with the Stoic doctrine, like your friend Hermotimus; he has never
travelled in Plato's country, or to Epicurus, or any other land; now, if
he were to state that there was no such beauty or truth in those many
countries as there is in the Porch and its teaching, would you not be
justified in considering it bold of him to give you his opinion about
them all, whereas he knew only one, having never set foot outside the
bounds of Ethiopia?_ What reply do you advise to that?

_Her_. The perfectly true one, of course, that it is indeed the Stoic
doctrine that we study fully, being minded to sink or swim with that, but
still we do know what the others say also; our teacher rehearses the
articles of their beliefs to us incidentally, and demolishes them with his
comments.

_Ly_. Do you suppose the Platonists, Pythagoreans, Epicureans, and
other schools, will let that pass? or will they laugh out loud and say,
_What remarkable methods your friend has, Lycinus! he accepts our
adversaries' character of us, and gathers our doctrines from the
description of people who do not know, or deliberately misrepresent them.
If he were to see an athlete getting his muscles in trim by kicking high,
or hitting out at empty space as though he were getting a real blow home,
would he (in the capacity of umpire) at once proclaim him victor, because
he _could not help winning_? No; _he would reflect that these displays are
easy and safe, when there is no defence to be reckoned with, and that the
real decision must wait till he has beaten and mastered his opponent, and
the latter 'has had enough'. Well then, do not let Hermotimus suppose from
his teachers' sparrings with our shadows (for _we_ are not there) that
they have the victory, or that our doctrines are so easily upset; tell him
the business is too like the sand houses which children, having built them
weak, have no difficulty in overturning, or, to change the figure, like