and asked him
what message he wished them to carry home, he bade them say this: that
children ought to be provided with property and resources of a kind that
could swim with them even out of a shipwreck.

2. These are indeed the true supports of life, and neither Fortune's
adverse gale, nor political revolution, nor ravages of war can do them
any harm. Developing the same idea, Theophrastus, urging men to acquire
learning rather than to put their trust in money, states the case thus:
"The man of learning is the only person in the world who is neither a
stranger when in a foreign land, nor friendless when he has lost his
intimates and relatives; on the contrary, he is a citizen of every
country, and can fearlessly look down upon the troublesome accidents of
fortune. But he who thinks himself entrenched in defences not of
learning but of luck, moves in slippery paths, struggling through life
unsteadily and insecurely."

3. And Epicurus, in much the same way, says that the wise owe little to
fortune; all that is greatest and essential is under the direction of
the thinking power of the mind and the understanding. Many other
philosophers have said the same thing. Likewise the poets who wrote the
ancient comedies in Greek have expressed the same sentiments in their
verses on the stage: for example, Eucrates, Chionides, Aristophanes, and
with them Alexis in particular, who says that the Athenians ought to be
praised for the reason that, while the laws of all Greeks require the
maintenance of parents by their children, the laws of the Athenians
require this only in the case of those who have educated their children
in the arts. All the gifts which fortune bestows she can easily take
away; but education, when combined with intelligence, never fails, but
abides steadily on to the very end of life.

4. Hence, I am very much obliged and infinitely grateful to my parents
for their approval of this Athenian law, and for having taken care that
I should be taught an art, and that of a sort which cannot be brought to
perfection without learning and a liberal education in all branches of
instruction. Thanks, therefore, to the attention of my parents and the
instruction given by my teachers, I obtained a wide range of knowledge,
and by the pleasure which I take in literary and artistic subjects, and
in the writing of treatises, I have acquired intellectual possessions
whose chief fruits are these thoughts: that superfluity is useless,