Oration 42
Imperial Dio Chrysostom Greek- How you are minded concerning me and my wisdom — or my ignorance — I cannot make out: whether you truly desire my discourses, as though about to hear something wonderful, and such as you would hear from no other man now living, or, on the contrary, as though about to put me to the test and to prove that I know nothing great or serious.
- For if you are so disposed, I confidently offer myself to you, that you may satisfy your eagerness; but if not, I fear the contrary opinion — lest, having heard, you then unjustly condemn me, because you yourselves formed an erroneous judgement. For I have never promised this to anyone — that I am competent to speak, or to think, or to know anything more than the many; on the contrary, fighting against this very thing on each occasion, and contradicting those who think it of me, I am then brought to speaking — and many have considered this very thing a display.
- Yet I myself, too, take now one path and now another. For whenever I look to myself and to my own inexperience — in all things simply, but most of all in what pertains to discourses — I consider myself a layman, and that henceforth I shall live the life of a layman; but whenever I look to those who are in earnest and who summon me, I am compelled to suspect of myself that perhaps something of mine is worth a word, and that, all unknowing, I have come to be in the same case as certain animals which, being useful to men and having within themselves a certain power for the curing of diseases — whether in their gall, or their blood, or their fat, or their hair — do not know it, while men, knowing it, hunt them and try in every way to catch them, not for the sake of their flesh, but for the sake of that power.
- May it not be, then, that they too compel me to speak on each occasion, having no need of the discourses, but of something else? For I cannot even suspect this, that they have been in earnest while ignorant and without having heard — as indeed many men, through ignorance, desire many things. For all men, one may say, know my discourses, and carry them about, some here and some there, just as children in the cities sing the cheap songs at evening; and nearly all repeat my discourses to one another — not as they were spoken,
- but having made them still better according to their own ability: some willingly correcting them, and plainly, being ashamed to remember such things, altering and transposing much, and for the better; others perhaps even unwillingly, through not remembering exactly. So that it is no longer easy, as someone said, to buy my wisdom for an obol in the market-place, but one must stoop and pick it up from the ground. My discourses, then, have come into much the same case as the Tenedian pottery; for from there, indeed, every passing sailor takes pottery aboard, but no one easily carries it home sound — rather most, having cracked or shattered it, end up with potsherds without knowing it.