| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: he does not like us when he has become of age and has seen the ways of the
city, and made our acquaintance, he may go where he pleases and take his
goods with him. None of us laws will forbid him or interfere with him.
Any one who does not like us and the city, and who wants to emigrate to a
colony or to any other city, may go where he likes, retaining his property.
But he who has experience of the manner in which we order justice and
administer the state, and still remains, has entered into an implied
contract that he will do as we command him. And he who disobeys us is, as
we maintain, thrice wrong: first, because in disobeying us he is
disobeying his parents; secondly, because we are the authors of his
education; thirdly, because he has made an agreement with us that he will
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: large parts, though not the whole of South Italy, were inhabited
by Greek-speaking races centuries before the Dorian
colonisations can hardly be doubted. The Sicians, and also the
Sicels, both of them probably spoke Greek.
{10} cf. "Il." vi. 490-495. In the "Iliad" it is "war," not
"speech," that is a man's matter. It argues a certain hardness,
or at any rate dislike of the "Iliad" on the part of the writer
of the "Odyssey," that she should have adopted Hector's farewell
to Andromache here, as elsewhere in the poem, for a scene of
such inferior pathos.
{11} [Greek] The whole open court with the covered cloister
The Odyssey |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: nothing."
"Oh! oh!"
"I'll leave you to do it, or not; I don't ask it. But you're an honest
man."
"Come, out with it!"
"Well, I'm prepared to bring you a father, mother, and only daughter."
"All for me?"
"Yes--they want their portraits taken. These bourgeois--they are crazy
about art--have never dared to enter a studio. The girl has a 'dot' of
a hundred thousand francs. You can paint all three,--perhaps they'll
turn out family portraits."
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