artificial composure; I shall be natural, as a gentleman should. I may go
as far as a fashionable coat, by way of publishing my renunciation of
nonsense. I only wish there were an emetic that would purge out every
doctrine they have instilled into me; I assure you, if I could reverse
Chrysippus's plan with the hellebore, and drink forgetfulness, not of the
world but of Stoicism, I would not think twice about it. Well, Lycinus, I
owe you a debt indeed; I was being swept along in a rough turbid torrent,
unresisting, drifting with the stream; when lo, you stood there and
fished me out, a true _deus ex machina_. I have good enough reason,
I think, to shave my head like the people who get clear off from a wreck;
for I am to make votive offerings to-day for the dispersion of that thick
cloud which was over my eyes. Henceforth, if I meet a philosopher on my
walks (and it will not be with my will), I shall turn aside and avoid him
as I would a mad dog.




HERODOTUS AND AETION


I devoutly wish that Herodotus's other characteristics were imitable; not
all of them, of course--that is past praying for--, but any one of them:
the agreeable style, the constructive skill, the native charm of his
Ionic, the sententious wealth, or any of a thousand beauties which he
combined into one whole, to the despair of imitators. But there is one
thing--the use he made of his writings, and the speed with which he
attained the respect of all Greece; from that you, or I, or any one else,
might take a hint. As soon as he had sailed from his Carian home for
Greece, he concentrated his thoughts on the quickest and easiest method