Page:Lucian, Vol 3.djvu/189

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THE IGNORANT BOOK-COLLECTOR

What good, you strange person, will it do you to own them, when you do not understand their beauty and will never make use of it one whit more than a blind man would enjoy beauty in favourites? To be sure you look at your books with your eyes open and quite as much as you like, and you read some of them aloud with great fluency, keeping your eyes in advance of your lips; but I do not consider that enough, unless you know the merits and defects of each passage in their contents, unless you understand what every sentence means, how to construe the words, what expressions have been accurately turned by the writer in accordance with the canon of good use, and what are false, illegitimate, and counterfeit.

Come now, do you maintain that without instruction you know as much as we? How can you, unless, like the shepherd of old,[1] you once received a branch of laurel from the Muses? Helicon, which the goddesses are said to haunt, you never even heard of, I take it, and your haunts in your boyhood were not the same as ours. That you should even mention the Muses is impious. They would not have shrunk from showing themselves to a shepherd, a hard-bitten, hairy man displaying rich tan on his body, but as for the like of you—in the name of your lady of Lebanon[2] dispense me for the present from giving a full description of you in plain language!—they would never have deigned, I am sure, to come near you, but instead of giving you laurel they would have scourged you with myrtle or sprays of mallow and would have made you keep your distance from those

  1. ↑ Hesiod: see the Theogony 29 ff.
  2. ↑ Aphrodite, perhaps, or Astarte; in later times there was a notorious cult of Aphrodite on Lebanon: Eusebius, Vit. Constantini 3, 53.
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