itten with love for his darling"[260] will show his mildness
and agreeableness in the presence of and joint pursuit of wisdom with
the loved one, but if he is drawn away from him and is not in his
company you will see him in a stew and ill at ease and peevish whether
at work or leisure, and unreasonably forgetful of his friends, and
wholly impelled by his passion for philosophy. For we ought not to
rejoice at discourses only when we hear them, as people like perfumes
only when they smell them, and not to seek or care about them in their
absence, but in the same condition as people who are hungry and thirsty
are in if torn away from food and drink, we ought to follow after true
proficiency in philosophy, whether marriage, or wealth, or friendship,
or military service, strike in and produce a separation. For just as
more is to be got from philosophy, so much the more does what we fail
to obtain trouble us.

Sec. V. Either precisely the same as this or very similar is Hesiod's[261]
very ancient definition of progress in virtue, namely, that the road is
no longer very steep or arduous, but easy and smooth and level, its
roughness being toned down by exercise, and casting the bright light of
philosophy on doubt and error and regrets, such as trouble those who
give themselves to philosophy at the outset, like people who leave a
land they know, and do not yet descry the land they are sailing to. For
by abandoning the common and familiar, before they know and apprehend
what is better, they frequently flounder about in the middle and are
fain to return. As they say the Roman Sextius, giving up for philosophy
all his honours and offices in Rome, being afterwards discontented with
philosophy from the difficulties he met with in it at first, very nearly
threw himself out of window. Similarly they relate of Diogenes of
Sinope,[262] when he began to be a philosopher, that the Athenians were
celebrating a festival, and there were public banquets and shows and
mutual festivities, and drinking and revelling all night, and he, coiled
up in a corner of the market-place intending to sleep, fell into a train
of thought likely seriously to turn him from his purpose and shake his
resolution, for he reflected that he had adopted without any necessity a
toilsome and unusual kind of life, and by his own fault sat there
debarred of all the good things. At that moment, however, they say a
mouse stole up and began to munch some of the crumbs of his