BOOK III. 1. 9-15
self beautiful; but so long as you neglect all this, you must needs be ugly, no matter if you employ every artifice to make yourself look beautiful.
10Beyond that I know not what more I can say to you; for if I say what I have in mind, I shall hurt your feelings, and you will leave, perhaps never to return; but if I do not say it, consider the sort of thing I shall be doing. Here you are coming to me to get some benefit, and I shall be bestowing no benefit at all; and you are coming to me as to a philosopher, and I shall be saying nothing to you as a philosopher. Besides, is it anything but cruel for me to leave you unreformed? If some time in the future you come to your senses, you will have good reason to blame me: "What did Epictetus observe in me," you will say to yourself, "that, although he saw me in such a condition and coming to him in so disgraceful a state, he should let me be so and say never a word to me? Did he so completely despair of me? Was I not young? Was I not ready to listen to reason? And how many other young fellows make any number of mistakes of the same kind in their youth? I am told that once there was a certain Polemo[1] who from being a very dissolute young man underwent such an astonishing transformation. Well, suppose he did not think that I should be another Polemo; he could at least have set my hair right, he could have stripped me of my ornaments, he could have made me stop plucking my hairs; but although he saw me looking like—what shall I say?—he held his peace." 15As for me, I do not say what it is you look
- ↑ Once when drunk he burst in upon Xenocrates, but was converted by him and eventually succeeded him in the headship of the Academy. See below IV. 11. 30; Diogenes Laertius, 4, 16; and Horace, Sat. II. 3, 253-7.
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