Et ideo ego adulescentulos existimo in scholis stultissimos fieri quia nihil ex his quae in usu habemus aut audiunt aut vident.

‘The reason why young men become such idiots in school is, I think, that they neither hear nor see any of the things of our ordinary life.’

It seems to me that it is inappropriate to exercise one's skill on Miltiades and Cimon and an assortment of anonymous characters, or on the political enmities of Rich Man and Poor Man, over which I saw two elderly gentlemen disputing in the public theatre. Both of them were very serious about their philosophy, and each carried, by my estimate, a talent's weight of beard. But all this seriousness didn't stop them from abusing one another and waxing indignant, waving their arms about uncontrollably in the process of delivering lengthy speeches on behalf of – well, at the time I thought it was friends of theirs, but actually, as people lost no time in pointing out to me, it was persons who, far from being their friends, never existed then, or earlier, or indeed in the natural world at all. For where can there be a form of government that allows the war hero as his reward the right to kill a fellow citizen who is his political rival? And when a man of ninety debates a fiction, how long is he putting off study of the truth?