M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
a choice must be made you would far and far prefer eloquence to dumbness.
10. I have heard you say sometimes, But indeed, when I have said something rather brilliant, I feel gratified, and that is why I shun eloquence. Why not rather correct and cure yourself of your self-gratification, instead of repudiating that which gratifies you. For acting as you now do, you are tying a poultice in the wrong place. What then? If you gratify yourself by giving just judgment, will you disown justice? If you gratify yourself by shewing some filial respect to your father, will you despise filial duty? You gratify yourself, when eloquent: chastize yourself then, but why chastize eloquence?
11. And yet Plato would tell you this and take you thus to task: Perilous, young man, is that hasty avoidance of self-gratification, for the last cloak that wraps the follower after wisdom is the love of fame, that is the last to be discarded:[1] to Plato, to Plato himself, I say, will fame be a cloak to his very last day.
This also I remember to have heard, that wise men must needs have many things—I mean in their mental rules and postulates—to which in practice they occasionally give the go-by; and occasionally also must needs allow in practice some things which they cry out upon in their tenets; and that the right rules of wisdom and the necessary practices of life do not everywhere coincide.
12. Suppose that you, O Caesar, succeed in attaining to the wisdom of Cleanthes or Zeno, yet
- ↑ "The last infirmity of noble mind": see Plato (ap. Athen. xi. 507 D), ἔσχατον τὸν τῆς δόξης χίτῶνα· ἐν τῷ θανάτῳ αὐτῷ ἀποδυόμεθα. cp. also Tac. Agr. 9.; Hist. iv. 6; Plat. An Seni, etc., 783 d; Lucian, Peregr. 38.
