, and musicians, and
house-builders, and farmers, are innumerable, good men are only a name
and expression, like Centaurs and Giants and Cyclopes, and that it is
impossible to find any virtuous action without alloy of base motives, or
any character free from vice: but if nature produces spontaneously
anything good, it is marred by much that is alien to it, as fruit choked
by weeds. Men learn to play on the harp, and to dance, and to read, and
to farm, and to ride on horseback: they learn how to put on their shoes
and clothes generally: people teach how to pour out wine, how to cook;
and all these things cannot be properly performed, without being
learned. The art of good living alone, though all those things I have
mentioned only exist on its account, is untaught, unmethodical,
inartistic, and supposed to come by the light of nature!

Sec. II. O sirs, by asserting that virtue is not a thing to be taught, why
are we making it unreal? For if teaching produces it, the deprivation of
teaching prevents it. And yet, as Plato says, a discord and false note
on the lyre makes not brother go to war with brother, nor sets friends
at variance, nor makes states hostile to one another, so as to do and
suffer at one another's hands the most dreadful things:[205] nor can
anyone say that there was ever a dissension in any city as to the
pronunciation of Telchines: nor in a private house any difference
between man and wife as to woof and warp. And yet no one without
learning would undertake to ply the loom, or write a book, or play on
the lyre, though he would thereby do no great harm, but he fears making
himself ridiculous, for as Heraclitus says, "It is better to hide one's
ignorance," yet everyone thinks himself competent to manage a house and
wife and the state and hold any magisterial office. On one occasion,
when a boy was eating rather greedily, Diogenes gave the lad's tutor a
blow with his fist, ascribing the fault not to the boy, who had not
learnt how to eat properly, but to the tutor who had not taught him. And
can one not properly handle a dish or a cup, unless one has learnt from
a boy, as Aristophanes bids us, "not to giggle, nor eat too fast, nor
cross our legs,"[206] and yet be perfectly fit to manage a family and
city, and wife, and live well, and hold office, when one has not learnt
how one should behave in the conduct of life? When Aristippus was asked
by someone, "Are you everywhere then?" he smiled and said, "If I am