Theognis, seeing Cyrnus environed with political difficulties, thought fit to furnish him with rules of conduct. He was very particular about the choice of proper friends. One elegy (31-38), in which he discourses on the desirability of consorting with none but the best company, and of avoiding the contagion of low comrades, attained a wide celebrity among the Greeks. So much of their life was spent in public, and so much of their education depended on society, that the question of social intercourse was one of paramount importance. Plato in the _Meno_, Xenophon in his _Memorabilia_, and Aristotle in the ninth book of the _Ethics_, all make use of these verses: "Come not into the company of bad men, but cling always to the good; eat and drink with them; sit with them, and seek to please those who have great power. For from the noble you will learn what is noble; but if you mix with base men you will lose the wits you have." It must always be borne in mind that by #esthloi# and #agathoi# Theognis meant the men of his own party. The "good" and "noble" were men of birth, wealth, breeding, and power, on whom, by prejudice and habit, he conferred these moral titles. In course of time, however, as the words acquired a more ethical significance, the philosophers were able to appropriate maxims of worldly prudence to their own more elevated purposes; nor were they even in the times of Theognis other than ambiguous, for the identification of aristocratic position and moral worth was so conventionally complete that words which were intended to be taken in the one sense had an equal application in the other. In another elegy (305-308) Theognis repeats this advice, when he observes that no one is born utterly bad by nature, but that he contracts habits of depravity from his associates. Here it is obvious how much of ethical meaning the words "good" and "bad" involved, even in the times of the Megarian poet, and how vastly important he considered the society of well-bred companions to be in the formation of character. A different view of moral habits seems to be taken in another fragment (429-438), where Theognis attributes more influence to nature than to training: "To beget and rear a child," he says, "is easier than to instil good principles. No one ever devised means for making fools wise, or bad men good. If Heaven had given to the sons of Æsculapius the gift of healing wickedness and folly, great fees would they have earned. If you could fashion or insert what minds you liked, good men would never have bad sons. But no amount of teaching will make a bad man good." These verses are quoted both by Plato and Aristotle, with whose inquiries on the subject of Education _versus_ Nature, of #trophê# as opposed to #physis#, they had, of course, considerable correspondence.