did
not desire to live longer than he should be able to write, as he says
himself in the prologue to the Noctes Atticae.

The fervour of study which possessed Euclid the Socratic, Taurus the
philosopher used to relate to incite young men to study, as Gellius
tells in the book we have mentioned. For the Athenians, hating the
people of Megara, decreed that if any of the Megarensians entered
Athens, he should be put to death. Then Euclid, who was a Megarensian,
and had attended the lectures of Socrates before this decree,
disguising himself in a woman's dress, used to go from Megara to Athens
by night to hear Socrates, a distance of twenty miles and back.
Imprudent and excessive was the fervour of Archimedes, a lover of
geometry, who would not declare his name, nor lift his head from the
diagram he had drawn, by which he might have prolonged his life, but
thinking more of study than of life dyed with his life-blood the figure
he was studying.

There are very many such examples of our proposition, but the brevity
we aim at does not allow us to recall them. But, painful to relate,
the clerks who are famous in these days pursue a very different course.
Afflicted with ambition in their tender years, and slightly fastening
to their untried arms the Icarian wings of presumption, they
prematurely snatch the master's cap; and mere boys become unworthy
professors of the several faculties, through which they do not make
their way step by step, but like goats ascend by leaps and bounds; and,
having slightly tasted of the mighty stream, they think that they have
drunk it dry, though their throats are hardly moistened. And because
they are not grounded in the first rudiments at the fitting time, they
build a tottering edifice on an unstable foundation, and now that they
have grown up, they are ashamed to learn what they ought to have
learned while young, and thus they are compelled to suffer for ever for
too hastily jumping at dignities they have not deserved. For these and
the like reasons the tyros in the schools do not attain to the solid
learning of the ancients in a few short hours of study, although they
may enjoy distinctions, may be accorded titles, be authorized by
official robes, and solemnly installed in the chairs of the elders.
Just snatched from the cradle and hastily weaned, they mouth the rules
of Priscian and Donatus; while still beardless boys they gabble with
childish stammering the Categorics and Peri Hermene