Justice -- Early works to 1800; Political science -- Early works to 1800; Utopias -- Early works to 1800
There complexity engendered license, and here disease; whereas
simplicity in music was the parent of temperance in the soul; and
simplicity in gymnastic of health in the body.
Most true, he said.
But when intemperance and disease multiply in a State, halls of justice
and medicine are always being opened; and the arts of the doctor and
the lawyer give themselves airs, finding how keen is the interest which
not only the slaves but the freemen of a city take about them.
Of course.
And yet what greater proof can there be of a bad and disgraceful state
of education than this, that not only artisans and the meaner sort of
people need the skill of first-rate physicians and judges, but also
those who would profess to have had a liberal education? Is it not
disgraceful, and a great sign of want of good-breeding, that a man
should have to go abroad for his law and physic because he has none of
his own at home, and must therefore surrender himself into the hands of
other men whom he makes lords and judges over him?
Of all things, he said, the most disgraceful.
Would you say 'most,' I replied, when you consider that there is a
further stage of the evil in which a man is not only a life-long
litigant, passing all his days in the courts, either as plaintiff or
defendant, but is actually led by his bad taste to pride himself on his
litigiousness; he imagines that he is a master in dishonesty; able to
take every crooked turn, and wriggle into and out of every hole,
bending like a withy and getting out of the way of justice: and all for
what?--in order to gain small points not worth mentioning, he not
knowing that so to order his life as to be able to do without a napping
judge is a far higher and nobler sort of thing. Is not that still more
disgraceful?
Yes, he said, that is still more disgraceful.
Well, I said, and to require the help of medicine, not when a wound has
to be cured, or on occasion of an epidemic, but just because, by
indolence and a habit of life such as we have been describing, men fill
themselves with waters and winds, as if their bodies were a marsh,
compelling the ingenious sons of Asclepius to find more names for
diseases, such as flatulence and catarrh; is not this, too, a disgrace?
Yes, he said, they do certainly give very strange and newfangled names
to diseases.
Yes, I said, and I do not believe that there were any such diseases in
the days of Asclepius; and this I infer from the circumstance that the
hero Eurypylus, after he has been wounded in Homer, drinks a posset of
Pramnian wine well besprinkled with barley-meal and grated cheese,
which are certainly inflammatory, and yet the sons of Asclepius who
were at the Trojan war do not blame the damsel who gives him the drink,
or rebuke Patroclus, who is treating his case.
Well, he said, that was surely an extraordinary drink to be given to a
person in his condition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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