'Ah! why,' I cried, 'mistress of all excellence, hast thou come down
from on high, and entered the solitude of this my exile? Is it that
thou, too, even as I, mayst be persecuted with false accusations?'

'Could I desert thee, child,' said she, 'and not lighten the burden
which thou hast taken upon thee through the hatred of my name, by
sharing this trouble? Even forgetting that it were not lawful for
Philosophy to leave companionless the way of the innocent, should I,
thinkest thou, fear to incur reproach, or shrink from it, as though
some strange new thing had befallen? Thinkest thou that now, for the
first time in an evil age, Wisdom hath been assailed by peril? Did I not
often in days of old, before my servant Plato lived, wage stern warfare
with the rashness of folly? In his lifetime, too, Socrates, his master,
won with my aid the victory of an unjust death. And when, one after the
other, the Epicurean herd, the Stoic, and the rest, each of them as far
as in them lay, went about to seize the heritage he left, and were
dragging me off protesting and resisting, as their booty, they tore in
pieces the garment which I had woven with my own hands, and, clutching
the torn pieces, went off, believing that the whole of me had passed
into their possession. And some of them, because some traces of my
vesture were seen upon them, were destroyed through the mistake of the
lewd multitude, who falsely deemed them to be my disciples. It may be
thou knowest not of the banishment of Anaxagoras, of the poison draught
of Socrates, nor of Zeno's torturing, because these things happened in
a distant country; yet mightest thou have learnt the fate of Arrius, of
Seneca, of Soranus, whose stories are neither old nor unknown to fame.
These men were brought to destruction for no other reason than that,
settled as they were in my principles, their lives were a manifest
contrast to the ways of the wicked. So there is nothing thou shouldst