36 presented than the monkey is revealed; your lips are the lips of a philosopher, and your heart is quite other; it is no injustice37 to say that those sentiments for which you claim admiration38 have ‘wetted your lips, and left your palate dry.’ You have not had to wait long for retribution; you spoke39 unadvisedly in scorn of human needs; and, this little while after, behold40 you making public renunciation of your freedom! Surely Nemesis41 was standing42 behind your back as you drank in the flattering tributes to your superiority; did she not smile in her divine fore-knowledge of the impending43 change, and mark how you forgot to propitiate44 her before you assailed45 the victims whom fortune’s mutability had reduced to such courses?
Now I want you to imagine a rhetorician writing on the theme that Aeschines, after his indictment of Timarchus, was himself proved guilty by eyewitnesses48 of similar iniquity49; would, or would not, the amusement of the audience be heightened by the fact that he had got Timarchus punished for offences excused by youth, whereas he was himself an old man at the time of his own guilt47? Why, you are like the quack50 who offered a cough-mixture which was to cure instantaneously, and could hardly get the promise out for coughing.
Yes, Sabinus, and there is plenty more of the same sort for an accuser like you to urge; the subject is all handles; you can take hold of it anywhere. I have been looking about for my best line of defence. Had I better turn craven, face right-about, confess my sin, and have recourse to the regular plea of Chance, Fate, Necessity? Shall I humbly51 beseech52 my critics to pardon me, remembering that nothing is in a man’s own choice — we are led by some stronger power, one of the three I mentioned, probably, and are not true agents but guiltless altogether, whatever we say or do? Or will you tell me this might do well enough for one of the common herd53, but you cannot have me sheltering myself so? I must not brief Homer; it will not serve me to plead:
No mortal man e’er yet escaped his fate;
nor again,
His thread was spun54, then when his mother bare him.
On the other hand, I might avoid that plea as wanting in plausibility, and say that I did not accept this association under the temptation of money or any prospects55 of that kind, but in pure admiration of the wisdom, strength, and magnanimity of my patron’s character, which inspired the wish to partake his activity. But I fear I should only have brought on myself the additional imputation57 of flattery. It would be a case of ‘one nail drives out one nail,’ and this time the one left in would be the bigger; for flattery is the most servile, and consequently reckoned the worst, of all vices58.
Both these pleas, then, being excluded, what is left me but to confess that I have no sound defence to make? I have indeed one anchor yet aboard: I may whine59 over age and ill health, and their attendant poverty, from which a man will purchase escape at any cost. The situation tempts60 me to send an invitation to Euripides’s Medea: will she come and recite certain lines of hers on my behalf, kindly61 making the slight changes needed? —
Too well I know how monstrous62 is the deed; My poverty, but not my will, consents.
And every one knows the place in Theognis, whether I quote it or not, where he approves of people’s flinging themselves to the unplumbed deep from sky-pointing crags, if one may be quit of poverty that way.
That about exhausts the obvious lines of defence; and none of them is very promising63. But never fear, my friend, I am not going to try any of them. May never Argos be so hard put to it that Cyllarabis must be sown! nor ever I be in such straits for a tolerable defence as to be driven upon these evasions64! No, I only ask you to consider the vast difference between being a hireling in a rich man’s house, where one is a slave, and must put up with all that is described in my book — between that and entering the public service, doing one’s best as an administrator65, and taking the Emperor’s pay for it. Go fully66 into the matter; take the two things separately and have a good look at them; you will find that they are two octaves apart, as the musical people say; the two lives are about as like each other as lead is to silver, bronze to gold, an anemone67 to a rose, a monkey to a man; there is pay, and there is subordination, in each case; but the essence of the two things is utterly68 different. In one we have manifest slavery; the new-comers who accept the terms are barely distinguishable from the human chattels69 a man has bought or bred; but persons who have the management of public business, and give their services to states and nations, are not to have insinuations aimed at them just because they are paid; that single point of resemblance is not to level them down to the others. If that is to be the principle, we had better do away with all such offices at once; governors of whole provinces, prefects of cities, commanders of legions and armies, will all fall under the same condemnation; for they are paid. But of course everything is not to be upset to suit a single case; all who receive pay are not to be lumped together.
It is all a mistake; I never said that all drawers of salaries lived a degraded life; I only pitied those domestic slaves who have been caught by compliments on their culture. My position, you see, is entirely70 different; my private relations are as they were before, though in a public capacity I am now an active part of the great Imperial machine. If you care to inquire, you will find that my charge is not the least important in the government of Egypt. I control the cause-list, see that trials are properly conducted, keep a record of all proceedings71 and pleas, exercise censorship over forensic72 oratory73, and edit the Emperor’s rescripts with a view to their official and permanent preservation74 in the most lucid75, accurate, and genuine form. My salary comes from no private person, but from the Emperor; and it is considerable, amounting to many hundreds. In the future too there is before me the brilliant prospect56 of attaining76 in due course to a governorship or other distinguished77 employment.
Accordingly I am now going to throw off reserve, come to grips with the charge against me, and prove my case a fortiori. I tell you that nobody does anything for nothing; you may point to people in high places — as high as you like; the Emperor himself is paid. I am not referring to the taxes and tribute which flow in annually78 from subjects; the chief item in the Emperor’s pay is panegyrics79, world-wide fame, and grateful devotion; the statues, temples, and consecrated80 ground which their subjects bestow81 upon them, what are these but pay for the care and forethought which they apply to public policy and improvements? To compare small things with great, if you will begin at the top of the heap and work down through the grains of which it is composed, you will find that we inferior ones differ from the superior in point of size, but all are wage-earners together.
If the law I laid down had been that no one should do anything, I might fairly have been accused of transgressing82 it; but as my book contains nothing of the sort, and as goodness consists in doing good, what better use can you make of yourself than if you join forces with your friends in the cause of progress, come out into the open, and let men see that you are loyal and zealous83 and careful of your trust, not what Homer calls a vain cumberer of the earth?
But before all, my critics are to remember that in me they will be criticizing not a wise man (if indeed there is such a person on earth), but one of the common people, one who has indeed practised rhetoric46 and won some little reputation therein, but has never been trained up to the perfect virtue84 of the really great. Well, I may surely be forgiven for that; if any one ever did come up to the ideal of the wise man, it has not been my fortune to meet him. And I confess further that I should be disappointed if I found you criticizing my present life; you knew me long ago when I was making a handsome income out of the public profession of rhetoric; for on that Atlantic tour of yours which included Gaul, you found me numbered among those teachers who could command high fees. Now, my friend, you have my defence; I am exceedingly busy, but could not be indifferent to securing your vote of acquittal; as for others, let them all denounce me with one voice if they will; on them I shall waste no more words than, What cares Hippoclides?
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1
dependants
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| 受赡养者，受扶养的家属( dependant的名词复数 ) | |
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divination
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| n.占卜，预测 | |
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scathing
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| adj.（言词、文章）严厉的，尖刻的；不留情的adv.严厉地，尖刻地v.伤害，损害（尤指使之枯萎）( scathe的现在分词) | |
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indictment
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| n.起诉；诉状 | |
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plunge
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| v.跳入，(使)投入，(使)陷入；猛冲 | |
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conspicuous
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| adj.明眼的，惹人注目的；炫耀的，摆阔气的 | |
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relinquish
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| v.放弃，撤回，让与，放手 | |
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consorted
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| v.结伴( consort的过去式和过去分词 )；交往；相称；调和 | |
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9
treatise
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| n.专著；(专题)论文 | |
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overt
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| adj.公开的，明显的，公然的 | |
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illustrate
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| v.举例说明，阐明；图解，加插图 | |
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homage
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| n.尊敬，敬意，崇敬 | |
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carving
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| n.雕刻品，雕花 | |
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cauterizing
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| v.（用腐蚀性物质或烙铁）烧灼以消毒( cauterize的现在分词 ) | |
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meritoriously
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contemptible
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| adj.可鄙的，可轻视的，卑劣的 | |
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condemnation
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| n.谴责; 定罪 | |
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plausibility
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| n. 似有道理, 能言善辩 | |
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strutting
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| 加固，支撑物 | |
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plumes
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| 羽毛( plume的名词复数 )； 羽毛饰； 羽毛状物； 升上空中的羽状物 | |
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compassion
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| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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precept
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| n.戒律；格言 | |
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infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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degradations
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| 堕落( degradation的名词复数 )； 下降； 陵削； 毁坏 | |
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miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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conspicuousness
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| 显著，卓越，突出； 显著性 | |
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reprobation
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| n.斥责 | |
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censors
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| 删剪（书籍、电影等中被认为犯忌、违反道德或政治上危险的内容）( censor的第三人称单数 ) | |
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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hissed
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| 发嘶嘶声( hiss的过去式和过去分词 )； 发嘘声表示反对 | |
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docile
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| adj.驯服的，易控制的，容易教的 | |
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regularity
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| n.规律性，规则性；匀称，整齐 | |
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alas
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| int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
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fig
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| n.无花果(树) | |
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flutes
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| 长笛( flute的名词复数 )； 细长香槟杯（形似长笛） | |
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figs
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| figures 数字，图形，外形 | |
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injustice
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| n.非正义，不公正，不公平，侵犯（别人的）权利 | |
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admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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behold
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| v.看，注视，看到 | |
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nemesis
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| n.给以报应者，复仇者，难以对付的敌手 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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impending
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| a.imminent, about to come or happen | |
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propitiate
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| v.慰解，劝解 | |
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assailed
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| v.攻击( assail的过去式和过去分词 )；困扰；质问；毅然应对 | |
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rhetoric
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| n.修辞学，浮夸之言语 | |
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47
guilt
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| n.犯罪；内疚；过失，罪责 | |
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48
eyewitnesses
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| 目击者( eyewitness的名词复数 ) | |
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49
iniquity
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| n.邪恶；不公正 | |
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50
quack
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| n.庸医；江湖医生；冒充内行的人；骗子 | |
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51
humbly
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| adv. 恭顺地，谦卑地 | |
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52
beseech
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| v.祈求，恳求 | |
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53
herd
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| n.兽群，牧群；vt.使集中，把…赶在一起 | |
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54
spun
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| v.纺，杜撰，急转身 | |
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55
prospects
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| n.希望，前途(恒为复数) | |
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56
prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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57
imputation
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| n.归罪，责难 | |
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58
vices
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| 缺陷( vice的名词复数 )； 恶习； 不道德行为； 台钳 | |
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whine
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| v.哀号，号哭；n.哀鸣 | |
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tempts
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| v.引诱或怂恿（某人）干不正当的事( tempt的第三人称单数 )；使想要 | |
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kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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promising
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| adj.有希望的，有前途的 | |
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64
evasions
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| 逃避( evasion的名词复数 )； 回避； 遁辞； 借口 | |
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administrator
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| n.经营管理者，行政官员 | |
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66
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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anemone
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| n.海葵 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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chattels
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| n.动产，奴隶( chattel的名词复数 ) | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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proceedings
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| n.进程，过程，议程；诉讼(程序)；公报 | |
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forensic
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| adj.法庭的，雄辩的 | |
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oratory
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| n.演讲术；词藻华丽的言辞 | |
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preservation
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| n.保护，维护，保存，保留，保持 | |
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lucid
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| adj.明白易懂的，清晰的，头脑清楚的 | |
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attaining
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的现在分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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annually
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| adv.一年一次，每年 | |
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panegyrics
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| n.赞美( panegyric的名词复数 )；称颂；颂词；颂扬的演讲或文章 | |
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80
consecrated
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| adj.神圣的，被视为神圣的v.把…奉为神圣，给…祝圣( consecrate的过去式和过去分词 )；奉献 | |
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81
bestow
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| v.把…赠与，把…授予；花费 | |
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82
transgressing
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| v.超越( transgress的现在分词 )；越过；违反；违背 | |
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83
zealous
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| adj.狂热的，热心的 | |
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84
virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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