Oration 27

Men become manifest, each in the cast of mind he has, no less at festal gatherings than at drinking-parties—save that the case of the gatherings is more varied and lasts a longer time. At drinking-parties, then, some, I suppose, arrive for the sake of drinking and do nothing else, like thirsty travellers who, when they come upon a spring, bend down and drink. But those, when they have had their fill and quenched their thirst, withdraw quietly, having neither done nor said anything out of place; whereas the others sometimes both say and do many disagreeable things.

For the Nymphs and Dionysus do not receive those who need them in the same way; but inasmuch as Dionysus is a dithyramb and born of lightning-bolt and thunder, as the poets say, those who use him too ignorantly he simply fills with fire, and in truth has made many of them thunderstruck. These men, then, all but raving, do many evil things, just as Homer says the Centaur, made drunk in the house of Pirithous, wrought evil deeds.

And others, being by nature chatterers, when they have got hold of certain of the drinkers as listeners, deliver long, insensible speeches; while others sing and sing out of tune, being utterly unmusical, and almost are more vexatious than those who fight and rail. Others again, calling themselves austere and self-controlled, wear one out with their disagreeableness, deigning to share neither in moderate drinking nor in talk.

But whoever is a gentle man and sufficiently well-attuned in his ways both easily endures the others' churlishness and himself, so far as he can, brings the untrained chorus into the order it should keep, with fitting rhythm and tune, introducing apt discourses, and by his deftness and persuasiveness winning over those present, so that they consort with one another more harmoniously and in friendlier fashion.

Such, then, is the case at drinking-parties. And men come to the festal gatherings too—some for the sake of seeing the various spectacles and the contests; and of these, all who are exceedingly in earnest about the matter spend the whole day from dawn doing nothing else; while many come bringing wares of every kind, a market crowd; and some come to make display of their crafts and handiworks;

and others to show off some wisdom of theirs—many exhibiting poems, both tragedies and epic verses, and many prose compositions—annoying the man who has come for the sake of leisure and wishes to take his ease. And these most of all resemble those who hum and sing at drinking-parties, whom one must of necessity hear, even if one is unwilling. Among these, the man who is able to speak useful and profitable words, and to render the whole assembly more seemly and better—this man, because of the uproar and the multitude of the rest, keeps quiet and turns aside to be by himself.

For the many feel toward the discourses that come from philosophy, I think, just as toward the physicians' drugs. For no one goes to those at once nor buys them, until he has fallen into some manifest disease and feels pain in some part of his body; nor are men willing, for the most part, to hear such discourses, unless something painful has befallen them and some of the things that seem grievous.

Take, for instance, the man who is fortunate—of the sort that the many call fortune—who, for example, has acquired wealth, mostly from loans, or a sufficient estate, and is himself in good health, with his children kept safe and his wife, and who holds some great power and office without war and faction and any manifest dangers: one would not easily find such a man approaching these discourses or thinking it worth his while to share in the words that come from philosophy.

But if some stumble befall a man in his life, and he becomes either poor instead of rich, or weak and powerless instead of powerful, or has some other grief, such men dispose themselves somewhat more familiarly toward the matter, and in a manner endure the discourses of the philosophers, and say, somehow, that they need consolation. And if a man chance to have lost one of his household—a wife or a child or a brother—they think the philosopher ought to come and console them, as though then were the time to consider how one may bear what happens with moderation and be able to hold out against what remains, but not before;

just as, with regard to the body too, the senseless behave, more or less. At all other times they have no care how they may keep their health, but use food and wine and the pleasures of love and the rest of their regimen as licentiously and recklessly as they can; but if some weariness and fever lay hold of them at the changes of the air, they bid men tend them, full as they are of much disorder and strong diseases, such as are likely to overtake such men; but how they may have no need at all of a physician—that, from the first, they do not consider.