Quomodo adolescens poetas audire debeat

If, my dear Marcus Sedatus, it is true, as the poet Philoxenus used to say, that of meats those that are not meat, and of fish those that are not fish, have the best flavour, let us leave the expounding of this matter to those persons of whom Cato said that their palates are more sensitive than their minds. And so of philosophical discourses it is clear to us that those seemingly not at all philosophical, or even serious, are found more enjoyable by the very young, who present themselves at such lectures as willing and submissive hearers. For in perusing not only Aesop’s Fables, and Tales from the Poets, but even the Abaris of Heracleides, the Lycon of Ariston, and philosophic doctrines about the soul when these are combined with tales from mythology, they get inspiration as well as pleasure. Wherefore we ought not only to keep the young decorous in the pleasures of eating and drinking, but, even more, in connexion with what they hear and read, by using in moderation, as a relish, that which gives pleasure, we should accustom them to seek what is useful and salutary therein. For close-shut gates do not preserve a city from capture if it admit the enemy through one; nor does continence in the other pleasures of sense save a young man, if he unwittingly abandon himself to that which comes through hearing. On the contrary, inasmuch as this form of pleasure engages more closely the man that is naturally given to thought and reason, so much the more, if neglected, does it injure and corrupt him that receives it. Since, then, it is neither possible, perhaps, nor profitable to debar from poetry a boy as old as my Soclarus and your Cleander now are, let us keep a very close watch over them, in the firm belief that they require oversight in their reading even more than in the streets. Accordingly, I have made up my mind to commit to writing and to send to you some thoughts on poetry which it occurred to me recently to express. I beg that you will take them and peruse them, and if they seem to you to be no worse than the things called amethysts which some persons on convivial occasions hang upon their persons or take beforehand, then impart them to Cleander, and thus forestall his natural disposition, which, because it is slow in nothing, but impetuous and lively in everything, is more subject to such influences. “Bad may be found in the head of the cuttle-fish; good there is also,” because it is very pleasant to eat but it makes one’s sleep full of bad dreams and subject to strange and disturbing fancies, as they say. Similarly also in the art of poetry there is much that is pleasant and nourishing for the mind of a youth, but quite as much that is disturbing and misleading, unless in the hearing of it he have proper oversight. For it may be said, as it seems, not only of the land of the Egyptians but also of poetry, that it yields “Drugs, and some are good when mixed and others baneful” to those who cultivate it.