e initiation is entire are subject no
longer to anger, fear, desire, regret. Nay! They scarcely feel at all.

--Well! as you have leisure to-day, why not tell an old friend in what
way you first started on your philosophic journey? For, if I might, I
should like to join company with you from this very day.

--If you be really willing, Lucian! you will learn in no long time your
advantage over all [149] other people. They will seem but as children,
so far above them will be your thoughts.

--Well! Be you my guide! It is but fair. But tell me--Do you allow
learners to contradict, if anything is said which they don't think
right?

--No, indeed! Still, if you wish, oppose your questions. In that way
you will learn more easily.

--Let me know, then--Is there one only way which leads to a true
philosophy--your own way--the way of the Stoics: or is it true, as I
have heard, that there are many ways of approaching it?

--Yes! Many ways! There are the Stoics, and the Peripatetics, and
those who call themselves after Plato: there are the enthusiasts for
Diogenes, and Antisthenes, and the followers of Pythagoras, besides
others.

--It was true, then. But again, is what they say the same or different?

--Very different.

--Yet the truth, I conceive, would be one and the same, from all of
them. Answer me then--In what, or in whom, did you confide when you
first betook yourself to philosophy, and seeing so many doors open to
you, passed them all by and went in to the Stoics, as if there alone
lay the way of truth? What token had you? Forget, please, all you are
to-day--half-way, or more, on the philosophic journey: [150] answer me
as you would have done then, a mere outsider as I am now.

--Willingly! It was there the great majority went! 'Twas by that I
judged it to be the better way.

--A majority how much greater than the Epicureans, the Platonists, the
Peripatetics? You, doubtless, counted them respectively, as with the
votes in a scrutiny.

--No! But this was not my only motive. I heard it said by every one
that the Epicureans were soft and voluptuous, the Peripatetics
avaricious and quarrelsome, and Plato's followers puffed up with pride.
But of the Stoics, not a few pronounced that they were true men, that
they knew everything, that theirs was the royal road, the one road, to
wealth, to wisdom, to all that can be desired.

--Of course those who said this were not themselves Stoics: you would