Megarensians entered Athens, he should be put to death. Then
Euclid, who was a Megarensian, and had attended the lectures of
Socrates before this decree, disguising himself in a woman's
dress, used to go from Megara to Athens by night to hear
Socrates, a distance of twenty miles and back. Imprudent and
excessive was the fervour of Archimedes, a lover of geometry, who
would not declare his name, nor lift his head from the diagram he
had drawn, by which he might have prolonged his life, but
thinking more of study than of life dyed with his life-blood the
figure he was studying.

There are very many such examples of our proposition, but the
brevity we aim at does not allow us to recall them. But, painful
to relate, the clerks who are famous in these days pursue a very
different course. Afflicted with ambition in their tender years,
and slightly fastening to their untried arms the Icarian wings of
presumption, they prematurely snatch the master's cap; and mere
boys become unworthy professors of the several faculties, through
which they do not make their way step by step, but like goats
ascend by leaps and bounds; and, having slightly tasted of the
mighty stream, they think that they have drunk it dry, though
their throats are hardly moistened. And because they are not
grounded in the first rudiments at the fitting time, they build a
tottering edifice on an unstable foundation, and now that they
have grown up, they are ashamed to learn what they ought to have
learned while young, and thus they are compelled to suffer for
ever for too hastily jumping at dignities they have not deserved.
For these and the like reasons the tyros in the schools do not
attain to the solid learning of the ancients in a few short hours
of study, although they may enjoy distinctions, may be accorded