Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
We deliberate and raise doubts about virtue, whether right thinking, right acting, and living well can be taught—and yet we do not find it strange that while the works of orators, pilots, musicians, builders, and farmers are countless, good men are only named and spoken of, like hippocentaurs and giants and Cyclopes, while a work faultless and unblemished in virtue cannot be found, nor a character untouched by passion and a life unstained by disgrace. But if nature does of its own accord produce something noble, it is dimmed by being mixed with so much that is foreign to it, as fruit is spoiled when mingled with wild and unclean soil.
People learn to play the harp, to dance, to read letters, to farm, to ride; they learn to put on shoes, to dress, and to anoint themselves. Men are taught to pour wine and to cook—can none of these things be done properly without having been learned? Yet the very thing for the sake of which all these are done, living well, is said to be untaught, irrational, unskilled, and spontaneous. O men, why, in calling virtue unteachable, do we make it nonexistent? For if learning is a coming-into-being, then the prevention of learning is its destruction. And yet, as Plato says, on account of the foot's
disproportion and disharmony with the lyre, neither does brother make war on brother, nor does friend quarrel with friend, nor do cities, coming into enmity with one another, do and suffer the worst extremities at each other's hands; nor can anyone speak of a civil strife that arose in a city over pronunciation—whether one should read "Telchines" or "Telchínas"—nor of a dispute in a household between husband and wife over the woof or the warp. And yet
no one who has not learned would take in hand a loom, a book, or a lyre, even though he would suffer no great harm by it, but he is ashamed to become an object of ridicule; for Heraclitus says, "It is better to hide one's ignorance." But is it possible to manage well a household, a marriage, a state, and an office of rule, without a wife, a servant, a citizen, a subject, and a ruler having learned how? When a boy was eating greedily, Diogenes gave the tutor
a blow, rightly making the fault not that of the one who had not learned, but of the one who had not taught. Again, one cannot share a side-dish or a cup with skill unless one has learned to do so, beginning straight from childhood—as Aristophanes says, not to giggle, nor to eat greedily, nor to cross one's feet; yet is it supposed that partnership in household, city, marriage, life, and rule can occur without reproach among people who have not
learned in what manner they must get along with one another? Aristippus, being asked by someone, "Are you everywhere, then?" laughed and said, "Then I am wasting my passage-fare, if indeed I am everywhere." So would you not say the same yourself: "If men do not become better through learning, then the wages of their tutors are wasted"? For these men, taking children first from the breast, just as nurses mold
the body with their hands, so they shape the character by habituation, setting it first upon some track of virtue. And the Spartan, when asked what he provides as a tutor, said, "I make good things pleasant to children." And yet tutors teach children to walk in the streets with head bowed, to lift dried fish with one finger, fish and bread and meat with two, to sit just so, to gather up the cloak just so.
What, then? The man who says that there is a medical art for lichen and for whitlow, but none for pleurisy and fever and phrenitis—how does he differ from the one who says that for small, childish duties there are schools, precepts, and instructions, but that for great and mature affairs there is only irrational habituation and chance occurrence? For just as the man who says that one must learn to row an oar, but that one pilots
without having learned, is ridiculous, so too the man who grants learning to all the other arts but takes it away from virtue seems to do the opposite of what the Scythians do: for they, as Herodotus says, blind their household slaves so as to hand things over to them; but this man, by implanting reason as an eye, so to speak, in slavish and menial arts, deprives virtue of it. And yet the general Iphicrates, to Chabrias's
Callias, who asked and said, "Who are you? An archer? A peltast? A horseman? A hoplite?" replied, "None of these, but the one who commands all of these." Ridiculous, then, is the man who says that archery, hoplite-fighting, slinging, and riding can be taught, but that generalship and the exercise of command come by chance, even to those who have not learned, whoever they happen to be. Still more ridiculous, then, is the one who declares that practical wisdom alone cannot be
taught, though without it there is no benefit or profit from the other arts at all. But if this alone, being the guide and order of all the others, and the arrangement that sets each thing to its proper use, then what pleasure is there at once in a dinner, however well-trained and well-taught the children who carve, roast, and pour the wine, if there is no arrangement or order among those serving?