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acabal committed Mar 21, 2024
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<p>“It remains” [he says] “to clear up, my dear Terentianus, a question which a certain philosopher has recently mooted. I wonder,” he says, “as no doubt do many others, how it happens that in our time there are men who have the gift of persuasion to the utmost extent, and are well fitted for public life, and are keen and ready, and particularly rich in all the charms of language, yet there no longer arise really lofty and transcendent natures unless it be quite peradventure. So great and worldwide a dearth of high utterance attends our age. Can it be,” he continued, “we are to accept the common cant that democracy is the nursing mother of genius, and that great men of letters flourish and die with it? For freedom, they say, has the power to cherish and encourage magnanimous minds, and with it is disseminated eager mutual rivalry and the emulous thirst to excel. Moreover, by the prizes open under a popular government, the mental faculties of orators are perpetually practised and whetted, and as it were, rubbed bright, so that they shine free as the state itself. Whereas today,” he went on, “we seem to have learnt as an infant-lesson that servitude is the law of life; being all wrapped, while our thoughts are yet young and tender, in observances and customs as in swaddling clothes, bound without access to that fairest and most fertile source of man’s speech (I mean Freedom) so that we are turned out in no other guise than that of servile flatterers. And servitude (it has been well said) though it be even righteous, is the cage of the soul and a public prison-house.”</p>
<p>But I answered him thus.⁠—“It is easy, my good sir, and characteristic of human nature, to gird at the age in which one lives. Yet consider whether it may not be true that it is less the world’s peace that ruins noble nature than this war illimitable which holds our aspirations in its fist, and occupies our age with passions as with troops that utterly plunder and harry it. The love of money and the love of pleasure enslave us, or rather, as one may say, drown us body and soul in their depths. For vast and unchecked wealth marches with lust of pleasure for comrade, and when one opens the gate of house or city, the other at once enters and abides. And in time these two build nests in the hearts of men, and quickly rear a progeny only too legitimate: and the ruin within the man is gradually consummated as the sublimities of his soul wither away and fade, and in ecstatic contemplation of our mortal parts we omit to exalt, and come to neglect in nonchalance, that within us which is immortal.”</p>
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<p>I had a friend once who, being in doubt with what picture to decorate the chimneypiece in his library, cast away choice and wrote up two Greek words⁠—<i xml:lang="el">ΨΥΧΗΣ ’ΙΑΤΡΕΙΟΝ</i>; that is, the hospital⁠—the healing-place⁠—of the soul.</p>
<p>I had a friend once who, being in doubt with what picture to decorate the chimneypiece in his library, cast away choice and wrote up two Greek words⁠—<i xml:lang="el">ΨΥΧΗΣ ἸΑΤΡΕΙΟΝ</i>; that is, the hospital⁠—the healing-place⁠—of the soul.</p>
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