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lay hold of your books, and of your hands when you open them. When do you do your reading? In the daytime ? Nobody ever saw you doing it. At night, then? When you have already given instructions to your henchmen, or before you have talked with them? Come, in the name of Cotys, never again dare to do such a thing. Leave the books alone and attend to your own affairs exclusively. Yet you ought not to do that, either; vou ought to be put to shame by Phaedra in Euripides, who is indignant at women and says:

But if you have made up your mind to cleave to the same infirmity at all costs, go ahead: buy books, keep them at home under lock and key, and enjoy the fame of your treasures—that is enough for you. But never lay hands on them or read them or sully with your tongue the prose and poetry of the ancients, that has done you no harm.

I know that in all this I am wasting words, and, as the proverb has it, trying to scrub an Ethiop white. You will buy them and make no use of them and get yourself laughed at by men of learning who are satisfied with the gain that they derive, not from the beauty of books or their expensiveness, but from the language and thought of their author. You expect to palliate and conceal your ignorance by getting a reputation for this, and to daze people by the number of your books, unaware that you are doing the same as the most ignorant physicians, who get themselves ivory pill-boxes and silver cupping-glasses and gold-inlaid scalpels; when the time comes to use