There remains, dearest Terentianus — for the sake of your love of learning we shall not shrink from adding it — to clear up a question one of the philosophers raised lately: ‘It astonishes me,’ he said, ‘as no doubt many others, how in our age there are natures persuasive to the highest degree, political, sharp, ready, and especially well-fitted for the pleasures of words; but lofty and exceeding-great natures, except very rarely, no longer arise. So great a barrenness of words has settled upon life.’ §1
‘Or are we to believe,’ he said, ‘that hackneyed phrase, that democracy is the kindly nurse of great minds, with which alone the able orators flourished and with which they died? For freedom, they say, can nourish the proud thoughts of the great-minded, and lift them up with hope, and at the same time work through the eagerness of mutual emulation and the ambition for first place.’ §2
‘Furthermore, by the prizes set forth in free states, the spiritual gifts of orators, exercised at every turn, are sharpened, are, as it were, polished, and shine forth free in the matter, as is fitting. But we today,’ he said, ‘seem to be educated from boyhood in a justified slavery, swaddled in its customs and habits while our spirits are still tender, untasting of the fairest and most fertile spring of words — I mean freedom; and so we come out nothing but flatterers, even when great-natured.’ §3
‘On this account,’ he said, ‘the other capacities can fall even to slaves, but no slave will become an orator; for at once there boils up the muteness of an inhibited tongue, the day that, garrisoned by custom, is forever beaten with the fist.’ §4
‘“Half of his manhood,” as Homer says, “the day of slavery takes away.” “If, then,” he says, “what I hear is true, the caskets in which the so-called Pygmies — that is, dwarfs — are reared not only prevent the growth of those enclosed but also rarefy them through the bond fastened around their bodies, so all slavery, even the most just, has been declared to be the casket of the soul and a common prison-house.”’ §5
I, however, in answer said: ‘It is easy, my excellent friend, and proper to man, to find fault with what is always present. But consider whether it is not really the peace of the inhabited world that destroys great natures, but rather, much more, this boundless war that holds our desires in its grip, and besides, the passions that garrison and master the life of today, leading and carrying us off altogether. For the love of money, with which we are now sick to insatiety, and the love of pleasure enslave us, no, drown us, men and all, beneath our very lives. Avarice is a pettifying disease, and the love of pleasure the most ignoble.’ §6
‘I cannot, on reflection, find how, when men have set an unbounded esteem on wealth, or, more truly, deified it, they should not also let in the evils that go with it into their souls. For with measureless and lawless wealth there comes wedded, ever stepping equal with it (so they say), extravagance; and as he opens the entrances of cities and homes, she enters at once and dwells with them. Lingering in lives, these things, as the wise say, build their nests; and quickly, breeding offspring, they beget arrogance and conceit and luxury, no bastard sons but truly born; and if one lets these descendants of wealth come of age, they soon plant within the souls inexorable masters: insolence, lawlessness, shamelessness.’ §7
‘These things must inevitably so come to pass; and men no longer look up, no longer have any account of fame, but, in such a circle, the corruption of lives is little by little brought to perfection. The greatness of soul wastes away, withers, and ceases to be admired, since they admire what is mortal in themselves and let pass the increase of the immortal.’ §8
‘For one who is bribed in a verdict could no more be free and sound a judge of what is just and beautiful: bribery makes a man's own concerns appear to him as just and beautiful. Where now bribes determine our whole lives, and the hunting of others' deaths and …’ [here the text breaks off] §9